Ok, you develop a way to break bitcoin keys, and you use it to take satoshi's stash. Now what?
Dumping that will cause massive downward price pressure, reducing the total effective value. See Musk's bitcoin dump earlier this year.
Inactive addresses with large balances are watched closely. Coins moved from those are going to be noticed and followed. It will be very hard to extract meaningful value without compromising your identity. Legal authorities may not agree that your possession of a particular string of digits entitles you to the proceeds.
People follow the path of least resistance - there is much to be made via malware and scams. Soft targets are plentiful, why make life harder on yourself while also taking on greater risk?
Even just 1% of Satoshi's stash at current prices is hundreds of millions USD. It would still be worth an attacker's time, unless you're suggesting that it would go all the way to zero immediately.
Weird, I've been vegan for a while, hopped on the bitcoin train when its energy footprint was negligible, hopped right back off when I read that it used as much energy as a small country. Animal farming also has the characteristic of enslaving animals for the entirety of their lives, and in factory operations, those lives are usually non-stop suffering.
How does one make the argument that Bitcoin is easier to attack?
Bitcoin and friends eat energy (lots of) without producing anything of collective value: there is no more creating businesses, research, jobs, products, that is, progress.
A family can easily manage a mining farm that eats the same energy of a business block that normally would provide jobs for a hundred people or more; can you see the implications?
Also, since energy is turned directly into money, it then becomes money, which translates in its price being dictated by the highest bidder.
Read this as: building 100 more nuclear plants per country won't solve the problem because the sudden increase in available energy will shortly be defeated by more and more of it allocated for more mining, creating in a few years a new shortage.
This is not a correct analysis. Firstly, Bitcoin is far more price sensitive to electricity than almost any other industry. Remaining profitable requires very low electricity costs, and are usually not competing in the same price bracket as other uses of electricity. Bitcoin mining is most prevalent in places where the energy is already wasted (thus very low price at market). Because Bitcoin miners can act as a buyer of last resort, it actually incentivizes energy development, not only for Bitcoin, but for every use.
Also, Bitcoin miners aren't destined to grow infinitely, consuming all spare electricity. There will be an equilibrium point where Bitcoin mining computers can only get so efficient and so fast.
There will be an equilibrium point - but that equilibrium will be between how many mining computers there can be run on the one side, and how much of the economy is parked in Bitcoin on the other side.
How efficient the computers are is completely beside the point, by protocol design.
It's certainly possible but likely not to happen. Bitcoin developers seem to have adopted a much more conservative stance than other chains, focusing almost entirely on stability and test coverage. I think Ethereum moving to proof-of-stake has hardened this mentality even further.
I think it's worth pointing out to people that the developers really have nothing to do with it. If the developers all decided to more Bitcoin Core to proof of stake, the node runners would just switch clients.
Bitcoin is open-source software. Anyone can fork the code and change it however they want. Just need to convince others to run a node with your code and convince the market that your new network protocol is worth something.
However the history of Bitcoin hard forks has shown that they're all almost certainly doomed for failure or irrelevancy, because one of the main value propositions of the original Bitcoin is that it's resistant to change by any single authority.
Want to replace the original Bitcoin using PoW with a new Bitcoin using PoS? You have to convince everyone running a Bitcoin PoW node (~50k globally) to switch over to the PoS client, including all the miners around the world (~6k globally).
Why did it work for Ethereum? Because it's centralised. The community will follow the lead of whatever Vitalik and the Foundation states is the path forward for the protocol. Bitcoin has no such centralised leadership and so is resistant to top-down decision making.
Comparing BTC to beef is the wrong comparison: we should be comparing BTC to USD. Over 95% of the USD money supply exists in digital form only; while there's no proof-of-work element to creating new USD the electricity to run all of the servers at all of the banks, Federal Reserve, Treasury department, etc is non-trivial. The physical protection of the money supply (Secret Service, FBI) also has massive cost and impact. And the ultimate environmental impact is the "full faith and credit" of the united States governement -- which translates to the US military-industrial complex and the threat of force of arms -- which causes far more environmental damage.
(And yes, we do use our military to protect the USD: we killed two heads of state primarily because they wanted to price their oil in something other than USD. Had they succeeded that would have killed the petrodollar system.)
You think the USD is stable? Being the least dysfunctional currency doesn't make it a good currency. And the trillions of dollars of inflation that's happened in the last 15 years is setting us up for far more than a mere revolt.
please explain how inflation over the last 15 years has hurt you? How about the deflation in bitcoin? Have you bought stuff with bitcoin? Bitcoin is essentially useless as a currency because nothing you buy appreciates as much as bitcoin. For the rest of the economy it is much better to a stable currency in exchange terms.
Inflation hurts me every time I go out to dinner and have to pay $100 for a simple meal for two.
BTC as an asset can be used as collateral. It doesn't have to be used just for trade. Maintain your LTV and the daily swings in BTC price are less relevant over the long term, while still be an effective store of wealth.
so, you take a loan in...USD to actually transact, and then hold an asset? so, why BTC, which is backed by nothing, when you could do this with a big portfolio of stock? Bitcoin is not really unique if used this way.
edit to add: owning bitcoin as a hedge to inflation has not worked. for about a decade of very low inflation, bitcoin was deflating. As soon as inflation started to rise, bitcoin lost 60% of its value. great hedge.
Do you use credit cards? Isn't that just taking out a loan and paying it back? Can you not fathom doing the same with BTC?
How do you use stock as collateral? Can anyone do that without having to ask for permission?
The 'btc is backed by nothing' argument is old and weak. We're over 10 years into this and it is still 20,000x more valuable than when it started. Try a new trope.
Inflation is one of the singularly most important economic inventions and is almost wholly responsible for getting us out of the 50 year recession that occurred in the second half of the 19th century.
If you would like to compare to USD, then also compare the volume of transactions....Carbon / transaction is massively lower in USD than Bitcoin. Especially because bitcoin is rarely used to buy anything. its just a speculative asset.
If you want to drag the MIC into this, then also drag the rest of the world economy. Dollars are not used to only buy guns, just like bitcoin isn't just for drugs...
Ah but if we're going down that waterslide of a slippery slope
The entire planet hedges its currency against the USD. Obviously every financial system on Earth needs to be included in that comparison. With their own servers, people, armies etc
And that says nothing of the people using those currencies to execute transactions to buy things such as oil and gas, of course!
Clearly Bitcoin is the solution as the USD is "indirectly" the cause of literally 100% of environmental damage
What he's comparing to Bitcoin is not EVERY SINGLE USE of the USD, but the actual USD network (the Fed and it's member banks) and it's security component (the US military, which is the ultimate enforcer of dollar hegemony).
This is comparable to the Bitcoin nodes and the miners.
All those entities you mention provide a lot of services beyond tracking transactions and balances, which is fundamentally the only thing bitcoin can do.
The crypto world ends up re-creating versions of many of these entities, and their power usage should be counted if you're going to put the entirety of the financial industry's power usage on USD.
The energy use to utility ratio of bitcoin sucks now and it's unlikely to get much better with scale.
It's hard to know where to start with such an all-encompassing, weird, hot take like this. I'd like to start the bidding with "no; your slow-moving, not-suitable-for-purpose-as-a-payments-system distributed ledger is not the functional equivalent of the entire global banking system".
Poisoned apples and organic oranges. The petrodollar system is explicitly underpinned by fossil fuels while bitcoin just wants the cheapest electricity.
There isn’t going to be a climate or animals to save if you all don’t pull your heads out of your asses and realize we are all possibly going to die in a nuclear war very soon. That is the most pressing climate issue by far.
I'm no fan of Bitcoin, but it irks me when established media muddies the waters like this. The climate impact is not inherent to Bitcoin; it is a function of the energy source mix that (still) uses fossil fuels to a large extent.
In short, if all Bitcoin mining used renewable energy sources, or if society switched to renewable energy as it should anyway, then the Bitcoin climate impact would be nil.
hypothetically sure it could be green. But in the real world, given the current makeup of our energy sources, people were well aware that it wouldn't be, and wouldn't be green any time soon, but started mining nonetheless.
"if all Bitcoin mining used renewable energy sources"
I don't know if you've looked at the requirements for covering our current energy sinks with renewable energy sources, but it's not looking manageable in the timeline we need to prevent climate change before we account for adding a random extra energy sink of bitcoin mining. Which, has frequently required peaker plants to cover the extra energy usage.
This statement waves away all of the difficulty of accounting for how much solar/wind we would need to account for bitcoin mining on top of what we need for everything else. It's impractical, especially for something as societally useless as bitcoin mining.
This is your daily reminder that computers, including Bitcoin miners, do not generate emissions, they only use electricity, and do not care where that electricity comes from any more than any other industry.
Now that Ethereum has moved to proof of stake, the part of the crypto industry that is in bed with ESG-friendly VCs and regulators has really turned on Bitcoin, as was always expected. There's an almost constant barrage of these articles now.
Some people really do want to live in a world the state gets to decide to what uses of electricity are allowed and which are not, but I am not one of those people.
You know, if ppl would just using electricity to perform their scams/utopian dreaming while exacerbating a world wide calamity the states will not need to decide for them...
We get more regulation mainly because of bad actors giving a f*ck about externalities.
Also bitcoin doesn't need all transactions to be instant or geographically in proximity to the user. A lot of energy on the grid will get wasted when using renewable with much higher peak production vs daily median. So it should be easy to collocate a few gpus near the grid and use this free electricity to mine crypto instead.
You get to wash your hands of any bitcoin mining you do, because it's everyone else's problem to figure out a green grid. I can load as much shit onto the grid as I want, and that's fine, it doesn't matter what I'm doing with it as long as I pay for it. It doesn't matter if the demand I induce causes us to need peaker plants.
> With pressure building to clean up the crypto industry, Bitcoin is now an outlier when it comes to its environmental impact. Its closest rival, Ethereum, recently completed a major software update to drastically reduce its energy consumption in a highly anticipated event called The Merge. Goodkind points to that as an example of potential solutions to make cryptocurrencies more sustainable. If Bitcoin were to make a similar update, “its climate damages estimated in this work, would likely become negligible,” the study says.
It's a "solution" to the extent that you think proof-of-stake has comparable security to proof-of-work. And the jury is very much out on that one.
For example, proof-of-stake is quite vulnerable to regulatory capture. Exchanges stake users'f funds. Exchanges are regulated at the federal level. Therefore, regulator pressure can lead to protocol changes that directly harm users. There are already strong hints that this dynamic will become a big factor.
The same dynamic does not exist in proof-of-work, where exchanges and miners are decoupled.
From the research article:
> ... POW-based cryptocurrencies are on an unsustainable path. If the industry doesn’t shift its production path away from POW, or move towards POS, then this class of digitally scarce goods may need to be regulated, and delay will likely lead to increasing global climate damages.
"Regulate" what exactly? Miners? Great, what's a "miner"? Even if you can thread that needle, all the regulation will do is to force miners into different jurisdictions or to downsize their operations. Neither of these outcomes will necessarily reduce the network's hash rate, jeopardize security, or convince Bitcoin users to stop using bitcoin.
Without it I don't know how the total absolute (as opposed to relative) climate damage associated with bitcoin compares with the total absolute climate damage associated with those other things.
At the least you know the market cap of bitcoin right? That's easy. Market cap of commodities is also Googleable.
But it's worth noting that while people need to eat, and need to transport themselves (tougher, relatively true), they don't need to own bitcoin. Nothing in the world is driven entirely off of bitcoin.
Sure, I just wish articles would provide the basic context needed to make sense of what's in the article.
I don't think bitcoin provides any value to the world, so trivially it doesn't provide value commensurate with its environmental costs, but I was hoping the article would give me a better idea how big a deal those environmental costs are in the larger scheme of things.
> The research found that every $1 in Bitcoin market value generated an average of 35 cents in global climate damages between 2016 and 2021. For comparison, gasoline generated 41 cents, and beef production was responsible for 33 cents in damages.
That doesn't look like an apples to apples comparison... The dollars spent on gasoline have to be at least two or three orders of magnitude above that of Bitcoin, right?
Edit: After checking, it's three orders of magnitude, 10 billion per year in USD spent on barrels [1] vs 0.09 billion in USD fees per year [2], but the article seems it look like comparable threats to our environment.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadDumping that will cause massive downward price pressure, reducing the total effective value. See Musk's bitcoin dump earlier this year.
Inactive addresses with large balances are watched closely. Coins moved from those are going to be noticed and followed. It will be very hard to extract meaningful value without compromising your identity. Legal authorities may not agree that your possession of a particular string of digits entitles you to the proceeds.
People follow the path of least resistance - there is much to be made via malware and scams. Soft targets are plentiful, why make life harder on yourself while also taking on greater risk?
An uncensorable store of value/currency is like an amphibious vehicle for most: pretty cool but they are never going to need one.
It's easy to see the utility of food and oil.
the problem is that bitcoin is simply video game money masquerading as “An uncensorable store of value/currency”
How does one make the argument that Bitcoin is easier to attack?
Also, since energy is turned directly into money, it then becomes money, which translates in its price being dictated by the highest bidder. Read this as: building 100 more nuclear plants per country won't solve the problem because the sudden increase in available energy will shortly be defeated by more and more of it allocated for more mining, creating in a few years a new shortage.
Also, Bitcoin miners aren't destined to grow infinitely, consuming all spare electricity. There will be an equilibrium point where Bitcoin mining computers can only get so efficient and so fast.
How efficient the computers are is completely beside the point, by protocol design.
Proof of work is core to the ethos of Bitcoin.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoinpos/
Bitcoin is open-source software. Anyone can fork the code and change it however they want. Just need to convince others to run a node with your code and convince the market that your new network protocol is worth something.
However the history of Bitcoin hard forks has shown that they're all almost certainly doomed for failure or irrelevancy, because one of the main value propositions of the original Bitcoin is that it's resistant to change by any single authority.
Want to replace the original Bitcoin using PoW with a new Bitcoin using PoS? You have to convince everyone running a Bitcoin PoW node (~50k globally) to switch over to the PoS client, including all the miners around the world (~6k globally).
Why did it work for Ethereum? Because it's centralised. The community will follow the lead of whatever Vitalik and the Foundation states is the path forward for the protocol. Bitcoin has no such centralised leadership and so is resistant to top-down decision making.
(And yes, we do use our military to protect the USD: we killed two heads of state primarily because they wanted to price their oil in something other than USD. Had they succeeded that would have killed the petrodollar system.)
BTC as an asset can be used as collateral. It doesn't have to be used just for trade. Maintain your LTV and the daily swings in BTC price are less relevant over the long term, while still be an effective store of wealth.
edit to add: owning bitcoin as a hedge to inflation has not worked. for about a decade of very low inflation, bitcoin was deflating. As soon as inflation started to rise, bitcoin lost 60% of its value. great hedge.
How do you use stock as collateral? Can anyone do that without having to ask for permission?
The 'btc is backed by nothing' argument is old and weak. We're over 10 years into this and it is still 20,000x more valuable than when it started. Try a new trope.
If you want to drag the MIC into this, then also drag the rest of the world economy. Dollars are not used to only buy guns, just like bitcoin isn't just for drugs...
The entire planet hedges its currency against the USD. Obviously every financial system on Earth needs to be included in that comparison. With their own servers, people, armies etc
And that says nothing of the people using those currencies to execute transactions to buy things such as oil and gas, of course!
Clearly Bitcoin is the solution as the USD is "indirectly" the cause of literally 100% of environmental damage
This is comparable to the Bitcoin nodes and the miners.
The crypto world ends up re-creating versions of many of these entities, and their power usage should be counted if you're going to put the entirety of the financial industry's power usage on USD.
The energy use to utility ratio of bitcoin sucks now and it's unlikely to get much better with scale.
Taxing dirty electricity sources however seems to be regarded as a stupid idea.
In short, if all Bitcoin mining used renewable energy sources, or if society switched to renewable energy as it should anyway, then the Bitcoin climate impact would be nil.
I don't know if you've looked at the requirements for covering our current energy sinks with renewable energy sources, but it's not looking manageable in the timeline we need to prevent climate change before we account for adding a random extra energy sink of bitcoin mining. Which, has frequently required peaker plants to cover the extra energy usage.
This statement waves away all of the difficulty of accounting for how much solar/wind we would need to account for bitcoin mining on top of what we need for everything else. It's impractical, especially for something as societally useless as bitcoin mining.
Now that Ethereum has moved to proof of stake, the part of the crypto industry that is in bed with ESG-friendly VCs and regulators has really turned on Bitcoin, as was always expected. There's an almost constant barrage of these articles now.
Some people really do want to live in a world the state gets to decide to what uses of electricity are allowed and which are not, but I am not one of those people.
That's an interesting world you're living in.
It's a "solution" to the extent that you think proof-of-stake has comparable security to proof-of-work. And the jury is very much out on that one.
For example, proof-of-stake is quite vulnerable to regulatory capture. Exchanges stake users'f funds. Exchanges are regulated at the federal level. Therefore, regulator pressure can lead to protocol changes that directly harm users. There are already strong hints that this dynamic will become a big factor.
The same dynamic does not exist in proof-of-work, where exchanges and miners are decoupled.
From the research article:
> ... POW-based cryptocurrencies are on an unsustainable path. If the industry doesn’t shift its production path away from POW, or move towards POS, then this class of digitally scarce goods may need to be regulated, and delay will likely lead to increasing global climate damages.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-18686-8
"Regulate" what exactly? Miners? Great, what's a "miner"? Even if you can thread that needle, all the regulation will do is to force miners into different jurisdictions or to downsize their operations. Neither of these outcomes will necessarily reduce the network's hash rate, jeopardize security, or convince Bitcoin users to stop using bitcoin.
For comparison, gasoline generated 41 cents, and beef production was responsible for 33 cents in damages."
What are the total market values of each of those things, though?
At the least you know the market cap of bitcoin right? That's easy. Market cap of commodities is also Googleable.
But it's worth noting that while people need to eat, and need to transport themselves (tougher, relatively true), they don't need to own bitcoin. Nothing in the world is driven entirely off of bitcoin.
I don't think bitcoin provides any value to the world, so trivially it doesn't provide value commensurate with its environmental costs, but I was hoping the article would give me a better idea how big a deal those environmental costs are in the larger scheme of things.
That doesn't look like an apples to apples comparison... The dollars spent on gasoline have to be at least two or three orders of magnitude above that of Bitcoin, right?
Edit: After checking, it's three orders of magnitude, 10 billion per year in USD spent on barrels [1] vs 0.09 billion in USD fees per year [2], but the article seems it look like comparable threats to our environment.
[1]: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php
[2]: https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_total_transaction_fee...