If you strip the envelope of crypto-hate, this is a really interesting idea to put transaction-validators on space-probes that are rapidly moving away from Earth.
There, they can't be coerced by terrestrial bullies - be they 'authorities' or criminals – or enlisted into new cartels. They'll be running the same audited code for as long as they're in operation, unless later probes can outrace them.
And if the economic effort that had been spent trying to corrupt terrestrial nodes is instead directed to ever-more-cost-efficient planet-leaving tech - that's a win, too!
(Maybe ʻOumuamua was the leading edge of some other solar system's cryptominer cone?)
As far as the keys go, you can design a secure enclave to do the crypto then ensure a design element is that it can't create the key without being in space. Perhaps it is only active when acceleration is below 0.1g. Or, maybe it's designed to burn out if used in atmospheric conditions outside the vacuum of space. There are plenty of ways i could see it working so that the keys are very secure.
The rest of your points are a feature for deflationary currencies, and perhaps ensures no one currency lasts more than a few decades.
This is just kicking the can down the road - why would you trust e.g. Intel to do this correctly, without someone on the inside compromising the keys? The pressure to do so (financial, political, espionage-related, etc.) would be enormous.
So a trustless oracle? I really don’t think it’s simple at all. For starters, you have to assume the original creators of the project have backdoored their system in every way they possibly can.
If we assume the code has been audited and that the "1,000 identical probes" idea mentioned above is implemented, then securely generating a random number is as easy as XORing the random numbers of a large enough group of mutually adversarial entities to guarantee that there isn't collusion between all of them.
Yeah, sure... Except that's the whole idea. A resource is perceived as more valuable the scarcer it is; making sure it gets ever more scarce is a way of insuring against it decreasing in value, or hopefully even insuring an increase instead. What you're saying is like:
> Bitcoin is an unworkable idea because:
> The difficulty of "mining" those magic numbers always increases
Sigh... You didn't understand the comment you replied to at all, did you? That's what makes the resource ever scarcer. It only makes the system "less useful" exactly as much as the ever harder-to-mine magic numbers make Bitcoin "less useful".
Beats achieving the same goal by having to burn an ever larger fraction of the planet's energy.
No, it’s clearly you who’s misunderstanding something. Presumably the satellites also perform the same chain-commit function as miners (otherwise there’s no point), meaning as the satellites get farther away, committing a transaction takes longer. Bitcoin maintains scarcity without getting slower over time.
You also seem to be under the false impression that Bitcoin requires monotonically increasing energy consumption. It does not. The amount of energy consumed by Bitcoin is a function of demand for security by its users, which presumably should equilibrate at some point. It sounds like your model of Bitcoin mining is not correct.
> Bitcoin maintains scarcity without getting slower over time.
How? Isn't the whole point of Satoshi's algorithm that those magic numbers it takes to commit a transaction are ever fewer and farther between? So -- given the same model and number of computers -- it takes ever longer to "mine" the next one? That is, by definition, getting slower. If you're arguing that they're still finding the same, eh, number of magic numbers per day, that's only because they're "compressing time" by throwing ever more and ever faster computers at it.
The point of Stross' idea was that this ever-increasing scarcity can be provided by astrophysics in stead of an algorithm, which AFAICS is pretty fucking genius. If your problem with that is "but then we can't beat the ever-increasing-scarcity algorithm by throwing ever more resources at the problem to keep up the speed!"... Well, then YTF use something based on ever-increasing scarcity in the first place?
> You also seem to be under the false impression that Bitcoin requires monotonically increasing energy consumption.
Well, no, not necessarily: If everyone just keeps their silly tokens where they are, I can see that it would take no energy at all. Not much of a "currency" then, though, if you can't actually do any trades with it, now is it? In practice, though: Yeah, that seems pretty much exactly what it has been requiring for all of its existence, and no end is in sight.
> The amount of energy consumed by Bitcoin is a function of demand for security by its users,
Huh? So Bit"coin" is millions of times as secure now as it was a decade or so ago? Wow, it must have had really crappy security back then. If you're saying it was so insecure then that it was pretty much fraud to sell it for real money, and sure, those guys should be in jail -- but fortunately it's a million times safer now... What do you then say to your equivalent (or yourself) ten years in the future, when they say the same about you now?
> which presumably should equilibrate at some point.
But it still hasn't, has it? And there is no such point in sight, or can you give us an approximate date? Within six months is precise enough...
Unfortunately, the point where the actual resource usage exceeded what's reasonable to waste on silly games like this was passed long ago. So unless you can fix it so it goes back to where it was in, say, the third or fourth year by tomorrow, it's already so deep into unreasonable territory that shutting down the whole damn Ponzi scheme seems ever more like the only sensible thing to do, lest this fucking Paperclip Maximizer eat the world.
> Isn't the whole point of Satoshi's algorithm that those magic numbers it takes to commit a transaction are ever fewer and farther between?
No. I suggest reading the whitepaper. Also c.f. Google search keyword "difficulty adjustment". There are some fundamental misapprehensions in your model.
> The point of Stross' idea was that this ever-increasing scarcity can be provided by astrophysics
With ever-decreasing performance. Bitcoin performance stays constant while its inflation schedule decreases to zero.
> So Bit"coin" is millions of times as secure now as it was a decade or so ago?
Yes
> Wow, it must have had really crappy security back then.
Correct, but no one cared enough to invest the resources required to derail it. Now its security threshold is sufficiently high that it's economically infeasible for anyone to derail it. This is well understood and part of the fundamental economic design of Bitcoin's security model. Once again, I suggest reading the whitepaper. It will clear up most of these questions you're asking.
> If you're saying it was so insecure then that it was pretty much fraud to sell it for real money
Is this a real argument or sort of a joke?
> What do you then say to your equivalent (or yourself) ten years in the future, when they say the same about you now?
This argument will be equally silly ten years from now
> But it still hasn't, has it? And there is no such point in sight, or can you give us an approximate date?
Whenever and if-ever Bitcoin displaces the dollar, yuan, ruble, gold, etc. as the global settlement and reserve asset. I expect its stability to asymptotically improve as it approaches that point, or to exponentially blow up before that happens.
> Within six months is precise enough...
You could make a lot of money if you could predict this, so I invite you to try.
> the point where the actual resource usage exceeded what's reasonable to waste on silly games like this was passed long ago
If you think millions of people are wasting resources on something and you can't really explain why, what's almost certainly happening is that they're buying something you personally don't understand (which I am certain is true in your case). Ideally once you understand how Bitcoin mining works you'll understand the economic security model and this will all make sense.
> lest this fucking Paperclip Maximizer eat the world.
Don't worry, there's not really any compelling reason for Bitcoin-related energy production to consume more than a fraction of a percent of global economic output. It's strictly bounded by the social surplus associated with using Bitcoin over fiat alternatives, which I would estimate at perhaps a few hundred billion dollars a year in current terms. Maybe even just a few tens of billions. So probably no more than 10-50x what it is now. There is no exponential growth problem like with a runaway paperclip maximizer. The Bitcoin network's "utility function" also isn't contrived, unlike paperclip maximization.
> And if the economic effort that had been spent trying to corrupt terrestrial nodes is instead directed to ever-more-cost-efficient planet-leaving tech - that's a win, too!
By that same argument, wouldn’t Bitcoin currently be directing economic effort towards producing electricity and computer hardware as fast and cheaply as possible?
True, but the same goes for “planet-leaving tech.” Some of us might not be able to afford leaving the planet, or might want the planet’s environment to remain somewhat hospitable to life even after the CEOs leave in their spaceships!
Of course, "billionaires won’t "escape" to space while the world burns" -- "when you understand the science, it becomes clear that the "billionaire space race" is just that—nothing more than a pissing contest between egotistical robber barons."
I'd not trust Salon to know what billionaires, or science/technology, will be able to do.
Modern Salon is even more ideology-addled than the historic NYTimes, which editorialized human flight was a million years away in 1903, when it was… 2 months away.
Still, billionaries are likely happy that creative-writers, like the author of the linked piece, keep Salon-readers smugly overconfident about what billionaires can't do.
No, and AFAICS that was never part of the proposal. Stross is talking about a dozen or two unmanned research probes, like Voyager or Viking, which is the sort of spacefaring we've had since the glory days of the Apollo project ended; he never claimed it would make Star Wars true, IIRC. Just get one extra use case out of the tiny bit of space activity we do have. Or did I miss something; do I have to re-read it?
Hey yeah! and maybe we can hire a bunch of aging seniors to validate by hand, and as their health dwindles we can see diminishing returns.
Or the transaction fees can act as a pension in a fixed-size house of validator farms, which, since we're all getting collectively more stupid will on average itself have diminishing returns.
I'm not sure we really need to be taking these things seriously.
In the same way software-based cryptocurrencies are self-funding bug bounties, this proposal is a self-funding bounty for deep-space military hardware.
(I believe the winner will be the $0.25 radio transmitter sufficient to jam a -150 dBm radio signal planet-wide).
I'm still confused about what advantage is gained by having the validator be a deep-space probe. How do we know whoever built/launched the probe didn't put in a back door, or can change the software by transmitting a special code, etc.
Also what currency does the system use, if it's a new one how is it originally (fairly) issued to people?
The back door angle isn't hard to solve, just have the launchers manufacture 1,000 identical probes, then let the community randomly choose one to launch. The others can be checked for back doors. The launchers would have to balance the chance of getting caught against the chance of launching a clean probe, and the bigger the number the better the odds are on both sides.
There is this obsession with speed and efficiency in computing. The tradeoff for a secure decentralized system anyone can use and audit is that its slow and inefficient. There are real benefits to adopting systems like this for some tasks and problems we face - like transparency in political and economic systems.
Interesting idea. I was going to ask how we know they didn't perform some sleight of hand at the last moment with a secret 1,001st probe. But I guess if we can confirm that the private key is securely and randomly generated we can verify the validator's public key once it's in orbit. OK, let's do this.
The private key could be generated after the probe leaves Earth, via a process where many competing parties contribute seeding information.
Hence, barring deep compromises of the hardware, it will have never existed on Earth - only in the deep "Trusted Platform Module" (TPM) of the off-planet hardware.
Alternatively, set things up so that you can use the same public key as used by the signing probes as the target address on another block chain. Dump $1B into the target address.
As long as the money remains untouched, you can be fairly confident that no one has the private key.
> what advantage is gained by having the validator be a deep-space probe
It's a (very!) scarce resource, and therefore if lots of people want it -- like for instance, if it's the base of a "currency" system -- they'll assign a lot of value to it. Just like craptocurrencies[1] get their percieved value from the necessary resource they're based on being scarce. In their case it's "proof of work", i.e. showing that you've squandered fucktons of computing resources on finding some magic number; in Stross' suggestion, it's the fact that space probes are few and hard to reach.
It even has the most famous trait of the Bitcoin algorithm, ever increasing scarcity, built in: with Bitcoin it takes ever longer to mine those magic numbers; in Stross' suggestion, it's the fact that space probes take ever longer to reach as they move away from Earth. (Though, hm, wait a minute: Come to think of it, as long as the probe can get signals, it should be able to reply to it the same number of them, although not in the same time? Replies should arrive back at about the same rate, only with ever longer latency. But maybe he meant that signal attenuation over these literally astronomical distances will slow down comms, Idunno.)
But, anyway: His "Spacecoin" will only have any value if enough people think / trust that it does -- just like craptocurrencies. That's what's so hilarious about those: Their fanbois rant and rave against ordinary currencies and deprecatingly call them "fiat"[2], and never seem to realise that their own nirvana-thing... is just as "fiat" as anything else. ALL currencies are. (Yes, including gold.)
[2]: I wonder, BTW, if the reason they're so in love with using that as a pejorative is partially based on old "folk wisdom" seeing the Italian car brand as atrociously low-quality?
Most of the money it is from people who have no idea what it is, don't plan to use it for transactions, just think the price in dollars/euros/whatever will go up.
No, most people probably value it for the same reasons any other silly tulip-mania arises: They see the market value rise and rise, other people seem to value it, it's "the hot new thing", and "it's so cool tech, very advanced".
But the ones who got the ball rolling -- a (rather weird IMO) intersection between tech nerds and "currency skeptics" / "anti-fiaters" certainly saw (or convinced themselves that they saw) that as its UVP.
Sad, really: If only they'd latched on to South Pacific seashells or something, anything else, instead... Heck, what's wrong with leaves, eh? Crypto-"currencies" are a typical Golgafrincham Ark Fleet Ship B scheme.
Which probes are the correct ones? Or is each its own cryptocurrency? What happens when satellites fail? How do you know that your transaction is being processed by a satellite and not something else? How do you know the private key is really only on the satellite?
I'm failing to see the value of putting this hardware in space.
They are launched with identity-keys which are, under proper processes, unique & secret. These are potentially rotated to new keys created off-world, early, so that even if unauthorized on-world keys remain, the window that those could be misused is small & early.
Multiple probes contribute to the consensus validation of a single cryptocurrency.
As satellites fail or move out of the practical distance in light-minutes, new ones take their place. (Or maybe, they're just put into long-orbits that keep them out of practical compromise range? CometCoin?)
Hardware on Earth can be compromised any time later - via coercion, inducements to collude, etc.
The usual disadvantage of far-space probes – older tech that can't be upgraded – becomes an advantage in the trusted-validator role, as long as the initial prep/launch isn't corrupted. The window of potential compromises is shrunk.
Software in space gets upgraded; the base stations the satellites communicate with can be compromised; you have to trust that the builders didn't include any backdoors or unexpected behavior (deliberately or accidentally).
Seems like this has all the same problems as the earth option, but is more expensive.
It only gets upgraded if it was designed to be so upgraded, which adds cost/complexity. If you don't manage your backdoor before the probe leaves human hands, you can't add it later.
And, other mechanisms (some described in sibling threads) can help drive the risk of a backdoor very low, & the liklihood of any compromise being widely revealed (if ever exploited) very high.
A sibling commenter said, only if that was the design. Heck they can launch with credit cards on board that have chips in them, those also have a private key, you give it some data, it returns a digital signature of this data, signed using a private key on-chip which can't be modified.
It'll be a different use case for encryption, but I guess a unique signature is not guessable that one could use that as an encryption key...
It's bewildering that so many people fail to get the "minimizing trust" aspect of Bitcoin; I do not trust anyone to successfully generate and hide (in space) super-secret private keys that might be worth trillions of dollars. Not to mention all the other obvious problems with this silly idea (What happens when the satellites stop working after 15 years because they got too far from the sun, or radiation fried their silicon?)
I think people are so accustomed to having to trust each other that the notion of something being "trustless" is really foreign.
If you tried to live a trustless life, you couldn't get surgery, ride on a plane, get food from a grocery store, etc. - all of those things rely on implicit trust in other human beings. The whole of human society was built on trust!
Oh great, then how about you implicitly trust me with your bank login info and email it to me?
> you couldn't get surgery, ride on a plane, get food from a grocery store,
I look up my doctors' ratings before I use them. I don't fly sketchy third-world airlines with bad safety records. I don't buy food from grocery stores in places with bad food safety. "Trusted" and "trustless" are shorthand for the degree of system-external due diligence you need to do before having a sufficient degree of confidence.
In that, you are still trusting that the system you have devised had not been successfully gamed or hacked by an adversary. For that matter, you may just be trusting that you don't have an adversary.
But you do trust mining groups not to get to 51% capacity, which has happened before. You do trust that ECDSA/secp256k1 and double SHA-256 don't have unknown shortcuts, even though that hasn't been proven.¹ You do trust the Bitcoin Core developers, and the developers of your wallet program, not to add a backdoor, and you do trust your own ability to keep your private keys confidential. In minimising trust, you're also centralising a single chain of it; the real world is resilient against misplaced trust (so long as many entities aren't secretly untrustworthy at once, which we call a conspiracy), but Bitcoin isn't. It's a small number of single points of failure.
I'm glad you said “reduced trust”, rather than “trustless”, because otherwise this would've been a several-page rant.
¹: It's unlikely either of them will have significant shortcuts discovered any time soon, but that's not the point.
The only reason people like bitcoin is because of its decentralizness (yes im aware there are big caveats on that in reality)
If you're ok trusting a specific entity, might as well just set up a mysql server.
If you dont want to trust a central entity but are still ok with it existing as potential single point of failure, use chaum style digi-cash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash
So if you're ok with this weird centralized on space x solution, you should be ok with a lot of other semi-centralized designs that solve all the same problems only better.
> The only reason people like bitcoin is because of its decentralizness
The main reason most people like bitcoin is because of how much the value has appreciated. I would bet that the majority of holders of bitcoin don't actually care about whether it's decentralized or not.
For sure. Two easy checks on this: 1) Are other decentralized things seeing major adoption? 2) Does a cryptowhatever or blockchainwhatever hype target have to actually be decentralized? Or can it just talk about decentralization and carry on?
Both statements are not mutually exclusive. I would agree most Bitcoin holders hold it only for financial returns, yet one of the core tenets of it likely/possibly going up in value is the decentralization itself, which enforces scarcity.
That's fair, but i also think its fair to exclude them from this discussion since they won't care about space probes or any other technical concern the article talks about. Bitcoin might as well be fancy sea shells for all they care.
I think there's a significant number of people who like decentralized currency systems because they can be used to circumvent border currency controls. I'm sure there are some reasonable reasons for disliking nation-states but practically speaking these people are mostly just avoiding taxes.
Obviously this is a joke, but the joke is based on a flawed premise. You could do the exact same thing on Earth without a satellite. The part he doesn't get is that cryptocurrencies are not solving the same problem as the space probe:
> the higher demand for the currency rises, the longer the delay to get your transaction into the queue for uplink and signing via the big dishes.
Cryptocurrencies are solving the problem, who controls the dish? If this were real, we would see a race to the bottom with bigger and bigger dishes transmitting at higher and higher power, and it would be more damaging than Bitcoin.
Complete trust is impossible and systems premised on it will be fundamentally flawed, no matter how stupidly (proof of work, space probes) we attempt to avoid that conclusion.
Of course you need more than simply a signing infrastructure, you need to make sure that certain properties like not sending more than you have and no double spends are okay.
To accomplish that most systems require storing the entire blockchain (I hope you've shipped enough hard drives with it!) [1]
Then you either need to have zero bugs from the start or a way to update it.
Then you also need to democratize access to the up & down link
Then you need to make it robust to failure of that node...
For all of the legitimate reasons to hate blockchains/cryptocurrencies fairly intelligent people come up with asinine solutions around it.
If you are concerned about the waste that PoW creates then try to accelerate proof of stake and push for a carbon tax.
[1]: There is a constant sized blockchain that recently came out, I'm not sure if it's actually viable, but it's an interesting proposition. https://minaprotocol.com/
fairly intelligent people come up with asinine solutions around it.
He posed it as a "modest proposal". [0] That pretty much guarantees that he did not intend it to be a serious or robustly presented option. Unless he actually enjoys eating Irish babies, which seems unlikely.
(If you check out the story linked, it's important to know that it was written against the backdrop of a not-completely-passive bit of Irish genocide)
I'm bored too. Why not have an expiry date on money? All of it: fiat and crypto. Good for 10 years from the date its minted/created, virtual or not. No more sleeping fortune being stashed. Why not do the same with corporations? Laws? States? Like a 50 years limit with forced liquidation at the end. Like for any life form: you born, you live, you die. Just imagine. What a dream.
And because I'm that bored, another one: sandboxeing corporations. Do whatever you want within your shop, but only within your shop. People show for work, they can be treated as slaves if they want to. People get outside the sandbox no strings attached, the corporation has zero influence outside its own domain, and whatever happen outside the sandbox is public or owned by individuals only. That would be great for the environment.
Because then it's not fungible, which means by some definitions it's not money. An "old" dollar whose time is running out would have less value than a "new" dollar, making transactions suddenly very complicated.
Some argue that as soon as central banks launch a digital dollar, said dollar becomes programmable.
One major change is that effectively the central bank becomes the main bank for everybody, fully centralized. As such, they would have far more insight. And they can push money to you directly, like a stimulus, when needed.
Yet also allow this money to have an expiry date, so you have to spend it before a certain date.
Tied to your account, obviously. Stimulus money that has to be used this month, or it will expire. For the receiving party of that money, it is "normal" money, that doesn't expire.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, but programmable money would make it possible.
Some type of money has an expiry date. Not sure how it works in other countries but here (France) we have "restaurant coupons". You get these issued from your employer. You pay half their value and then you can use them to pay for food, at the grocery store, restaurant, fast food, etc. They are physical coupons so even though there is your name on it you can treat them as parallel money: you can trade them, give them away, etc.
They have an expiration date, they only last until the beginning of the following year. So usually if you have many of them left and the expiration is near (you can only use two at a time and they are less than 10€ each) there is a lot of trading or donations between family members to make sure they don't go to waste.
> Why not have an expiry date on money? All of it: fiat and crypto.
I came up with that idea in my teens (so looong before "crypto"), thinking about replacing taxes with it: Deprecate your currency by the same percentage the state needs to run, have your central bank print the same amount of new currency for next year, and voila: Nobody pays taxes, the state gets its cut anyway, and the money supply remains constant because the X billion the public held at the start of last year are only 0.7 X billion at the end of it / start of the next and the other 0.3 X billion are freshly minted by the central bank for the government.
This was before I learned that "the money supply" doesn't consist only (or even mainly) of cash, and that most "money" isn't actually created by state central banks but by the commercial banking system... But what can I say, it was in my teens.
> Good for 10 years from the date its minted/created, virtual or not.
Too discrete-step-ish. Deprecate at lest yearly, or if possible somehow smoothly over the year.
Your second paragraph: Full (well, almost full) agreement.
Yeah, so it would also have the advantage of discouraging money turning from a useful active medium of exchange to a passive "resource" to be hoarded and have rent extracted from -- yet another point in its favour, as I saw it.
My initially unquestioned assumption was that since the money in your bank account is denominated in the same currency as cash, it would automatically lose value at the same rate as cash. Can't recall exactly when I realised that the presence of money in bank accounts might influence the value of cash in stead; still in my teens, I think. As I recall, I started speculating about whether my system would have to even things out between cash and bank accounts by obliging the banks to continuously adjust your balance down, or something. (Can't recall if transferring the reduction to the state as tax, or just msking it go "POOF!" and disappear.)
Next thing, I probably realised there are yet other types of holdings than cash and savings accounts, and lots of other complications, so abandoned the idea. And then I guess I grew out of my teens.
I also had that idea in my teens. Some time later it occurred to me that it's already mainstream, in a way: that's what inflation is doing, and that's why currencies are usually managed to have a low but nonzero rate of inflation.
Right now I'm not well off enough to buy my own home and I'm well above 30.
If my kids or grandkids some day can buy their own home with my help, even if I've passed on, it gives me happiness and purpose.
In a world where inherited wealth isn't a thing, house prices and politics and enterprise are very different. It's hard to really know if your concerns would be meaningful in such a world or not.
Inherited wealth is unearned wealth, and sure, it's nice to think about your kids having a little unearned wealth to make their lives better, but less nice to think about them competing with people with insane orders of magnitude more unearned wealth (and power) which is the actual world we're living in, and most likely a big part of why you can't afford to buy your own home.
This is far too simplistic. My children are elementary school age. If I get killed in a car accident, it would be a second tragedy if I couldn't at least help provide for them until they reach adulthood from my savings.
Instead, I think we should just have very progressive inheritance taxes. Taking care of offspring is one of the fundamental drivers of humanity, so we should all have some ability to do that. But large-scale multi-generational wealth consolidation is a driver of inequality and is bad for society.
> Instead, I think we should just have very progressive inheritance taxes.
Or you could just have progressive income tax, treat income from gifts and inheritance as income, and allow tax recognition both in advance of income and deferred over a period of years for windfalls (relative to prior-years actual income) so that one-time or irregular income events aren't overtaxed.
We don't need a lot of specialized taxes if we just have a well-thought out general income tax.
>If I get killed in a car accident, it would be a second tragedy if I couldn't at least help provide for them until they reach adulthood from my savings.
tbf in a society that would use inheritance to improve the commons your kids would probably be fine. But yes a progressive tax is probably the more realistic option. That said I actually sympathize with OPs take because inheritance is for some reason one of the most accepted, but also most obvious examples of unearned wealth.
> inheritance is for some reason one of the most accepted, but also most obvious examples of unearned wealth.
I've been thinking about this Steven Pinker quote for literally decades:
"No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn."
For context, the author (who lurks around here) is a sci-fi author who has some background in online banking (from the first dot-com boom!)
His novels often feature aspects of economics, and in particular his novel Neptune's Brood [1] features a slower-than-light interstellar economy (and scam!)
I'm under the vague impression that if you wanted to get in on Chia "farming" it's already too late. Anyone know if that's true? Is there still an effect on the SSD market?
Conceptually, this can be thought of as generating Bingo cards (expensive, requires SSD's.) and playing Bingo (cheap, can be done with regular hard drives and a network connection).
So many Bingo cards have been generated that there's probably not much point in generating more.
> PS: my preferred solution to the problems created by cryptocurrencies is to treat them all like child pornography: totally illegal, possession a strict liability offense, choke off interoperability with real currencies at the credit agency/bank interchange level, and make them useless for non-criminals, at which point only criminals will bother with them. And India is going down this route.
If that's a joke, I fail to see how it's funny ... It's wild to see such rabid hyperbole, lumping all decentralised currency into a single basket with child pornography (!!) go completely unremarked on.
BTW the linked article from 2018 re India's "ban" talks about an order which was struck down by the Indian Supreme Court in March 2020.
It will be a while before the entire earthbound population is using cryptocurrencies, but I think it was hyperbole and that we should not take it seriously. /s
I don't know if you've read the latest IPCC report that just came out. But the state of the planet is approaching apocalyptic. Even with the most extreme measures, like cutting our net carbon output to 0 in just a handful of years we will have natural disasters that used to happen every 50 years, every 3-4 years now. And that's the optimistic scenario.
It should be illegal to waste resources this way. All in the name of destabilizing the financial system.
The problem is deciding what is waste. I think your gaming system is waste, therefore you should not be able to buy one. It has no important utility, given the catastrophe ahead.
You can't just pick one thing you happen to dislike or find unimportant whilst at the same time listing your own waste as in fact being very much needed.
The idea of mining being wasteful is of course a popular talking point for those not in crypto, yet the 100+ million owners of bitcoin would disagree and see it as the essential feature to secure the network.
Further, the word "waste" needs far more nuance. Clearly, mining is highly energy intensive, yet that doesn't mean it has to be wasteful. Increasingly, mining is done using clean energy whilst also in particular seeking out stranded energy, which is not in competition with other uses.
If the implication is that waste conditions are too diverse then we take it on a case by case basis. 100+ million owners can still be wrong. BTC is still no better than the US dollar for almost all transactions that don't require obfuscation, which is most of them. And furthermore since its economic value in use is primarily pegged to its ability to convert to USDT, it's then just a form of USD derivative which banks have had to regulate in other settings.
Spending all that energy to mine addresses that act as USD derivatives, when USD is still there, when derivatives can be created without these numbers, is waste.
Yes, just accounting better for negative externalities (that is, making externalities internal) would solve a lot problems. But, given how hard it is to get people on board to pay for something that was seen as free or close to it before is (see CA trying to fix messed up water rights), I don't have high hopes for that.
I wonder how much of this is money and how much is because of time and inconvenience. A spot without any fee is the baseline for a lot of people. A spot with one of those dedicated meters that's at each space and takes it's own card or change is slightly inconvenient, but not too much. Those lots that have a central place to pay that takes a card are less convenient, but not too egregious. Those lots that require you go find the central box just to have it tell you a lot code, and then you have to go back and find the spot number, just so you can got to a website to enter the information (I hope you have a good memory, or took some pictures) and pay online are the bane of my existence, and I will happily drive around looking for any other option for a minute or two (FWIW, in my minivan most often, but I don't know how much of your perception is BMW assisted ;) ).
On the other hand, if you could just have it auto-deduct from the same account that pays tolls on the bridges in the bay area through license plate recognition with a similar level of "you park and walk away" automation, I think most people would happily just deal with it because of the convenience.
That's not really a problem. For better or worse, no major economy on Earth is completely libertarian, so countries can make democratic or otherwise decisions about what constitutes waste - even if they're inconsistent or seemingly arbitrary. Sucks for the people who disagree, but that's the social contract for ya.
That's certainly possible, but I think you're far too optimistic about political feasibility, because it's largely a new concept.
Right now, if I have money, I am free to use it on wasteful products as I please. I can buy a massive truck, 5 times too large for my needs, just because I can.
People are used to this liberty. You may get some public support when something is banned that a huge majority agrees on, but things will quickly turn sour when it actually starts to hurt. When people are simply banned from buying that 75" TV. It's all cool until it's not.
You can imagine the political opportunity of being the party that does allow everything.
Pricing by CO2 output, as the other commenter suggested, likely is simpler.
We're not talking about regulating all kinds of waste though; we're talking about regulating (proof-of-work) crypto. And I think that, absolutely, is politically feasible.
As for things like massive trucks and giant TVs - well, steps are (slowly) being taken to regulate the former, at least; think of all those countries that swear up-and-down that all cars sold there will be electric in 10 or 20 years or whatever. But that's an extreme example, and this isn't really a new concept at all: plenty of things are made illegal or economically impractical due to regulations, environmental or otherwise.
Giant TVs, though - yeah, those are unlikely to be regulated any time soon. But then, that was the substance of my comment that I sort of feel you failed to engage with: government is absolutely free - via public opinion, some objective metric, or their own whims - to decide what's too wasteful to allow. Giant TVs, probably not. Massive trucks, getting there. Bitcoin? Well, it's not crazy to suggest it, anyway.
ETA: also, speaking of political feasibility and carbon taxes - do you think a regressive tax that drives up the price of virtually everything has more popular appeal than a targeted ban on crypto mining? Here in Canada our carbon tax has faced enormous political opposition, as did the one in France.
Regulating proof-of-work mining is not as simple as it appears. There's an international aspect to it, where some argue that killing crypto this way in one country, may mean missing out on the crypto industry altogether, whilst another country thrives on it.
Even just in the US there's now crypto-friendly states, neutral ones, and skeptical ones. Realistically, it will not really be banned, rather a compromise will be found. For mining to use renewables, and ideally stranded renewables. The mining industry is already self-regulating, as they can obviously see the writing on the wall.
The fact that you don't expect giant TVs to be banned is quite telling. It's subjective and based on popularity. I get it, people like their TVs. It's considered more important than a giant truck, which few people have.
Yet if the goal is to conserve energy, the savings on those TVs would be far more impactful compared to a small amount of massive trucks. So that would mean that we're merely virtue signaling rather than addressing actual usage.
Now let's talk ACs. Most Americans can't imagine life without them. But a few decades ago, nobody had one. In most countries, including far hotter ones, many if not most people function without one.
So let's ban them.
I hope you see my point. Bitcoin mining and big trucks are easy targets but a mere distraction from the heart of the matter. Large scale energy savings inevitably cut into the quality of life of the typical household, and will therefore be unpopular or politically not feasible.
As for carbon taxing, it's complicated. I'm from the Netherlands, by the way.
Personally, I am a 100% supporter of products having externalities priced in. Including paying staff a living wage, environmental costs, taxation in the country of production and real non-subsidized cost of transport. I truly believe that a number of categories of products are unnaturally and unsustainably cheap.
I'm in favor of such system but it will be a cultural shock for most of society. I have many thoughts on potential consequences, but this comment is already getting quite long.
I still won't stop the massive trucks though. We have crazy taxation on vehicles as well as fuel over here, yet there will always be people whom can afford it anyway. Our country isn't designed for such large cars yet they are on the rise. I've never seen one in my childhood yet now they appear everywhere.
A distraction though. It may anger you, but it's not the heart of the matter.
It's a myth that only markets can determine what is 'waste'.
We make non-market determinations all day long because we're also rational and can apply reason in systems.
Using tons of energy to distribute crypto is a 'waste' that just might not seem like it because of how a small group of individuals want to spend their money.
What would we think of a bunch of billionaires, getting together, and burning giant amounts of oil in their backyards, 24/7, for no other reason than 'they want to'?
Well, the market would deem that 'efficient' because the Billionaires value the Oil just to burn it for no reason. It's their perogativem, technically.
But we would view it as wasteful, because it is.
So use another mechanism to distribute crypto and that's that.
Just Bitcoin alone has a 100+ million users and its user base is exponentially growing at a speed larger than both the rise of Facebook and the internet as a whole.
So no, you cannot "absolutely" state that it is a waste as if it is an established fact.
You likely consider it a waste as you believe it has no function, and zero value. You're free to believe that, but it doesn't make it fact. Clearly, the high energy usage is not "because they want to", it has an essential function: securing the network.
Bitcoin will never switch to another distribution mechanism.
We ban Ponzi schemes with 'millions of users' even though the people involved don't think they are a 'waste'.
BTC has zero 'users' - because it can't be used for anything, and it's a waste.
This is mostly a fact, because it's possible to be objective about things.
If Bill Gates burned $2B in Oil in his backyard for no reason, we would instantly make a law banning it. Why? Because it would be an easy way to stop 'waste' even if Gates did not think it was a 'waste'.
There are other ways to distribute cryptocurrencies, they should definitively ban power consumption for such activities.
It doesn't matter that BTC 'will always do such and such' - it's an irrelevant Ponzi scheme.
At least the scammers can pick a scam that doesn't involve wasting energy which could be used for literally anything else.
Calling Bitcoin a ponzi scheme means you use an extremely lax definition of the term "ponzi", which would make any appreciating asset in this world also a ponzi. Like real estate.
Bitcoin doesn't even meet the most basic definition of a ponzi. A ponzi promises (and initially delivers) a guaranteed return on your investment, funded by an ever larger group of newer investors.
Bitcoin doesn't do any of those things. It doesn't give or guarantee a return and may in fact cause a massive loss. It's a speculative, scarce asset subject to price discovery.
So no, you're not objective about things, you're clueless.
Bitcoin doesn't "burn oil", it's at 55-60% renewable energy and rapidly improving, which is a whopping 3 times better than the average of any other industry.
As for it having "no use", it stores (and grows) monetary value. An important function for people's savings. And not just that, in countries with failing currencies, it is a life raft against double digit inflation. It's also massively embraced by young people, as they came into a world with zero access to anything that preserves or grows wealth.
As for relevancy, it has an exponentially growing user base. The first institutional investors are in, ETFs are coming and the first country has embraced it. ATMs are being mass deployed and even the most conservative banks (like Goldman, JP Morgan) add it to client portfolios now. Google has unblocked crypto ads, Apple and Amazon are working on support, and Twitter's CEO is all-in. Tesla has indicated to reverse their statement.
A trillion dollar market cap that is exponentially growing is not "irrelevant". You're stuck in a narrative from 5-10 years ago and have no idea what is happening.
'You're clueless' if you're worried about the technical definition of a 'Ponzi Scheme', when colloquially, it's clearly a scam in which participants gain book value only to the extent that there is an every growing number of idiots willing to continue participating, i.e. a 'Ponzi-like Scheme' for all intents and purposes.
"Bitcoin doesn't "burn oil", it's at 55-60% renewable" - 'it doesn't matter' from which source it draws energy because it's effectively (by and large) the same pool of energy that other, far more useful mechanations are bidding on and drawing from, and of course, it's an enormous amount of energy wasted.
"As for relevancy, it has an exponentially growing user base"
Which is false, it has zero user base, because it can't be 'used' for anything, which is the entire point.
"A trillion dollar market cap " again a bit 'clueless' to get into pedantic definitions because that has absolutely nothing to do with what a 'market cap' is.
Bitcoin had some promise even as it was a little bit of a hustle, it never materialized, now it's a total waste of time and energy.
People can waste each other's time, but not our energy.
Thankfully, it's so wasteful politicians will eventually hone in and ban mining it, they'll have no choice.
In both the generous definition of a ponzi or the technical one, Bitcoin doesn't fit in. Words matter. Neither does it fit any definition of a scam. A scam has a central owner, trying to rug-pull somebody. Bitcoin doesn't have any owner or central organization behind it.
You have no point. I already explained how it's secure savings technology. Hence if you use Bitcoin for that, you're a user, and it has a use.
You lack even the most basic understanding of Bitcoin as mining cannot be banned. If you outlaw large scale mining, as recently done in China, the Bitcoin hash rate recovers in mere weeks. Which is what just happened.
Even if you'd outlaw any and all large scale mining in the US, it will just move to another country. Many happy to host such a profitable business. Many places with surplus energy.
And if that fails, we just go back to home mining, which would decentralize Bitcoin further. Drawing power from a solar panel, what exactly are you or the government going to do about it?
None of this will even happen as it won't be banned in the US.
Not all cryptocurrencies have the same problems. Not all require massive amounts of computational power to "mine". There are many cryptocurrencies (and many of them popular) that don't work on proof of work, and don't require massive amounts of energy to function. This is sort of table stakes knowledge to be able to competently speak about cryptocurrencies at this point.
> It should be illegal to waste resources this way.
Don't try to pick winners and losers. Add externalities back into the cost of energy. No crypto PoW miner will keep mining when it's just completely unprofitable. By making choice high energy expenditures illegal, all we're going to do is subsidize someone running their AC all day to keep their residence at 68F or driving a mile and back, while we play whack-a-mole on society's social mores.
The obvious problem here is that we don't value things rationally or properly, and bubbles happen. If we're in a Tulip Crypto Bubble, then the 'market winner' isn't really a 'winner' in the grand scheme. Especially if we 'die of climate change', it'll look like the plebes were acting on bad information, in hindsight. (I'm being hyperbolic here but you get my point).
It actually is not that hard to stand outside of a market and make interventions which are super rational.
We ban and regulate all sorts of things.
There is actually no reason for a lot of energy to be used in the distribution of new crypto, there are a number of other ways, it's a completely arbitrary mechanism that happens to have real-world side effects.
I don't think they should ban crypto, but they should definitely ban crypto that arbitrarily uses quite a lot of energy.
> The obvious problem here is that we don't value things rationally or properly, and bubbles happen. If we're in a Tulip Crypto Bubble, then the 'market winner' isn't really a 'winner' in the grand scheme. Especially if we 'die of climate change', it'll look like the plebes were acting on bad information, in hindsight. (I'm being hyperbolic here but you get my point).
The reason it's called a bubble is because it pops. Even if BTC were inflated to the point where even with externalities priced in that it made sense to mine on dirty energy, the moment the bubble pops this will stop. There's nothing wrong with punishing people who act on bad information. Not allowing firms to fail is how we get banks and firms like Uber who exploit labor while losing money faster than they can raise more rounds.
> It actually is not that hard to stand outside of a market and make interventions which are super rational.
I'm pretty sure if this were true, you'd solve multiple hard, open problems in game theory, statistics, and economics. Problems like the Multi-Armed Bandit or Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. The US Tax Code is as byzantine as it is because of its piecemeal attempts to make market interventions. The US healthcare system is likewise what happens when the government creates an incentive structure with unforeseen negative externalities.
> We ban and regulate all sorts of things.
Of course and we should continue to. But emissions of energy usage is a very complicated problem. Did I save on emissions by using a thermal cooker, or did the use of my gas stove just to have the cooker come to temperature end up using more emissions than an induction stove would result in cooking the meal regularly in a pot or pan? Even this depends on the energy mixture of your grid. Oh and what about the input emissions to making your induction stove, would that make things even out in the end? Banning things to solve such a complicated problem is silly and you'll run out of political will fast. It's all fine-and-dandy when the internet mobs want to ban crypto, but what happens when the government tells you that you can't drive your F150 to the store a mile away to pickup milk? Turning energy efficiency into a political fight over banning goods and services will be a quick way to stall any progress.
> but they should definitely ban crypto that arbitrarily uses quite a lot of energy
Until crypto creators come up with new incentive schemes that come up with different, less understood negative externalities. Attacking the problem at its source is much simpler than playing whack-a-mole.
> The miners can move to locations where the externalities aren't considered.
Which is the same problem with banning crypto. Unless you can get every government in the world, or a smaller goal of every government in the G20, to ban crypto, there will still be demand, thus an incentive for miners, for crypto.
The modern financial system IS what causes global warming among other problems. Too few people understand this, and it's not possible to change it politically. Bitcoin is the only real solution for this problem.
> It should be illegal to waste resources this way. All in the name of destabilizing the financial system.
I agree. But the genie is out, and profit will be had. If one tries to enforce, say, emissions standards on computers, then maybe AWS fees go up to justify taking time from bitcoin mining.
That would be difficult, but I suggest it's very, very rare for someone to use the words "a modest proposal" in an essay and mean it to be taken totally seriously.
I don't believe that. For one thing, a huge proportion of people have simply never heard of Swift's essay; for another, it's quite possible to use the phrase in earnest even if you have. It's not as if ever since Swift it has had only his meaning.
But, sure, maybe he didn't mean for it to be taken totally seriously. Maybe he just meant that to 60%. Or 90.
> PPS: I despise libertarianism. Just in case you were wondering ...
So yes, we have an aspiring central planner who wants to take Bad Excuse #1 for intrusive government surveillance, rampant violation of peoples' privacy, and the like — to collect all its abuses, and expand it to a new area. And he ostentatiously despises anyone who tries to build politics around liberty.
These facts are entirely in harmony with each other. I've seen far worse political agendas, but he's an authoritarian thug, and it's as simple as that. Perhaps he should now compare the libertarians to terrorists, so he has access to the abuses collected from Bad Excuse #2, Terrorism.
It is unnecessary for you to draw this false dichotomy and its substance is rhetorical nonsense. There's plenty of non-Libertarianism in the world, just as there are plenty of ways to trample on liberties that aren't Stalinism.
And it really shouldn't take someone editorializing the spectre of an overbearing government pressuring service providers for unlimited power to spy on your communications for illicit material, because — as you might have noticed — that's already happening; these pages have of late been covered with news of Apple's fingerprinting schemes, and of the potential consequences to freedom. Our author wants the same sort of laws brought to bear, to stamp out what he sees as moral evil, and perhaps he's right it's evil, just as it is certainly true that child porn is evil.
In either case, though, he wants the authority to stop it, and shrugs off the idea that this would bring unfortunate consequences. This isn't Stalinism, this is just cranky authoritarianism, and if you go for this sort of thing then hating on the libertarians is fun, thus none of what he says is likely to be a joke. It is sufficient for him to be a cranky authoritarian, and nothing further is claimed.
Next time you rag on someone for not drawing any distinctions, maybe try actually drawing the distinctions yourself??
> It is unnecessary for you to draw this false dichotomy and its substance is rhetorical nonsense.
You turned his "I despise libertarianism" into "an aspiring central planner who wants to take Bad Excuse #1 for intrusive government surveillance, rampant violation of peoples' privacy, and the like — to collect all its abuses, and expand it to a new area." So, no: "false dichotomy" my arse.
> Our author wants the same sort of laws brought to bear, to stamp out what he sees as moral evil, and perhaps he's right it's evil, just as it is certainly true that child porn is evil.
Exactly: Perhaps he's right. And if it is as evil as child porn then it logically should be stomped out with the same vehemence. Or does your definition of libertarianism entail different responses to equal evils?
> Next time you rag on someone for not drawing any distinctions, maybe try actually drawing the distinctions yourself??
I don't think you're in any position to criticise my reasoning when your own is this muddled.
> You turned his "I despise libertarianism" into "an aspiring central planner
No, sir. I turned his "preferred solution to the problems created by cryptocurrencies is to treat them all like child pornography: totally illegal, possession a strict liability offense, choke off interoperability with real currencies at the credit agency/bank interchange level, and make them useless for non-criminals, at which point only criminals will bother with them. And India is going down this route"
into that. Despising Libertarianism is merely co-occurrent, proceeding from the same philosophies.
Yeah, well, that's even more stupid. Because if one is convinced that they are as bad as child porn -- a perhaps somewhat exaggerated view IMO, but not at all outlandish -- that's the only sensible stance to take. So, you turned an arguably reasonable stance into whatever libertarians want to rant against today. That, OTOH, is definitely not reasonable.
Can’t imagine it is a joke based on his work and posts. It’s how I feel as well. The only people it benefits are the people who don’t need another leg up. It’s like someone purified everything ugly about Capitalism.
Anyone taking odds on whether author has a trenchcoat and samurai sword to accompany all this irrational crypto hate?
Innovation is never perfect. Unix declared itself a multi user operating system but failed system calls used to crash the kernel for everyone. It has a design flaw boys I guess we screwed up when we didn't throw the whole thing in the trash.
I think it merits some formal consideration, a scifi novel isn't a whitepaper, but I think the concept has promise. You can't cheat the speed of light without finding a few jupiters worth of exotic matter.
Another function of these probes could be crypto time capsules.
For instance, years ago Google implemented an internal policy of deleting all company email after something like 90 days. This included all the ancient ones, which would have been invaluable to historians one day. A sad destruction of a trove of history.
With a space probe flying out of the solar system, they could've encrypted all the old mail with a public key whose pair was on the probe, and then 100 years from now, the probe could be programmed to transmit the private key back to earth.
I'm quite not sure I understand the point here. Sure, by putting the hardware in outer space you make it harder to access, and if you boost it away from the solar system you can guarantee it would be cost prohibitive to catch up to it - but the physical security of monetary systems is rarely the problem.
The main problem that any currency faces is why should anyone place any trust in it? Why does it provide a reliable record of wealth transfer? If it's a probe that Elon Musk has sent off, then you're asking me to trust Elon and his company. Will the hardware function correctly? Will the software? Is it free of accidental exploits or deliberate back doors? How much wealth am I prepared to wager on this?
For all Bitcoin's flaws, it does have a robust trust infrastructure. You trust the processing-majority of miners, who have only become the majority because they have made a significant investment in the fidelity of the system. Their wealth (at least in theory) is tied to upholding an honest transaction record.
Would Elon or SpaceX lose money if it turned out their interplanetary server was defective? Sure, but they'd only lose the cost of producing the probe and boosting it into space. If it costs $10 billion to do so, and Elon makes $11 billion from it before a flaw is discovered, then from a financial standpoint it's a still a success.
Ideally a currency should be backed by a number of independent actors, whose stake scales with the currency's value.
>And about NFTs, the less said the better. Grift, 100% grift, and exploitation of artists as well. Oh, and it appears to be mostly used for money laundering.
IIRC, Stross learned about Bitcoin in 2011 when doing research for Neptune's Brood. Had he hedged his bets and bought $20 of Bitcoin before writing posts like "Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire"[1], he'd be a multimillionaire today.
At some point in the past decade, Stross went mad. He's become consumed by dogmatism and doomsaying. He constantly predicts disaster, and he's constantly wrong. Here are a few examples.
He thought that Brexit would destroy the UK[2]:
> I'm calling Hard Brexit a road to mass starvation and famine-grade deaths on a scale not seen in the UK since the Hungry Forties (that's the 1840s, not the 1940s).
He canceled visits to the US because thought that Trump would become a totalitarian dictator[3]:
> In which case, for me to continue to plan to travel to the United States in eight months time would be as unwise as it would have been to plan in February 1933 to travel to Germany in September of that year: it might be survivable, but it would nevertheless be hazardous.
Here's a snippet from his 2018 retrospective[4]:
> 2018 was the year that the global climate change alarm sirens began to sound continuously, with wildfires and heat emergencies and melting icecaps. 2018 was also, by no coincidence whatsoever, the year in which the global neo-Nazi movement made considerable headway, with neo-fascist demagogues grabbing power in Brazil, tightening their stranglehold in India, the Philippines, Turkey, the USA, Italy, and elsewhere. The UK was, for a third consecutive year, paralyzed by the utter shit-show that is Brexit, with the deadline now looming less than 100 days ahead of us.
No matter how many times reality contradicts his views, he refuses to change his mind. Even in December he was predicting Brexit catastrophes.[5] Moreover, his writing style has become snide and dismissive. At first the transition saddened me, but now I just find it annoying.
Thanks for quantifying this, it helps clarify his position (or lack thereof.) Unfortunately that's what happens when you fall into a bubble. Even when your worldview clashes with reality, rather than come to terms and revise your understanding/predictions, you retreat to your bubble and become redoubled. This is the true threat of the echo chamber.
I agree that he overestimated the damage Brexit would cause, and has continued to do so.
The bit about Donald Trump is very misleading. The quotation is from a paragraph that begins "As for my worst-case nightmare scenario?". He was not claiming that in the actual world as it was then travelling to the US was like travelling to Germany in 1933. Trump becoming a totalitarian dictator was his worst-case nightmare scenario, not a prediction of what was definitely (or even likely) going to happen.
I am not sure what in what he said about 2018 you consider to have been contradicted by reality. (Expressed overdramatically, sure.) I think you can make a pretty good case for all of Balsonaro, Modi, Duterte, Erdogan as neo-fascist demagogues, with allowance for a bit of hyperbole. I shall refrain from trying to assess Trump on that score. I'm not sure what he was so cross about in Italy. His description of the UK situation is pretty much right.
Was intrigued, yet somewhat disappointed, after reading Stross's post as I've read Accelerando several times. Some thoughts:
> It's also horribly energy-inefficient
Yep, here are some comparative carbon costs:
US Military:
59 M Tons 2017.
BTC:
22 M tons 2018,
37 M tons 2021,
130 M tons by 2024 predicted in China before shutdown,
Banks:
1040 M tons
IMO, the idea of a $1,000,000 BTC would be a huge hit on reducing CO2, as cost of mining approaches BTC price.
> Hork up a bunch of space probes
Here is a variation on that idea: One of the claimed advantages to satellite is lower latency (see https://www.groundcontrol.com/Satellite_Low_Latency.htm) Solana is claiming layer 1 blocktime of 400ms by synchronizing clocks. For Global coverage, I think satellite is a requirement to achieve that throughput as consumer latency is at least double that. This isn't proof of work; Solana calls its method proof of history.
IMO, PoW is the like the Cray Supercomputer of the 80's. My Apple Watch is lot more powerful at -let's see- 1/64,000,000th the cost.
I have no idea where you got these numbers from, but the idea that banks produce 17 times as much CO2 as the entire US military - with all of its fossil fuel-burning vehicles - is obviously ridiculous.
It sounds like banks are being credited with the carbon emissions of everything they loan money to? Should the US military be credited with the carbon emissions of everything they either defend or attack?
What's the total addressable market for disrupting carbon footprint of banks? When every person is their own bank, there is less need for brick-and-mortar real estate, the employees commuting, and the like -- what the EPA calls "Scope 3" effects, as per: https://www.epa.gov/climateleadership/scope-3-inventory-guid....
The above carbon TAM is why I'm pro-crypto, as soon as we move past PoW.
seriously if most of you were your current age in the early 90s you'd be bitching about how the internet consumes telephone lines and is no improvement over mail and face to face communication.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadThere, they can't be coerced by terrestrial bullies - be they 'authorities' or criminals – or enlisted into new cartels. They'll be running the same audited code for as long as they're in operation, unless later probes can outrace them.
And if the economic effort that had been spent trying to corrupt terrestrial nodes is instead directed to ever-more-cost-efficient planet-leaving tech - that's a win, too!
(Maybe ʻOumuamua was the leading edge of some other solar system's cryptominer cone?)
* Latency always increases
* Satellites will fail due to radiation/solar panel degradation/distance from sun/etc.
* Sending a missile fast is cheaper than sending a probe fast
* There's no one on earth who is trustworthy enough to build these satellites without keeping the private keys
The rest of your points are a feature for deflationary currencies, and perhaps ensures no one currency lasts more than a few decades.
EDIT: And https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28147525
below 0.1g for a minimum duration. otherwise, put it in the vomit-comet or similar to persuade the SE to generate the key.
> * Latency always increases
Yeah, sure... Except that's the whole idea. A resource is perceived as more valuable the scarcer it is; making sure it gets ever more scarce is a way of insuring against it decreasing in value, or hopefully even insuring an increase instead. What you're saying is like:
> Bitcoin is an unworkable idea because:
> The difficulty of "mining" those magic numbers always increases
Beats achieving the same goal by having to burn an ever larger fraction of the planet's energy.
You also seem to be under the false impression that Bitcoin requires monotonically increasing energy consumption. It does not. The amount of energy consumed by Bitcoin is a function of demand for security by its users, which presumably should equilibrate at some point. It sounds like your model of Bitcoin mining is not correct.
How? Isn't the whole point of Satoshi's algorithm that those magic numbers it takes to commit a transaction are ever fewer and farther between? So -- given the same model and number of computers -- it takes ever longer to "mine" the next one? That is, by definition, getting slower. If you're arguing that they're still finding the same, eh, number of magic numbers per day, that's only because they're "compressing time" by throwing ever more and ever faster computers at it.
The point of Stross' idea was that this ever-increasing scarcity can be provided by astrophysics in stead of an algorithm, which AFAICS is pretty fucking genius. If your problem with that is "but then we can't beat the ever-increasing-scarcity algorithm by throwing ever more resources at the problem to keep up the speed!"... Well, then YTF use something based on ever-increasing scarcity in the first place?
> You also seem to be under the false impression that Bitcoin requires monotonically increasing energy consumption.
Well, no, not necessarily: If everyone just keeps their silly tokens where they are, I can see that it would take no energy at all. Not much of a "currency" then, though, if you can't actually do any trades with it, now is it? In practice, though: Yeah, that seems pretty much exactly what it has been requiring for all of its existence, and no end is in sight.
> The amount of energy consumed by Bitcoin is a function of demand for security by its users,
Huh? So Bit"coin" is millions of times as secure now as it was a decade or so ago? Wow, it must have had really crappy security back then. If you're saying it was so insecure then that it was pretty much fraud to sell it for real money, and sure, those guys should be in jail -- but fortunately it's a million times safer now... What do you then say to your equivalent (or yourself) ten years in the future, when they say the same about you now?
> which presumably should equilibrate at some point.
But it still hasn't, has it? And there is no such point in sight, or can you give us an approximate date? Within six months is precise enough...
Unfortunately, the point where the actual resource usage exceeded what's reasonable to waste on silly games like this was passed long ago. So unless you can fix it so it goes back to where it was in, say, the third or fourth year by tomorrow, it's already so deep into unreasonable territory that shutting down the whole damn Ponzi scheme seems ever more like the only sensible thing to do, lest this fucking Paperclip Maximizer eat the world.
No. I suggest reading the whitepaper. Also c.f. Google search keyword "difficulty adjustment". There are some fundamental misapprehensions in your model.
> The point of Stross' idea was that this ever-increasing scarcity can be provided by astrophysics
With ever-decreasing performance. Bitcoin performance stays constant while its inflation schedule decreases to zero.
> So Bit"coin" is millions of times as secure now as it was a decade or so ago?
Yes
> Wow, it must have had really crappy security back then.
Correct, but no one cared enough to invest the resources required to derail it. Now its security threshold is sufficiently high that it's economically infeasible for anyone to derail it. This is well understood and part of the fundamental economic design of Bitcoin's security model. Once again, I suggest reading the whitepaper. It will clear up most of these questions you're asking.
> If you're saying it was so insecure then that it was pretty much fraud to sell it for real money
Is this a real argument or sort of a joke?
> What do you then say to your equivalent (or yourself) ten years in the future, when they say the same about you now?
This argument will be equally silly ten years from now
> But it still hasn't, has it? And there is no such point in sight, or can you give us an approximate date?
Whenever and if-ever Bitcoin displaces the dollar, yuan, ruble, gold, etc. as the global settlement and reserve asset. I expect its stability to asymptotically improve as it approaches that point, or to exponentially blow up before that happens.
> Within six months is precise enough...
You could make a lot of money if you could predict this, so I invite you to try.
> the point where the actual resource usage exceeded what's reasonable to waste on silly games like this was passed long ago
If you think millions of people are wasting resources on something and you can't really explain why, what's almost certainly happening is that they're buying something you personally don't understand (which I am certain is true in your case). Ideally once you understand how Bitcoin mining works you'll understand the economic security model and this will all make sense.
> lest this fucking Paperclip Maximizer eat the world.
Don't worry, there's not really any compelling reason for Bitcoin-related energy production to consume more than a fraction of a percent of global economic output. It's strictly bounded by the social surplus associated with using Bitcoin over fiat alternatives, which I would estimate at perhaps a few hundred billion dollars a year in current terms. Maybe even just a few tens of billions. So probably no more than 10-50x what it is now. There is no exponential growth problem like with a runaway paperclip maximizer. The Bitcoin network's "utility function" also isn't contrived, unlike paperclip maximization.
> Yes
> > Wow, it must have had really crappy security back then.
> Correct
> > If you're saying it was so insecure then that it was pretty much fraud to sell it for real money
> Is this a real argument or sort of a joke?
Wow, that must be a world record for short memory. You just admitted that yourself, in your previous paragraph.
> > What do you then say to your equivalent (or yourself) ten years in the future, when they say the same about you now?
> This argument will be equally silly ten years from now
Yeah, sure, whatever.
> If you think millions of people are wasting resources on something and you can't really explain why
Who says I can't?
By that same argument, wouldn’t Bitcoin currently be directing economic effort towards producing electricity and computer hardware as fast and cheaply as possible?
Unfortunately ”cheap” is not the same as ”ecological”.
https://www.salon.com/2021/07/07/no-billionaires-wont-escape...
Modern Salon is even more ideology-addled than the historic NYTimes, which editorialized human flight was a million years away in 1903, when it was… 2 months away.
Still, billionaries are likely happy that creative-writers, like the author of the linked piece, keep Salon-readers smugly overconfident about what billionaires can't do.
Here, a single computer + transmitter would be a tiny fraction of the cost or a space probe that you're sending up anyway.
Or the transaction fees can act as a pension in a fixed-size house of validator farms, which, since we're all getting collectively more stupid will on average itself have diminishing returns.
I'm not sure we really need to be taking these things seriously.
or if there is a secret backdoor or a 0-day that can be exploited from earth
In the same way software-based cryptocurrencies are self-funding bug bounties, this proposal is a self-funding bounty for deep-space military hardware.
(I believe the winner will be the $0.25 radio transmitter sufficient to jam a -150 dBm radio signal planet-wide).
Also what currency does the system use, if it's a new one how is it originally (fairly) issued to people?
There is this obsession with speed and efficiency in computing. The tradeoff for a secure decentralized system anyone can use and audit is that its slow and inefficient. There are real benefits to adopting systems like this for some tasks and problems we face - like transparency in political and economic systems.
Hence, barring deep compromises of the hardware, it will have never existed on Earth - only in the deep "Trusted Platform Module" (TPM) of the off-planet hardware.
As long as the money remains untouched, you can be fairly confident that no one has the private key.
It's a (very!) scarce resource, and therefore if lots of people want it -- like for instance, if it's the base of a "currency" system -- they'll assign a lot of value to it. Just like craptocurrencies[1] get their percieved value from the necessary resource they're based on being scarce. In their case it's "proof of work", i.e. showing that you've squandered fucktons of computing resources on finding some magic number; in Stross' suggestion, it's the fact that space probes are few and hard to reach.
It even has the most famous trait of the Bitcoin algorithm, ever increasing scarcity, built in: with Bitcoin it takes ever longer to mine those magic numbers; in Stross' suggestion, it's the fact that space probes take ever longer to reach as they move away from Earth. (Though, hm, wait a minute: Come to think of it, as long as the probe can get signals, it should be able to reply to it the same number of them, although not in the same time? Replies should arrive back at about the same rate, only with ever longer latency. But maybe he meant that signal attenuation over these literally astronomical distances will slow down comms, Idunno.)
But, anyway: His "Spacecoin" will only have any value if enough people think / trust that it does -- just like craptocurrencies. That's what's so hilarious about those: Their fanbois rant and rave against ordinary currencies and deprecatingly call them "fiat"[2], and never seem to realise that their own nirvana-thing... is just as "fiat" as anything else. ALL currencies are. (Yes, including gold.)
---
[1]: Thank you, user "Pigeon": http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/05/because-...
[2]: I wonder, BTW, if the reason they're so in love with using that as a pejorative is partially based on old "folk wisdom" seeing the Italian car brand as atrociously low-quality?
Most of the money in it probably doesn't even understand it at a superficial level.
But the ones who got the ball rolling -- a (rather weird IMO) intersection between tech nerds and "currency skeptics" / "anti-fiaters" certainly saw (or convinced themselves that they saw) that as its UVP.
Sad, really: If only they'd latched on to South Pacific seashells or something, anything else, instead... Heck, what's wrong with leaves, eh? Crypto-"currencies" are a typical Golgafrincham Ark Fleet Ship B scheme.
They didn't do it for the proof of work.
They did it for the money!
Careful there, those Ship B folks were our ancestors.
Which probes are the correct ones? Or is each its own cryptocurrency? What happens when satellites fail? How do you know that your transaction is being processed by a satellite and not something else? How do you know the private key is really only on the satellite?
I'm failing to see the value of putting this hardware in space.
Multiple probes contribute to the consensus validation of a single cryptocurrency.
As satellites fail or move out of the practical distance in light-minutes, new ones take their place. (Or maybe, they're just put into long-orbits that keep them out of practical compromise range? CometCoin?)
The usual disadvantage of far-space probes – older tech that can't be upgraded – becomes an advantage in the trusted-validator role, as long as the initial prep/launch isn't corrupted. The window of potential compromises is shrunk.
Seems like this has all the same problems as the earth option, but is more expensive.
And, other mechanisms (some described in sibling threads) can help drive the risk of a backdoor very low, & the liklihood of any compromise being widely revealed (if ever exploited) very high.
It'll be a different use case for encryption, but I guess a unique signature is not guessable that one could use that as an encryption key...
If you tried to live a trustless life, you couldn't get surgery, ride on a plane, get food from a grocery store, etc. - all of those things rely on implicit trust in other human beings. The whole of human society was built on trust!
> you couldn't get surgery, ride on a plane, get food from a grocery store,
I look up my doctors' ratings before I use them. I don't fly sketchy third-world airlines with bad safety records. I don't buy food from grocery stores in places with bad food safety. "Trusted" and "trustless" are shorthand for the degree of system-external due diligence you need to do before having a sufficient degree of confidence.
The point isn't that you have to trust everything. The point is that trust underpins everything. At some level, you are trusting something.
Obviously. Most rating sites are scams. There might not be a formal meta-rather, but I can use eg reddit.
The rabbit hole runs stupid deep.
I'm glad you said “reduced trust”, rather than “trustless”, because otherwise this would've been a several-page rant.
¹: It's unlikely either of them will have significant shortcuts discovered any time soon, but that's not the point.
If you're ok trusting a specific entity, might as well just set up a mysql server.
If you dont want to trust a central entity but are still ok with it existing as potential single point of failure, use chaum style digi-cash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash
So if you're ok with this weird centralized on space x solution, you should be ok with a lot of other semi-centralized designs that solve all the same problems only better.
The main reason most people like bitcoin is because of how much the value has appreciated. I would bet that the majority of holders of bitcoin don't actually care about whether it's decentralized or not.
Really? Regular people could not care less about it, at most this is an argument for people filling their pockets of fiat money from it
Must have been very temporary; I just successfully reloaded the page.
I guess one can use statistics to figure out their alphabet.. or alphabets, if they have several languages on this planet.
> the higher demand for the currency rises, the longer the delay to get your transaction into the queue for uplink and signing via the big dishes.
Cryptocurrencies are solving the problem, who controls the dish? If this were real, we would see a race to the bottom with bigger and bigger dishes transmitting at higher and higher power, and it would be more damaging than Bitcoin.
It's a bad idea, but it's not bad because you could do the same thing on earth.
To accomplish that most systems require storing the entire blockchain (I hope you've shipped enough hard drives with it!) [1]
Then you either need to have zero bugs from the start or a way to update it.
Then you also need to democratize access to the up & down link
Then you need to make it robust to failure of that node...
For all of the legitimate reasons to hate blockchains/cryptocurrencies fairly intelligent people come up with asinine solutions around it.
If you are concerned about the waste that PoW creates then try to accelerate proof of stake and push for a carbon tax.
[1]: There is a constant sized blockchain that recently came out, I'm not sure if it's actually viable, but it's an interesting proposition. https://minaprotocol.com/
He posed it as a "modest proposal". [0] That pretty much guarantees that he did not intend it to be a serious or robustly presented option. Unless he actually enjoys eating Irish babies, which seems unlikely.
(If you check out the story linked, it's important to know that it was written against the backdrop of a not-completely-passive bit of Irish genocide)
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm
And because I'm that bored, another one: sandboxeing corporations. Do whatever you want within your shop, but only within your shop. People show for work, they can be treated as slaves if they want to. People get outside the sandbox no strings attached, the corporation has zero influence outside its own domain, and whatever happen outside the sandbox is public or owned by individuals only. That would be great for the environment.
Boredom is a blessing.
Because then it's not fungible, which means by some definitions it's not money. An "old" dollar whose time is running out would have less value than a "new" dollar, making transactions suddenly very complicated.
Some argue that as soon as central banks launch a digital dollar, said dollar becomes programmable.
One major change is that effectively the central bank becomes the main bank for everybody, fully centralized. As such, they would have far more insight. And they can push money to you directly, like a stimulus, when needed.
Yet also allow this money to have an expiry date, so you have to spend it before a certain date.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, but programmable money would make it possible.
They have an expiration date, they only last until the beginning of the following year. So usually if you have many of them left and the expiration is near (you can only use two at a time and they are less than 10€ each) there is a lot of trading or donations between family members to make sure they don't go to waste.
I came up with that idea in my teens (so looong before "crypto"), thinking about replacing taxes with it: Deprecate your currency by the same percentage the state needs to run, have your central bank print the same amount of new currency for next year, and voila: Nobody pays taxes, the state gets its cut anyway, and the money supply remains constant because the X billion the public held at the start of last year are only 0.7 X billion at the end of it / start of the next and the other 0.3 X billion are freshly minted by the central bank for the government.
This was before I learned that "the money supply" doesn't consist only (or even mainly) of cash, and that most "money" isn't actually created by state central banks but by the commercial banking system... But what can I say, it was in my teens.
> Good for 10 years from the date its minted/created, virtual or not.
Too discrete-step-ish. Deprecate at lest yearly, or if possible somehow smoothly over the year.
Your second paragraph: Full (well, almost full) agreement.
My initially unquestioned assumption was that since the money in your bank account is denominated in the same currency as cash, it would automatically lose value at the same rate as cash. Can't recall exactly when I realised that the presence of money in bank accounts might influence the value of cash in stead; still in my teens, I think. As I recall, I started speculating about whether my system would have to even things out between cash and bank accounts by obliging the banks to continuously adjust your balance down, or something. (Can't recall if transferring the reduction to the state as tax, or just msking it go "POOF!" and disappear.)
Next thing, I probably realised there are yet other types of holdings than cash and savings accounts, and lots of other complications, so abandoned the idea. And then I guess I grew out of my teens.
Right now I'm not well off enough to buy my own home and I'm well above 30. If my kids or grandkids some day can buy their own home with my help, even if I've passed on, it gives me happiness and purpose.
Inherited wealth is unearned wealth, and sure, it's nice to think about your kids having a little unearned wealth to make their lives better, but less nice to think about them competing with people with insane orders of magnitude more unearned wealth (and power) which is the actual world we're living in, and most likely a big part of why you can't afford to buy your own home.
This is far too simplistic. My children are elementary school age. If I get killed in a car accident, it would be a second tragedy if I couldn't at least help provide for them until they reach adulthood from my savings.
Instead, I think we should just have very progressive inheritance taxes. Taking care of offspring is one of the fundamental drivers of humanity, so we should all have some ability to do that. But large-scale multi-generational wealth consolidation is a driver of inequality and is bad for society.
A progressive tax rate would balance those.
Or you could just have progressive income tax, treat income from gifts and inheritance as income, and allow tax recognition both in advance of income and deferred over a period of years for windfalls (relative to prior-years actual income) so that one-time or irregular income events aren't overtaxed.
We don't need a lot of specialized taxes if we just have a well-thought out general income tax.
tbf in a society that would use inheritance to improve the commons your kids would probably be fine. But yes a progressive tax is probably the more realistic option. That said I actually sympathize with OPs take because inheritance is for some reason one of the most accepted, but also most obvious examples of unearned wealth.
I've been thinking about this Steven Pinker quote for literally decades:
"No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn."
Oh, I'm fairly sure he could... If he wanted to.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune%27s_Brood
Conceptually, this can be thought of as generating Bingo cards (expensive, requires SSD's.) and playing Bingo (cheap, can be done with regular hard drives and a network connection).
So many Bingo cards have been generated that there's probably not much point in generating more.
Sort of like hanging onto baseball cards. Or Dogecoin.
If that's a joke, I fail to see how it's funny ... It's wild to see such rabid hyperbole, lumping all decentralised currency into a single basket with child pornography (!!) go completely unremarked on.
BTW the linked article from 2018 re India's "ban" talks about an order which was struck down by the Indian Supreme Court in March 2020.
It should be illegal to waste resources this way. All in the name of destabilizing the financial system.
You can't just pick one thing you happen to dislike or find unimportant whilst at the same time listing your own waste as in fact being very much needed.
The idea of mining being wasteful is of course a popular talking point for those not in crypto, yet the 100+ million owners of bitcoin would disagree and see it as the essential feature to secure the network.
Further, the word "waste" needs far more nuance. Clearly, mining is highly energy intensive, yet that doesn't mean it has to be wasteful. Increasingly, mining is done using clean energy whilst also in particular seeking out stranded energy, which is not in competition with other uses.
Spending all that energy to mine addresses that act as USD derivatives, when USD is still there, when derivatives can be created without these numbers, is waste.
My idea is to trade less stuff for more economic security.
I live in SoCal and see BMW 7 series diving around looking for street parking to save the $1.50/hr parking charge.
I can't imagine what would happen to sla politician who would suggest putting in parking meters!
On the other hand, if you could just have it auto-deduct from the same account that pays tolls on the bridges in the bay area through license plate recognition with a similar level of "you park and walk away" automation, I think most people would happily just deal with it because of the convenience.
Right now, if I have money, I am free to use it on wasteful products as I please. I can buy a massive truck, 5 times too large for my needs, just because I can.
People are used to this liberty. You may get some public support when something is banned that a huge majority agrees on, but things will quickly turn sour when it actually starts to hurt. When people are simply banned from buying that 75" TV. It's all cool until it's not.
You can imagine the political opportunity of being the party that does allow everything.
Pricing by CO2 output, as the other commenter suggested, likely is simpler.
As for things like massive trucks and giant TVs - well, steps are (slowly) being taken to regulate the former, at least; think of all those countries that swear up-and-down that all cars sold there will be electric in 10 or 20 years or whatever. But that's an extreme example, and this isn't really a new concept at all: plenty of things are made illegal or economically impractical due to regulations, environmental or otherwise.
Giant TVs, though - yeah, those are unlikely to be regulated any time soon. But then, that was the substance of my comment that I sort of feel you failed to engage with: government is absolutely free - via public opinion, some objective metric, or their own whims - to decide what's too wasteful to allow. Giant TVs, probably not. Massive trucks, getting there. Bitcoin? Well, it's not crazy to suggest it, anyway.
ETA: also, speaking of political feasibility and carbon taxes - do you think a regressive tax that drives up the price of virtually everything has more popular appeal than a targeted ban on crypto mining? Here in Canada our carbon tax has faced enormous political opposition, as did the one in France.
Even just in the US there's now crypto-friendly states, neutral ones, and skeptical ones. Realistically, it will not really be banned, rather a compromise will be found. For mining to use renewables, and ideally stranded renewables. The mining industry is already self-regulating, as they can obviously see the writing on the wall.
The fact that you don't expect giant TVs to be banned is quite telling. It's subjective and based on popularity. I get it, people like their TVs. It's considered more important than a giant truck, which few people have.
Yet if the goal is to conserve energy, the savings on those TVs would be far more impactful compared to a small amount of massive trucks. So that would mean that we're merely virtue signaling rather than addressing actual usage.
Now let's talk ACs. Most Americans can't imagine life without them. But a few decades ago, nobody had one. In most countries, including far hotter ones, many if not most people function without one.
So let's ban them.
I hope you see my point. Bitcoin mining and big trucks are easy targets but a mere distraction from the heart of the matter. Large scale energy savings inevitably cut into the quality of life of the typical household, and will therefore be unpopular or politically not feasible.
As for carbon taxing, it's complicated. I'm from the Netherlands, by the way.
Personally, I am a 100% supporter of products having externalities priced in. Including paying staff a living wage, environmental costs, taxation in the country of production and real non-subsidized cost of transport. I truly believe that a number of categories of products are unnaturally and unsustainably cheap.
I'm in favor of such system but it will be a cultural shock for most of society. I have many thoughts on potential consequences, but this comment is already getting quite long.
I still won't stop the massive trucks though. We have crazy taxation on vehicles as well as fuel over here, yet there will always be people whom can afford it anyway. Our country isn't designed for such large cars yet they are on the rise. I've never seen one in my childhood yet now they appear everywhere.
A distraction though. It may anger you, but it's not the heart of the matter.
We make non-market determinations all day long because we're also rational and can apply reason in systems.
Using tons of energy to distribute crypto is a 'waste' that just might not seem like it because of how a small group of individuals want to spend their money.
What would we think of a bunch of billionaires, getting together, and burning giant amounts of oil in their backyards, 24/7, for no other reason than 'they want to'?
Well, the market would deem that 'efficient' because the Billionaires value the Oil just to burn it for no reason. It's their perogativem, technically.
But we would view it as wasteful, because it is.
So use another mechanism to distribute crypto and that's that.
So no, you cannot "absolutely" state that it is a waste as if it is an established fact.
You likely consider it a waste as you believe it has no function, and zero value. You're free to believe that, but it doesn't make it fact. Clearly, the high energy usage is not "because they want to", it has an essential function: securing the network.
Bitcoin will never switch to another distribution mechanism.
BTC has zero 'users' - because it can't be used for anything, and it's a waste.
This is mostly a fact, because it's possible to be objective about things.
If Bill Gates burned $2B in Oil in his backyard for no reason, we would instantly make a law banning it. Why? Because it would be an easy way to stop 'waste' even if Gates did not think it was a 'waste'.
There are other ways to distribute cryptocurrencies, they should definitively ban power consumption for such activities.
It doesn't matter that BTC 'will always do such and such' - it's an irrelevant Ponzi scheme.
At least the scammers can pick a scam that doesn't involve wasting energy which could be used for literally anything else.
Bitcoin doesn't even meet the most basic definition of a ponzi. A ponzi promises (and initially delivers) a guaranteed return on your investment, funded by an ever larger group of newer investors.
Bitcoin doesn't do any of those things. It doesn't give or guarantee a return and may in fact cause a massive loss. It's a speculative, scarce asset subject to price discovery.
So no, you're not objective about things, you're clueless.
Bitcoin doesn't "burn oil", it's at 55-60% renewable energy and rapidly improving, which is a whopping 3 times better than the average of any other industry.
As for it having "no use", it stores (and grows) monetary value. An important function for people's savings. And not just that, in countries with failing currencies, it is a life raft against double digit inflation. It's also massively embraced by young people, as they came into a world with zero access to anything that preserves or grows wealth.
As for relevancy, it has an exponentially growing user base. The first institutional investors are in, ETFs are coming and the first country has embraced it. ATMs are being mass deployed and even the most conservative banks (like Goldman, JP Morgan) add it to client portfolios now. Google has unblocked crypto ads, Apple and Amazon are working on support, and Twitter's CEO is all-in. Tesla has indicated to reverse their statement.
A trillion dollar market cap that is exponentially growing is not "irrelevant". You're stuck in a narrative from 5-10 years ago and have no idea what is happening.
"Bitcoin doesn't "burn oil", it's at 55-60% renewable" - 'it doesn't matter' from which source it draws energy because it's effectively (by and large) the same pool of energy that other, far more useful mechanations are bidding on and drawing from, and of course, it's an enormous amount of energy wasted.
"As for relevancy, it has an exponentially growing user base"
Which is false, it has zero user base, because it can't be 'used' for anything, which is the entire point.
"A trillion dollar market cap " again a bit 'clueless' to get into pedantic definitions because that has absolutely nothing to do with what a 'market cap' is.
Bitcoin had some promise even as it was a little bit of a hustle, it never materialized, now it's a total waste of time and energy.
People can waste each other's time, but not our energy.
Thankfully, it's so wasteful politicians will eventually hone in and ban mining it, they'll have no choice.
You have no point. I already explained how it's secure savings technology. Hence if you use Bitcoin for that, you're a user, and it has a use.
You lack even the most basic understanding of Bitcoin as mining cannot be banned. If you outlaw large scale mining, as recently done in China, the Bitcoin hash rate recovers in mere weeks. Which is what just happened.
Even if you'd outlaw any and all large scale mining in the US, it will just move to another country. Many happy to host such a profitable business. Many places with surplus energy.
And if that fails, we just go back to home mining, which would decentralize Bitcoin further. Drawing power from a solar panel, what exactly are you or the government going to do about it?
None of this will even happen as it won't be banned in the US.
Don't try to pick winners and losers. Add externalities back into the cost of energy. No crypto PoW miner will keep mining when it's just completely unprofitable. By making choice high energy expenditures illegal, all we're going to do is subsidize someone running their AC all day to keep their residence at 68F or driving a mile and back, while we play whack-a-mole on society's social mores.
It actually is not that hard to stand outside of a market and make interventions which are super rational.
We ban and regulate all sorts of things.
There is actually no reason for a lot of energy to be used in the distribution of new crypto, there are a number of other ways, it's a completely arbitrary mechanism that happens to have real-world side effects.
I don't think they should ban crypto, but they should definitely ban crypto that arbitrarily uses quite a lot of energy.
The reason it's called a bubble is because it pops. Even if BTC were inflated to the point where even with externalities priced in that it made sense to mine on dirty energy, the moment the bubble pops this will stop. There's nothing wrong with punishing people who act on bad information. Not allowing firms to fail is how we get banks and firms like Uber who exploit labor while losing money faster than they can raise more rounds.
> It actually is not that hard to stand outside of a market and make interventions which are super rational.
I'm pretty sure if this were true, you'd solve multiple hard, open problems in game theory, statistics, and economics. Problems like the Multi-Armed Bandit or Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. The US Tax Code is as byzantine as it is because of its piecemeal attempts to make market interventions. The US healthcare system is likewise what happens when the government creates an incentive structure with unforeseen negative externalities.
> We ban and regulate all sorts of things.
Of course and we should continue to. But emissions of energy usage is a very complicated problem. Did I save on emissions by using a thermal cooker, or did the use of my gas stove just to have the cooker come to temperature end up using more emissions than an induction stove would result in cooking the meal regularly in a pot or pan? Even this depends on the energy mixture of your grid. Oh and what about the input emissions to making your induction stove, would that make things even out in the end? Banning things to solve such a complicated problem is silly and you'll run out of political will fast. It's all fine-and-dandy when the internet mobs want to ban crypto, but what happens when the government tells you that you can't drive your F150 to the store a mile away to pickup milk? Turning energy efficiency into a political fight over banning goods and services will be a quick way to stall any progress.
> but they should definitely ban crypto that arbitrarily uses quite a lot of energy
Until crypto creators come up with new incentive schemes that come up with different, less understood negative externalities. Attacking the problem at its source is much simpler than playing whack-a-mole.
The miners can move to locations where the externalities aren't considered.
Which is the same problem with banning crypto. Unless you can get every government in the world, or a smaller goal of every government in the G20, to ban crypto, there will still be demand, thus an incentive for miners, for crypto.
I agree. But the genie is out, and profit will be had. If one tries to enforce, say, emissions standards on computers, then maybe AWS fees go up to justify taking time from bitcoin mining.
Prove that.
But, sure, maybe he didn't mean for it to be taken totally seriously. Maybe he just meant that to 60%. Or 90.
(TL;DR: Prove that.)
> PPS: I despise libertarianism. Just in case you were wondering ...
So yes, we have an aspiring central planner who wants to take Bad Excuse #1 for intrusive government surveillance, rampant violation of peoples' privacy, and the like — to collect all its abuses, and expand it to a new area. And he ostentatiously despises anyone who tries to build politics around liberty.
These facts are entirely in harmony with each other. I've seen far worse political agendas, but he's an authoritarian thug, and it's as simple as that. Perhaps he should now compare the libertarians to terrorists, so he has access to the abuses collected from Bad Excuse #2, Terrorism.
Where this is going, of course, is that I think you're wrong and I think the evidence supports you being wrong.
And it really shouldn't take someone editorializing the spectre of an overbearing government pressuring service providers for unlimited power to spy on your communications for illicit material, because — as you might have noticed — that's already happening; these pages have of late been covered with news of Apple's fingerprinting schemes, and of the potential consequences to freedom. Our author wants the same sort of laws brought to bear, to stamp out what he sees as moral evil, and perhaps he's right it's evil, just as it is certainly true that child porn is evil.
In either case, though, he wants the authority to stop it, and shrugs off the idea that this would bring unfortunate consequences. This isn't Stalinism, this is just cranky authoritarianism, and if you go for this sort of thing then hating on the libertarians is fun, thus none of what he says is likely to be a joke. It is sufficient for him to be a cranky authoritarian, and nothing further is claimed.
Next time you rag on someone for not drawing any distinctions, maybe try actually drawing the distinctions yourself??
You turned his "I despise libertarianism" into "an aspiring central planner who wants to take Bad Excuse #1 for intrusive government surveillance, rampant violation of peoples' privacy, and the like — to collect all its abuses, and expand it to a new area." So, no: "false dichotomy" my arse.
> Our author wants the same sort of laws brought to bear, to stamp out what he sees as moral evil, and perhaps he's right it's evil, just as it is certainly true that child porn is evil.
Exactly: Perhaps he's right. And if it is as evil as child porn then it logically should be stomped out with the same vehemence. Or does your definition of libertarianism entail different responses to equal evils?
> Next time you rag on someone for not drawing any distinctions, maybe try actually drawing the distinctions yourself??
I don't think you're in any position to criticise my reasoning when your own is this muddled.
No, sir. I turned his "preferred solution to the problems created by cryptocurrencies is to treat them all like child pornography: totally illegal, possession a strict liability offense, choke off interoperability with real currencies at the credit agency/bank interchange level, and make them useless for non-criminals, at which point only criminals will bother with them. And India is going down this route"
into that. Despising Libertarianism is merely co-occurrent, proceeding from the same philosophies.
What better solution do you propose to this?
Are you aware of proof-of-stake, which is not wasteful, avoiding the "security-by-outspending" model proof-of-work has?
Innovation is never perfect. Unix declared itself a multi user operating system but failed system calls used to crash the kernel for everyone. It has a design flaw boys I guess we screwed up when we didn't throw the whole thing in the trash.
He proposed it in his novel "Neptune's Brood" in 2013 and it is described in some more detail here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210514225451/http://www.antipo... (original at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/09/crib-she... but the site is dying)
I think it merits some formal consideration, a scifi novel isn't a whitepaper, but I think the concept has promise. You can't cheat the speed of light without finding a few jupiters worth of exotic matter.
For instance, years ago Google implemented an internal policy of deleting all company email after something like 90 days. This included all the ancient ones, which would have been invaluable to historians one day. A sad destruction of a trove of history.
With a space probe flying out of the solar system, they could've encrypted all the old mail with a public key whose pair was on the probe, and then 100 years from now, the probe could be programmed to transmit the private key back to earth.
The main problem that any currency faces is why should anyone place any trust in it? Why does it provide a reliable record of wealth transfer? If it's a probe that Elon Musk has sent off, then you're asking me to trust Elon and his company. Will the hardware function correctly? Will the software? Is it free of accidental exploits or deliberate back doors? How much wealth am I prepared to wager on this?
For all Bitcoin's flaws, it does have a robust trust infrastructure. You trust the processing-majority of miners, who have only become the majority because they have made a significant investment in the fidelity of the system. Their wealth (at least in theory) is tied to upholding an honest transaction record.
Would Elon or SpaceX lose money if it turned out their interplanetary server was defective? Sure, but they'd only lose the cost of producing the probe and boosting it into space. If it costs $10 billion to do so, and Elon makes $11 billion from it before a flaw is discovered, then from a financial standpoint it's a still a success.
Ideally a currency should be backed by a number of independent actors, whose stake scales with the currency's value.
[citation needed]
At some point in the past decade, Stross went mad. He's become consumed by dogmatism and doomsaying. He constantly predicts disaster, and he's constantly wrong. Here are a few examples.
He thought that Brexit would destroy the UK[2]:
> I'm calling Hard Brexit a road to mass starvation and famine-grade deaths on a scale not seen in the UK since the Hungry Forties (that's the 1840s, not the 1940s).
He canceled visits to the US because thought that Trump would become a totalitarian dictator[3]:
> In which case, for me to continue to plan to travel to the United States in eight months time would be as unwise as it would have been to plan in February 1933 to travel to Germany in September of that year: it might be survivable, but it would nevertheless be hazardous.
Here's a snippet from his 2018 retrospective[4]:
> 2018 was the year that the global climate change alarm sirens began to sound continuously, with wildfires and heat emergencies and melting icecaps. 2018 was also, by no coincidence whatsoever, the year in which the global neo-Nazi movement made considerable headway, with neo-fascist demagogues grabbing power in Brazil, tightening their stranglehold in India, the Philippines, Turkey, the USA, Italy, and elsewhere. The UK was, for a third consecutive year, paralyzed by the utter shit-show that is Brexit, with the deadline now looming less than 100 days ahead of us.
No matter how many times reality contradicts his views, he refuses to change his mind. Even in December he was predicting Brexit catastrophes.[5] Moreover, his writing style has become snide and dismissive. At first the transition saddened me, but now I just find it annoying.
1. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-w...
2. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/10/facts-of...
3. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/01/policy-...
4. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/12/crawlin...
5. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/12/so-you-...
I agree that he overestimated the damage Brexit would cause, and has continued to do so.
The bit about Donald Trump is very misleading. The quotation is from a paragraph that begins "As for my worst-case nightmare scenario?". He was not claiming that in the actual world as it was then travelling to the US was like travelling to Germany in 1933. Trump becoming a totalitarian dictator was his worst-case nightmare scenario, not a prediction of what was definitely (or even likely) going to happen.
I am not sure what in what he said about 2018 you consider to have been contradicted by reality. (Expressed overdramatically, sure.) I think you can make a pretty good case for all of Balsonaro, Modi, Duterte, Erdogan as neo-fascist demagogues, with allowance for a bit of hyperbole. I shall refrain from trying to assess Trump on that score. I'm not sure what he was so cross about in Italy. His description of the UK situation is pretty much right.
> It's also horribly energy-inefficient
Yep, here are some comparative carbon costs:
US Military: 59 M Tons 2017. BTC: 22 M tons 2018, 37 M tons 2021, 130 M tons by 2024 predicted in China before shutdown, Banks: 1040 M tons
IMO, the idea of a $1,000,000 BTC would be a huge hit on reducing CO2, as cost of mining approaches BTC price.
> Hork up a bunch of space probes
Here is a variation on that idea: One of the claimed advantages to satellite is lower latency (see https://www.groundcontrol.com/Satellite_Low_Latency.htm) Solana is claiming layer 1 blocktime of 400ms by synchronizing clocks. For Global coverage, I think satellite is a requirement to achieve that throughput as consumer latency is at least double that. This isn't proof of work; Solana calls its method proof of history.
IMO, PoW is the like the Cray Supercomputer of the 80's. My Apple Watch is lot more powerful at -let's see- 1/64,000,000th the cost.
I have no idea where you got these numbers from, but the idea that banks produce 17 times as much CO2 as the entire US military - with all of its fossil fuel-burning vehicles - is obviously ridiculous.
USMilitary 59 M Tons 2017: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report...
BTC: 37M M tons - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-wor...
BTC: 130 M tons China - https://cacm.acm.org/news/251829-bitcoin-mining-emissions-in....
Banks: 1040 M tons - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/banks-pro...
The military is a separate article. A sankey diagram would be less ambiguous: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/
Wrong; Gigatons.
The above carbon TAM is why I'm pro-crypto, as soon as we move past PoW.
seriously if most of you were your current age in the early 90s you'd be bitching about how the internet consumes telephone lines and is no improvement over mail and face to face communication.