It seems to me that Bitcoin has only really solved one problem: to allow transactions that governments don't allow and there's really two classes of that:
1. Illegal stuff
2. Capital controls and other government impediments on the movement of money.
What I didn't realize until Bitcoin was nearing $1000 was just how much (2) contributed to driving its value, specifically all the affluent Chinese (who are subject to capital controls) who used Bitcoin mining to move wealth beyond the reach of the Chinese government. I really wish I'd figured that out earlier but hindsight is 20/20.
At this point it's hard to view anything other than speculation as driving Bitcoin prices.
We're still figuring out what cryptocurrencies are. I don't think it's likely to be as a currency anytime soon. Traditional currencies just have better properties (stability in value, reversible transactions and the banking system are more of a feature than a bug). If it's an asset, it's hard yet to say what drives the price so this is little more than gambling.
That really just leaves it as a temporary medium for exchange and for Bitcoin at least, we're spending an awful lot of energy to maintain that.
> The CCAF team surveys the people who manage the Bitcoin network around the world on their energy use and found that about two-thirds of it is from fossil fuels.
Nice to see actual data on this. Bitcoin advocates keep claiming it's mostly renewable.
If that were true, we'd be seeing fluctuations in how frequently blocks are being created depending on where the sun shines and where it's windy. Water power is more stable but not enough to explain the TWhs all disappearing into bitcoin every year.
No need to do a lot of work surveying miners to disprove these trolls, also they'll just come up with a new argument like that it's the payment method of the future and they don't want to miss out on that (that's what people threw at me on reddit in a similar thread earlier today)... just admit it, btc investors, you want to use the investment vessel and not feel bad about the enormous amount of pollution you cause in the process...
I find it funny that in every post that denounces the energy use of bitcoin, which is one of its apparent weakness and strength at the same time, there are what I'd call "apologists" who come in and give other reasonings to support bitcoin, ignoring facts that go against it.
Let's be honest with each other:
- The reason why bitcoin is revolutionary is because it opens up a way to do transactions on a ledger between millions of people without a central authority. Even if you say owning 51% of the network means you are the central authority, you have to keep pushing those resources forever, basically impossible to happen in a "struggle" situation.
- The reason that in itself is its weakness is because it relies on computational proof of work, and that means energy. The more people are involved in bitcoins the more energy will be consumed to vie for the possibility of mining out rewards, to the point where the costs doesn't make sense anymore and you have to rethink mining strategy. Any system that proposes a central authority to lessen this energy use burden is just making it weaker, not stronger, if you care about decentralised transaction systems.
I am kinda surprised it's not higher, just because solar and wind energy is so cheap now I assumed it would be attractive.
That said, even if it was run with renewable energy, at this point in time it would still contribute to emissions indirectly. That power could have been used to displace fossil fuel usage, so diverting it to bitcoin hashing causes a net emissions increase for... very little benefit.
Even this doesn't matter much. Nuclear, wind, and solar are all frequently criticized because they do not have the ability to scale with demand. We can think of all of these energy sources as fixed, with all of the marginal energy use coming from CO2 emitting sources. If you use one fewer watt of power, virtually all of that savings is in coal and gas. This is why reducing power usage is so important.
Why would this cause the bubble to burst? Btc doesn't require the difficulty to be this high to function.
"The fact is, it's not really used much in the legal economy now. Yes, one rich person sells it to another, but that's not a final use. And without that it really doesn't have a long-term future."
Sentences like this make me think the author is clueless. That could be said of any neutral storage of value, like gold.
Btc is super convenient compared to gold, and transacting with it can't be easily shut down by anyone. Seems like that is all btc needs to be. It could be more maybe, but that is hardly a requirement for it to be successful.
Ethereum is moving to proof of stake shortly. I imagine a lot more BTC will transfer over to take advantage of this & other benefits like defi interest
For the migration to be complete, there would need to be a coordination between the btc network and an eth contract to move the issuing of the remainder of the supply over to the contract. And an agreement of how the new units would be allocated; it seems doubtful that this could ever take place.
I don't think there's any reason for a 100% migration. It would be impossible to get consensus for that, like you said.
Anybody who wants to move their coins over can. There are plenty of economic, technical, and moral (climate change) reasons to do so.
Besides, when it's voluntary, people can choose to lock their coins into whichever network they like Ethereum, Cardano, Polkadot. (note: ETH is the only network that has currently has contracts able to lock BTC)
I've heard some skepticism regarding the PoS of eth, so I'm in "let's see it when it's there" mode, but I'm somewhat optimistic here. Can't go fast enough for my taste, I'm really curious if it'll turn out to be what it's supposed to! Hopefully this will also mean people start to move over to this better tech.
It's been running perfectly in production since Dec. 1, with over $5 billion in ETH staked so far.
Migrating the legacy stake and EVM to it still needs to be done, but that's irrelevant to the consensus algorithm. It's just changing the data it reaches consensus about.
I've very skeptical for cryptos, specially about their regulatory survival, but I've been studying it a bit, and aside some obscure cryptos that are propably genius, I found nano worth mentioning as currency, and Cardano seems on track for a blank sheet replacement of Ethereum.
Genuinely curious, why Cardano? There are dozens of reputable, high profile “eth killers”, such as Cosmos, NEAR, Polkadot, Solana, Avalanche, Tezos and many more. All of these have a proof of stake consensus, and smart contracts which are supposed to have some special sauce that makes them better than Solidity, be it functional programming, formal proofs, rust, or what have you.
Cardano seems to have accomplished the least of the bunch, (not even fully operational yet) but somehow it has spiked in the last few months to have the highest market cap. Not trying to offend you if you have invested in it or anything, but do you have any idea why?
It’s like gen 3 crypto, incepted in 2017. I’m a believer in their platform and governance models, and enjoy their fast, cheap transactions today. IOHK is delivering something with vast consequence, generally on schedule. They will lag until dev adoption takes off, but then I have high hopes for the network and protocol to deliver on early crypto promises.
Yeah, but every blockchain that isn't used much has fast transactions. And even with smart contracts they will be missing layer 2. It's a long time to wait.
I am speculating on Algorand after doing some research and listening to a talk by Biden's SEC chair Gary Gensler where he spoke positively about it. It is a cool project in the Proof of Stake space. Although there are several "Eth killers", Algo included, that could go nowhere.
It’s ironic the premise is we trust nuclear weapons to the government but not our pithy accounts of bitcoin - which in the event of a trust-less government is worthless (because of the arsenal)
Odd framing. No one "trusts" nuclear weapons to the government as opposed to having control themselves. "Pithy accounts" (money) represent to a fairly large degree an individual's autonomy / freedom / independence. Is it so bad to find it appealing that one may wish to assert more control over this given the choice?
I say this as someone who finds crypto to look like almost a complete scam but I can't dispute the appeal of the concept.
Yeah. If you only want to handle around 7 transactions a second, you can buy an of the shelf Db such as a DynamoDB table for that, and it will cost you next to nothing.
There are a lot of arguments against Bitcoin, and the energy consumption argument has always struck me as the most asinine. It's an anchoring fallacy rooted in the fact that bitcoin's energy consumption is easy to estimate with a fair amount of confidence. However, because Bitcoin is easy and other industries are hard, we do not scrutinize the utility of any other industry in this way, though data suggests global video gaming is a comparable energy hog[1][2]. We have no way of estimating the energy consumption of the finance industry, and I wouldn't trust any attempt. Bitcoin is being compared to countries instead of other industries because it looks alarming, but many global industries that rely on energy look like this.
I hate pointing this out, because I get misconstrued as a Bitcoin supporter. I hold no Bitcoin, and I never have because of other principles. However, criticisms such as this one don't create constructive conversation, in my experience. Unless we want to start regulating what you can and cannot use energy for in your home, there's no point to thinking this way. The fossil fuel angle, in my mind, is simply a sign that we need to get off fossil fuels, Bitcoin or not.
It makes very much sense to criticize Bitcoin for its energy usage, I really don't understand your angle, and how that would asinine. "Mining" Bitcoin is literally competing to waste energy. Even if you want to ignore the fossil fuel angle, as a civilization energy for us is still of pivotal importance - to like build stuff, live and do amazing stuff like explore another planets.
If the price of Bitcoin continues to climb, at which point does it become not sensible to spend more energy mining it? When every inch of our planet has been filled with a nuclear plant or a solar panel? Because rising price will perpetually mean mining more will break a profit. If you can make a profit from wasting energy, markets will reward you for that indefinitely and the entire society will reconfigure around Bitcoin mining.
No, that makes no sense. I don't think anybody wants to regulate how private homes or businesses use their electricity, but I just find the fundamental proposal of Bitcoin as untenable. Criticizing it does not have ulterior motive apart from trying to make people see how silly it appears to me personally.
We can compare transaction fees. Bitcoin transaction fees average $12 right now, which IIRC is comparable to bank fees for wiring cash. (Of course with bank wires you might have more security, at least in the developed world...)
I might be a little rusty, but don’t we know exactly how much calculating is being done (measured in M/G/T/P/E hashes/second)?
And don’t we also have fairly accurate measurement of how much electricity it takes to calculate those hashes (assuming everyone is using this year’s tech)?
We do, which is why it's so attractive to look at Bitcoin's energy consumption. The result is a big number, but we don't know how bad this number actually is because we don't have fairly accurate measurements of any other industry to compare it to. We can't answer the first questions that arise from this kind of analysis. For example, is Bitcoin the most energy intense industry, or is it really just because computing in general is energy intense? What percentage of overall computing is taken up by bitcoin? Are there other computing segments that are worse? We can't answer these questions very well, and even if we could the only way to regulate it would be to limit what we can do with our computers. Last I checked, the HN community hated such suggestions.
It's worth noting that Tether has not minted any significant amount of new coins since the NYAG settlement was announced. If the terms of the settlement effectively prevent them from being able to print any more coins, we will soon find out whether or not the theory of Tether propping up the price of BTC was indeed accurate or not.
All the such energy/BTC arguments miss that BTC (and other crypto) mining in space has no limit and will become feasible when Starships start flying. And it looks to be more profitable than asteroid mining :)
People frequently raise the issue of cooling in space while missing the fact that at 60C 1m2 radiates away 700w - enough to cool 3-4 mining GPUs which can basically be just slapped on that heatsink.
Not sure. For example at $100/kg blasting a manufactured home into space is comparable to getting a land to put it in Silicon Valley. The point here is that such low price of space access will drastically change a lot of calculations.
It is quite pathetic that a purported 'future of payments' is so inefficient in so many ways. This is why I will never participate in systems like bitcoin that consume hundreds of TwH (and growing) each year.
I don't think btc has been purported the future of payments for years, since things like ETH, ADA, ALGO have been proven better for that. BTC is considered 'digital gold', as in an alternative asset class that millenials and zoomers have adopted in lieu of gold. And now it has become mainstream for fund managers with large AUM to hold some without being laughed out of wall street.
Its a long solved problem. Just years after bitcoin went live bitcoin devs figured out that PoW just cant be the solution.
FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) DLT ("blockchains") where the result or making "a better bitcoin". There is no need to burn energy to solve the double spending problem. All you need is a distributed way to agree on Tx order. Whoever tries a double spend just f**ed up themself and simply wont know which one will be ordered first and which one therefore will be invalid. Thats not a problem for any honest participant.
See xrpl.org if you wanna read more in dept about this. There are plenty other protects using BFA instead of PoW/PoS by now.
In my view, "law of unintended consequences" looms large here. On the other hand, "proof of work" reminds me that the equivalence of heat and work was proven more than 150 years ago by Joule.
That equivalence exists in the domain of classical physics.
Bitcoin only exists in semiconductor systems: its ineffectiveness stems from the extra logical layer (gates on silicon) which, while based on quantum effects, does not utilize quantum effects directly for calculation.
If we had desktop quantum computers, and a computationally hard algorithm on qubits was used for proof of work instead, we would still end up in the same arms race of ever more expensive, ever more power hungry systems do that work.
What would happen if Bitcoins work function (the hardness) was made 10 times easier, would miners use 1/10th the power budget? No, they'd just 10x their mining rate. Why? Because other miners have every incentive to do the same.
Isn't there also a fundamental equivalence between information and energy in physics? And so is there not a lower limit to the amount of energy required to compute a SHA256 hash of a certain number of bytes, and by extension mine a bitcoin block?
Isn’t the Margolus Levitin theorem slightly different?
As in while it puts the maximum bound of amount of computation per J it doesn’t enforces a requirement that the entropy increase needs to be through a non-information degree of freedom as in heat.
Locally and classically, yes. But quantum effects demonstrably break locality. Call it quantum woo if you want, but the reality is that we perceive the world top-down and know incredibly little of how our universe actually functions from the bottom up.
Its not a payment system (unless the transaction is sufficiently large).
It's more like digital gold. But gold has a track record of holding value over millennia. Bitcoin is only a decade old. Will it hold up over time? Nobody actually knows.
It was an impressive proof of concept. There are technically better cryptocurrencies (along pretty much any dimension), but they just didn't get as much attention. Maybe these articles about how bad bitcoin is should call out some alternatives.
The Lightning network is an overloy network on Bitcoin that allows faster transactions and higher transactions-per-second. Due to the economics of mining, it won't decrease the overall electricity usage of the network, but will make it more "efficient" per-transaction.
Ethereum is more programmable, to the point of being quite easy to shoot oneself in the foot. (Bitcoin is intentionally not Turing-complete to avoid abuse.)
Anything with proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work is going to be less wasteful in terms of electricity. Ethereum is trying to get there but it has been delayed a lot.
The slow pace of block creation has been a problem with Bitcoin for a long time and lots of blockchains have higher transaction-per-second capacities and quicker verification times. Ripple was promising but had some serious scandals and I don't know if it has a future. Anyway, Bitcoin is one of the slowest ones out there now.
Several have improved on the privacy/anonymity aspects. The most famous of those I think is Monero.
(I did not want to sound like I was advocating for anything in particular, but since it would be on topic, and you kindly ask :)
As you said, as a start, anything with a higher TPS (transactions per second) is more efficient, which helps. Some notables, in my mind (not exclusive, of course) ...
I really love what Cartesi is doing: They are bringing Smart Contracts to the "linux stack", securely (same guarantees than on-chain) but -outside- of chain. This will, obviously, raise efficiencies ...
The Fantom chain is high performance -and- their contracts are Ethereum-compatible (smart!), aside from it being a very nice, well thought out "ecosystem"
The NANO token makes it a point of pride, exactly how -much- more efficient ("Eco-friendly") it is than BTC, and their approach is interesting. (It has got some HN love lately and everything :)
(On a tangent, I am also a fan of what FRAX is doing in the stablecoin space, bringing decentralization and transparency to that space ("Frax is the world’s first fractional-algorithmic stablecoin") ...
We could make an educated guess, however. Gold has intrinsic value, which gives it a significant advantage over a tiny arrangement of bits in an ocean of them.
It does, but that only establishes a low floor on the price of gold. If it had no value as a store of wealth, it would plummet in value to a tiny fraction of what it is actually worth.
Bitcoin has a floor of 0 in theory.
I would also guess that makes gold better as a store of wealth. But given that the price rarely ever approaches that floor means it might not matter. And bitcoin is harder to steal (at least you don't have to pay someone to guard it in a vault), easier to divide and transact and verify ownership. I don't claim to know how it will turn out.
I wonder about the value of gold. You might buy gold, but can you actually, physically hold it and own it?
As far as I know, the only way you can buy gold is if you either buy jewelry or are a jeweler to make said jewelry. Otherwise you’re just buying stocks which could theoretically be lost in the digital wind.
Depends on the weight of the coin, but 1+ oz. can be as low as 1% above spot (bare gold price), where 1/20 oz. can be as high as 10% above spot. So 1-10% markup for most purposes
It's better in some ways and worse in others. It could be a lot easier to hide a key than a gold bar. You could still use bitcoin to buy your way to freedom, and there would be a black market for it if there's any way to get online, which there will be. The value is supported outside the country.
It's not clear to me that gold is superior in that use case.
Aside from some industrial uses, gold really has no intrinsic value aside from cosmetic. And cosmetic use is really just shared appreciation. There's really no reason btc couldn't offer shared value as medium of exchange in the same way fiat currency serves. Just depends on enough people who agree to use it.
Your aside is an extraordinarily large aside and yet you casually toss it in there.
Humans have a nearly unlimited desire for luxury goods and always will, quite predictably. They lust after jewelry accordingly and have for many thousands of years. Nothing about that will change. The aesthetic demand for gold will remain so long as people continue to desire luxury goods.
If you drop the price of gold low enough, people will start rampantly decorating their walls and consumer goods with it. It has potent intrinsic support under the price, as much as anything can. It will remain scarce and desirable.
Most gold isn't used in jewelry either, so it didn't derive much value from a fringe use.
Ironically we go to huge effort to dig gold out of the ground, purify it, and form it into blocks and coins. Then we dig a new home in the ground, bury the gold in there and put guards outside the door. Someone here pointed out how aliens would be scratching their heads over our behavior if they could see it.
There's no such thing as intrinsic value. Gold has value because humans value it. Humans value it basically because it's shiny and somewhat rare, but the value is something we project onto it.
It is a fringe application, regardless of downvote. Usage in electronics is probably less than 1% of the demand for gold. That's the very definition of fringe.
Also, what happens when the power is out? Texas power grid was apparently a few minutes from completely collapsing recently, with some estimates that it'd take up to months to get it fully back online (and what does electricity cost around that time?). Or if a weather event seems too local, what about a major solar flare that takes out transformer capacity for years? (and it would be expensive for a long time). One could revert back to cash and gold without power, but bitcoin transactions?
Edit: I guess the summary would be that cash & gold are decoupled from electricity (even if it takes some to create/mine them), but Bitcoin's entire existence depends on continuous availability of (cheap enough) electricity.
Who needs digital gold? Why not just trade ownership rights to actual gold? We used to have gold-backed paper money and you can easily trade gold electronically today.
By putting it in a central database? We already do that. If wager you can probably buy gold online which just changes digital records while the gold doesn't move in the vault.
If you don't trust the bank our government you can put it on a blockchain. It sounds a little silly to us, but remember half the world lives in non free countries. So trust in government and institutions is a big concern. But then why bother with the gold? Proof of work ensures scarcity. So just drop the gold from the equation and now you have bitcoin.
I'm curious, did you originally own more than 50? If not, do you have a plan for when you will sell? I know if I'd bought 50 bitcoins back in 2010 I would have sold them, or at least most of them, many times over by now.
There was a YouTube video explaining how to buy bitcoin and I got curious. I bought 50 because I originally wanted to but 5 and I accidentally added 0. I intended to spend 10 dollars but I accidentally spent 100 dollars. I tried everything to get my money back but it was too late. Fast forward to 2015 I remembered bought some bitcoin in highschool and I have my key stored in a flash drive. That flashdrive was like external hard drive for me at that time.
And you weren't tempted to take some money off the table when your $100 investment hit $100,000, $500,000, $1M, $2M? Or are you saying you've lost the key?
Well, congrats on your wealth! I occasionally kick myself for not buying a few when I got interested in it back around the same time, but I console myself with the certain knowledge there's no way I would have held on to nearly these prices. I would've felt the need to diversify away as soon as it became an appreciable fraction of my portfolio. A bitcoin millionaire, I was never destined to be.
ETH is great, but it has some scaling issues that are going to take years to sort out.
One benefit of ETH over BTC mining is that PoW mechanism (ethash) has, so far, kept most ASICs off the network (1). This has prevented the speed / power race BTC faces. In addition, the fastest GPUs are not necessarily the most ROI efficient, so people aren't EOL'ing their hardware every week. Even better is that GPUs still have life after mining.
(1) Yes, there are ethash asics, but being a memory constrained algo means that at the end of the day, the limiting factor is memory, not asic chips. The other issue is availability... shipping asics out of China is expensive.
There’s definitely been improvements in cryptocurrencies since Bitcoin was launched. I’m a big fan of Cardano for example which is led by a scientific community and not apes posting diamond hands and rockets. Sadly it seems like the network effects and “brand” of Bitcoin is winning over better technology. This has to change before we spend a significant portion of our power capacity on a money system. I don’t want aliens to see us like that when they come visit.
You better not particpate in fiat currencies that maintain themselves by spending TwHs to maintain their standing armies (or diplomatic relations with countries that do have standing armies).
Don't you need the armies to protect the infrastructure that powers bitcoin? And if you get to the point where you don't need armies, do you need a massive global network to verify you can trust the people you're doing business with?
Bitcoin infrastructure is distributed widely across the world. No single country disappearing off the face of the earth entirely would take it down before the internet itself went down.
Assuming Thanos would snap away China (the whole land not just the people) bitcoin definitely could be considered "down" because it would no longer mine blocks every 10 minutes on average.
Difficulty does adjust but that take weeks. the internet would not be effected like that.
That's not how fiat currencies maintain value. I suspect, if you do a thorough analysis of history, the inflation rate is going to be mostly uncorrelated with the percentage of GDP spent on military. Perhaps it might be negatively correlated, as high military spending typically means wars which have historically (especially in pre-modern times) resulted in massive financial crises for those countries heavily involved in them.
No, nation states and their fiat currencies are locked into the bare metal layer of human relations and the only thing that matters is ability to legitimately threaten to kill humans and destroy infrastructure. (or an alliance with a country that has those capabilities)
Bitcoin is not a nationstate and doesn't have the weaknesses of nation states and their economic systems. It uses far less energy to establish and maintain itself.
Thanks. Had not considered that. An acre of property is enough to get as close as possible, earning as much as needed for taxes and utilities thru death. Few other promises in life. That sounds more defeated than I like. What I mean is that steady state life through generations should look pretty similar, because we all eat and potty and need to be cleaned, etc. Transhumanism could speciate us, no doubt. I was deep into that for a while but can’t grok consciousness downloading yet so I’ve become a lot more wait-and-see. But back to the point, thanks for that angle.
I’ve objected to Bitcoin since at least 2010ish, where I mentioned that I didn’t want to turn the polar bears black on Facebook but maybe that it looks epic and brilliant technically.
The market is more liquid than it ever has been. But yeah, not as liquid as I or many others would like.
But if you really think it's gonna burst, there are plenty of eager sellers who would love to sell you some put options on LedgerX :) very above board, and the only CFTC-regulated physically settled BTC options exchange out there
ledgerx.com is tightly regulated (all trades reported to CFTC) and physically settled with (in my opinion) very good security practices, but it's only available to US residents. Their longest expiry dates are December 2022, so about 2 years out. I haven't seen anything longer, unfortunately. Since it's physical delivery, when you sell an option, the exchange "locks" the coins or USD that would be required if it were to get exercised until the position is closed (either by expiring worthless, getting assigned, or if you trade out of it), so the counterparty risk is against the exchange only. They're aware that it makes people uncomfortable to lock up coins for a long time, so they work with BitGo to actually handle the coin custody, in separate accounts per customer. It's all reasonable enough to me that I feel comfortable sending them a decent amount of money.
Deribit is a larger derivatives exchange by trading volume, and is open to the rest of the world (explicitly not the US), but isn't physically settled so is more of a "side bet" and is riskier. That said, it's been operating successfully for a while now. I haven't used it because I'm not allowed to in the US.
Not only isn't deribit physically settled but the "cash" is Bitcoin-- my understanding is that there is no actual USD on the platform (like how bitmex works).
While this is a convenience for those of us that like Bitcoin exposure, it's probably a major downside for people who expect Bitcoin to lose lots of value, be outlawed, or even fail completely. :)
(plus, I would be uneasy about any cash settled product not just becoming irrecoverably insolvent in the event of the kind of black swan that a contract buyer would be hoping for...)
I'd say it would be worth asking LedgerX for 5 year contracts but I doubt anyone would be willing to sell them for prices people would be willing to buy them at-- and that assumption is supported by the fairly low volumes on the Dec2022 so far.
>Deribit ... it's been operating successfully for a while now.
Deribit operates from Panama.
Typically these markets work well until there is finally some big event in the markets. Just when when big wins and losses are actualized they have "technical difficulties" or they just disappear.
Yeah, so that's why I was more hesitant about Deribit than I was about LedgerX. I have full faith in LedgerX the company and the regulator that oversees is. With Deribit you only really have a track record to go on, because if past performance fails to predict the future then you're kinda SOL.
But if you're outside the US I'm not sure there are many other choices. I think okex and bit.com might both offer some flavor of option, but last I looked were relatively tiny markets.
Bitcoin is just a way of funneling money from financial markets into energy production.
Since we will need way more energy to produce out carbon free all electric future and solar is cheapest way to get new energy already I believe that bitcoin will eventually lead to more investment in renewables.
And since bitcoin mining is variable load that can easily be adjusted to momentary demand for electricity I think it will solve the problem of storing energy from renewables. Why store energy if you can produce vastly more than is needed and use excess whenever available to mine bitcoin?
If you stop mining bitcoins, anybody with a small rig can produce a double spend and destroy all trust in the network. It wouldn't disappear, but the coins wouldn't be worth much.
Changing the block size was so controversial that it split the community and created years of bad blood and claims of shilling. I don't believe that the core devs are capable of making such a huge change as moving to PoS.
Bitcoin is whatever the majority decides... They could also increase the supply if they wanted to, or whatever other change comes to mind? Think of it as Bitcoin 3.0, 4.0, etc...
It could move to the exchanges moving around IOUs. It's not like actual gold moves around every time I buy some on the internet, someone just moves data in a giant excel somewhere.
Really just more crybabies crying. It is only about 20x more than the total electricity used annually for Xmas lights in the USA. Thank about it. If you want to save the environment. Cancelling Xmas is a much better choice.
What about if the supposed "bubble" lasts until it's unfeasible to continue mining on the same speed as now? Eventually, bitcoin will have been mined, and then there is no need for as much mining, depending on transaction fees only. By then the energy use is massively lowered as well.
Well, the security of Bitcoin == amount of transaction fees + block rewards. The cost to 51% attack the network is opportunity cost of mining valid transactions
So you either get secure wasteful bitcoin, or insecure bitcoin. Not really any other options with PoW
> The cost to 51% attack the network is opportunity cost of mining valid transactions
Which, after the block rewards run out and the price of Bitcoin probably looks different, will still be difficult to attack. But, the mining will have stopped then. Although it's pretty far in the future presumably.
Tons of other solutions than PoW as well, Algorand's PPoS is just one example.
Full disclosure, I'm trying to fund my open source space game via https://mintable.app/u/smcameron It's totally not working though, because it's obviously ridiculous. Luckily my funding needs are quite modest. (I should have just bought Cardano instead of this silliness.)
It seems to me that Bitcoin has only really solved one problem: to allow transactions that governments don't allow and there's really two classes of that:
1. Illegal stuff
2. Capital controls and other government impediments on the movement of money.
What I didn't realize until Bitcoin was nearing $1000 was just how much (2) contributed to driving its value, specifically all the affluent Chinese (who are subject to capital controls) who used Bitcoin mining to move wealth beyond the reach of the Chinese government. I really wish I'd figured that out earlier but hindsight is 20/20.
At this point it's hard to view anything other than speculation as driving Bitcoin prices.
We're still figuring out what cryptocurrencies are. I don't think it's likely to be as a currency anytime soon. Traditional currencies just have better properties (stability in value, reversible transactions and the banking system are more of a feature than a bug). If it's an asset, it's hard yet to say what drives the price so this is little more than gambling.
That really just leaves it as a temporary medium for exchange and for Bitcoin at least, we're spending an awful lot of energy to maintain that.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213693