The "stepping back", as mentioned in the title, doesn't summarize what's happening here. laanwj decided to delegate some of his lead maintainer tasks to others with aim to further improve the decentralization and reducing the attack surface. He want to continue to work on Bitcoin an Bitcoin Core.
Most recently, this became relevant as the bitcoincore.org website he (co-)maintains received a legal letter from a (fraudulent; as in unproven and repeatedly lying) entity claiming copyright of the 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper. He complied[0] by taking the PDF down from bitcoincore.org and received a lot of slack for it by parts of the community. He then made clear that he'll happily continue to work on Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin in general, but will not be a "martyr"[1] for the project: "it's up to you as bitcoiners to protect it". As a reaction a lot of community members and companies proceeded to host the PDF on their site [2].
Its a nice introspection that this person realize they were a centralized bottleneck
I’ve seen similar things happen in other cryptocurrency communities, where the primary binaries being released needed one person who was out on a conference circuit or vacation
The infrastructure is mature enough to distribute signing and other duties more adequately, as this person has asked
I think the people who are critical of the wastefulness of Bitcoin fail to factor in the usefulness of a store of value.
Whether you like it or not, human beings find a need to store value. In countries without a proper store of value -- due to e.g. government intervention -- they start hoarding commodities (e.g. wheat, cotton) or productive assets like cars.
So the question becomes whether having something like Bitcoin as a replacement for hoarding useful assets is actually environmentally preferable. Hoarding millions of cars as a store of value -- as they do in e.g. Argentina -- also impacts the environment, as we need to produce more cars to account for it. So if hoarding bitcoins replaces this practice, perhaps it will become a net benefit for the environment.
Of course, this point of view assumes the inevitability of hoarding. As far as I can see, it's a survival instinct, which cannot be suppressed -- we can only control which goods are hoarded. Ban money and people will start hoarding less saleable goods.
Fiat currencies proof-of-work is taxation, inflation and interest rate control. That accounts for 1/2 of your productivity, just so that governments can have a monopoly on their currencies.
Not to say that managing fiat money is tremendously wasteful. Credit cards alone take 3% of every transaction on fees that barely make sense. Banks charge ridiculous taxes on pretty much everything they do, and don't even guarantee your money can be withdrawn.
Gold and silver on a per unit-of-value basis require more energy to mine than Bitcoin.
When you compound all of that, you'll realize that Bitcoin energy expenditures are overall not so much of a big deal.
But if they are a big deal for you, at least be consistent and go after gold and silver mining, to start with, and do fight against governments' monopolies on currencies, as those are a lot less "green" and more widespread than Bitcoin.
Additionally, you can come up with new blockchain technologies that don't require PoW, and/or support the existing ones that don't require PoW by parking your money on them. You can also short Bitcoin in a futures market in order to protest against it.
I disagree. The only asset that falls into this category is credit. And credit is not a good -- it's a promise that someone will deliver a good to you when you demand it. And this type of promise tends to be broken just when you need it the most.
Proof-of-stake has different properties than proof-of-work.
For example, given n different chains, proof-of-work (PoW) reaches consensus simply by choosing the chain with the most work — irrespective of block contents. Proof-of-stake (PoS), on the other hand, requires granting special meaning to a particular public key (in the first block) in order to reach consensus.
So PoW reaches consensus without granting special meaning to any public key while PoS requires this in order to work.
The public has no idea how important the developers in charge of the code they run are. Underhanded C contests (The Underhanded C Contest is a programming contest to turn out code that is malicious, but passes a rigorous inspection, and looks like an honest mistake even if discovered.) make you really want honest guys upstream, and lots of eyes on things that affect consensus.
> We need a decentralized web. For us, one option would be IPFS, which is starting to catch on. For the binaries themselves there’s already the option of downloading through torrents.
I agree with the OP Bitcoin should run over a network protocol like PJON https://github.com/gioblu/PJON and a private network infrastructure made by people.
The point is, if you switch just the protocol, and keep the same infrastructure nothing will change.
If I make bread and you grow potatoes, we can barter, but it’s much easier to use some intermediary to track the value that we exchanged. The intermediary facilitates this with tokens (coins, notes, cards.)
Bitcoin seems perverse. It puts all the value in the tokens themselves and at the same time I can’t even use it to buy bread or potatoes.
About the only thing I hear that you can buy with Bitcoin is USD, and even the liquidity of that seems questionable beyond a certain amount — the millions maybe but probably not billions.
I think it should seen as more similar to gold than to money.
We don't use gold to buy goods either, but it has a value, because people believe it has. The value of Bitcoin is disputed because not everyone believes in it yet. So it's either a gold in the making or nothing, depending on whether those who believe in it will succeed at convincing the others of its merits.
Gold has a value because it can also be used for legitimate industrial applications, plus it has the other physical qualities of being attractive to look at and doesn't corrode (i.e. useful for making jewellery).
So yes, while it does have value because people believes it has value. Even if no person wanted gold for its "imagined" value, it would still have value because it's used by many actual companies in actual products (electronics etc). E.g. Every iPhone contains about 0.0012 ounces of gold.
Bitcoin has no value other than imagined by people. I.e. Greater Fool theory.
Bitcoin can be used for making transactions on the Bitcoin network, and to store information permanently on the Bitcoin blockchain. Here are examples of applications.
Industrial applications of gold as imaginary as those applications of Bitcoin are. You can use other metals as conductors, and the whole notion of a specific arrangement of molecules being called “an appliance” or “a jewellery piece” is just human imagination.
> Bitcoin can be used for making transactions on the Bitcoin network, and to store information permanently on the Bitcoin blockchain. Here are examples of applications.
Why would I want to do this on Bitcoin specifically? There are thousands of cryptocurrencies that offer this and an entire banking system that specializes in financial transactions.
>You can use other metals as conductors, and the whole notion of a specific arrangement of molecules being called “an appliance” or “a jewellery piece” is just human imagination.
The difference is that it is a form of human imagination shared by most humans. The golden appearance has a certain appeal to it. If humans want it regardless of its value on the financial markets that is a reason to agree that gold is THE store of value instead of silver or Bitcoin being THE store of value. This is a popularity contest and being able to wear and see your gold gives you a massive head start in the popularity contest.
> the whole notion of a specific arrangement of molecules being called “an appliance” or “a jewellery piece” is just human imagination.
Yes indeed! And you know what they say about too much imagination - VERY dangerous. In light of this, I am making a special one-time offer to you to improve your safety by sending me specific arrangements of molecules you may have that take the form of gold or US "dollars". Act now before it expires!
Actually that is what makes it attractive as a store of value. It's going to last millions of years. Bitcoin is data on HDDs and SSDs and we know that those eventually corrode or simply become obsolete.
It sounds like the reason is that you don’t understand money, which is generally regarded as having 3 core functions. Acting as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. Bitcoin does all of those things. Your issue seems to be that it’s not widely accepted enough as a medium of exchange to properly facilitate that function? The problem with that view is that it is widely accepted enough to drive some level of demand. With that demand being generated by (probably a relatively small number of) people who use it for retail payments, speculators, and black market participants.
What makes much more sense to me is agreeing on a central authority (or a distributed one, if we have the math to be able to do that securely) to track the exchange of things with actual value.
Bitcoin-the-tech feels like it’s partly that, but also it’s partly some side-wheeze for the initial Bitcoin folks to print their own money.
Bitcoin would make sense if the inflation (deflation?) component was removed because at least you then actually had to do something to gain Bitcoin wealth — namely buy computers and burn electricity. If you want $15,000 of Bitcoin then you buy an ASIC and pay your power bills in time.
That seems extremely wasteful. Wouldn’t a global tally of IOUs satisfy the same requirements, without having to have this centralised coin stuff?
Of the two things it represents — a global ledger, and a money printing machine — all I hear about are people focused on the latter.
Well a bank account provides all the functions of money, and to a much greater level of functionality. But the whole reason cryptocurrency exists is to avoid some of the issues you get when dealing with centralized financial institutions. If you want to decentralize that role, you need a new way of managing scarcity. Proof of work is one way to do that. Whether that’s wasteful or not would be a personal judgement, but the reasons the demand exists are pretty simple to understand.
You don't seem to understand the OP's point: Bitcoin makes minting tokens incredibly expensive due to the electricity usage.
A good currency is not consuming a huge chunk of the resources it is tracking. Electricity spent "mining" bitcoin is not somehow recoverable from the tokens. Which makes it worse then gold, which actually is.
People use Bitcoin to protect their wealth from inflation/debasement. It’s easier to own and protect than gold and real estate, easier to transact, etc.
Whether it’s widely used as a currency is irrelevant to whether it can be.
>Whether it’s widely used as a currency is irrelevant to whether it can be.
It's not used as a currency because of transaction fees. I still remember Steam pulling support for bitpay because people couldn't get their transactions through fast enough because the fees exceeded the value of the transaction. By the time the transaction went through the value of the Bitcoin has changed and you had to send the missing amount in a separate transaction.
You pay $5 transaction fees to pay for a $50 dollar game and then get told that you are missing $1.25. Sending the missing money costs $6.25. A refund costs $5 in transaction fees. On some days the transaction fees were well above the value of the game so you could not do a refund even if you wanted to. Paying $55 to refund a $50 transaction doesn't make sense. Paying $56.25 to transfer the missing amount doesn't make sense either. Your money is just gone and you didn't even get a game.
we invented something else than barter long time ago and that's money. Lately money isn't backed by anything else than belief and guns, Bitcoin is backed by belief and hash power that's all.
> About the only thing I hear that you can buy with Bitcoin is USD, and even the liquidity of that seems questionable beyond a certain amount — the millions maybe but probably not billions.
The order books of Bitcoin exchanges are publicly available.
Last time I checked, Bitfinex had around $100MM in liquidity at 0.1% slippage.
Thank you for the reference, and I look forward to understanding what you mean by myth.
Barter is literally my life. I teach other people’s children about life and Computer Science in order to buy potatoes. The children’s parents make medicine and build houses to pay for their children’s education. Is your point that barter is about goods, whereas most people provide services (time, labour?)
Or perhaps you mean that the majority of the economy in terms of wealth is engaged in the investment of capital, and we potato eaters are but a percentage of a percentage?
With barter is meant (in the context of Graeber's book) trading tit for tat, without having a currency to go between. E.g. a farmer buying a book and paying with apples.
The book says that this barter method is almost never used, and instead people tend to keep track of favors and things they owe in a more vague way. And every now and then, these debts are settled in a communal fashion. But barter is not used.
So the farmer just asks for the book and gets it. And when autumn comes, and the bookstore owner feels like having an apple, he just goes to the farmer and asks for some. But the two transactions are not really linked.
Right. I feel like that’s nit picking (your parent; not you.)
Of course I (teacher) don’t buy potatoes by teaching the farmer’s children Dijkstra.
Instead of bartering we chooses to track our debts. Using Bitcoin as a cryptographically secure distributed debt tracker sounds great.
But Bitcoin right now feels like a bunch of technology enthusiasts have blessed the world with such a debt tracker while also saying ”btw you collectively owe us $630,000,000,000 worth of stuff”.
Also, this digital debt tracker uses numbers, which most of these communal debt systems do not do. Because different people put different value to things, tracking debt in numbers is not how it is done (the book goes in a lot of detail how this works). This is what makes bitcoin a currency, a way to track debts rather than having them implicit.
I'm not sure where on the globe you are at, but where I am from, groups of friends buy rounds of beers at the bar. You do not keep track of whose turn it is to pay the round or whether someone is buying more expensive stuff, but since you are friends you make sure things are fair over time. But implicitly, not tracking numbers and accounts.
And Graeber argues that that is actually the method that predates currency. Not barter.
I fully agree on the hilariously large "primordial" debt we somehow owe the early miners.
I'm not sure it's relevant, although the book is fantastic.
The first few chapters show that historically money predates barter, not the other way around. And that money was born as "I owe you" notes issued by the government.
I know of only one comment [1] Graeber made about bitcoin, and it's too late to ask him now.
That is basically what the book is telling. You are probably not tit-for-tat bartering, but taking on debts and returning things you owe in some more vague approach. History went through multiple cycles where currency went in disuse in favor of just tracking and settling debts.
Exactly, that is the alternative system which was the default. It has gone through a number of cycles in history and is not always thought of the same way across different cultures (which is why there is a whole book on the topic).
But it is a recurring theme in history, and most (all?) monetary systems were traded for this alternative within 1000 years. For me, in Western Europe, this was 500 years ago between roughly 1000-1500. The churches were fitted with gold roofs, and because of the lack of coinage and currency, most people lived their lives with this alternative approach, only rarely coming across money, currency, accounting and debt.
You can put a lot money into Van Gogh's painting, and you won't buy bread with it. Bitcoin is just easier to transfer than a painting, and you can buy a fraction of it. I don't see Bitcoin as a currency at all, but it does display certain properties of instruments to store value.
You pointed right in the middle, but try to rationalize with someone who is a crypto advocate? I bet that it will be a completely usefulness conversation. The crypto money rely purely on USD exchange and that's why suddenly appeared so many crypto startups, because their "value" is speculative.
I wonder how these Bitcoin devs rationalize the environmental impact their ongoing work has. They've created something that started as a revolutionary innovation, but by now is an incredibly wasteful way of turning kWhs into money.
Something that has outlived its fitness as a payment system, but still trundles on due to its own inertia. Like oil execs that refuse to acknowledge that the age of oil is coming to a close, and are now pushing shale oil extraction. A suboptimal waste of effort.
Probably the same way most people rationalize consuming the flesh of slaughtered animals, despite the massive negative environmental impact that has, and the better alternatives that are available.
That seems like a somewhat random point to make. Sure, there are positive characteristics of meat - just like there are of bitcoin. That's part of why the comparison between the two works.
In terms of conversation you got a point yourself, however you cannot compare food with currency. Food is connected to us on a biological level, currency is a construct of society.
This is a simple untruth. Vegetarianism is possible in specific ecological conditions (e.g. the Ganges Delta) and in those conditions it wins, economically, because as you note it is notionally ideal. In a non-tropic or desert environment, vegetarianism is a wasteful use of resources that typically involves transport of goods from remote locations in the service of performative consumption.
Vegetarianism outside such regions might be more wasteful, but it is still mich less wasteful and has a much smaller environmental impact than an omnivore diet
It’s not entirely clear to me how that could possibly be the case, when pasture raised animals often graze land that is completely unsuitable for agriculture. They also eat tons of byproducts of agriculture that are not suitable for human consumption.
This thing about how vegetarianism is sooooo much better for the environment is such a meme. Especially when you take into account what a tragedy modern industrial agriculture really is, with its monocrops, deforestation, and so on.
It summarises the differences in global greenhouse emissions between various types of food, and the contributions of the different sources of these emissions - farming, transport, land use change, and so on.
Even without going into the details, I can already see a major mistake that is made here.
They cite emissions per kilogram, but that’s completely nonsensical. A kilo of meat does not equal a kilo of spinach in terms of calories or macro-/micro-nutrients.
This is a mistake that I see very often when these kinds of comparisons are made.
Wasteful compared to which other network that manages money and protects property rights? Most popular place to mine bitcoin is the north-west of China where there are unused hydroplants
I don’t fully understand your argument. Are you saying that a full crypto inplementation would entirely rid the World of the need for military, police, lawyers etc. or what?
No but it removes the need to delegate trust to managing the ledger to a bank. A bank which is required to be highly regulated, audited and with great physical security to earn that trust
Sorry to repeat myself, but these are not good examples. HTTP/HTTPS, SMTP, IMAP are just protocols. I'm talking about a single piece of software, built in a fully-distributed manner without centralization.
I cannot recommend enough for everyone who has a minimal sensibility towards the climate impact to read this thread: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1350869944888664064. Since we are inevitable heading over to a climate catastrophe it's really the time to advocate against bitcoin.
This is like crusading against people using their clothes dryer, driving when they don't absolutely need to, turning on A/C when they could just put on a sweater, not to mention all the industrial and commercial energy expenditures producing bullshit we don't need. From where you sit, look around your room and contemplate the incredible energy expended to get these items where they are.
If your concern is about avoidable energy waste, you'd need to have a bizarrely weird misunderstanding of the scales here to pick Bitcoin as your hill to die on.
It's like when people complain about how much water you waste by leaving the tap on while you brush your teeth while my dad has the water rights to waste 10,000,000L/year of creek water because he owns a single cow. People have such little understanding of the relative scale of everything, so they laser-focus on whatever inconsequential, concrete morsel that sounds good to them.
We still need to move to fossil fuel free energy with Bitcoin being a huge energy user or not. It seems like a lot but money has to be backed by something, a percentage of the total processing power on Earth makes sense.
None of the things you listed are on the same scale if that 621KWh is true. What you should say is: "crusading against people who leave their a/c on for 2 months when they are away, people who drive 2500 miles for fun every day, people who run their clothes drier for a month non-stop even though it's empty".
Regardless, I would be sceptical about that 621 KWh. Does not sound realistic...
It's in the design. Higher price -> more miners -> increased mining difficulty (due to design goal – 1 block per 10 min) -> more energy waste. Bitcoin was a fun prototype idea, but humans made it just evil. As usual, though.
The security of the network is proportional to the amount of work put into it.
If the network wasn't consuming absurd amounts of hardware and energy, anyone could waltz in and use a perfectly reasonable amount of hardware and energy to break it. So yes, it does need to constantly increase as fast as possible. If it ever increased less fast, someone could eventually exploit that delta.
If you have more hashing power you have more chance of earning a block reward to it's effectively a competition for each entity to get as much hashing power as quickly as possible. You can either make the hardware more efficient (and throw away old hardware) or increase the amount of hardware and therefore energy consumption.
If you decrease energy consumption per computation you can afford to buy more miners which then leads to an increase in difficulty and you end up wasting the exact same amount of energy.
If a bitcoin costs $30k then the amount of electricity you can afford to waste is exactly... $30k worth of electricity. Higher energy efficiency is just a competition among miners. Less efficient ones have to stop mining.
If anything that is contributing more to energy waste because you have to periodically replace old miners and not every miner managed to break even on their less efficient hardware by the time the latest hardware became available. It's probably less significant over the long term though because eventually there is a limit to how efficient bitcoin miners can be.
> This is like crusading against people using their clothes dryer, driving when they don't absolutely need to, turning on A/C when they could just put on a sweater, not to mention all the industrial and commercial energy expenditures producing bullshit we don't need. From where you sit, look around your room and contemplate the incredible energy expended to get these items where they are.
You didn'tconsider that the things you have listed cost money. There is an incentive to reduce them to the absolute minimum because you would go broke if you leased commercial property and put 200 clothes dryers running 24/7.
Mining bitcoin is a profitable activity. You can afford to do that. The price of bitcoin dictates how profitable mining is. The higher the bitcoin price and transaction fees the higher the margins and that means you can buy more miners and thus waste more energy. There is no limit to how much energy can be wasted. Every time you think this is an insane amount of energy it can always get worse. Right now it is only at approximately 80 TWh. In 10 years it could be at 300 TWh. In 20 years it could be 1000TWh. There is no reason why this shouldn't happen.
Bitcoin doubled multiple times in the last decade. The value of a bitcoin could easily outpace the reduction in block reward.
This depends on your moral framework. A large part of moral culpability is proximity. How close are you to the issue at hand, and how easy is it for you to take/not take some action. For example, worrying about poverty in a country on the other side of the world, when there are homeless people sleeping on a bench on your street. I can't possibly convince a mega corp to stop wasting energy, but I can try and waste less myself. I can't stop people from using Bitcoin, but I can try and develop/advocate for better alternatives. When all is said and done, is it better to have shrugged and done nothing, or done what was within your power to do? "All we have to decide, is what to do with the time that is given to us".
This thread is nothing new. This exact sentiment has been repeated over and over for the last 10 years.
From the angle that bitcoin is useless, it's easy to dismiss it as waste. The reality is that you live in world where people have different understandings and values than you may have. So advocating against Bitcoin is no different than advocating against air travel. You see no issue in the huge amounts of energy consumption for "seeing the world" and "business travel" but maybe I do.
Use resources the way you wish and so will others. Free markets will decide where scarce resources work best.
The last sentence is the entire problem. It ignores the externalities of whatever it is you’re doing. Which in turn (amongst other things) makes the claim of efficient distribution questionable.
Huge energy consumption would be much less of an issue if it wasn’t also causing huge long term problems.
> Huge energy consumption would be much less of an issue if it wasn’t also causing huge long term problems.
Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels and animal products are two far larger, far more pressing issues than Bitcoin's carbon footprint.
I would additionally rank “bullshit jobs” far above Bitcoin's carbon footprint in a ranking of things causing widespread social ills.
If Bitcoin became global reserve currency, all things would decrease in absolute price, disincentivizing consumerism. As the pace of technological innovation increases, and vendor competition increases along with it, absolute prices in BTC terms will go down even assuming everyone already transacts in BTC exclusively. Higher amount of available products/services, same amount of money, equals lower absolute prices. Assuming 1% annual "growth", that's 1% you gain. This isn't outside the bounds of inflation policies today, and keep in mind those inflation targets skim off the top after haircutting GDP growth — a 1% inflation in an economy expanding by 2% equals the central bank skims the 2% growth plus expands by 1%. In a Bitcoin world, that would be 3% gains for simply holding onto your coins.
As such a deflationary global currency could cause a global economic slowdown, which might be completely necessary to save the planet's natural ecosystems.
Bullshit jobs are a product of low interest rates and low yield government bonds driving capital allocation elsewhere.
If CPI inflation is high that means there are not enough workers to do the most valuable work. Workers reallocate to more productive jobs and earn more money.
Interest rates usually follow CPI inflation. If interest rates are near 0% then you get lots of people starting stupid businesses. That's fine if everyone is unemployed and thus would prefer a bullshit job over a productive job but once the pandemic is over it won't be true anymore.
High interest rates force a company to be profitable enough to at least cover the interest payments. In theory the Fed should raise rates to at least 1% just to match current inflation but the economy is now full of bullshit and that bullshit is going to fail once the cheap money dries up. We can't afford to do that during a pandemic but once it is over it is necessary to cull the useless zombies.
I may or may not have conveyed this in a dramatic way but don't take this as a call to action. If you are invested in the stock market you should always make sure that you don't put too much money into dead companies regardless of how well the economy is doing. Timing crashes or whatever is futile. Your personal goals (risk tolerance aka financial security and when you want to withdraw money) are more important and should be planned well in advance.
The climate catatrosphe that looms upon us all has been caused by individuals and organisations using resources as they wish.
What we've ended up with is a planetwide tragedy of the commons - and free markets aren't going to solve this. They can only continue to exacerbate it.
Carbon taxes are a market based solution and pretty much everyone agrees.
Unregulated pollution is basically like having unregulated crimes. Criminals obviously want to keep committing crimes because they benefit personally.
Imagine if you could just go and mug a random CEO and get $10k out of that and the police won't stop you. The CEO and even those who hate the CEO would agree that muggings are bad. The only one who disagrees is the criminal. Therefore regulation is actually necessary to have a well functioning free market in the first place. Heck, punishing net negative behavior is compatible with the free market. The only question is how that punishment is implemented.
Without CO2 taxes you basically have people legally dump waste into the atmosphere which is shared by everyone equally. It's pretty obvious that there is nothing free about this. You can consider the act of pollution to be a forced transaction between the polluter and every other living being on earth. It's like you are mugging a tiny fraction of a cent off of millions of people.
The obvious idea is to just do the same thing we did with garbage disposal. Just charge a fee that covers the damage. That way the polluter has to weigh the damage he does. In some cases the damage outweighs the benefits, in other cases the benefits outweigh the damage. As a society we only want the latter.
The only real problem with CO2 taxes is that every nation has to agree on them. That's what the paris agreement is for. Dismissing CO2 taxes entirely because of global competition doesn't make sense. Global competition merely puts an upper bound on how high domestic CO2 taxes can be without introducing special tariffs or other means of global enforcement.
I prefer a token amount over complete denial because at that point you can just point out that the price is too low instead of pointlessly arguing about which policy to implement or whether to implement a policy at all.
That thread is assuming that BTC runs on fossil, non-renewable energy, which was mostly correct ten to five years ago, but will be mostly wrong onwards.
BTC runs mostly on surplus hydroelectric power. This may change based on what's locally available and the local cost of oil gas and coal, but when renewables will become cheaper than fossil (which will never be soon enough) it will not make any sense to mine on fossils.
I can't offer a citation, but I can observe that electricity prices in wholesale markets regularly go negative during times when renewables are operating at peak output. Since people overprovision solar to have enough power at non-peak times, during peak generation times, there's too much energy.
This doesn't happen with fossil fuels, since the plant operator will of course reduce output as far as possible by reducing fuel consumption.
So it seems entirely reasonable that the bulk of bitcoin mining in the future is going to be done at times when the electricity price is exceptionally low (or negative), and mostly be powered by renewables. It's an economically rational thing to do and as a bonus it will provide some grid stability.
As long as the profit from operating the mining during high prices is higher than the cost of electricity at high demand times, it is economically rational to continue mining and grow demand to use the "excess" capacity that is provided in the grid.
In China it in particular it is seen as an easy way to convert coal to money, as one of the other commenters already linked [1] (which is also economically responsible, given the looming deadlines due to international agreements, but also disastrous to the climate at large).
Also, not to put too fine a point at it, neither Chinese nor US bitcoin miner server farms (mines?) have been found to be using particularly clean energy sources [0].
Nevermind traditional banks with their towering office buildings full of air conditioning/appliances, employees commuting to work, remote branches, sophisticated vaults and online infrastructure.
I can never take the bitcoin climate change hysteria seriously. I wonder why the people who write these articles aren't calling out traditional banks? hmm.
Traditional banks pay their electricity bill, so they naturally need to account for that. On the other hand, bitcoin network pays for that collectively. No single entity pays the bill. If a single entity had to pay for 621KWh for every transaction, I don't think that bitcoin could exists. That is the main difference here: multiple parties are doing small contribution to the energy consumption, instead of a single entity. That is the reason why bitcoin networks ecological footprint is huge compared to traditional banking per transaction.
Traditional banks are not accountable for all the electricity their services consume. One example alone is considering all the clients, pos and other systems that operate.
Banks are also a very different model with different overheads compared to Bitcoin. I'd argue that banking infrastructure is quite wasteful with their physical skyscrapers and vaults. Executives at banks would argue otherwise.
Bitcoin aims to disrupt financial services to some extent. A significant electricity cost shouldn't be a surprise. Does that mean it should be outlawed? I think not.
If we banned every costly disruptive idea that emerged, we wouldn't get anywhere.
Oh yes. I agree, there is probably ton of waste in the entire banking sector. I just wanted to clarify why each transaction most likely costs more in blockchain compared to one transaction in the traditional network.
I wonder how much energy we would consume if bitcoin would replace the whole banking sector? Back-of-an-envelope calculation: If it would be powering billion transactions per day, it would need 400 nuclear power plants to provide required energy.
I don't know if we should ban bitcoin or not. I don't have any strong sentiment towards it. But if the numbers here are right, I don't think it is a viable main stream currency.
I don't think many people believe (even crypto advocates) that a large number of transactions are going to happen directly on the blockchain. There seem to be two possible futures for Bitcoin: Either most people will transact their BTC on an energy efficient network separate from the blockchain (like the Lightning network) or they will use BTC as a long-term store of value like gold*, and not use it to buy everyday things like coffee.
* Of course, at the moment it's not a very good store of value because of the price volatility. But advocates argue that these are just growing pains.
The only thing is, with Bitcoin we have the numbers. The classic banking system look like a few thousend banks with thousends of buildings with hundreds of thousend computers and million of emloyees. The employees again need to eat, sleep, drive around. They have money that needs to be designed, to be printed, to be distributed. All this cost ressources too, but this really hard to put in numbers.
Bitcoin has the energy consumption of small nations. Banking is one of the many things that can be self contained in the energy budget of a small nation. On the other hand, bitcoin's transaction throughput would constrain my neighborhood's commerce at lunch. That is to say, traditional banks are doing a whole lot more to facilitate actual commerce.
It would seem to me that the efficiency gap is insurmountably large.
The amount of value that the financial industry provides is multiple orders of magnitude greater. The market cap of bitcoin is a joke compared to gold and gold is an insignificant percentage of all financial services.
> Since we are inevitable heading over to a climate catastrophe it's really the time to advocate against bitcoin.
I would advocate for renewable energy. It's not like miners demand electricity to be from fossil fuels. The electricity gets paid for, how you use it is up to you.
If Bitcoin would run 100% on solar power I guess then it would be fine? Or maybe you're unhappy with Bitcoin because of its goal and not the means it gets there? That would be different discussion.
It feels like people want to argue against Bitcoin, don't have credible arguments, and bring out the climate card.
Climate is going to shit, but not because of Bitcoin.
Or just move over to Ethereum which is actually moving forward on proof of stake, which solves this problem in an elegant way. It also has major plans for scaling, which Bitcoin has ignorantly refused to budge on.
Proof of Work is a simple algorithm that has worked for over 10 years. Proof of Stake is incredibly complex and might be broken in implementation or from a game theory perspective. It also might be a huge improvement over PoW... it’s just too early to say.
This is not how it works at all. A bitcoin block can have 0 transactions and still need the same energy to produce.
a) Sending payments is not the only purpose of the network, it's issuance, it's security, it's to make the ledger immutable.
b) No one's buying a burger with bitcoin. Bitcoin's production is a monetary base. Using the same block space you can have an infinite number of economic transactions happen with the same power consumption (block) on multiple layers, each with a degrading level of security. Of course you don't need the full force of the bitcoin network for a coffee or burger.
Bitcoin mining on a block secures not just this block's transactions, but the transactions in all previous blocks as well. For each block that is added to the blockchain more transactions are secured by the following blocks. Consequently, these "power usage per transaction"-figures are misleading.
Although you are correct I feel like you skipped over an important detail that is crucial to your argument.
The power consumption does not depend on the block size.
Securing blocks has a cost that is independent of the block size. Bitcoin Cash is a good example.
I also find it interesting that Bitcoin Cash is not as prone to deflation which means that in theory you could actually use it as money. It never caught on so it is effectively dead though. It's best to forget about it.
Not really. You could interpret it as older transactions are massively more expensive than newer ones and every transaction we make will have perpetual upkeep costs for as long as we keep running Bitcoin, but the overall result isn't changed by that, the average cost per transaction is the same
People computing the joules/tx of Bitcoin are missing that PoW scales such that the amount of a transaction has nothing to do with the amount of mining work that validates it.
I hope that initiatives like Lightning Network can help it scale further though.
Before you criticize bitcoin you should understand the problem it is solving. Bitcoin is a technological solution to a government-created problem: the creation of money from nothing because politicians and government leaders want to spend more than they can collect in taxes.
Other solutions to this problem include owning gold and stocks, both of which are also costly, but in ways that are harder to quantify.
If you want to avoid the waste caused by government money printing, lobby your government to stop confiscating wealth by allowing gold-backed money and reducing taxes.
This thread does not answer the predominant usage of waste electricity by Bitcoin miners. Can't take it seriously without any mention of that. Bitcoin is mined where it makes profit, and you can't make any profit without using waste electricity. Today's mining hardware is smart enough to turn off when the powerplant signals there is too much demand and no waste (thus increased prices), and turn back on when convenient.
Simply look at prices and rewards. You literally can't have any profit without using waste electricity. The price of ordinary industrial electricity anywhere in the world is at least double of what you can mine with the latest Bitcoin mining hardware (which is expensive to begin with).
BTW, what if the demand for Bitcoin mining hardware accelerated our technological or economical development of semiconductors? I think that's good, and the electricity is small price for that.
In theory Bitcoin has some psychological benefits. It is literally Keynesian gold digging. You are putting people to work (workers employed at power stations and workers at semiconductor companies) and thus stimulate the economy. A lot of the bitcoin money originally came from central banks or at least was pushed to Bitcoin by the central banks. The only problem is that Bitcoin mining is not a domestic industry. Not every country benefits equally.
and favor Proof of Stake and other more modern implementations of the blockchain that accomplish both technological innovation and climate preservation
What do you mean by “no evidence”? Could you expand your argument further, or are you just dismissing the reality of large amounts of energy being used to run Bitcoin?
Thats just lame and missing the entire point of bitcoin lol.
I dont even know where to start, the fact that you're really criticizing bitcoin when you got factories cars and plastics around you, or the fact that the energy isnt wasted but spent to secure and preserve its speculated market value.
Sure, we could just use fiat (paper money), it's eco-friendly, right? But good luck in dealing with inflation lol.
Simple math for all: your 1 USD today is 0.99x tomorrow, while 1 BTC will always = 1 BTC.
I don't know much about the subject, and I'm one of those that misses the entire point of bitcoin itself and other mined cryptos... but if 1 BTC = 1 BTC, why is it being always indexed to USD?
I doesn't seem to make sense to say 1BTC = 1BTC, when people reference it's value to regular currency.
I understand that, but my doubt still hasn't been cleared - if BTC is referenced to USD, then if you print more USD then doesn't it also decrease the buying power of all existing BTC?
2% inflation is necessary to keep economies fair and productive. Without inflation you basically get hoarders that do nothing productive with their wealth. Deflation increases wealth inequality and is far worse for the average person.
bitcoin appears to have just become another asset that rich people on wall street are hoarding with no real attention or interest in the actual payment mechanism at all. it might as well just be some trading cards being shuffled around.
The dream of using bitcoin as p2p digital cash does seem to be dead for now, the fees are too high for that[1]. Lightning hasn't really taken off for that use case either, the number of bitcoins in Lightning channels appears to have stopped growing.[2]
But it looks like bitcoin can still be very useful as an alternative settlement layer for international payments. Either directly for large payments, or under the hood for something like Strike[3].
As someone who lives my life in two currencies, my main hope for Bitcoin circa 2014 was that it would make for simpler and cheaper international transactions and currency conversions. I don't know if the situation has gotten any better, but around 2015/2016 this seemed untenable due to high transaction costs, and volatility.
I'm not sure I understand what would be the value of using cryptocurrency under the hood for something like Strike. If they are settling the payments themselves, why not just use a simple database to reconcile their transactions?
> I'm not sure I understand what would be the value of using cryptocurrency under the hood for something like Strike. If they are settling the payments themselves, why not just use a simple database to reconcile their transactions?
A multi-country payment service can indeed just update their database. But If there is a net flow of value between countries, then they will still have to move that value over slower and more expensive traditional systems. If they implement fast transfers for their users on top of those slow systems, then that means they need idle capital waiting in each destination country so that they can front the money to the receiver. This adds cost and complexity: interface with traditional systems, capital opportunity cost, need to forecast demand, need to do currency hedging, ...
Transfering via bitcoin and converting via exchanges on both ends eliminates that problem. It also makes it easy to partner with other payment services that do the same, while minimizing the need for trust.
> the number of bitcoins in Lightning channels appears to have stopped growing
That is misleading in two respects: Funds in lightning have high velocity, so it doesn't necessarily take a lot of funds to support a lot of economic activity.
Channels were originally all public, but now most channels are private, so no one really knows how much funds are involved in lightning channels.
People who use lightning generally describe it very positively. The bigger impediment to making small frequent payments is Bitcoin's tax treatment: E.g. in the US every single purchase made with Bitcoin requires line item reporting to the IRS and cost basis tracking.
USD equivalent in lightning is growing. I think that it matters more. People usually use USD prices and then derive bitcoin price for goods and other stuff.
Are there any statistics of how much of the total CO2 that's produced by year is caused by computer equipment?
Are there any estimates, what percentage of that is caused by mining bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies? What about things like machine learning or rendering video footage?
I'm afraid that i couldn't find anything comprehensive, but something like that would be very interesting to explore!
Which is a shame, as the technology always has been as impressive as claimed.
There was for a long while talk of whether or not the blockchain would ultimately be adopted for state currencies going forward but it's not clear that this is even an ideal use case.
As an example, I would personally view it as a good thing (and I know others have different views on this) that the government for tax and law enforcement purposes can view the global transaction log (it would certainly simplify taxes while increasing compliance), but is it a good thing that everyone else can view the transaction log too?
Ideally I would like the police and the tax man to know that people are not up to anything nefarious without everyone in the world knowing when you buy birth control or a pregnancy test.
The other issue is obviously money supply. Governments like to be able to manage the supply of currency, but deflationary issuances like Bitcoin are clearly incompatible with that goal.
I would argue that claims about the revolutionary potential of blockchain as a technology have been largely exaggerated, but I agree that it's hard to imagine it replacing the financial system in its current state. It just doesn't seem like it could possibly scale to the number of transactions which have to be made globally every second. That's not to say there aren't technical solutions to some of these problems, but currently it seems like even if less than 1% of the population tried to start using bitcoin as their only currency, the system would collapse under its own weight.
I actually think it might be interesting for something like voting. Here having a completely public, verifiable record would add a lot to what is currently a very opaque system in a lot of places.
I thought about how it would be good for voting in the past - again though, not as a public transaction log (how you vote being public could get you killed in some places).
I'm not an expert, but it seems as if you could make this process both anonymous and verifiable. I.e. the number and authenticity of votes is verifiable through cryptography, but the identity of the voter is not accessible.
Even that is an extremely charitable interpretation. From what I can tell, Bitcoin seems largely to be an engine for fraud: fake value is injected into the system via dollar-pegged tokens like Tether, retail "investors" pile in to chase rising asset prices, and then the bottom drops out, amidst "liquidity issues" at major exchanges which prevent people from pulling out at the top. Or at least that is what happened in 2017.
I don't see any evidence that institutional wall street investors are adopting bitcoin in any real way.
There does appear to be some evidence of this, but again, you can be an institutional fund manager and still speculating.
It's simultaneously described as a currency for exchange, a store of value and a speculative asset, but logically it cannot be all of these things simultaneously.
As an example, it fell quite sharply the other day while gold and stocks treaded water.
Is it going to $1 or $1 billion? I have no idea. But whatever is, it's certainly not reliably static.
Why would I want to pay capital gains taxes on things I order online? There is also the obvious problem that spending your Bitcoin is foolish because it is deflationary. Remember the Bitcoin pizza?
Again, there are some institutional investors dabbling in this, but I would like to see evidence that this is more than a rounding error in terms of Bitcoin's total market cap.
I was wondering if these developers have any ethical concerns about the environmental impact they are responsible for by developing a technology which I can categorize with a single world: ABSURDITY!
Reposting the 300 IQ comment i replied to someone else on this thread:
Thats just lame and missing the entire point of bitcoin lol.
I dont even know where to start, the fact that you're really criticizing bitcoin when you got factories cars and plastics around you, or the fact that the energy isnt wasted but spent to secure and preserve its speculated market value.
Sure, we could just use fiat (paper money), it's eco-friendly, right? But good luck in dealing with inflation lol.
Simple math for all: your 1 USD today is 0.99x tomorrow, while 1 BTC will always = 1 BTC.
Raising the block size is complete nonsense. It will simply kill of nodes and at best create increased transactions per block proportional to the block size increase. A very poor trade-off.
Bitcoin's creator thought the block size should be raised and nodes would end up in server farms. Whether you agree with this or not, that was the original vision of Bitcoin. Now, start-ups pivot, and it's great that there are experiments, but BTC should not have used the Bitcoin name to do this. That is the point being made.
There has always been a challenging trade-off here, which is presumably why he limited the size in the first place.
This trade-off was widely acknowledged in the community going back essentially as far as records do.
And as time has gone on we've only learned more about how some ideas don't work. For example, Satoshi believed businesses would run nodes to verify their own transactions-- but we've found in practice few do, instead outsourcing it to centralized third parties often with dubious security practices.
He _implemented_ the block size limit, nothing forced him to. Had he wanted it to change automatically he could have coded it that way. Instead, he tended to describe the design as being mostly set in stone. When someone tried to remove the limit he urgently yelled at them to stop (and stated if it were ever needed it could be phased in). I'm sure that his, like everyone elses, understanding of the requirements evolved over time too.
Meanwhile, scaling Bitcoin via layers was endorsed explicitly by essentially every technical voice in the space for years until some got wrapped up with scammers. Satoshi even built specific affordances for payment channels directly into the transaction format, and was the first person to describe their use.
"At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node."
- November, 2008
Here:
"The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users."
-July, 2010
Here:
"It would be nice to keep the [block chain] files small as long as we can.
The eventual solution will be to not care how big it gets.
But for now, while it’s still small, it’s nice to keep it small so new users can get going faster. When I eventually implement client-only mode, that won’t matter much anymore. (note to readers, "client-only mode" refers to SPV mode)"
- August, 2010
Here:
"The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling."
- in an email to Mike Hearn
Are you really unfamiliar with these, or think they're not worthy of your reader's attention?
The second is saying not literally every user, similar to the third. (and in fact said it would be best to keep things as small as possible for as long as possible!)
The last was in a message thread that discussed using payment channels.
So I do not agree with your claim that they unambiguously supported your position, moreover they were made much earlier-- before there was much practical experience. I already pointed out his last comment on the subject...
There's no evidence to suggest it's discussing mining. It's directly in response to a criticism of the Bitcoin design, where a correspondent argues that everyone validating everything to ensure the transactions they receive are valid will get too costly in computing resources. This is the email that the quoted statement was responding to:
>To detect and reject a double spending event in a timely manner, one must have most past transactions of the coins in the transaction, which, naively implemented, requires each peer to have most past transactions, or most past transactions that occurred recently. If hundreds of millions of people are doing transactions, that is a lot of bandwidth - each must know all, or a substantial part thereof.
So it's unambiguously about validation. Why would you claim otherwise?
And the last known statements Satoshi made on it were in emails to Mike Hearn, like this one, from December 29 2010:
>>A higher limit can be phased in once we have actual use closer to the limit and make sure it's working OK.
>>Eventually when we have client-only implementations, the block chain size won't matter much. Until then, while all users still have to download the entire block chain to start, it's nice if we can keep it down to a reasonable size.
>>With very high transaction volume, network nodes would consolidate and there would be more pooled mining and GPU farms, and users would run client-only. With dev work on optimising and parallelising, it can keep scaling up.
>>Whatever the current capacity of the software is, it automatically grows at the rate of Moore's Law, about 60% per year.
That is much more clearly his preference/vision than the brief reference to the community turning tyrannical about block sizes, and it was more recent.
Nodes can handle far more than 7 transactions per second of throughput, even if you 4X the data size of that to account for propagation to multiple peers. 10 KB/s is nothing. Keeping nodes so light so that you can validate with a Raspberry Pi with a dialup connection, at the cost of preventing 100X more people from using Bitcoin, is a terrible tradeoff.
There is no technological bottleneck preventing a 100X raising of the throughput limit: not Initial Blockchain Download, which is already being expedited with trusted third party set checkpoints, not computation, not storage and not bandwidth.
The vast majority of Bitcoin agreed with my sentiment, and that was the sentiment expressed by Satoshi any time he commented on it.
It was just irresponsible, overly timid leadership allowing a loud minority to sabotage Bitcoin's widely supported roadmap.
Responding to the comment below:
1. You can prune spent transactions. Only the UTXO set needs to be stored, so you don't need to store 5 TB more each year. But even that wouldn't be prohibitively costly for thousands of hobbyists worldwide. So even if pruning wasn't an option - and it is - Bitcoin's censorship resistance would remain totally secure.
2. You can use checkpointing in initial sync up, instead of downloading the entire transaction history. The hash of the true chain is widely disseminated and Bitcoin nodes already use a form of checkpointing, where they skip validation for transactions before the checkpoint flag, to expedite Initial Blockchain Download.
Raising the limit 100x means the blockchain would grow 5tb a year. So personal computers would not be able to use Bitcoin anymore. Only companies like Google would have the resources to participate in the Bitcoin network.
The block limit has nothing to do with the transaction rate. You'll just wind up waiting longer for a block.
Bitcoin core has had since the Big Forks a larger number of transactions than Bitcoin Cash, which was forked to allegedly fix the transaction rate.
If the rest of you had actually tried /running a node/ instead of just copying and pasting the fifty cent army's argument of the day maybe you'd realize that.
If you have to be a server farm to prune past 1 week, Bitcoin will no longer be decentralized and censorship resistant, losing its main point in the first place.
A single modern consumer-grade PC can validate 100X larger blocks in real time.
The average web page these days is over 1 MB. The idea that you need to limit every once-in-every-10-minute block to 1 or 1.6 MB is not, from everything I can see, close to approaching a sound balancing of competing priorities.
If the throughput of the network equals the throughput of your device, you'll never catch up if you go offline at all. At 90% capacity it will take you 10 hours to catch up for every hour you are behind. Taking long periods of catch up time for outages isn't acceptable. At 100x capacity most conventional equipment right now would fail to complete its initial synchronization before the participant gave up.
The security of the system comes from decenteralization, so its goals can't be reached if its only workable for the best funded 10% of the participants. Moreover, the operating cost of a node are only compensated fairly indirectly and are a public good (if everyone else runs an honest node, you don't gain from running your own). As a result, it's not sufficient to just be not-astronomical, it has to be fairly close to painless.
Node's ability to keep up is also only one part of the equation. Bitcoin's long term security is absolutely dependant on transaction fees paying for proof of work. With functionally limitless capacity the natural price of transactions is essentially zero-- as has been demonstrated by competing systems which have found that they can only fund security with inflation.
Most critically-- while you can make a fine argument that some moderate increases (more like 2x or 5x than 100x) are viable without too much increase in security risks-- those kinds of changes (heck, even 100x) don't categorically change the situation.
But we do have technology to categorically change the situation, tech that was thought of and made accordance for before Bitcoin was ever released and has always been part of the long term plans-- regardless of whatever lies motivated parties might want to tell you-- tech like lighthing adds essentially unlimited transaction throughput to Bitcoin because it doesn't require public broadcast for each and every transaction. I was talking to someone this morning who is doing a test sustaining 400 transactions per second.
> and that was the sentiment expressed by Satoshi any time he commented on it.
Sorry, that is just a flat out lie-- at I pointed out in a prior comment literally the last public statement Satoshi made on the matter of scalablity/resource usage was: "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices."
If you're going to interpret Satoshi's single "tyrannical" reference as endorsement of restraining block sizes to 1 MB, it is a much weaker 'endorsement' than multiple explicit calls for a much higher on-chain throughput, including his directly saying that the intended network configuration for Bitcoin at scale was for validation to be done only by users with server farms, which implies even greater than 100X boosts in throughput from current levels.
As for initial synchronization:
There is no basis for claiming users cannot keep up with it at 100X current throughput levels, and like I said, relying on trusted third party set checkpoints to completely do away with validating the entire blockchain history is always an option, and already one being utilized to some extent with the flag in Bitcoin Core to skip validation on transactions older than a TTP-set checkpoint.
Saying every one should validate, but then limiting the world to 300,000 on-chain writes a day, meaning limiting who can use Bitcoin without third-party intermediaries to 0.1% of the world population, is a bad trade-off. Better 10% of Bitcoiners be able to run their own fully validating node, and all 7 billion people be able to generate transactions *with their own private keys*, than let every one with a PC run a fully validating node, while only 0.1% make writes to Bitcoin with their own private keys.
In a scenario where a party cannot write a transaction to Bitcoin, due to limited on-chain capacity, there is little point in running a fully validating node. Emphasizing full node validation accessibility over main chain write accessibility to this extent is not a sensible prioritization.
Regarding this off-chain payment channel networks Red Herring, there is no reason to be confident that PCNs like the lightning network can provide a mix of trade-offs that will make them compelling to a wide set of users, and indeed the LN has still failed to get traction nearly 6 years after first being proposed.
The capital lock-up requirements, especially in a setting where on-chain transaction fees are high, the need for being online to trustlessly receive funds, and the routing challenges, are all potentially fundamental showstoppers for the LN being a viable technology for widespread utilization/adoption.
Finally, even if payment channel networks work - which is a very speculative 'if' and not one that the entire empowerment of humanity with access to electronic cash should be made dependent on - blocks would still need to be on the order of 100X larger to enable global mass-adoption, as payment channel networks do not completely do away with the need to have on-chain throughput.
Checkpointing very much runs counter to the decentralizing philosophy of bitcoin. Nodes should be able to fully verify the transaction history with reasonable resources.
In practice, checkpoint is not a big deal. For history older than X, where X is a sufficiently distant time in the past, there will always be widespread consensus on the hash of the true chain, and numerous reputable parties that the hash of the true chain can be obtained from. Some poison node attack where fraudulent websites provide a hash of a fake history will not be viable.
Checkpointing is also currently being utilized in Bitcoin Core, so relying on it further is not a major departure on how things are currently done.
And at 100X current block sizes, validating the entire history with no checkpoints will still be possible for thousands of hobbyists with beefed up but still modest hardware/bandwidth.
The empowerment from 100X more people being able to write transactions to the main chain, with their own private keys, will be well worth the relatively tolerable compromises on full node validation.
Bitcoin Core removed that form of checkpointing, and added in another.
Currently it has checkpointing in the form of assumevalid, which by default causes a full node to skip validation of transaction older than the checkpoint when synchronizing. [1]
Well, that is depressing to learn. So by default, a bitcoin full node DOESN't fully validate transaction history. If it finds a particular block at a particular height (that a group of developers have signed off on), then all signature validations in prior blocks are assumed to be successful.
The reasoning is that you have to trust those developers anyway not to sign off on malicious source code.
Yes, and that is why the alleged initial synchronization concerns surrounding larger blocks are mostly baseless.
As it is, tens of millions of people can easily stream 700 KB/s HD video 24/7, yet Bitcoin is being kept to a throughput of 2 KB/s based on the claim that increasing it to satisfy market demand would lead to Bitcoin becoming centralized, with only large corporate entities left being able to fully validate.
Miners can't change Bitcoin without the consent of full nodes, who run the core client. That's why SegWit2x didn't happen three years ago. All the miners supported it, because bigger blocks means bigger transaction fees. Full nodes and core devs didn't support it, because big blocks means you won't be able to run Bitcoin on PCs much longer and therefore centralized online service providers will control it.
FWIW bigger blocks actually mean much much smaller transaction fees, both in theory and practice. Though it's true some miners erroneously believed arguments otherwise.
BCash, for example, some loopy "large block" clone of Bitcoin has only rarely had more than $1 in fees in blocks-- and not primarily because it has fewer transactions (though it does), but because there is no cause to pay more than negligible amounts when both capacity isn't scarce and mining isn't completely centralized.
The result is that the BitcoinUnlimited (one of the BCash clients) "chief scientist" proposes that security must be paid for by perpetual inflation... and they've been moving towards abandoning Bitcoin's decentralized consensus-- e.g. bcash clients will no longer reorg so if there is a split deeper than a few blocks (caused by a network partition or a block race), their nodes will just split off into separate networks. Quite a mess.
>>FWIW bigger blocks actually mean much much smaller transaction fees, both in theory and practice.
Ethereum has larger transaction fees than Bitcoin right now, on a larger volume of transactions, so in practice, that is not true.
The addressable market will necessarily shrink with too small blocks.
Now of course when Bitcoin Cash launches, with most of the world unaware of it, it's not going to get as much as adoption, and by extension transaction fees, as Bitcoin, irrespective of its block size limit, so your comparison is inappropriate.
Ethereum has a what is effectively a block size limit, which is limiting usage to pretty similarly to Bitcoin's and it is operating hard against it. ('volume' of transactions is not particularly comparable because the average bitcoin transaction now makes multiple payments in a single txn).
Back in the past the issuer of Ethereum stated publicly that online money should not cost more than 5cts/txn... and yet here we are with $50 transactions there.
BCash has not only fewer transaction in spite of tens of millions spent promoting it, but it has vastly lower fees per transaction. If its blocks were half full at 10x the current feerate (and many times larger than bitcoin blocks), its fee income would still be a tiny fraction of Bitcoin's-- and nowhere near enough to support even the extremely low level of security it currently has.
That is simply not true. You can even look to the public markets, there were futures on each of these fork attempts and they traded at a tiny fraction of the price of Bitcoin.
It's a nice post, but it is a shame that the author does not mention certain current controversy [0] where Bitcoin Core has crumpled like a wet paper bag under a thread of lawsuit by one Craig Steven Wright - one that he played a key role in [1].
The PR to revert that change is still open and locked [2] so I can only imagine what kind of direct messages he would be receiving - I doubt many of them would be what one would consider 'nice'. Not to mention any of it when stepping back seems a little incredulous.
Most recently, this became relevant as the bitcoincore.org website he (co-)maintains received a legal letter from a (fraudulent; as in unproven and repeatedly lying) entity claiming copyright of the 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper. He complied[0] by taking the PDF down from bitcoincore.org and received a lot of slack for it by parts of the community. He then made clear that he'll happily continue to work on Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin in general, but will not be a "martyr"[1] for the project: "it's up to you as bitcoiners to protect it". As a reaction a lot of community members and companies proceeded to host the PDF on their site [2].
[0]: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/bitcoincore.org/pull/740
[1]: https://twitter.com/orionwl/status/1352181235766988800
[2]: https://twitter.com/hashtag/BitcoinPDF