Holy crap that's really cool! For one, the interface is very pretty, for two he is actually chatting in real time with you once you enter the site! I asked him how he does it, he says he built the chat mostly as a frontend to Slack, so he gets messages on his phone and can respond to them on his phone. Pretty cool!
This is blowing my mind. I was knocking and wondering why nothing was happening. It simply took Johan a moment to "let me in" it seems? Then we chatted! Impressive if anyone has a link as to how it's built I'd love to see it.
The site overestimates power consumption by 2-3x, because it gets the estimate from BECI which is grossly flawed: http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/ (Disclosure: I am the author of this critic)
And BC's current transaction rate is a rounding error. If it ever becomes popular for more than crime and tax evasion, that's as lot of Christmas lights.
Also, Christmas lights can use a lot of power. Your example reminds me of those electric heater ads that say their product uses as much power as a coffee maker.
More popularity will lead to higher bitcoin prices, and that will indirectly to more power consumption for hashing until no-arbitrage equilibrium is restored.
That is only true for burning fossil fules. Considering that the Hover Dam can generate 2 GW peak, the bitcoin network could feasibly run on renewable energy.
Waiting for the inevitable: "What if we could guarantee that these coins were made only with renewable / sustainable energy sources, giving you the benefit of digital currency w/o the pollution", and the coming "It's like CO2 / renewable energy credits, but with blockchain!" startups.
using something that is practically infinitely abundant (renewable energy) to create an artificially scarce medium of exchange is illogical to say the least... why not use renewable energy itself as the self-valued currency?
Energy price's are highly volatile because you cannot control the supply in a timely fashion nor store energy for later usage (in amounts that matters anyway), i.e it would be a worse currency.
Scarcity is a good attribute for a currency. Plus having a currency that mirror an asset (gold, energy) is actually a bad idea economically speaking because then the currency cannot be used in time of crisis to soften economic downturns. Which is what was used during the 2007 crisis. People do not realize how much worse the 2007 crisis would have been without the measures taken by the Federal Reserve.
IMO, the attractiveness of bitcoin is about being a secure decentralized payment system everything else is fluff. Such a system takes some energy to work what a surprise...
Do you guys think that all the financial institutions combined use less energy than bitcoin ?
Bitcoin is probably using a lot less energy...
> Plus having a currency that mirror an asset (gold, energy) is actually a bad idea economically speaking because then the currency cannot be used in time of crisis to soften economic downturns.
I shared your concern until recently. But then I learned more about fractional reserve banking: with suitable (lack of) regulations banks can and will create just the right amount of extra bank money to satisfy extra demands from the general population for holding extra money.
Historically, just conditions have held in eg the free banking episodes in Scotland, Canada, France, Australia. (I think in the Song dynasty in China, too.)
Australia's free banking period ended up with a property bubble and banks going bust, causing the country's worst ever financial crisis. Instead of "creating just the right amount of extra money", other banks suspended trading.
But free banking is much closer to the way major currencies actually operate today (which also involves money supply determined primarily by banks' willingness to extend credit and fluctuating from day to day) than the concept behind Bitcoin or indeed the gold standard (supplies of a particular currency should be limited by [proof of] specific type of work and only able to grow, and very slowly)
> Australia. Operating with few restrictions, Australian banks were large, widely branched, and competitive, and they practiced mutual par acceptance, making the system resemble Scotland’s. The Australian episode is of special interest for suffering the worst financial crisis known under a free-banking system. After a decade-long real estate boom came to an end in 1891, some building societies and land banks failed, after which 13 of 26 trading banks suspended payments in early 1893. George Selgin (1992a) finds that the banks’ reserve ratios do not indicate any overexpansion of bank liabilities during the boom, though some banks clearly made bad loans. The boom was rather financed by British capital inflows, which suddenly stopped after the Baring crisis of 1890. Kevin Dowd (1992) adds that the banks were not undercapitalized. He argues that “misguided government intervention” in the first failed institutions “needlessly undermined public confidence” in other banks, while other interventions boosted the number of suspensions (all but one of the suspended banks soon reopened) by providing favorable reorganization terms for banks in suspension. (For a different view, see Turner and Hickson (2002).
I don't understand your second paragraph. You can have free banking in a gold standard or in a fiat regime. The historic free banking episodes regularly cited were in a gold standard setting. (But perhaps the confusion comes from 'Internet-Austrians' common insistence on 100% reserve banking as a mandatory feature of what they'd call a gold standard?)
(Bitcoin in its current parameters is more or less trying to imitate a gold standard.)
You seemed to understand my second paragraph pretty well tbh.
Internet Austrians and Bitcoiners believe that what is used as money should be a commodity with highly constrained supply, hence full reserve requirements for the former and a unified ledger and no credit-creation mechanism for the latter. Free bankers (and some altcoiners, and the economic mainstream) believe that what is used as money should be a promise from a financial institution with a flexible supply based on credit creation (disagreeing with each other on whether it's best backstopped by convertibility to a [quasi]commodity or central bank reserves under stricter regulations)
Free banking fanatics' arguments that Australian free banking practices were fundamentally sound and systematic collapse happened only because the government saved some of the worst ones should be taken with the same pinch of salt as anarchists' claims that people are fundamentally non-violent with crime occuring mainly as a reaction to police brutality.
Sure, it's good to be wary. Though even blaming any crises at the end of free banking episodes, still seems to leave a pretty good track record overall.
As an aside:
Reading about how free banking can automatically can adjust the amount of bank money created over eg a fixed amount of gold to keep nominal GDP stable even in the face of eg increased demands for holding money from the general population, made me much more sympathetic to bitcoin's fixed supply than I'd been before. Since some kind of inflation, price level or nGDP targeting seemed like a good idea for a currency regime, and I could only assume that bitcoin was bound to fail before.
Of course, the mechanism George Selgin describes don't necessarily have to work that way. But at least it's something that looks plausible.
Renewable energy is not an asset. It's energy. It's the basis of all life. It is infinitely abundant (until our Sun dies and the winds stop blowing) Unlike currency, energy has an intrinsic value as a unit of work (the 'joule' being that unit) Energy as a currency would get its value not from artificial scarcity but from its rate of flow in a surplus energy p2p exchange network. Satoshi himself mentioned this line of thinking back in 2009 [1] when I wrote about a hypothetical p2p energy economy, but he thought the Blockchain could power such an energy-as-currency-based economy, and he's actually right. You need to think of the Blockchain as the low level API and write high level currency schemes on top of it. I haven't given it much thought since then.
Haven't tou heard of civilization types? I think type 3 (or 5?) is one where they have harness the energy of their sun(s) in an optimal wag. They gather solar energy in space and beam it to their planet, moon(s$ and their space colonies.
Users would still need to be able to transfer control over such energy to other users in order to pay them. For bitcoin, you can just use the internet. What is your practical proposal for making the "energy transfer" possible?
No, a lot of it happens in Sichuan province specifically, because of the availability of hydroelectric power. Also Washington state for the same reason.
Using that list, Cuba and North Korea immediately follow Bitcoin in energy consumption. Cuba or North Korea alone could never hope to gain control of the network: they could not supply enough power even if they redirected everything to malicious Bitcoin mining rigs. More realistically, even a country like Saudi Arabia (with a reported 272TWh) could not control the Bitcoin network in the long term--"wasting" 5.5% of your national energy consumption is not sustainable.
This "waste" is actually a kind of security all its own.
Comparing finance's shares of GDP to bitcoin hashing power is useless. The power used for hashing is at best a lower bound on how much a bitcoin based finance system would need to run.
(Eg even with bitcoins, you'd still have essentially the same stock market. You might be trading coloured coins on the blockchain, but people would still need to work to raise capital etc.)
The hashing power creates trust in settlement. Much of the financial industry is also about trusted settlement through other means. They are in fact quite comparable in that sense.
You are right that the hashing power basically produces trust in settlement.
I guess where we disagree is in how much of a proportion effort in finance is spent on producing that kind of trust vs other activities (like eg capital allocation, or hunting for arbitrage activities etc).
To be truly accurate, you would need to look at the marginal impact.
Ie even if bitcoin was purely running on renewable energy, it would still crowd out other users of renewable energy, and those might fall back to coal.
Really puts into stark contrast the power requirements of proof or work vs the chain of trust that everyone else uses. This is the main reason I'll never be on board.
Care to share any of the details on the tech? Are you using each of the exchange's individual APIs to calculate the weighted average? Did you use any library or framework to help with websockets, or to look at the blockchain?
The meaning of "Estimated Money Sent" was a little confusing to me, even after reading the definition on the About page.
What do the scrolling numbers in the background mean? I imagine there aren't enough of them to be all of the realtime transactions happening on the blockchain. Also, I'm sure you know, but they overlap when showing as 600x120 in iframe mode.
Allowing users to embed the widget in an iframe is nice and a good way to spread the word about your site. Maybe unbury that from the About page and link directly to an 'Embed this' page from the main page, and (as silly as it sounds) use something like clipboardjs to make copying the snippet to the clipboard easier.
The amount of power we're wasting computing a giant rainbow table drives me mad.
We could at least burn coal to compute something useful.
I'm not dismissing bitcoin altogether as it brought a great deal of interesting concepts, in fact I even mined a very small quantity once uppon a time. But right now the whole hashing random number madness is mostly a waste of energy.
I don't think we should afford 1.7GW (apparently 500MW according to a comment bellow) of power as long as we're still burning fossil fuel somewhere on earth.
Why aren't you mad about all the gigawatt hours that are wasted powering banks, bank servers, armored trucks silly moving fancy paper from business to banks, printing presses, the distruction of various ecological areas to take the mineral gold out of the ground, VISA servers, printing Visa cards etc.
Just because the method to defend against unmodified database entries in the Bitcoin blockchain is very evident and the evidence of ecological cost to our current financial system is largely silent doesn't mean one can ignore those costs.
Not being able to easily quantify the inefficiency of one kind of waste is a very simple reason to not be mad about it.
And, of course, one can express a desire to want to fix one problem without being obligated to express the desire to fix problems many orders of magnitude larger ("You don't want our town to cut down the trees in the park? Why don't you care about the destruction of the rainforests?"). You don't even know that the person you're talking to doesn't want to fix those problems.
We have a network growing exponentially relying on the fact that we're hashing random numbers. Academic research aside, it sounds very useless.
That has nothing to do with the way banks are doing their maths or maintaining their infrastructure. Again, I'm also very grateful of bitcoin demonstrating we can exchange value without a 3rd party, but it looks like nowadays we could do better.
Now in regard of the destruction of ecological areas, mining gold etc... I simply agree with you.
> That has nothing to do with the way banks are doing their maths or maintaining their infrastructure. Again, I'm also very grateful of bitcoin demonstrating we can exchange value without a 3rd party, but it looks like nowadays we could do better.
I once suggested protein folding on bitcointalk.org. The thing is : it's easier said than done. Folding protein can not trivially be used to mark data as a cryptographic hash does, and you need this for the whole protocol to make sense. But if someone can come up with a proof of concept, we'd all be happy to look at it.
Some people have looked into securing a blockchain currency with some other more useful computation. So far nothing much has come out of it, and there are some theoretical reasons why we shouldn't expect too much.
No PoS system has emerged that can both remain perfectly distributed while also preventing double spend chain forks. If the cost to participate in multiple conflicting histories is effectively 0 (as it isn't with PoW, but is with PoS) then you can prioritize a history most beneficial to you instead of the reality.
Honestly, if you are going "big leagues" in cryptocurrency, I don't think having a central authority is bad as long as procedures are in place to contest flawed histories. Peercoin does its PoS through the developers signing key locking history - as long as people trust the devs, they trust the blockchain. If someone can prove the Peercoin blockchain is manipulated, the chain and project can be forked and someone else can be given confidence by whatever measure the community wants to use.
> And then it always seemed to me, also, that some kind of strategic partial centralisation could help make cryptocurrencies much more efficient..
Yes, and you could implement that specialisation on top of bitcoin. Just imagine eg one of the bitcoin exchanges that hold your balance for you allowing you to send money to other account holders (even at other exchanges) without that ever hitting the blockchain.
The control to keep that kind of company honest is that people will occasionally demand their balances be paid out in bitcoin.
I feel your pain. In fact, the reason why bitcoin took cryptographers so long to come up with is the sheer inelegance of the scheme: normally you want the attacker to have to expend exponentially more resources to crack your security. Not just slightly more (ie 51% of the total).
The bitcoin design sat in a blind spot, perhaps deservedly though.
However, history has parallels: digging up gold out of the ground is enormously wasteful just to use it as a currency. Paper mostly does the job just as well. But just like bitcoin, the very expense can buy you certain security features. 'Gold' is the original proof of work?
History however also shows solutions: for commodity money, fractional reserve banking was one. For example, at its heyday the Scottish free banking system had a gold-reserve ratio of about 2% and was virtually crisis free. So the expense of digging up gold was all else being equal reduced by 98% compared to using gold directly for all trades.
Now, I wonder how widespread fractional reserve banking would work for bitcoin. At the moment, bitcoin exchanges holding your money in escrow come closest to the kind of institutions that could start this kind of banking for bitcoin.
I also don't know how fractional reserve banking would impact the price of bitcoin and the incentives for mining. As a bigger proportion of transactions would be off the bitcoin chain, eg mediated by trusted third-parties, mining incentives would perhaps go down?
Surely if we're involving trusted third parties and doing fractional reserve financial wizardry, we could just continue using a regular stable currency and payments network which doesn't involve expending enormous amounts of energy to ensure the monetary base is "trustless"
1000+ Bitcoin companies have been created. You may disregard everything else, but this fact alone make Bitcoin not "wasteful". We get more than just transactions and SHA256 computations out of it, since already thousands of jobs were created at these companies.
So far no one has been able to come up with a useful PoW that leaves the properties of Bitcoin intact (notably decentralization, and trustlessness.) That is why it has to be based on abstract puzzles like hashing data. Some thoughts as to how implementing a useful PoW might be done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8963209
Also, Bitcoin miners use only a fraction of the electricity used by a thing that is literally useless on a technical level: Christmas decorative lights (6.63 TWh/yr in the US, probably 20+ TWh/yr in the world). This helps put things in perspective. If Xmas lights use 4x more electricity, you should be 4x more mad at Xmas lights.
I'm a little surprised I haven't seen more discussion about Gridcoin. I'd much rather use a digital currency if I knew it was contributing to curing cancer, mapping the shapes and orbits of asteroids, discovering new pulsars, understanding the genome, and so on.
It makes me wonder if Gresham's law [1] will apply to cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin being slow to change and expensive to mine, may give way to other coins that are more adaptable and use less energy, such as Ethereum and Litecoin. Litecoin has already implemented Segwit, whereas Bitcoin seems paralysed by a debate that is hard to understand by an outsider.
These other cryptocurrencies are only less energy intensive because they are mined by less computer power. However Eth may introduce POS which will reduce computer power required.
The money sent metric is interesting, is that what's actually going on right now?
I have a miniscule amount of BTC (currently 'worth' £20), I just bought it out of novelty really, never found that much of a use for it outside of buying gift vouchers.
Where is all this money going? People just trading the currency between each other? Retail?
Do you ever watch highway traffic at an odd time of day? I have the same thoughts about it. Who are all these people? Where do they need to go at 1am on a Monday morning? How did they get the money to buy these cars?
this is all an estimate. it's comprised of trading (to and from exchanges), sure, but also mining rewards, etc. there are some orgs analyzing the data, e.g. www.chainalysis.com
Beautiful. I think text size should always be proportional to log(transaction size) for better visual processing. I notice once $650,000 which was indeed larger and slower, which was great, but would be nice if had text size function change over entire range.
I think near the "coins in circulation" as $ rate someone should add a big fat disclaimer: "AT CURRENT EXCHANGE RATE". I know this applies to every currency, but given Bitcoin's volatility, it goes without saying...
