Leaving the arguable utility and purpose aside, why is consuming electricity for securing traditional finance ok, but not for securing crypto based financial system? Isnt traditional systems consuming arguably needless electricity for ATM security, severs, surveillance, transportation, software and its resources that go into securing the system, etc etc? If thats acceptable i wonder why is the energy spent, in the name of PoW, unacceptable?PoW grabs a lot of eyeballs and also lets these paper analysts to easily quantify the consumption. While quantifying the energy consumption of traditional systems is difficult and hence becomes ok..
There's a lot of one-liner talk about externalities in this thread above, but I'd be curious if people would show the stats of energy consumption of the rest of the traditional banking system. I'm not an owner of BTC, but I worked managing datacenter servers in the past, and it's like no one has mentioned a single time that there are arrays upon arrays of servers, 10's of thousands, that run company back-end systems. There are servers to manage the servers to manage the servers (stuff like monitoring, automation management systems, etc.), and it blossoms from there. And these places still use mainframes on top of distributed computing.
BTC might be giant waste of resources, but it's curious that the comparisons imply that it's BTC versus no energy usage, instead of BTC versus traditional banks with their giant datacenters all over the country and world. Might be worth at least a mention in the comparison?
Traditional banking runs all the world's actual financial transactions (likely billions settlements at any given moment), something that crypto hasn't even started scratching.
Right, but is that not merely because cryptocurrency is a nascent technology?
The modern financial system has required an insane amount of capital (energy, resource, human) in order to get where it is.
It seems very Luddite to think that the pure-digital system is not more than capable of outpacing (in terms of efficiency and effectiveness) a system that involves massive amounts of human capital, when that (humans > machines) has literally never happened in human history in the long-term.
I can't comprehend your comment. You can just create a centralized system that does the same thing as Bitcoin and consume less power. It is that simple. Blockchains don't provide utility beyond executing arbitrary code in a trustless manner. We already know how to execute arbitrary code in a trusted manner so the only substantial difference is the degree of trust which in the vast majority of cases simply doesn't matter.
The key improvement with cryptocurrency (and what allows it to be the first truly digital currency / financial system) is the trustless nature.
Yes, existing banking is just "database queries", which are of course more efficient than transactions on a blockchain. BUT in order for people to trust those database queries, you need to build a monstrous behemoth of energy/resource/human expenditure to maintain that trust. If I just spin up a PostgreSQL database and tell people "hey, I'll store transactions for you – super energy efficient" obviously nobody will use my system (e: without utilizing supplemental systems for trust). Think about how much human/energy/resource expenditure goes into just making counterfeit-proof paper money – humans designing anti-counterfeiting measures, building money printing machines to make good on those ideas, using plastic/metal threads and such in each and every dollar, humans checking your $100 at the grocery store with a pen / UV light / whatever, people making those pens / UV lights, Secret Service agents investing time and money to find and stop counterfeiters, etc.
In cryptocurrency, "counterfeit-proof" comes merely at the expense of more clock cycles. The benefit of which is obvious (to me at least) as the world moves towards 100% renewable energy.
Here's a graph to illustrate the point. txns is the cost of an actual transaction. trst is the cost to maintain trust on top of transaction cost. Worth noting that at some point (hopefully), both "txns" rows will be entirely renewably-powered, while the "trst" rows have a good number of processes that are not made more efficient with the onset of renewables.
If my bank switches to bitcoin only, I still need a bank. So the energy consumption of the new bank is bank + the banks share of bitcoin overhead, energy or other wise. Subtract the overhead of supporting the currency called dollars.
Bitcoin doesn't save me from living my life and needing financial services. I choose to transact with people I trust or intermediaries I trust.
We will still need the OTC, FDIC, SEC, the Fed the Treasury, even if it is all denominated in bitcoin.
>If I just spin up a PostgreSQL database and tell people "hey, I'll store transactions for you – super energy efficient" obviously nobody will use my system.
This happens all the time and there are more of those nobodies than people in the cryptocurrency space.
Can you give me an example? The things that spring to mind for me are generally built on the back of (usually more than one) existing financial system, for example settlement layers at the very least (Visa / Mastercard).
> It’s important to choose a moderator that is trustworthy for both parties on a decentralized network so make sure to join the OpenBazaar discussion communities and learn How To Choose a Good Moderator.
I don't want to learn "How To Choose a Good Moderator." I'd like to have someone with deep pockets that I can sue for damages if they don't keep their guarantees, like Visa.
How do they get paid? I didn't see that in the FAQ. Presumably they take a cut from the seller? If so, I'd imagine it might be frustrating to negotiate which 3rd party you pick for what fee for each transaction.
No doubt. But there's some footprint there that should at least be tossed in the conversation about BTC externalities.
It might be that BTC is 10X worse, 100X worse, but it's head-scratching that the comparison remains between BTC, with its externalities and so sorth, carbon footprint, and null. BTC might fail miserably (it may already have) but the claim is it can be a store of wealth and a possible transaction system.
I’m no expert but I would wager that all of the world’s financial infrastructure consumes less electricity than Argentina[0] and that it’s growth is fairly linear and predictable.
The article deems neither Bitcoin's energy consumption nor the traditional banking system's as "acceptable" or "unacceptable". (e.g. check out the footnotes.) Bitcoin's energy consumption can be "justified" in many ways (if it even needs justification at all!). But "Bitcoin is a Battery" is not a good justification, since it is demonstrable false.
Bitcoin energy consumption is a brittle argument, our entire monetary system is backed by much more expensive energy usage. Energy usage for security is a trait of sound money.
Japan, Korea or other countries may also be overpopulated yes. But realize the volume spread. A few millions overpopulation is largely different from an over population of a few billions. The magnitude is incomparable.
OK yeah this looks good. Was expecting a tech demo but this is such a sales pitch glorifying a pretty common solution to a pretty common problem. The Intro on eval result not being a data is something that I don't get. If it's not data then what is it? Atleast what is it for the thing that's presenting it? All these while the folks were flaunting how awesome the REPL experience has been and suddenly Stu gives a small intro on how painful it is to eval a code. Just to glorify how awesome this REBL wud be? . I generally love most talks from clj community but not this one.
> The Intro on eval result not being a data is something that I don't get. If it's not data then what is it?
For an example - while technically a set of all prime numbers is data - you can't just view it in the REPL as a whole. So I interpret the "not data" notion as a shortcut to saying - a subset of data and optionally some way to navigate throgh the rest of it.
Unwritten rule of HN is that, one must be a blind supporter of anything clojure, Haskell and must be a blind hater of anything java, Javascript. Downvoters:care to provide reasons??
It's probably the accusational tone and sweeping generalisation coupled with the absence of proof, data, or at least examples to back it up. Also, it doesn't even tangentially touch on the actual subject of the post.
