Does anyone thing that this recent media bombardment about the massive energy waste of bitcoin - it’s just a diversion to stop us focusing on the massive energy waste of data-centres?
These are huge warehouses that (do many things but mostly) spend massive energy and hardware on training AI, to better manipulate people.
Data centres power a huge amount of digital infrastructure that billions of people rely on.
Bitcoin powers a distributed ledger that can process at most 7 transactions per second for the small number of people who can afford the fees.
As of right now, bitcoin consumes about as much power as all of Egypt.
The worst part is that it isn’t even necessary. There are coins that use much more efficient consensus mechanisms (e.g. ADA, IOTA and NANO). These coins can process many more transactions for less (or no) fees.
yes the data centres also do useful things. but have you read about the amount of energy consumed to train a single ai? and how many they train, and how the consumption is rising exponentially?
it’s just as shocking as this PoW thing.
but are the ai doing anything useful to justify this? probably nobody knows.
nano
Consensus is reached through an algorithm similar to proof of stake named Open Representative Voting (ORV). In this system, the voting weight is distributed to accounts based on the amount of NANO they hold: accounts then freely delegate this weight to a node of their choice. In the event that two contradictory transactions are broadcast to the network (as in a double spend attempt), nodes vote for one of them and broadcast their vote to the other nodes. The first transaction to reach 67% of the total voting weight is confirmed, and the other discarded.
iota
The network currently[when?] achieves consensus through a coordinator node, operated by the IOTA Foundation.[4] As the coordinator is a single point of failure, the network is currently[when?] centralized.
ada
Cardano uses a proof-of-stake protocol named Ouroboros
so they all have serious flaws too.
monero has a very good mining strategy though. it may be the perfect solution.
but monero has other technical problems that might prevent mass adoption. probably the ultimate global currency is not one that exists yet.
I don’t see the issue with Nano or Cardano’s consensus algorithm, could you elaborate?
I wrote a too-long answer. Here’s a short version. Long version below the line.
There are a lot of alternatives to proof of work. Proof of stake is one. You can read about the known problems with proof of stake anywhere, so I’ll give you my opinion instead.
It’s too easy for a few people (or one person) to make a lot of money early on, buy a lot of coin. They those few guys control the currency, they make the rules. That’s too easy an attack. In a normal currency, if the few richest people can make the rules about the money supply, there are so many ways that could lead to disaster. It’s already a big problem today that banks have some leverage over the central bank and the rich and lobby governments. PoS makes this already serious problem much much worse.
Bitcoin was revolutionary. It was the first proper working cryptocurrency, so it had to work - it had to be robust and simple. Satoshi chose a simple PoW which is impossible to attack. Nobody has hacked bitcoin mining yet, after so many years. That’s a real achievement. Many much newer cryptographic functions (and currencies) have already been hacked. The downside - it wastes electricity and leads to centralisation. Not too bad a tradeoff. The amount of energy now being wasted on mining just means that bitcoin is much too successful.
If you get votes based on how much money you have, it’s easy for the rich to make rules that give them extra power over the poor. Giving the rich extra powers is historically the problem with everything in the world. It’s led to all the world’s global wars and revolutions. But we are moving slowly towards democracy. Democracy is the contradiction of PoS.
Yeah, that’s a really good point actually. I guess both sources of waste don’t cancel each other out.
in some ways… the problem could be solved if people just switch to using wBTC instead. it’s a currency on the eth network with the price tied directly to the price real btc.
“we could all own a small slice of nothing” they will say. (because the price will literally go down to nothing if people stop buying it.) but i don’t believe it was ever about achieving some incredible price target. all that matters is if the price acts predictable. the lower prices are fine imo. more volatility.although nontraders(holders) are against the idea of trading.
Owning wBTC will still push the price of BTC up and incentivise mining and therefore energy and electronic waste.
