I'm a geek, computer science graduate and I love Crypto from a conceptual & theoretical point of view. But I think cryptocurrencies will be short lived in our lifetimes. Reason being... energy consumption. With present usage, if Bitcoin were an actual country it would be the 61st biggest power consuming country in the world! Like seriously. Bitcoin uses more energy than the whole of The Republic of Ireland. It uses more than the US States Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming Combined. https://powercompare.co.uk/bitcoin/ And it uses this much power to support its current use-cases; Which is basically just paranoid geeks and people buying porn and drugs. However imagine if bitcoin, or some other cryptocurrency, was to become a more mainstream currency... This would mean more fees for the miners, which would bring more miners and therefore the power consumption would become ridiculous. And unfortunately there's no way around high power consumption. Bitcoin mining needs to be a computationally-difficult problem to solve, but easy to verify. Miners add blocks to the block chain, and they need to solve a very difficult problem to do so and get the reward of 12 BTC + Miner fees. If the problem wasn't hard to solve then anyone could add a block to the blockchain and write transaction into the ledger and make themselves rich. Therefore, I think if it was to become mainstream and move beyond geeks, porn and drugs, the power consumption would become so astronomical that it would be an environmental disaster. The United Nations would ban it on Environmental Grounds. Therefore, despite my love for the tech, I don't see how crypto can ever have a long-term future as a credible currency alternative on the basis of its power consumption. What are your thoughts?
your post has a Malthusian quality attached to it. if crypto currencies are a much needed solution to fiat currencies human ingenuity will find a solution for increased power consumption.
Having cleaned mining trojans out of over 200 computers in two schools that I was visiting and noticed many machines were on full fan, I say criminalize and end them. Stealing from who knows how many across the world? Also two friends who's phones were being used for surreptitious mining. How many others having their batteries ruined?
Are they a much needed solution though? The rules of the Bitcoin network are as follows... (btw any block that gets added to the chain that does not conform to these rules will be rejected by all other nodes on the network). - Blocks need to be hashed using the SHA256 algorithm twice and... - the resulting hashcode needs to have an agreed number of zeroes at the start. - Blocks should not be added more than 12 minutes after the previous block - - in the event that this happens, the network shall agree to require an extra zero to be added to the hashcode, making the problem an order-of-magnitude harder to solve, thus ensuring the next block takes longer to find. This means that you could throw an INFINITE amount of computation power at this problem. And the network would agree to add an INFINITE number of zeroes to the beginning of the hashcode to make the problem INFINITELY harder to solve. This will ensure that no matter how much power you add to the network a block will never be added less than 12 minutes after the previous one. These rules prevent anyone who owns a super computer from owning the whole network. No matter how much power you throw at mining you can never ever earn more than 10 bitcoins every 12 minutes. There is literally no limit to the potential power consumption.
that is likely saying that a short stock position has no limit to a possible loss. it is not reality. the cost of power consumption may go down, solar power or some other energy will likely come to the fore.
itt: unawares of Proof of Stake coins, or more efficient networks which have higher capacity for transactions at a fraction of the energy used by bitcoin.
I've not heard of these. But if the problem isn't difficult to solve and easy to verify. What's to stop me from "solving a block" on my laptop then writing into the ledger including a transaction that you just paid me 1 million stake coins or whatever they are? I didn't realise there were so many blindsighted crypto fanboys on here.
So a single critical post to a new user w/9 posts and clearly no bias and the place is full of fanboys? ok then. Also, masternodes
So as a guy who had over 600 BTC as recently as Feb 2018... what's the takeaway? What's the future of crypto?
I'm just a programmer, geek, computer scientist trying to make a discussion about the technical of bitcoin and the challenges of its energy consumption. You wanna share you knowledge of "proof of stake" and how it solves the "difficulty"(energy) requirement of crypto? I'm giving rationale argument and reasons for my opinion. If you don't want to be seen as blindsighted crypto fanboys maybe you could counter my arguments with equivalent rational counter arguments? Sorry but solar power isn't going to cut it lol