Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin
arstechnica.com
Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin::US government tracking the energy implications of booming bitcoin mining in US.
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Is it not a way in which some governments could collaborate to end this Bitcoin madness?
Genuinely question.
Like maybe some big countries could agree to collaborate and join resources to make a 51% attack and bring Bitcoin price to 0 so people stop wasting resources on it.
2% of enery usage for something that do not add any value to society is INSANE.
I think the best solution would be to properly tax carbon. That way Bitcoin miners would either become unprofitable or move to greener energy.
I don't think it's a good idea to establish the precedent that gov't can decide what you can and cannot do with your energy. You may think it's a waste of energy, but if the externality is properly taxed, I don't see the problem with letting it continue
Agreed, tax what the problem is not just one facet of it.
I think cap and trade can be a good idea, the problem is getting all the countries in the world to sign onto it. Any country that doesn't ends up with a competitive advantage. But if you somehow got them to all agree, blockchain actually provides a perfect way to build a cap-and-trade system that every country can participate in, transparently, without having to trust one country or group of countries to run it honestly. That's the essential problem blockchain solves: administering systems trustlessly.
Bitcoin miners do by and large use green energy since it tends to be the cheapest (off-peak hours from over-provisioned grids). If electricity gets more expensive, it doesn't mean it becomes unprofitable to mine, that's only one side of the equation. The other side is how much people are willing to pay to get transactions added to the blockchain, which is a number, on average, that has increased year after year. Not that you ever need to make an on-chain transaction, with Bitcoin lightning you can do transactions off-chain while getting much of the security of on-chain transactions. You can move money internationally in under a second for pennies in fees. And it works just as easily as venmo. In fact, if you have cash app on your phone, you already have the ability to use the lightning network, though it's a custodial wallet (meaning you are trusting cash app not to take/lose your BTC).
Then it's just gonna suck up "green energy". It's still energy. We have already have provably secure PoS (not Ethereum btw, it's PoS sucks ass).
Yeah I'm pro PoS in general, but I don't think we should forbid people from running PoW on their own computers. Seems like a step too far.
Side note, what's wrong with Ethereum's PoS in your opinion?
Oh yeah, I was never for banning PoW. I just don't like it since I know same or better can be achieved with a well designed PoS.
Ethereum PoS has slashing so people are scared to stake thus causing low participation rate. Also, in Ethereum, you need a minimum amount of 32 ETH to solo stake. Ethereum also doesn't have a native liquid staking and has locking, unlike Cardano. And you can't delegate your coins without giving up custody of them. Cardano PoS is designed completely differently and is natively liquid with no locking, no min amount to stake, native delegation and both delegation and self-staking is risk free when it comes to your balance. Worst case - you miss out on those 3.5% rewards for the period your balance is delegated to a pool that's not doing its job. All of this is the reason staking participation is like 65% in Cardano. Would probably be even higher if it wasn't for lost coins and large whale wallets that are not staking/delegating for some reason.
I think the 32 ETH lockup + slashing does make it riskier to stake, but it also makes the chain more secure. As a malicious Ethereum staker, every failed attack costs me a lot of money. As a Cardano staker, I can attempt an attack many times because there I don't lost that much if it fails.
The lack of liquid staking is the only real drawback I see here, as it has allowed some centralization in the Lido token. Ethereum has yet to address that issue
Yeah, but people are just gonna leave your pool if you try to attack the network or miss blocks. (And good luck attacking the network where even the largest 2 entities Binance and Coinbase together only have about12% of block production (stake)).
Like... ye, it's not happening.
And why would you attack a network (if you could) where your value is stored. It's a suicide.
If you did have so much stake, it might be smarter to play by the rules.
If you destroy Bitcoin, another currency would take its place.
Good. Most don't use proof of work anymore because they don't feel the need to watch the world burn for no reason other than propping up techno bros.
A lot still do, and that's where the miners would go
If governments started regulating bitcoin because it was proof of work based then people aren’t going to pump real money into another proof of work scheme to replace it - why would they take the risk of it happening again when there are alternatives? the mining profit margins would disappear and so would they.
It woulf take years and years to pass such a ban in a significant number of countries - assuming they would ever want to cooperate on this, that is
Oh I think that’s probably true, but the question assumed it taking place
Some have tried, they have all failed. Bitcoin is international. A 51% attack is so implausibly expensive that nobody really has the resources to pull it off. Even if you had enough money and energy to burn, there is the small problem of acquiring enough of the specialized hardware to do it (ASIC miners), and potentially the specs and fab to make that hardware. People will see it coming a mile away. Don't want to use ASICs? Enjoy at least a 100x increase in energy and equipment costs. And it gets more expensive every year. If you had that much money to put into destroying Bitcoin, it would be much better spent on an ad campaign telling people Bitcoin was bad than doing a 51% attack.
A 51% attack doesn't prove Bitcoin is broken, it proves the protocol is working exactly as expected. A 51% attack causes a temporary fork. This happens all the time organically when two miners find the next block at the same time, it's a natural part of the protocol. That's why for really large or important transactions on main chain, you wait a few blocks before considering them fully secured.
Bitcoin's value to society is the ability to easily transfer money from point A to B and having a clear fiscal policy it has kept to for 15 years, 365 days a year, 24/7 without a single hour of downtime, a bank holiday, or getting hacked. There's a reason big money like hedge funds and private banking are investing in it: it's actually useful and has massive potential. The market cap of Bitcoin is 850 BILLION USD, that's bigger than the GDP of Sweden or Israel or Vietnam. People use it to move over a trillion dollars of value a year. You can debate how much of that movement is trading & speculation vs use as a currency, but it's a trillion nonetheless. I personally pay for things regularly with Bitcoin, you'd be surprised how many places you can spend it when you start looking. And it's available to anybody with a cellphone and halfway reliable internet access, including the billions of people who are "unbanked" and lack access to stable banking infrastructure.
Transactions on Bitcoin lightning occur in under a second and cost pennies in fees. That's to send it across the room or across the globe. Remittance services and bank wires use just as much energy and cost 10x-1000x as much. And they waste not just energy but human capital as well, we no longer need humans manually sending bank wires like it's 1910. You just don't see headlines about the energy impact of bank wires or western union because it's not novel, we just accept it as a cost of our financial system.
That's not even getting into the secondary costs to the environment of running a society on an economy based on an inflationary currency which requires that currency be rapidly spent because it's getting constantly devalued. That's a great strategy to rapidly industrialize the world, but it's not a great strategy on a globe with limited resources. Tell me, if you knew your dollar would be worth 10% more next year, would you be more hesitant to spend it? Might you consume less if you knew saving money in your bank account would actually cause it's value to stay the same or increase over time? Might you focus your spending more on quality products that will last instead of just buying the cheapest thing because if it breaks, you can just buy a new one? This isn't just on a personal level, this same kind of calculus is used by big investment firms to build everything that won't last. Buildings, stadiums, entire cities, financed with money that is constantly losing value. Bitcoin's value relative to goods and services will fluctuate like any currency does, but the supply of the currency does not increase. There are 21 million which will ever be minted. Your 0.1BTC will always be 0.1BTC and will always represent 0.1/128M% of the total supply. If the Bitcoin economy grows, you share in that growth and the value it produces instead of seeing the difference printed away and given to whoever controls the money supply and whoever they want to give it to.
Skip ad. Bitcoin is pumped through ridiculous leverage and printing of "stable" coins like tether. The scam hasn't unraveled yet, but that doesn't mean it won't.
Do you know that Tether and Bitcoin are different things? Because it seems like you don't.
Do you know that tether is printed and used to buy bitcoin? Because it seems like you don't.
Stablecoins are a house of cards built around stably relating to another house of cards which is the entire inflationary fiat system. Every single asset and currency is speculated on via the open market. Bitcoin is no exception. If it is overvalued or undervalued, that creates market opportunities for people to exploit the difference. The market has decided it's worth a certain amount today, it will be another amount tomorrow. Not unique to Bitcoin. Every year people have said Bitcoin was "overvalued" and powered purely by hype, on average, the market has decided they were wrong the following year.
Any honestly-run stablecoin inherently has to collateralize their coin with something. They can buy BTC (and do), they can buy USD (and do), they can buy wheat futures (but I'm not sure they do). Ultimately, a diverse portfolio would probably be wisest. Yet you don't see anybody complaining that "USD is being pumped by Tether/USDC". Why? Because it's not a problem.
??? How is USD being pumped by USDT/USDC? I'm lost, lol.
The previous poster is alleging BTC is being "pumped" by tether because tether is collateralizing their coin by buying BTC. I'm pointing out that they also buy USD yet nobody is complaining that USD is being pumped.
If you buy a stablecoin, the hope is that the stablecoin is tied to an actual dollar (or whatever it is supposed to represent). This means if you buy $1 in tether, tether should buy $1 USD on the open market, put it in a vault, and wait until somebody else comes back to sell that dollar back to Tether. But you can buy other stuff too, other assets, which when you start managing large amounts of money is important for risk management. Plus they can make some returns that way. Some stablecoins pass the returns on to people who hold the stablecoin. Generally, these stablecoins are collapses waiting to happen for these and many other reasons.
Do you genuinely believe the impact of Tether buying Bitcoin on Bitcoins price is comparable to the impact of Tether buying USD to USD "price"/value? Like fr?
I'm not saying it doesn't impact the price, I'm saying it doesn't matter. Bitcoin's current price looks like a steal to me if it's going to be the underlying currency for the global economy.
All currency is speculated on. The market finds the right price. Then it corrects. The price goes up and down. That's how markets work. The USD is guaranteed to lose value and buying power over time due to an inflationary supply. That's not even throwing in the US's declining role as a global currency hegemon and the reduced demand it causes.
Bitcoin? It could go up or down relative to other currencies or goods, but my portion of the supply relative to the whole will always be the same. That's why I buy bitcoin.
People defending Binance and Tether are either:
Which one are you?
IDGAF about Tether, IMO it will collapse one day, and the world will be better for it. It's a currency whose basis is "trust me bro".
I just wish it collapsed sooner. At this point the effect on the whole crypto sector, be it BTC, ETH or ADA will be unimaginable for most people.