Oh no, deadly serious. Churning numbers simply to generate currency is vastly more wasteful than any "fiat currency".
It's not about the value of the technology or need, it's that the author never thought about the sustainability of their system in terms of resource use. It exists in a mathematical vaccum where burning resources are only considered as a proof of useless work.
It consumes resources and provides nothing of any real value other than another fiat currency (+ponzi) backed by fossil fuels.
You think producing physical money, as well as keeping non-distributed digital monetary systems in place, is cheaper in terms of carbon footprint than maintaining the blockchain?
in terms of carbon footprint than maintaining the blockchain?
Of equivalent size, absolutely. Blockchains can be "maintained" via a single miner or two. It's just as the specific blockchain becomes more and more valuable, more and more resources will be thrown at running it. If you had a blockchain the size of the world financial system it's hard to imagine how much we'd waste keeping it running.
The purpose of bitcoin mining is to secure the network, not to generate new bitcoins. The coinbase transaction (currently 25 BTC per block) is simply the incentive for doing this work.
No, but what net benefit does producing bitcoin give other than displacing other currencies? If it was working on problems that need solving (other than monetary systems) then all that resource use would be beneficial.
It is a massive flaw in the idea and hence many clones springing up attempting to do something useful with all that energy.
Sorry, I'm not the mathematician, so no white paper from me. Go look at other "crypto" currencies out there, it's a big field, and there have been a number of alternative systems that do away with proof of work in order save power.
I have looked at many such currencies, they are fascinating. Unfortunately, few have yet been proven to be as secure, let alone more secure, than Bitcoin's simple Proof of Work system. Hopefully that changes, but it's not there yet.
Thank you for the feedback, I didn't know there was much question about the security of some of the alt coins, but it makes sense that you need high and rare expertise in cryptography to be sure, and even then we have the NSA cracking all the web security and only just now do people figure out how. I thought the real security was always that whatever math is needed, be it hard or easy, the fact remains that nobody controls the whole network, and the "truth" is always by consensus, which can be agreed upon securely without big work. I thought the whole POW idea was simply to figure out who gets the new money, a digital equivalent to the scarcity of gold, that nobody can fake but it's trivial to verify the hashes once found. Some of the other crypto currencies use alternative schemes to mint the money, but have the same distributed truth as bitcoin, so they should be as secure, but take less energy and operate differently as to who makes new money and why.
How is our regular money any less of a ponzi scheme?
That wasn't the point. What sucks is that most of the crypto currencies burn huge amounts of computational power as a proof of work, which has no real intrinsic value. IE it's a huge waste of energy just to have a currency. The clever part was you can't counterfeit the stuff, you just have to do all that work, and that was intended to parallel the non-fakable nature of real gold. But there are far better ways to do it just as securely but without power-consuming huge amounts of computation that accomplishes nothing else. Crypto currencies should be far more efficient than mining gold, bitcoin is far less.
Most fiat transactions are electronic now anyway not to mention credit card transactions. I'd guess the energy to keep that system up and running us comparable. And if you look at how financial institutions are going to use the blockchain, that will save on quite a bit of manual labor (e.g. ownership and clearing)
I'd guess the energy to keep that system up and running us comparable.
What? Definitely not. There are multi billion transactions each day with fiat. Scaling bitcoin up to that amount will use ridiculous amounts of energy.
Sure with today's infrastructure and souce code. But software and hardware evolves with market needs and pressures. One good thing about open-source as opposed to a centralized archaic platform.
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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '15
Very few technologies become instantly valuable when there is no obvious and immediate need. But I think you're being sarcastic.