> No, this needs to have the plug pulled on it if we're to keep global warming to 2C.
Bitcoin accounts for <0.1% of global CO2e and has one of the highest shares of renewables in any industry (since it competes globally for the cheapest energy).
It incentivises renewables (by being a location agnostic buyer of first and last resort which buys all excess energy 24/7), reduces CO2e (by making it profitable to combust CH4 instead of venting it), stabilises energy grids (by providing flexible demand response, i.e. can be turned on and off at moment's notice), provides banking services for the global unbanked and financially discriminated, shields from gambling bankers and inflation of the money supply, ...
In comparison to all these use cases and benefits, mere "luxury" energy uses such as air-conditioning, tumble drying, video games, porn, ... all consume more energy and produce more CO2e (e.g. A/C ~100x more). Yet nobody calls to have the plug pulled on them.
Regulate the production of energy, not the consumption.
Computers, data centers and networks consume about 10% of all the world energy. [1] 4 percent of websites are estimated to be porn [2] a single gaming computer costs about up to 1400 kWh annually. [3]
So the porn websites are about 3X bitcoin and BTC represents around 8.7m gaming computers.
I would like the source too. I would be very surprised if Bitcoin energy consumption passed even half of what is consumed for porn and video games. I expect the amount of energy being used to maintain Bitcoin to be a rounding error in comparison.
Can somebody who knows statistics explain something for me?
They report (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01285-8/tables/1, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-022-01285-8) e.g. the C allele of rs114142727 to have an OR of 1.285, yet they also report the frequency of said allele to be similar in the case and control group (both ~0.988). Is this a rounding issue (i.e. frequency in the case group must always be higher to report an OR>1) and the frequency is only slightly higher in the case group and the OR becomes so large simply because of the large sampling size? (40K case, 200K controls)
When they report 1.285 OR with a standard error of 0.04 at N=38691, does this roughly translate to a 95% CI of [1.207,1.363]?
The reported frequency is with respect to A1, which in this case appears to be the major allele C. According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/snp/?term=rs114142727, the minor allele is G with MAF (ALFA) ~0.013, this would make C the major allele with frequency of ~0.987 which seem to be in line with the report.
Just use Bitcoin. Don't trust anyone except yourself. You can store your coins in your phone, hardware wallet, paper wallet. You can encode it in steel and bury it in your backyard. You can "horcrux" them (e.g. via MultiSig or SSS) and store the parts (and copies of them) at different locations (friends, family, attorney, ...). Or put them in a safe deposit box if you like. Put a small amount on your phone and you can send them in seconds via the Lightning Network to anyone in the world at minimal fees, without relying on or needing permission from anybody else.
Few actual need custodial services and nobody needs the greedy shitcoin casino. Decentralize. Be your own bank.
Growth continued on second layers: Bitcoin's tx count on the Lightning Network has doubled over the last year. Forks of Bitcoin who attempted to scale by increasing the blocksize all failed and are practically dead (Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash, eCash, Bitcoin ABC, ...).
> lightning isn't on the bitcoin chain until it gets synchronized.
That is literally the purpose of building second layers. We don't need to keep on-chain records of every microtransaction and coffee purchase in an immutable, ever-growing blockchain synchronized across thousands of nodes across the globe.
> If I give you a bitcoin address, you can't send anything to me with the lightning network.
You can call it whatever you want, someone still has to sync with the main chain, where all the utility is. You can get together with your friend and give each other IOUs all day every day, it doesn't somehow change the fact that bitcoin's throughput is severely crippled to be the speed of a dialup modem.
Have you ever stopped to think that other cryptocurrencies don't have second layers because people don't want them and their chains don't need them? Why go through all this when there is no reason to have a crippled chain in the first place?
Using regular cryptocurrencies is incredibly simple and elegant. It's only when people started to believe propaganda about disk space and cpu time (that never made sense with the most basic examination) that somehow something that worked amazingly well is now a complete mess.
> Using regular cryptocurrencies is incredibly simple and elegant. It's only when people started to believe propaganda about disk space and cpu time (that never made sense with the most basic examination) that somehow something that worked amazingly well is now a complete mess.
Bitcoin SV did not care about these things and is dead because of it. Its blocks are ~200MB spammed with mostly non-payment related data. Its blockchain has grown to over 6 TB, the global number of nodes verifying the chain is down to 20 and it has been delisted by many exchanges and block explorers.
Bitcoin and Lightning in comparison have ~25,000 nodes.
Your example is bizarre since it is a nonsense fork made by a scammer. Even so it does actually work and keeps running even though all the people that sold you a second layer said throughput above a 56k modem was impossible. The spam could easily be prevented by a minimum fee. Even $0.10 per transaction would be $120,000 an hour paid by spammer and going to miners.
Someone needs to explain to me how the Lightning Network actually works, because I find it super sus. How do people make money off transactions as miners if BTC transactions are so cheap ?
People must lock BTC in the "channels" from them to each of the peers they ever want to transact with, in the amount of what they will spend with them in the future. This should produce approximately 10billion*10billion channels in total (so 1^20 whateverellion channels for all humans). Then magic internet machine will solve this Traveler Salesman problem for each transaction.
After people realised that this is a crap idea, they have reinvented banks, who take people's BTC and give them IOUs instead. Then only banks have to deal with the "channels" and "locked" tokens in a centralised way, lessening the overall complexity.
People have realized this a long time ago. The expected configuration is a node-based network like the internet. Messages (money) hop from "router" to "router" until they reach their final destinations through the shortest paths. The "bank" would still be your bitcoin wallet, while your lightning allocation would be like a credit account with every vendor simultaneously. The nodes are routers. The amount you put "at-risk" in lighting only needs to be a minimum amount you need to transact for the day/week/month - and it is not really "at-risk" since there are strong protections built-in.
The general story is that not all transactions are equal. A payment from your cousin for a poker debt doesn't need the fury of a million computers protecting it. Similarly if you have an ongoing relationship with a vendor, and many other examples. In real-life there are vastly differing trust-profiles between transactions. It's ok to trade some security for some efficiency sometimes. It doesn't make sense to treat them all the same.
So user gets a credit at the Not-A-Bank router-node for the full amount of what he intends to spend. Tell me, how exactly does this differ from a bank? Except with less oversight?
Are you asking how do lighting STAKERS make money if lightning transactions are so cheap? Right now they don't, people are doing it to bootstrap the network. But in the future, they will be able to make it on volume. Staking is nearly costless. There were 369 billion purchase transactions for goods and services worldwide in 2018 [1]. At a penny per, that's a lot of scratch.
This rests on the amazing assumption that Bitcoin will replace all currency everywhere somehow.
This is why I can’t get Bitcoiners - their assumptions are always over the top “we will take 100% of gold’s value” “nations will dissolve because of Bitcoin” or something of that order.
Compare that to ETH - people will build decentralised applications and ETH will be the currency in those applications. Stakers get a fee.
Since we're on a tech inclined site, you'll be happy to hear that an RPi4 can process 256MB blocks in well less than two minutes. Current 32MB size limit on BCH in 8 seconds. Check for yourself.
Bitcoin Cash (the og big block chain) is alive and kicking, and getting stable updates (both features and performance), and also has optional (affordable) coin shuffle). Lightning Network is a security and usability nightmare, and its total liquidity is in the low thousands of BTC (lol).
Since LN's inception, liquidity and transaction count on the LN have roughly doubled with every year.
In comparison, BCH has lost 80% of its transaction volume in the last year alone. Its blocksize is now 100KB on average and it now processes fewer transactions than LN. It also regularly hard-forks, either because of leadership cults (Ver, Wright, Sechet, ...) or because of scheduled hard-forks every 6 months which kick off all users who haven't updated. It's the opposite of stable and the market apparently does not share its determination in sacrificing decentralization for adoption.
> I say "the price people were willing to pay" instead of "value"
The price people are willing to pay is how you estimate the value of something.
> For Bitcoin, the most popular one, on the order of 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 of hashes get calculated to mine a single block, multiple trillion per second. Within ten minutes, only a single one of those 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 hashes is actually used, depending entirely on luck. The rest are thrown away entirely. They do not form part of the final hash or anything else, the energy spent on them is lost.
You need to dig through 1 million gram of ore to find 1 gram of gold, depending entirely on luck. The rest is thrown away entirely. The energy is of course not lost but was necessary to find something of value (which also creates a lower price boundary). In contrast to gold, Bitcoin mining ensures provably fair probability of winning, has a tremendously lower barrier of entry, provides incentives to be run on renewable energy and produces far less waste.
The culprit here is likely that you don't consider Bitcoin to be something of value. Particularly for those with less financial privilege, Bitcoin can provide uncensored access to financial services and a long-term hedge against inflation.
I really like that comparison with the gold to raw ore ratios as a frame of reference, but isn't mining hashes in general just a completely arbitrary selection for a definition of work and wouldn't harnessing some more useful proveable activity tied to a lottery system be better ?
Even all the Miners locking cash in a single account with a constant reward function could be put to some real use and still generate the same return outcome of new minted coin to investment/work; just with fewer steps and without all the electric overhead.
> wouldn't harnessing some more useful proveable activity tied to a lottery system be better
Yes, but such a puzzle needs to be
- easy to generate at a certain difficulty
- difficult to solve
- easy to verify and
- the solution needs to be dependent on previous solution (so you can't silently pre-solve them).
Solving (stupid) hashes so far is the only activity that checks these requirements.
Another option might be to design a certain hash function such that when the hardware miners dedicated to solve them become obsolete (i.e. too expensive to be used for crypto mining), they can be easily repurposed for another problem set.
Thank you for the constructive comment but I think you are approaching it from a cryptographical computer science angle which even if solved still results in work as an empty puzzle of floating point mips and what I cannot yet rule out is a reimagined scope for real provable work that also has some positive social value like say creation of 1kwh of renewable energy placed on the grid. Suspend disbelief for a moment as to the many actual mountains you would need to move and consider that such a scheme is hypothetically possible on paper under laboratory conditions given an infinite capacity of unrestricted action. Puzzle solving in a sandbox might have been fine back in the OG whitepaper hypothetical days of Bitcoin et al but the stakes are sufficiently high now that considerable thinktank type effort could reasonably be spent on this problem. My reductio ad absurdum argument of all miners proveably locking and unlocking real money as work in to and out of a single bank account tied to a snapshot lottery mimicking the existing mint award outcomes seems at least less impossible and the mining account's interest can at least then be put to a real world good use.
> wouldn't harnessing some more useful proveable activity tied to a lottery system be better ?
Can you devise such a provable activity that has a difficulty that can be adjusted to the levels Bitcoin requires and is dependent on the last block's hash?
> Bitcoin can provide uncensored access to financial services
Example needed here, how are people with less financial privilege censored by fiat? Loan conditions? Definitely not, that's just the financiers not wanting to issue risky loans.
it failed as a currency, failed as a hedge and failed as a store of value. for 99% of holders like me it's just a speculative asset. nobody really cares about the pie in the sky idealism or libertarian nonsense spouted by maxis.
