Bitcoin discussion and news

[Idaho]

This is the rationale of this - and the anger and the guff about lightning bollocks etc whole. Making money. Real money.

Gambling on crypto (some say "investing", but don't) is all about making money. Or at least increasing buying power (as you can just spend the currency).

The lottery, the pools, the bookies. Gambling is gambling. I am forced to gamble on the stock market in order to get a pension - private sector alas.

We gamble in the hope of escape.

 

[camouflage]

Although I take your point, two wrongs != 1 right and anyway there's an element of apples and oranges. I have no love for the mainstream banking system, but recognise it covers far, far more than straightforward electronic transfers. All those customer service buildings that people campaign to keep open so they can stand in queues, all the cash processing, all the terminals in retail outlets, all the loans and overdrafts, all the murky new and inventive ways they find to relieve people of their money, and that's just retail banking. All of it can use renewables, of course. The equivalence is closer to energy consumption of the online purchase aspect of the Visa debit system (about 20% of all transactions), or perhaps Paypal.



So there is hope, but only if the lightning network can be made to work. Good, the sooner the better because the current arrangement simply has to stop.

That's in the future, meanwhile we live in the internet age, when popular services snowball to alarming scales. Bitcoin is very attractive and starting to hit the mainstream, not least because the price has increased by a factor of 6 or so in the last year. In that time the number of users has doubled to 15 million, a rate of increase that's likely to continue to rise.

Every single time someone buys an eighth of weed they use the same power as their home uses in a couple of months. Madness.

Just for reference, there are 250million Paypal users, 1.5 billion debit cards. Is there enough electricity in the world if bitcoin becomes really popular?

Classic example of what's discussed in this: http://www.productmanualguide.com/newpdf/joseph-tainter-the-collapse-of-complex-societies-pdf.pdf

I'm not making a Doomer point, I mean specifically where he makes the point about the take-up of new inventions and new infrastructure to support them being dependant on the energy available to the society. Not just to build the new things, but to pay the ongoing cost of their maintenance and expansion and any tertiary effects (often meaning security overheads of course).

 

[camouflage]

does this not seem an absurd waste of resources and time that could be used elsewhere ?

Managing information is always going to be necessary and costly.

I think that will create centralised ones in order to have their currencies be able to work with smart contracts and the Internet of things.

Internet of things is another one. People talk about their fridges using the internet, I mean think of the bandwidth on that? extra capacity all has to come from somewhere, it all has to be processed. In some ways efficiency savings can be made but only because everything's shifted to the next magnitude up. I hadn't realized the power-cost of bitcoin until that article either but I had wondered, no idea it was so significant at this stage. I've worked in datacentres so I know what it feels like, aisles and aisles of stacked servers in cabinets being constantly cooled and powered, little lights flashing away on floor after floor of always-on strip lighting. And that's just regular internet sitting there humming away. But yeah there's been datacentres worth of bitcoin investment built up for a few years now.

Makes me wonder if bitcoin is like a film I saw once where idiots create an artificial black hole in a reconditioned nuclear power plant as a means of disposing of radioactive waste. Needless to say the whole experiment got away so they were left with a hungry black-hole that needs a constant supply of ever more radioactive waste or it'll collapse and take out an increasingly large bite of the Earth. Bitcoin might not collapse in a wash of gamma-rays and vaporization but it could become a sort of Frankensteins Monster feuled by fear and greed, I can see that happening.

I've been interested in bitcoin for ages, moneys always interested me as an invention, and I've been interested in bitcoin too, I'll continue to find it and other crypto or things like tally-sticks and various games-of-value worth thinking and talking about for a long time to come I hope, happy to see the thread liven up a bit and touch on some of these important issues around crypto like energy-usage or impact on people and world beyond the usual "it'll never work bcoz thin air" and "omg moon!"

 

[camouflage]

i am just spooked at electricity facilitating scarcity innit.just seems utterly wasteful. didnt want to get into the fiat thang.

there are a few, dodge comes to mind.

 

[newbie]

does this not seem an absurd waste of resources and time that could be used elsewhere ?

yes.

But unlike other outrageous carbon footprints on a similar scale* I'll guess that many/most of the people involved have no idea that that's what they're doing. And that is scandalous. It's taken 60-odd pages of this thread over 6 years or so without the carbon footprint being mentioned by any of the more knowledgeable users/tekkies/visionaries/evangelists, the people who ought to have known. Maybe they didn't know. Certainly those of us who are observers of money or politics, tech or futurology don't appear to have realised. So I doubt those who just use bc to buy weed or chase windfalls knew. Because the insider Bitcoin/crypto community has been ignoring what they should have been shouting about. Almost like there's something shameful to hide.

Mea culpa: I knew it took serious computational power to 'mine' coins, what I hadn't twigged and should have done is the per-transaction costs that implies: even if I had, never in a million years would I have guessed the sheer absurdity of the scale. Cleverer people than me flagged it years ago



'Mine' is the wrong word...


* alright, I admit I have no idea what else a very few people get up to that wastes as much power as 186m people in Nigeria use for their daily lives.

 

[newbie]

Pray continue. I'm interested to hear your "informed" (snigger) view on what the effects of crypto will be in 5 years time.

 

[kabbes]

Well said, newbie -- I've been following this story since it started, I swim in a money bin ("like Carl Barks drew it...") every day, trying to anticipate future macroeconomic fuck-ups, I've even read the dry-as-shit technical papers on blockchains and I thought I knew the ins and outs of what I was dealing with... but I had literally NO idea just how much power was involved in this. When people think Bitcoin, they don't think "one purchase has enough energy to run my house for 9 days", or whatever that stat was.

 

[Idaho]

View attachment 119847

0.1% of global power is the straw that breaks the camel's back?

I completely agree that pow is ridiculously wasteful. And it must be fixed. But it's a thousandth of output, and effort is being made to make it more sustainable. I get the suspicion that people who don't like the idea of crypto are delighted to hang their irritation on something concrete.

 

[Silas Loom]

Well said, newbie -- I've been following this story since it started, I swim in a money bin ("like Carl Barks drew it...") every day, trying to anticipate future macroeconomic fuck-ups, I've even read the dry-as-shit technical papers on blockchains and I thought I knew the ins and outs of what I was dealing with... but I had literally NO idea just how much power was involved in this. When people think Bitcoin, they don't think "one purchase has enough energy to run my house for 9 days", or whatever that stat was.

Hmm. There's a lot you can do with distributed ledger besides cryptocurrencies. Some of it is really useful.

Isn't Moore's law a counterbalance to all this? By the time East Anglia is threatened, won't industrial-scale computing have moved to (say) quantum platforms, or at least substantially cheaper forms of binary electronic processing.

Broadly and crudely, smarter technology tends to reduce demand for physical transportation of people and stuff. Again, broadly and crudely, if distributed ledger provides IP assurance for additive manufacturing, then there will be fewer lorries on the roads. There will be better examples. It seems a bit off to attack DL on power consumption grounds without considering its total impact.

 

[kabbes]

0.1% of global power is the straw that breaks the camel's back?

I completely agree that pow is ridiculously wasteful. And it must be fixed. But it's a thousandth of output, and effort is being made to make it more sustainable. I get the suspicion that people who don't like the idea of crypto are delighted to hang their irritation on something concrete.

What proportion of global power does it rise to if it reaches your fabled 5% of online transactions?

 

[kabbes]

Hmm. There's a lot you can do with distributed ledger besides cryptocurrencies. Isn't Moore's law a counterbalance to all this? By the time East Anglia is threatened, won't industrial-scale computing have moved to (say) quantum platforms, or at least substantially cheaper forms of binary electronic processing.

That's a lot to rely on. Moore's Law is in its death throes with quantum tunneling placing hard limits on how small you can make your chips (when you rely on binary on-off states, you don't want to deal with electrons that are actually probability clouds and may or may not be on or off). Quantum computers have been talked about for a long time and may be the future, but it's a shaky thing to assume they will seamlessly pick up where Moore's Law left off. Meanwhile, East Anglia is threatened right now -- it is the CO2 that is being currently pumped into the atmosphere that will be the cause of the kind of sea level rises that wipes it out. Besides, if quantum computing really makes calculations orders of magnitude faster, it could potentially undermine the cryptography being relied on in the first place.

 

[Idaho]

What proportion of global power does it rise to if it reaches your fabled 5% of online transactions?

2nd layer should have a negligible power use, at the cost of some security.

 

[Silas Loom]

Besides, if quantum computing really makes calculations orders of magnitude faster, it could potentially undermine the cryptography being relied on in the first place.

No. QC basically stops the crypto-decryption arms race in its tracks and gives everyone intercept-proof communications. It's not a good thing, from many perspectives.

 

[Silas Loom]

That's a lot to rely on. Moore's Law is in its death throes with quantum tunneling placing hard limits on how small you can make your chips (when you rely on binary on-off states, you don't want to deal with electrons that are actually probability clouds and may or may not be on or off). Quantum computers have been talked about for a long time and may be the future, but it's a shaky thing to assume they will seamlessly pick up where Moore's Law left off. Meanwhile, East Anglia is threatened right now -- it is the CO2 that is being currently pumped into the atmosphere that will be the cause of the kind of sea level rises that wipes it out. .

Fair points - any thoughts on the other suggestion, though? The broader carbon impact of DL as a component of trusted electronic supply chains and therefore reduced physical supply chains?

 

[kabbes]

2nd layer should have a negligible power use, at the cost of some security.

"Should"? Let's talk about what is actually being used before getting too excited about theoretical future changes. After all, it is the current generation of blockchain that everyone was telling us four years ago would be the foundation of future transactions. Nobody then was saying "don't worry, there'll be a new generation along eventually to fix the current technical problems with Bitcoin"

 

[kabbes]

Fair points - any thoughts on the other suggestion, though? The broader carbon impact of DL as a component of trusted electronic supply chains and therefore reduced physical supply chains?

I agree, there are things that smart contracts generally can potentially achieve that counterbalance their carbon cost. Self-actualizing insurance contracts, for instance. There are other politico-philosophical problems with them (butchers linked to a fantastic book about it a few years ago, which should still be on this thread somewhere), but that doesn't detract from their practical efficiency given the current social/economic framework.

So distributed ledger contracts, maybe. But blockchain money? It still has as much to prove in terms of its worth as it ever did, and arguably more.

 

[Idaho]

"Should"? Let's talk about what is actually being used before getting too excited about theoretical future changes. After all, it is the current generation of blockchain that everyone was telling us four years ago would be the foundation of future transactions. Nobody then was saying "don't worry, there'll be a new generation along eventually to fix the current technical problems with Bitcoin"

It's open source, iterative, malleable. There is no one person in charge. It's an open ended project.

 

[kabbes]

Here's the link to that book I was talking about.

I've just finished this short book The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism By David Golumbia. It's a useful read, the first half especially where he establishes that bitcoin isn't a neutral tool that just happens to attract far-righters but that the very foundational assumptions of the project are far-right and there's no way of escaping it no matter what you claim your personal politics are. 2nd half relies too much on failed economic orthodoxies and statism. There is a much expanded version on the way.

 

[kabbes]

It's open source, iterative, malleable. There is no one person in charge. It's an open ended project.

And that's exactly why I'll focus on the problems of what we are currently being presented with and not assume they will magically disappear with some future wave of a techno-wand.

 

[Silas Loom]

But blockchain money? It still has as much to prove in terms of its worth as it ever did, and arguably more.

I'm not a fan at all, that libertarian nerds invented a currency which is tied to a metaphorically physical mining process just shows how bad they are at coping with abstracts, and how fundamentally unambitious their thinking is. That money can simply be invented by states is far more impressive. I'm just a bit worried about your argument from power consumption.

 

[kabbes]

I'm not a fan at all, that libertarian nerds invented a currency which is tied to a metaphorically physical mining process just shows how bad they are at coping with abstracts, and how fundamentally unambitious their thinking is. That money can simply be invented by states is far more impressive. I'm just a bit worried about your argument from power consumption.

I'm more worried about the actual power consumption as it actually stands!

Let's not forget that even though Bitcoin transactions are a tiny fraction of 1% of total transactions (this estimates wealth not transactions, but if Bitcoin is 0.05% of the world's wealth, this at least gives us an idea of implied transaction volume), these transactions are nevertheless currently causing noticeable, measurable power usage - 0.1% of the world's total power output. That isn't theoretical, it's real.

It also seems to be the case that as blockchains get longer, they get noticeably more power intensive. This article notes that power usage per transaction basically doubled from 2015 to early 2017.

As we then move from 0.05% to 5% of transactions -- a 100x increase -- what happens to power use? That isn't a small question. If the power per transaction increases propotionally as well as scaling up the number of transactions, what are we looking at? 20% of world power output? 50%?

Saying that the problems are solved by better computers or better algorithms doesn't answer this question, as it uses theoretical solutions to actual existing problems. If that's the answer, let's see those solutions actually in place before we start to build systems around cryptocurrency.

 

[newbie]

"one purchase has enough energy to run my house for 9 days", or whatever that stat was.

3 months

 

[Silas Loom]

Saying that the problems are solved by better computers or better algorithms doesn't answer this question, as it uses theoretical solutions to actual existing problems. If that's the answer, let's see those solutions actually in place before we start to build systems around cryptocurrency.

Would have to agree, I think. Well argued.

Do you - or anyone else - happen to know whether it is the mining process which is so processor-intensive, or just the existence of a blockchain? I'm assuming that mining, unlike other aspects of DL, is specific to cryptocash.

 

[kabbes]

Would have to agree, I think. Well argued.

Do you - or anyone else - happen to know whether it is the mining process which is so processor-intensive, or just the existence of a blockchain? I'm assuming that mining, unlike other aspects of DL, is specific to cryptocash.

Not me -- I'm still trying to get my head around this power intensity as something I hadn't come across before.

 

[kabbes]

3 months

Frankly, whether one transaction is 3 months' power, 9 days' power or even a single day's power, it's all a gamechanger for the viability of widescale use.

 

[camouflage]

yes.

But unlike other outrageous carbon footprints on a similar scale* I'll guess that many/most of the people involved have no idea that that's what they're doing. And that is scandalous. It's taken 60-odd pages of this thread over 6 years or so without the carbon footprint being mentioned by any of the more knowledgeable users/tekkies/visionaries/evangelists, the people who ought to have known. Maybe they didn't know. Certainly those of us who are observers of money or politics, tech or futurology don't appear to have realised. So I doubt those who just use bc to buy weed or chase windfalls knew. Because the insider Bitcoin/crypto community has been ignoring what they should have been shouting about. Almost like there's something shameful to hide.

Mea culpa: I knew it took serious computational power to 'mine' coins, what I hadn't twigged and should have done is the per-transaction costs that implies: even if I had, never in a million years would I have guessed the sheer absurdity of the scale. Cleverer people than me flagged it years ago
View attachment 119845


'Mine' is the wrong word...


* alright, I admit I have no idea what else a very few people get up to that wastes as much power as 186m people in Nigeria use for their daily lives.

Probably best not to get too high up on that horse, it would be insightful indeed to examine the energy footprint of a whole range of clever new internet things. Amazons vast logistics machine, twitter, wiki, Netflix,... the internet is pretty aggressive in the way it develops anything that turns out to have legs. And let's not pretend that for the most part the naysayers of this technology have had only banging on about thin-air to say about it for ages. I found it frustrating actually, I wouldn't call myself a bitcoin evangelist as I've always been interested to talk about the various issues around it but it's only now after years that people are starting to talk about precisely the kind of stuff we should have been discussing all this time around crypto other than the usual dismissive "pretend nonesense internet money". Well now, turns out this pretend nonsense internet money is quite capable of taking serious bites out of the planet... does the technology and it's various implications pregnant with future-shock/horror/potential finally deserve a more serious and deeper level of discussion now... or will we just go back to waving it off as of interest only to deluded libertarian techno-wankers and whistle on? Do what you want really, but we might get further with less ego to drag along the way. who knows what else might need awareness that we still don't know about or haven't yet thought of because it's taken the smug-dismissal brigade so long to get over that first initial step?

I mean it's as if with the development of the first prototype nuclear power-station for energy people just dismissed the whole subject of nuclear power with "what's wrong with coal?" or "boiling water with radioactive decay to push dynamos thus generating electricity? Nonesense, Coal burner works fine." Maybe so but what will you bring to the conversation come a Three Mile Island, something about soot? Thanks, glad to see our best minds on the case.

Powerful new technologies deserve more than dismissal and than haughty outrage that one lacked the imagination or the interest to take the matter seriously in the past, almost accusingly of those that did like they've only been interested all this time because they're all snake-oil tossers. Jeesh.

 

[Idaho]

 

[Idaho]

View attachment 119857

There's your solution to high fees and the environmental problems of bitcoin.

 

[camouflage]

Would have to agree, I think. Well argued.

Do you - or anyone else - happen to know whether it is the mining process which is so processor-intensive, or just the existence of a blockchain? I'm assuming that mining, unlike other aspects of DL, is specific to cryptocash.

It's the PoW algorithm, that requires increasingly harder computation- work, to verify transactions and ensure that an attacker must pay huge "costs" to manipulate the ledger of transactions all that work is used to confirm. A change to PoS would take that particular element away, but whatever happens we still have a vast expanding internet whose foot-print is indeed real and does take up actual space and actual energy. For me, sans PoW the energy foot-print issue is no longer about Bitcoin but the internet as a whole. Say Bitcoin really did cut out the middle-men of the current financial system, that's loads of overhead shed right there... but the efficiency gains would surely just enable us to step up to the next magnitude up of overall consumption sort of thing. Just posting this here now costs something somewhere, and I doubt the broadband supplier is paying those costs.

 

[elbows]

I note the following form a BBC article about the Isle of Man, in light of the Paradise Papers.

Each lunchtime, office workers in pinstripe suits emerge from Athol Street’s buildings. Many huddle together in Coffee Exchange or the Courthouse bar around a laptop or a sheaf of papers, keeping their voices low as they talk business.

There’s the occasional visible indication that this is a place apart, like the sign in the window of The Thirsty Pigeon pub declaring that it accepts Bitcoin.

The island that swapped donkey rides for offshore cash - BBC News