An investigation identified national security risks posed by a crypto facility in Wyoming. It is near an Air Force base and a data center doing work for the Pentagon.
That’s the big environmental issue with Bitcoin — other major cryptocurrencies have moved to proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work, so they don’t need vast quantities of energy, and when you stop using all that energy, the generators with the highest marginal cost shut down, which generally means coal or gas.
A few months ago I read up on how much energy is used in a bitcoin transaction compared to a VISA transaction, it was something like 10000 times more energy for a bitcoin transaction
Because the stakeholders become the new central bank, with all the same motivations and conflicts of interest. You end up with a “staked class” and an “unstaked class”.
This is a contributing factor to why ethereum can be rolled back: because the stakeholders didn’t like it.
Bitcoin essentially has the same thing though — it’s just that the “staked class” is those who have built power-devouring ASIC facilities to compute lots of hashes. Get enough of them together, and you can roll back transactions via a Sybil attack, just as you can with organized action by stakeholders in a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency.
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That’s the big environmental issue with Bitcoin — other major cryptocurrencies have moved to proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work, so they don’t need vast quantities of energy, and when you stop using all that energy, the generators with the highest marginal cost shut down, which generally means coal or gas.
A few months ago I read up on how much energy is used in a bitcoin transaction compared to a VISA transaction, it was something like 10000 times more energy for a bitcoin transaction
10000 seems generous to Bitcoin given a single transaction takes 1.3 megawatt hours. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-network-use-391280
You are absolutely right, I must be off by an order of magnitude.
Proof of stake is just the Fed all over again.
Proof of work isn’t perfect, but there’s a reason Bitcoin uses it.
What’s the reason? Using more electricity than whole nations just to move some money around hardly seems worth the cost.
Because the stakeholders become the new central bank, with all the same motivations and conflicts of interest. You end up with a “staked class” and an “unstaked class”.
This is a contributing factor to why ethereum can be rolled back: because the stakeholders didn’t like it.
Bitcoin essentially has the same thing though — it’s just that the “staked class” is those who have built power-devouring ASIC facilities to compute lots of hashes. Get enough of them together, and you can roll back transactions via a Sybil attack, just as you can with organized action by stakeholders in a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency.
…because it was too early to know any better and the creators are stubborn, lazy, and passively malicious?