[Cryptography] Digital currencies

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Sun Jun 26 22:20:39 PDT 2016


On 6/20/16, grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/20/16, Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill at 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=00020160615101405024dzgObks806F2

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/iPadEnergyConsumeExecSummary6-2012Final.pdf

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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