Re: [Cryptography] Digital currencies
On 6/20/16, Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@hallambaker.com> wrote:
Using as much electricity as the island of Malta does to distribute the ledger is an abomination.
Far less than all the electricity consumed by the fiat system of the US alone... gov / fed reserve / bank buildings full of offices / datacenters / networks / devices, hvac, payroll, healthcare, vehicles, maintenance... all the electrons needed to make it go. Bitcoin, and any other digital currency, is likely highly efficient and becoming optimal implementations of whatever usable monetary and other features they provide.
Ultimately BitCoin is betting on the ultimate dotcom bubble, the only value in the currency is that people want the currency.
Someone have a rare known "thing" that others want, negotiate and trade for it. You're correct, and nothing could be more pure. The delusion that any fiat is backed by any "value" should end the minute you try to trade it for something of value to you from its issuer / participant brokers and discover them telling you to get lost at gunpoint, thus establishing its exact and formal value to both of you as zero. Particularly for any physical good. Then when actually trading with others you must also evaluate whatever issuer / broker party is doing with it, which at times in history is difficult to do, and such doings not necessarily always to your benefit.
On 6/20/16, grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/20/16, Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@hallambaker.com> wrote:
Using as much electricity as the island of Malta does to distribute the ledger is an abomination.
Far less than all the electricity consumed by the fiat system of the US alone... gov / fed reserve / bank buildings full of offices / datacenters / networks / devices, hvac, payroll, healthcare, vehicles, maintenance... all the electrons needed to make it go.
Taking bitcoin as subject currency... and substituting best publicly available hardware... https://bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020160615101405024dzgObks806... you can compute the current best case electric consumption from double-sha256 hashrate... https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty and see that it's really just a drop in the bucket both net, and compared brick and mortar systems above... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations_in_the_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3 http://www.epri.com/Our-Work/Documents/Energy%20Efficiency/iPadEnergyConsume... BTC hashpower has also been relatively logarithm flat since ASIC replaced everything in late 2014... http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-ever.png ASIC is mostly done tech, so this flattening will continue... https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=81.0 meanwhile enabling potentially more distributed end user coupled mining devices models where some extra differential cost is available and accepted. Adoption there may add hashrate but not techrate.. https://21.co/ which should do interesting things to the existing competitive mining for profit sake. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5PJnDi_uGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30rvfroRHTY In the end, whichever digital currencies survive, whether anonymous and decentalized, or otherwise... I'd bet that when you draw a box around it, and compare it to any other honestly boxed traditional currency system that does the same thing, they're going to use less overall power. Don't forget to add in today's gov / bank regulators, loan departments, markets, investment vehicles, etc... everything part of delivering similar features. Compared to purely digital forms of same residing in cyberspace on ethereum-like programmable bot contracts. Long term... entire populations of staff and buildings stand to be obsoleted. Welcome to the Matrix.
Bitcoin, and any other digital currency, is likely highly efficient and becoming optimal implementations of whatever usable monetary and other features they provide.
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grarpamp