I find the figures about bitcoins carbon footprint to be somewhat dubious. Anyone verify the calculations?
Interestingly, with Bitcoin you could do the mining with carbon neutral energy, since the electricity can be consumed where it's generated and the output is just data to be transmitted.
I'm not sure about his figures, but the idea of a crypto-currency that needs petaflops of continuous processing power to keep itself safe from attack does seem ass-backwards in the extreme.
Proof-of-x seems inelegant to me, it's unnecessary for a currency. It may be necessary for a decentralised currency like BTC, but it's not part of all schemes. I don't tend to prefer a currency that requires vast waste of resources to bootstrap and protect.
As a method of slowing things down (like the various spam-email limiting proposals) they're great, though.
IF you don't care about trying to wrest currency away from central control (and I really don't care about that at all) then you can come up with some really nice, cryptographically secure systems that don't involve heaps of processing power, have instant verification, support offline transactions etc. etc.
It's only the political aspect (we must have decentralisation and a fixed supply of coins!) that mean Bitcoin has to operate that way, an thrash away at petaflop speeds, burning electricity as fast as it can, to try and keep security.
Decentralisation is indeed one of the main points of bitcoin. It's not a necessary feature of all crypto-currencies and it's not a feature that I care about.
I have no idea if it's possible to design a decentralised crypto-currency without all this pointless thrashing, it may well be, but the currency designs I know of from the crypto-establishment (rather than the cipherpunk/crypto-anarchist community) tend to be far more featureful and elegant, and their security is based on mathematical constructs rather than brute force. They just don't cater to internet-libertarian talking points.
It would be like me saying 'Wind power is ass backward. Other power sources can achieve just as much electricity without taking up all that land.' As if it wasn't a trade--off. And then only later acknowleding that wind power is about not relying on fossil-fuels.
Anyway, what do these other crypto-currencies give you, if it's not decentralization?
>> It would be like me saying 'Wind power is ass backward. Other power sources can achieve just as much electricity without taking up all that land.'
To me it's more like saying "everyone having a turbine and blowing on it themselves is just dumb, why not put a huge one on the common land so we don't all have to spend all day blowing at our little windmills?"
As I say, I like some of the ideas of crypto-currency but I actually consider all the decentralisation and deliberate removal of central authority from the issue a net negative.
>> As if it wasn't a trade--off.
That really depends if you place any value on what's being traded.
>> Anyway, what do these other crypto-currencies give you, if it's not decentralization?
Offline transactions, computational efficiency, various other things. But if your entire worldview is anti-centralisation and anti-government then they give you nothing, just as BTC gives me nothing I care about.
Interestingly, with Bitcoin you could do the mining with carbon neutral energy, since the electricity can be consumed where it's generated and the output is just data to be transmitted.