I've seen your comments throughout the years and it's been one of the sparks for me to learn more about Bitcoin's power consumption, it is truly bizarre how easily shoved aside the argument about the climate impact of PoW cryptocurrencies is by their proponents. Seems that some on the Bitcoin train didn't realise that the concept and technology have been coopted by miners, etc. since the rift about increasing block size or not, the miners and others with high stakes in maintaining the status quo have won. They won't ever allow their investments to become worthless (or at least non-profitable) and now all the other smaller agents have to fight a war against that to ever have a chance to change the massive ecological impact of Bitcoin.
Thanks for shaping a path to educate myself on this issue, I recognised the Dyson sphere analogy pretty quickly, haha.
There's a really strong movement inside the crypto community to move away from any sort of technology that requires a Proof of Work system like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is like the racist grandfather that started the family: nobody _actually_ likes it except the people trying to get close to get rich off of it someday. There are lots of blockchains that are very promising that are excellent alternatives that are gaining major traction. Even Ethereum itself recognizes that Proof of Work is terrible and is restructuring how the blockchain itself operates to correct it.
But something nobody ever even questions is: How much power does Wall Street consume? Or every bank, and every bank chain in the world? It's so easy to point the finger directly at coin mining as "that's bad" because people used to try to do it at home and it became increasingly impossible to do because of the power consumption, but nobody sees the power consumption by the huge amount of computational automation that goes into stock trading.
Ethereum is facing that very scenario of miners versus environment and has told the miners: too bad, your way will die, prepare for it. I don't know if Bitcoin will do that or follow suit, but I would argue that Ethereum is the worst of the two since it still uses GPUs for mining rather than customized ASIC processors (which only have one purpose: to calculate, in hardware, a SHA256 hash using parallel micro-cores that can run hundreds simultaneously per chip) like Bitcoin does.
I'm looking forward to the day when a smart, environmentally-friendly blockchain like EOS/WAX, Stellar, Solana, and the likes take over and slowly "wrap" BTC into them, burning them on one chain to activate their value on another.
Replace Bitcoin as a speculative asset? Because I don't really see Bitcoin as anything else. Just to clarify why, according to Coinmarketcap, trade volume for june 1st was about $35B. The transaction volume on the actual Blockchain was about $5B, according to Blockchain explorer.
So yesterday, 85% of Bitcoin transactions wasn't even on the blockchain. They were trades within markets that use the same old technology that banks do. They (often) have the same KYC that banks do. And have no direct connection to the blockchain. I doubt most people who 'own crypto' actually own any crypto and they just have the right to crypto that is stored in the wallets of their markets.
I realize this rant went a bit off topic, but I really wonder what 'replace bitcoin' means in this context.
Edit: I realized that coinmarketcap and blockhain explorer numbers are probably cumulative, so it'd be more like 87,5% of transactions off blockchain. Doesn't really change anything about my point, just thought it was worth an edit.
Yeah, I think people forget what is it that makes cryptocurrencies popular. It's not about all the ideals about decentralization, innovation, working around dictatorships and Big Banks, etc. Few people understand any of this, and even less people care.
Cryptocurrencies are popular first and foremost because they streamlined the ability to run financial scams, which otherwise are much more difficult to pull off. Secondly, because they make it easier to gamble. Thirdly, because they make it easier to exchange illegal goods and services.
Well the entire country of El Salvador now believes it to be the best option they have as a currency of choice. So I guess your points might be valid for some very minority stake, but they're popular because you can trade them like stocks and even trade futures on them to make money. So sure, like all financial systems, it's being used for bad things. But cash is used far more often than anything else to trade money for bad things.
Yeah, but people that own stocks do not typically go on and on about how the stock market is a revolutionary technology that changes everything. Stocks are worth something no matter how they are traded.
Supposedly, it is the blockchain that makes bitcoin viable but if most transactions are off chain then what is the point?
A thought experiment: at what point does the blockchain cease to add value? What if 99% of transactions were off the blockchain? What if all transactions were off-chain?
At the moment it looks to my untrained eye like a few big exchanges do almost all of the trading internally without moving coins, keeping the expensive blockchain transactions for batched redemptions between exchanges. How is this different that what normal banks do with cash?
This is actually how Bitcoin is supposed to work if successful. Normal banks perform final settlement with Fedwire. That is actually what Bitcoin is competing against (except at an international scale).
It is confusing because stores keep wanting to accept Bitcoin as payment for small transaction but it is obviously horrible at that.
It is different mainly in that if you want to move around large amounts of money outside of the banking system you can do so without using briefcases/trucks full of physical cash.
Whether that movement is illegal or legal is probably at a similar ratio for both crypto and USD physical cash.
You can't turn this speculative asset back into currency without the banking system...so how can this possibly move money outside of the banking system?
It's funny that you call bitcoin a "speculative asset" even though fiat currencies are far more "speculative" than anything tangible. Bitcoins are tangible even if they're electronic. Your statement is like saying "this news source that reported this is speculative because it's on the internet, but the real news that's printed in a newspaper is what actually happened."
This is a straw man argument. If Bitcoin is useful, it is for final settlement for larger institutions. Of course a proper rollup that works at scale is missing.
> Most people think it (Etherium) will replace bitcoin
Sorry for going full meta and I hope this doesn't come across as mean but, coin speculation is something I hope to see less on HN. There's enough of this on Twitter and everywhere else.
Wonder when Elon will complete this pump & dump just like he did with bitcoin. He is either a fraudster or a moron, when he decided to embrace bitcoin and a month later decided it wasn't good for the environment... Anyone with access to the internet and a few minutes time can figure out the power consumption required to back a network which supports a miniscule amount of transactions. And that power usage will only grow as acceptance and price continues to rise.
I have the same feeling. Elon despises the SEC and he might have found a way to mess with them by playing with a mostly unregulated market.
Edit: Also, his name was used a lot by crypto scammers on Twitter and nothing was ever done about those. That might also have pissed him off even more.
I’m not sure Musk has seen the last penalty for that tweet. The SEC has been corresponding with Tesla about Musk’s noncompliance with the court-ordered legal review of his tweets.
These kind of headlines are so terrible. This is like saying UPS launches new server because they delivered it. SpaceX is literally a transportation company. The title is nothing other then trying to clickbait of the popularity of SpaceX.
Isn't it inevitable for any company which is successful and innovative in its field (especially if the field is space flight related)? SpaceX really achieved a lot with Falcon 9, Dragon, Crew Dragon, pushing Starship even higher [1]. If you want some context, and a comparison of already 12 years ago decommissioned SpaceX Falcon 1 with current state of the art small-lift launch rockets of other companies, check out this excellent video [2].
I think their success and innovation is in getting people excited about space again. People not caring was space exploration's problem for like thirty years.
It is. And I am even fan of Ethereum. But still, wasting space and energy on ISS for what can be done literally anywhere on Earth seems unreasonable. Why did organization(s) that run ISS agreed to that? What is the motive?
You could create a "green" block chain by launching a secure cryptographic enclave that broadcasts a randomness beacon into orbit. (Several of them really, with the same seed.) Make it something that can be picked up by cheap SDRs. Then your block mining lottery becomes whoever can guess the next beacon output, and by being in orbit everyone can hear the beacon and it becomes extraordinarily costly (and obvious) to tamper with.
Of course that would allow extraterrestrials to cheat on coin mining...
There are cryptographic primitives that can be instantiated via a multiparty key signing ceremony when the satellites are commissioned and then the keys thrown away. After that, you'd have to grab a satellite and disassemble it in a clean room and use some kind of nanometer-scale logic probe to extract secret key information to Sybil attack anything.
Sybil attack has nothing to do with stealing keys. It's just sending guesses into the network as fast as you can, to maximize chance of your guess ending up as winner.
a) It's a PR stunt. Adding *in space* works a lot better than "SpaceX is running an Ethereum node" alone.
a.1) Particularly for the company "SpaceChain" that actually runs it, ridding piggy back PR on the name of SpaceX and the recent Tesla/Bitcoin craze.
b) Every time Elon Musk appears in a sentence together with crypto currencies, prices bounce around (exactly what you want in a currency, right). This can be used deliberately to make bank and in contrast to the stock market, there is no regulatory body stopping/punishing that.
c) Last time I checked, the ISS didn't have a diesel generator standing out back, so it will run on solar power only (which is of course offset by burning rocket fuel to get there in the first place, and probably by burning itself up when eventually returning home)
Space has different risk factors than places on earth, so this diversifies the risks of the ETH network by adding another dimension of geographic decentralization.
Why the ISS -> probably because it has a well-understood power, data & thermal framework that the company now doesn't have to build for themselves, nor do they now have to manage the orbit of their node.
In this case it doesn't. If there is a catastrophic failure on earth so big that it wipes out all electrical systems and kills all computers the ISS won't survive for long without any resupplying. In that case you'll have an ETH node orbiting earth in a station full of dead people.
Such scenarios are mostly hypothetical, and would mostly include world-ending situations such as planetary impactors.
Do note that I'm not advocating for ETH-nodes in space, I'm just putting up reasons for sending [stuff] into space. If you had a very lucrative webshop, you could decide to do HA by sending some of your servers to space. It doesn't logistically or practically make any sense, but the reasons for doing so are not wrong per se.
Thermal management would be a bit hard for that, so I'd guess no. Apart from that there's no real benefit to having that there. I would assume there is not that much computation requirement that has to happen in space that isn't cheaper and much easier to do on the ground with just sending the results to space.
