I'm disappointed of HN comments whenever cryptocurrency topics come up.
People are forgetting that Nakamoto Consensus is a legitimate CS breakthrough concerning the Byzantine Generals Problem.
Is it acceptable to bash every stock in the Nasdaq just because a second tech bubble popped and some SV companies are behaving unscrupulously?
Frenzied speculation brought about inadvertent side effects but these should not detract from the fact that significant advancements are continuously being researched and implemented.
The comments seem to honestly reflect the state of the technology, its environmental impact, the annoyance factor of its extreme adherents, the total lack of a really compelling non-ideological or criminal use case after more than a decade, and a deflating bubble. The insane gulf between the promises made by the “every day brings a new breakthrough” crowd and the reality of ICO’s and Bitcoin is vast, and hard to ignore. Blockchain is a neat idea, but presently it is used in ways that are far from compelling, and I’m yet to hear of a non-hypothetical application that could change that (apart from buying drugs, or money laundering).
It’s also hard to forget the last few years of relentless evangelism, which was equal parts annoying and ethically challenged.
The comments reflect the (perceived) state of the technology.
One has to admit that the reputation of the entire space has been tarnished by snake oil salesmen. For some historical context it is worth looking at countless examples such as the Railway Mania[1] of the 1840s or the more recent Dot-Com bubble[2]. For more depth one can read Mackay[3].
Some of the most promising advancements in payment channels were only published as papers in 2016[4] and are understandably still being implemented. If anything the speed at which enthusiasts are willing to deploy experimental software at their own risk is breathtaking.
Regarding the environmental impact of the Bitcoin network, while being widely derided for its energy use, it is in fact using less electricity than the major credit card networks. It is also using less energy than global gold mining. There are ways to reduce consumption should a consensus accept the tradeoffs.
The term "Blockchain" as it is currently used often refers to private chains which are in vogue with corporate stakeholders. This appears to be a solution in search of a problem–I have not been able to identify a compelling use case here either.
Most ICOs are outright scams.
It is truly unfortunate that promising advancements of micropayments, smart contracts and the world's closet thing to an incorruptible currency are lumped together with so much rubbish.
> using less electricity than the major credit card networks
I googled around for "Bitcoin vs. VISA energy consumption"; the only argument I found in favor of VISA using more is here [0]. This compares Bitcoin to the entire global banking system, including the cost of e.g. keeping the lights on at physical bank branches. It very approximately guesstimates that the entire global banking system requires ~100 TWh/year, compared to Bitcoin's ~30 TWh/year [1].
For comparison: all data centers worldwide combined use about ~400 TWh/year [2]. I very much doubt that the credit card networks account for 7% of all data center energy consumption.
@corv come on, even if we go with the incredibly generous hypothesis that Bitcoin alone currently uses 1/3 the energy of the entire global banking system including physical lamps at desks (!!!), it is still only providing a tiny, teeny, percentage of the value store or of transaction volume. It's not even remotely a fair comparison. It's like saying my car consumes 1/3 of the world's entire output of gasoline so it's way more efficient than the sum total of all the transportation on the planet.
I didn’t say it’s currently more efficient. I’m saying what it is designed to replace eventually, is already using more energy.
Currencies are adopted and developed on a different time scale than most other technologies we are used to.
Saying cryptocurrency has failed after being around for 10 years is shortsighted and not giving the incredible minds working on these problems enough credit.
It's designed to be actively anti-efficient. The more efficient tech is deployed the less efficient Bitcoin gets. It's already atrocious, and it's going to get more-so, on purpose. What it's designed to replace is using more energy (maybe) because it serves like 3 orders of magnitude more customers, value and transaction volume. A single BTC payment takes 826kWh of energy. Now, a MacBook Pro uses at most 85W, so for a single payment on Bitcoin network you could run your laptop for almost 10,000 hours -- or your house for a WEEK. That's stunning, and only going up (again, intentionally).
Visa OTOH is around 41Wh per transaction, or 20,000x more efficient.
There need be only one decentralized, immutable ledger to handle all transactions, the store of value and registration of assets for the entire planet.
While we’re comparing Apples and Oranges, credit cards don’t confirm payments for weeks and there are significant fees associated with accepting transactions, apart from that risk for the merchant.
Nope, I haven't. The anti-efficiency element applies to core Bitcoin no matter what you run on top of it. If you keep to the maximum 7tx/sec that's what you'll encounter. I can't imagine a world where no matter what you're running L2 that the system won't hit that incredibly low limit.
Second layer technologies, in the form of exchanges, aren't blockchain at all. They're just varying degrees of fly-by-night bookkeeping and/or settlement. They require blockchain tokens as much as they require the dollar - not at all.
There's no viable L2 technology right now that anyone is using (especially LN) yet, so it's too early to speculate. If I recall correctly it takes a traditional transaction to open a channel, and we're still capped at 7 per second. If there's 7.5 billion people on earth and we want to establish a channel for each of them, well, buckle up, we'll be here melting the Earth for 1.071 BILLION seconds, or 34 years. Just to open channels. Then another 34 years to close them. Here's a mathematical proof of the LN issues [1].
Hand-waving and pretending there's a path or some solution today means we're not even talking about objective reality anymore.
> Regarding the environmental impact of the Bitcoin network, while being widely derided for its energy use, it is in fact using less electricity than the major credit card networks. It is also using less energy than global gold mining. There are ways to reduce consumption should a consensus accept the tradeoffs.
That's not the point. The issue is with its growth trajectory.
Setting aside how little Bitcoin network can handle vs. major credit cards per unit of energy used, the "mainstream" financial system treats energy use as waste that has to be minimized. Per constant number of players, it is expected to stay stable or even decrease. Bitcoin treats energy use as a security feature, and is designed up front to grow it continuously. Per constant number of players, it'll still grow fast as the difficulty of mining is increased. Even with growing populations, mainstream system seems at worst O(n log n), and Bitcoin is definitely faster[0].
Another thing is - the mainstream financial system already works, and does its job well. Bitcoin is seen as a way for some mix of greedy and politically fringe types to make money quick, exploiting cheap electricity.
--
[0] - I'm giving a tentative O(n^2) here, I have a feeling it might be faster, but didn't check it. I'd love if someone could list here the sources of growth of energy usage in Bitcoin network.
Yes, the expenditure of energy is a defining feature of Proof of Work security, however there is going to be a plateau.
The immutable base layer Bitcoin provides is also on a trajectory of feature completion and second layer technology will increase the amount of transactions per kWh tremendously.
Who knows what benefits micropayments or smart contracts are poised to bring to further increase the efficiency of the global economy?
If you can’t offer a concrete example of more efficient micropayments or useful smart contracts, you’re basically talking about how great the second coming of Jesus might be.
I should have been more careful in my wording here.
What I meant by this is the total energy expenditure of current payment systems (Credit cards, PayPal, WeChat Pay, Alipay, SWIFT, ACH, SEPA) including the overhead of fraud detection, chargebacks and the cost of fees on the economy.
To be entirely fair you would also factor in the cost of QE & inflation.
Although cryptocurrency isn’t widely used as such, notarization and its associated costs could also be taken into account.
All of these factors are obviously extremely difficult to estimate properly.
I still stand by my assertion that a mature cryptocurrency would be less costly for the global economy than the current systems of regional central banking and the damaging credit & debt cycles it brings with it.
This "I don't see a use-case for my very limited life/experience/work" is very toxic.
I use Bitcoin to get paid and to pay. That is legitimate. I know a lot of people that uses it for the same reason. There is also a whole lot people using it to evade capital controls; which is modern day repression on freedoms.
Also what is wrong about buying "drugs"? Would you say the same about an encrypted messaging platform that operates in China. That the user should not use it since China did not approve that?
The compelling usecase is censorship resistant financial transactions.
The fact that you have never been subject to financial censorship puts you in a priviledged position that you are fortunate to be in.
I am similarly priviledged in that I have never needed to use TOR, but I still recognize the extreme value of something like TOR brings for the billions of people in the world who live under oppressive, censoring governments.
I simply dont like the idea that the government will print more money.
Mainstream 'economics' might not like a deflationary currency, but since the last economic collapse was 10 years ago, I don't exactly trust 'economics'.
I have 2 problems with this line of argument that I haven't really heard anyone address in a useful way.
1)While abundance certainly reduces value (by creating oversupply), scarcity can't in and of itself create value if there isn't demand. Say there is only 1 original Sean Hunter painting in the entire world. Since there are 34 Vermeers, it should be worth more than a Vermeer, right? Well no. Vermeer was much much better at art than I will ever be, so noone is ever going to want to own anything I paint.
2)While there is a finite supply of BTC, there is a limitless supply of alternative altcoins, and no barrier whatsoever to entry, so people can keep creating them. Since these can be made functionally identical to BTC, why should BTC retain value through scarcity? It's not doing anything that can't easily be done via another altcoin.
I think you might like this because it addresses both of your points.
>Vermeer was much much better at art
BTC is a 'much better coin' than alt coins. Its currently used worldwide. No other coin is used worldwide.
Its not just scarce, but its also highly demanded. Consider that people don't care about other coins, AND this is scarce. Its very difficult to become a rockstar, but once you do, your signature is very valuable.
BTC has broken into rockstar status. It has already happened. Alt coins have not.
BTC can't extinguish debts and taxes in any nation-state on Earth.
Taxation is in fact continually reducing the value of Bitcoin when it's applied - you can't pay your taxes in BTC, so you have to sell some of them to gain USD to cover your taxes (easy enough: you do it when you trade). But the person you sell them to has the same requirement - they will have to sell some BTC and trade out into local currency to extinguish tax obligations. The long term trend is everyone eventually must trade out of BTC to cover their taxes.
The trajectory of BTC is inexorably down - the current market is irrational.
> It's not doing anything that can't easily be done via another altcoin.
You can't pay to a Bitcoin wallet with an altcoin. It's a different currency.
I could start printing jstanley dollars but that won't impact the scarcity of actual dollars. Even though a jstanley dollar is still just a piece of paper that can do exactly the same things as a USD piece of paper.
>I’m yet to hear of a non-hypothetical application that could change that
shared accounting systems between collaborates. complete replacement of ap/ar and every company in a consortium not needing to keep their own, isolated, audit requiring, double entry books. the amount of duplication reduction potential is staggering.
"money laundering" is a feature, not a bug. To bucket all forms of monetary subversion as a bad is like saying all drugs are bad. There is too much control exerted by various authorities and companies over transactions and Bitcoin creates a much needed outlet.
Besides the battles over efficiency (it's bad) and novelty (it's not really), there are some truly fundamental blockers to adopting cryptocurrencies. For instance, this poor Redditor lost the keys to a wallet with $40,000 of crypto in it [1]. This happens all the time. Being your own bank is literally the worst. Plenty of jokes ensued:
"It's just like the time I lost my car keys and need to buy a new car next day."
"It’s just like the time that I lost my house keys and had to move into a homeless shelter."
"It's just like the time I forgot my personal question to my 401k account and I got locked out forever, nobody could help me, and I lost the entire balance."
Unlike all the efficiency and speed questions, this part here is a stated, inalienable objective of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This is the expected behavior. Some clown designed it to work like this. Imagine grandma trying to use this. Remember that time PayPal locked your account and you were so mad you couldn't get at your $600 for a few weeks? Now imagine you lost your life savings because you can't remember your password and literally nobody can help you now, or ever again - and thats the point.
I'd imagine it'll destroy itself anyways, it seems like any random walk ends in 100% of coins lost to human inability to preserve access.
Who cares how amazing the system is technically? It's designed to be actively hostile to human users.
Of course having access to the private key, need to be the most basic way to access funds. It's the only thing that's guaranteed to be uncensorable, while minimizing the requirement of trust. It is a big responsibility though, and should not be taken lightly. The crypto-currency community is partly at fault here, for blaring memes like "If you don't control your private keys, it's not your Bitcoin", without any regard for whether or not people are ready for that responsibility.
That being said, there are number of ways you can store your crypto-currency, with varying degrees of trust-minimization:
- Use a multi-signature smart contract wallet, where a master key has power to move the money. If the master key is lost, the money can be moved by X out of Y keys signing off on the transaction. You can then distribute the Y keys to your trusted associates, preferably without telling them who the other key-holders are.
- Use a dead-hand smart contract wallet, where the money can be retrieved by a trusted associate, if the dead-hand switch hasn't been activated within Z amount of time. Can be combined with the above, in case further trust minimization is needed.
- Store your crypto-currency at a FDIC exchange. Pretty much the same model as the banking world. This really should be the go to way for the average Joe, as it mirrors what you currently can expect from online-banking.
I'm pretty sure the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation doesn't cover crypto. I know what you mean but even with the more reputable players like Coinbase of Kracken I'm a bit wary of the oops we got hacked / shut down / we can't give to you due to AML type stuff.
The first two are way too complicated for retail banking customers. Do you really think you can explain to your parents how dead handed multi pantsed wallets work? I stopped reading half a line in and I’m well within the target customer group here.
The third, an exchange, violates all the core principals of cryptocurrency and is basically no different than what we have today but way harder and less efficient. Exchanges don’t require crypto they just run a MySQL store and attribute fractional ownership as centralized, opaque records not protected by the blockchain. If everyone just did that because it’s the simplest and easiest and most secure way to hold on to your coins, cryptocurrency would just replace bank to bank transfers which by definition don’t require a trustless backing and all the worlds electricity.
Plus to quote your fellow converts “not your keys, not your coins.”
Why wouldn't people be irrationally angry at crypto? Every mainstream use case marketed online has turned out to be an extreme dud.
Online payment system through bitcoin? High confirmation times, sometimes high fees, and very few accepting vendors
Deflationary store of value through bitcoin? Nope, just speculative frenzy.
"Ethereum World Computer"? More like platform for ERC20 token fraud. Top dapps get low thousands of users, so Etherum has thus far failed to turn up anything of note to the mainstream.
"Will be ready for mainstream once (SegWit / block size increase / lightning / PoS) is done"? None of these have materialized into any mainstream value.
On top every mainstream use case being a dud, the goalposts move every single time there's a discussion about crypto. If you bring up the transaction time, you get "it's supposed to be digital gold". If you bring up the speculative frenzy, you get the "it's supposed to be a foundational technology, not immediately useful". It's exhausting, and it's predictable that there can be no good faith discussion since the speculative price varies based on public opinion & new user buy-in (ie shilling galore).
It's great that some people in Venezuela have found blockchain actually useful for avoiding the collapse of their currency, rather than hypothetically useful like it is for the rest of the world. Personally, I would be happy to not hear from any blockchain project ever again unless it has say 100,000 daily users that actually use it "as intended" - say as a payment system rather than as a speculative investment, or as a decentralized computing platform rather than as a speculative investment disguised as a token.
I don't think anybody denies that Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper was novel and extremely clever. At least I don't. But being novel and clever is not enough to justify the "frenzied speculation" that followed IMO.
You seem to root for cryptocurrencies so I can understand your frustration when faced with naysayers like me but understand that the feeling is mutual. Ten years that we hear the same promises, ten years that we're told that "it's being researched", ten years that we only see half-assed solutions to fundamental problems that create as many issues as they solve (e.g. Segwit, PoS) or basically give up on the whole ideal of cryptocurrencies by introducing centralization or trusted peers (Ripple and many others). Ten years on, billions of dollars speculatively invested, "clever people" supposedly working on these issues and what do you have to show for it? People basically reinventing the current banking system on top of an inefficient, wildly speculative asset. "Fidelity just made it easier for hedge funds and other pros to invest in cryptocurrencies". New ways to speculate with cryptocurrencies!
The conversation is frustrating because all's been said. We all know where we stand and at this point the only way to move forward would be for the cryptocurrency scene to come up with something truly novel and useful, not something that reinvents the current banking system but worse.
Ten years on, and with as much intellectual honesty I can muster, I still see only two worthwhile uses of cryptocurrencies: buying drugs online and serving as some sort of notary to timestamp documents. For these two things Bitcoin is actually very competitive. For the rest as far as I'm concerned it's either "reinventing the wheel but worse" (re-creating current infrastructure only less efficiently) or "software cold fusion" (pipe dreams that would require major breakthrough in computer science to achieve their stated goals).
>Frenzied speculation brought about inadvertent side effects but these should not detract from the fact that significant advancements are continuously being researched and implemented.
The frenzied speculation is basically the only actuality surrounding cryptocurrencies these days. Maybe this research you speak of is going to bear fruits and revolutionize the world as we know it or maybe it's going to fizzle out gently as hype dies. This is not a small startup in a garage, this is supposedly a trillion dollar market cap industry, "we're working on it" doesn't cut it for me anymore.
It's also incredibly important to note that Bitcoin (and really all current cryptocurrency implementations) are still very much in their early stages, like a child intuitively understanding the spatial dimensions of the world by bumping into furniture.
The environment probably needs more rigorous and academic consideration in order to legitimise it (if for no other reason than that it does contribute to comp sci theory at least).
I also do not think that Satoshi Nakamoto intended for his technology to be the last say in the crypto space. The implementation was given to the world to iterate on and improve the tech (just like every other tech ever). Environmental impact of mining, inefficiency, scalability etc. should all be considered candidates for improvement as opposed to armchair criticism alone.
The problem is how to achieve agreement (“consensus”) on the truth when at least one person is actively lying and trying to disrupt the truth. In the context of digital money, it’s how you prevent the same coin being spent twice when manipulating digital information is easy.
A related problem is a Sybil attack, where a decentralized peer-to-peer system that is truly open makes it easy to generate new identities and overwhelm the system, so simply relying on the majority of accounts to agree on truth can still be subverted by a motivated attacker.
Bitcoin was a novel solution to this problem by using “mining”, or raw computation power, as a mechanism for enforcing consensus. This made Sybil attacks worthless as the only thing that truly matters in Bitcoin is computation power, which is expensive, and an attacker would need 51% of the power to attack the network.
At the moment, accumulating 51% of the Bitcoin network's hash rate is prohibitely expensive. An attacker would be better off just using that massive hash power to legitimately mine bitcoins. This is the game theory behind bitcoin mining.
Having said that, smaller PoW coins have been recently hit by 51% attacks, as renting the needed hash power for them is cheaper than the profits from selling the double spent coins.
Not too expensive if you're Beijing. 75% of hashpower is centralized within the PRC. All Beijing has to do is inform the miners they now do their bidding. This kind of thing happens all the time in the PRC. The 'community' lost this fight ages ago, at this point Bitcoin effectively operates at the pleasure of Beijing, and one day that may very well change.
Byzantine generals: N generals wish to coordinate their attack on a defending army. The attack will succeed if a majority attack at the same time, so you send messages to the other N-1 generals saying "attack tomorrow at dawn".
But wait: Some of those messages may have been captured by the enemy, and some generals may simply not agree with your strategy. If enough generals don't attack, but you still attack, you will fail. So the new plan is to send a message to the other N-1 generals saying "attack tomorrow at dawn, please reply with confirmation that you will be participate", and then if you get confirmation from at least (N/2 - 1) generals, you can attack with confidence.
But wait: Your fellow generals know that the enemy is potentially capturing messengers, and they won't want to attack if nobody else is attacking, and they know nobody will attack if they don't get the confirmation, so they need confirmation that everyone got their confirmation.
But wait: You'll need confirmation of their confirmation, and so down the rabbit hole we go.
What we end up with is a network of messengers, where every general keeps broadcasting a planned attack date to all the others, but it never able to be certain that the others heard and agreed to it. What's needed to solve this problem is a way of sending a message who's mere existence proves that a majority of generals are committed to the attack, and thus you don't have to reply to the message asking for confirmation that everyone still agrees.
Enter proof of work. What if each general would, upon receipt of the proposed attack date, perform some complex and time consuming calculation; maybe have some poets write a poem in iambic pentameter about the proposed date, and then the first one to finish attachs the poem to the message, and rebroadcasts it? Each time a general receives a new message, they'll take the one with the most poems attached, and start writing a new poem that references the attack date and all previous poems. Fairly soon you'll have a massive chain of dozens of epic poems about the proposed attack date. This tells you a couple of things:
1. All those poems are too much work for one rogue general (or the defending army) to have done. This took the finest minds of the most of the Byzantine general staff to create.
2. And that means that most of the generals must be okay with this plan, because they've spent all week writing poems about it.
3. And most of them must be aware that everyone else is okay with it too, since they've all seen all the poems everyone else saw.
The mere existence of this attack plan, with all of it's self-referentials poems attached, is proof that a consensus attack date exists, and means you're safe to attack, without needing to communicate further.
It's a classic topic of study in the field of distributed systems.
The overarching goal is consensus between agents (e.g servers) over the state of the system.
For example, suppose that you want to achieve atomic consistency (i.e at any point in time the committed/persistent state of the system is homogeneous across all live nodes) in a private cluster replicating a database. The incoming requests are routed randomly to any node in your cluster. You have a synchronization mechanism (a consensus algorithm - like any-Paxos, Raft, Viewstamped Replication etc.) that lets you get this cluster of machines to agree on the state of the database. This is useful if you want fault-tolerance. The synchronization part is the consensus. The agents have to agree on the state-transition.
Now, observe two things:
1. This is a private cluster you own. In other words, you can make all the machines run the same software, trust each other, and assume they act on a best effort basis.
2. The failure model is "fail-stop". If a machine encounters some kind of failure, it won't exhibit arbitrary behavior but rather crash immediately. And you do not consider the case where a machine is taken over and tries to mess with the rest of the cluster in order to violate the desired safety guarantee (atomic consistency).
Obviously, these works if you are a privately own company and can spend resources hardening the parts of your network that are susceptible to be taken over. In a private setting, these assumptions are sufficient even though they are weak and optimistic. In practice, this is not so much an issue.
This falls apart however when you are in an adversarial setting and when your cluster is an open and public network that anyone can join or leave at any point in time. In that model, malicious actors can also show-up and exhibit/fake any kind of failure they want (e.g re-order messages, lie on their internal state, attempt to spoof other agents etc.). In that case, we say the fault-tolerance model is Byzantine. We go one level above in difficulty from the comfortable fail-stop assumption.
That's the gist of what Byzantine fault-tolerance is about. It defines the ability of a distributed system to resist a subset of its network trying to break consensus by any means possible as long as a sufficient majority remains honest.
For years, the major result on Byzantine Fault-Tolerance (BFT) had been a system called PBFT which although innovative and first of its kind, suffered several limitations. One of them was that any node in the network needed to have a complete list of the other nodes in the network, another was high-overhead, and communication complexity.
The innovation of Bitcoin cannot be explained without providing full-context of many different topics (defining asynchronicity, FLP result etc.) but the crux of it is that it offered a way to circumvent these limitations by massaging some of the requirements and cleverly aligning incentives such that you get a system where: 1/ safety is preserved even in an adversarial setting 2/ anyone can join/leave 3/ you get some degree of asynchronicity, 4/ many other things.
I realize this cannot be a satisfactory or exhaustive exposition of all the innovation that Bitcoin introduces but that would turn this comment into x10 its current length.
> I'm disappointed of HN comments whenever cryptocurrency topics come up.
Couldn't agree with you more, however, this story is not about a significant advancement in technology and people are reading too much blockchain into it.
This new investment product is nothing to do with 'proof of stake' or the ethics of bitcoin mining. In essence it is a fund that is backed by bitcoin that has been purchased privately without going through exchanges people know about, e.g. Coinbase.
People investing in this fund do not have their transactions recorded on the blockchain. The bank simply have bitcoin in cold storage to back the fund in a similar way to how banks used to have gold in a vault. With legacy banking the gold did not physically move every time someone used the ATM. Same here, no bitcoins get moved.
This is not a difficult story to understand. There is no need for people to be getting uppity about it and to downvote those that bring information to the story that is obfuscated by how the crypto-media have described it thus far from their understanding of the press releases made available.
We don't have to keep current cryptocurrencies around just because there was a CS breakthrough in its first implementation.
Should keep all of these shitcoins and ICO scams around because 1/100 might be legit while 99/100 of them do real damage to investors? Or do you want to keep them around because a CS breakthrough being implemented takes precedence over enforcing financial fraud?
I don't mind the skepticism. What's disappointing to me is that the comments usually rehash the same tired arguments and ignore the actual article. What's the point?
Well....There is a stark difference in appreciation for TCP/IP the computer science protocol versus the Cesspool that is the internet or the early AOL crap...
"If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry" - Satoshi Nakamoto
Our job is to keep on grinding to bring these things into fruition.
It's a shame that scammers in the space have turned most technologists against Bitcoin. But really, there's nothing that can be done other than to keep pushing.
Keep up the fight. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But really, this mud flinging is distraction. And yeah, there's a bloody lot of it.
HN is incredibly homogenious across certain verticals, crypto being one of them. The earth is flat and you'll be downvoted if you suggest otherwise. All ideas should be up for fair debate and, at worst, let the "wrong" side choose to believe what they please, unless you think your thoughts need external censoring as well.
No, I would never downvote for opinions expressed.
But I certainly downvote ludicrous and dishonest statements like Visa consumes more energy than bitcoin and here's why.
While theoritcally true here's the thing:
While one bitcoin transaction consumes 1'005 kWh of energy 100'000 visa transactions require 169 kWh.[1]
Trying to frame that in a way that Visa is more expensive than Bitcoin, energy wise, is a deeply dishonest sleight of hand, which absolutely deserves to be downvoted into oblivion.
What are the heuristics for computing your chart? How much energy was it to make the plastic on the credit card terminals? Do bankers drive Priuses or Cadillacs? What if Bitcoin eliminates 50,000 bankers's air-conditioned office desks?
Is Bitcoin's cost per transaction a fixed number or improving in efficiency? What if planes were "downvoted" 10 years after invention due to inefficiency over rail transport?
People are forgetting that Nakamoto Consensus is a legitimate CS breakthrough concerning the Byzantine Generals Problem.
Is it acceptable to bash every stock in the Nasdaq just because a second tech bubble popped and some SV companies are behaving unscrupulously?
Frenzied speculation brought about inadvertent side effects but these should not detract from the fact that significant advancements are continuously being researched and implemented.