Topic: Bitcoin Is Having Its Moment But There Are Better Sustainable Currencies (Read 4994 times)

The energy used needn't increase as the network is used more, so the current situation needn't get worse. As the block reward halves, it will become easier to manage the total cost of mining by controlling transaction fees.

(I think the opposite will happen. The energy cost of Bitcoin will likely reduce over time, for the reason given below.)

It won't be a problem for the miners because they can drop out in good time. However, that doesn't answer the question. As the miners stop investing, the network becomes less secure.

The security of the network against an outside attack is roughly what it would cost to mount such an attack, which is roughly what it would cost to acquire 51% of the hashing power, which for reasons of economics is directly proportional to the real-world value that miners get paid for mining one block. So if the block reward halves, and Bitcoin value, transaction volume and fee-per-transaction stay the same, then the security of the network halves. So it's really a question of how low can it get before it matters.

That's a matter of opinion, and your threat model. Some say the network is already vulnerable. Some say Bitcoin it is actually over-secured now.

Personally I am in the former group. An attack might cost someone like a bank $100m. HSBC got fined $1.9bn for money laundering. UBS got fined $1.5bn for rigging Libor. If those guys felt seriously threatened by Bitcoin, $100m is easily affordable to them. Since a lot of ASICs are made in China, the Chinese government could probably do it with a phone call. A terrorist might manage it by kidnapping the ASIC manufacturer's daughter. Not to mention we've already seen hash pools hovering around 51%, that we're basically just trusting not to mount an attack. Many people in the Bitcoin community are complacent, in my view.

Can you stop copying articles word for word from other sites? Post the original you clickbaiter.

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/bitcoin-crypto-currency-sustainable-alternatives


Any way to stop this guy from posting his links to his personal metal site here?

Nope, for these reasons:

1) All other open source block-chain currencies depend upon the success of Bitcoin. If Bitcoin fails than doubt of long term survivability will be cast upon them as well.

2) The network effect is strong within protocols that have developers and hardware designed around them. The same reason other technologies are scaffold-ed around IPv4 and HTML despite any weaknesses and flaws in them is the same reason Bitcoin will succeed.

3) Bitcoin has many ardent supporters , some would suggest are "religiously" devoted to Bitcoin. Because of this Bitcoin will never go to 0 and always hold value even as a collector item.

BTCBTCBTCBTCBTC

SEAT BELTS ON - STRAPPED IN!

That's quite possible. But I highly doubt BTC will be ever be dead.

Even as cryptocurrency evolves beyond Bitcoin, since Bitcoin was the original and scarce crypto so it will probably end up considered something like gold. Scarce and valuable, not as good as alternatives for use as a daily currency, but a good store of value.

For all we know BTC could be dead in a few years and another coin could be worth MORE than what bitcoin's price is now, maybe even higher than BTC highest, who knows?

It won't be a problem because the number of minors won't change suddenly. While a drop of 50% in the block reward seems like a lot, it really isn't, because it's the some order of magnitude. It would be a big drop if it happened without warning, but minors plan their purchases will in advance.

A 50% drop in block reward means a 50% drop in mining revenue, assuming everything else stays the same (transactions fees and the BTC exchange rate), which in theory could mean a 50% drop in the number of minors. At that number, the network would still be considered secure, based on the current numbers.

Today, the block reward is half what is was 4 years ago. The BTC exchange rate, however, is much more that twice what it was. I believe that statement will be true for decades to come. Thus, there will always be enough minors.

There is no law that says Bitcoin must be the singular currency. There is no proof that it's even possible for a global singular currency to function. There's also no reason it cannot.

The question is: How high will the transaction rate have to be to incentivise enough miners to keep the network secure?

Or: How low can the difficulty fall for the network to be considered secure?

The idea is that by the time Bitcoin is mined out there would be more transactions going from a > b to sustain the amount of miners that would be staying in the game. Difficulty adjusts itself as miners leave making it more profitable

Why do you think the huge energy waste wont be a deal breaker? What will happen when all BTC are mined?


The conclusion of your second sentence doesn't follow from the premise, because your first premise is wrong imo:

P1: If a "Proof of X" currency hasn't already made it big, it never will.
P2: Proof of Stake has not made it big.

C: PoS will never make it big.


P1 was proven wrong in the past, when PoW made it big. Would you have said the same about bitcoin before it was big?

Actually I thing energy consumption wont be any deal breaker regarding future world currencies. PoS will never make it big, if they would they would have done it already.

There are many kinds of 51% attacks, but I gather that is the kind you want to talk about.

As an aside, I think the most likely kind of Bitcoin 51% attack is one that rejects transactions with low fees. Since that would benefit miners in the long run, they might see no need to avoid mining pools. I'll be mildly surprised if this doesn't become a real concern in 2 or 6 years, when the block-reward halves.

As far as I can tell, what you have in mind is like 50% of Americans deciding to boycott Walmart. It's not likely. I'm not sure where you get "only 51%" from. 51% is a lot.

You seem to be saying anonymity is a two-edged sword.

In Nxt, the blocks are signed by the accounts that forged them, so we'd know which accounts to blame. There's not much anonymity in Nxt. If a single entity gains 51% of NXT, then its true Nxt has a huge problem. I think an attack like you describe would destroy all confidence in the currency, so the entity would lose the value of their coins. It'd be very expensive for them.

Trying to buy 51% of NXT will be very expensive and will push the price up. Dumping 51% of NXT will crash the price, so they won't be sold at the price they were bought for. The attacker will lose a lot of money. The price crash would be a problem, even without the attack.

I think you are underestimating how difficult it is to get 51% of NXT. It's not like in Bitcoin, where entities have got that much hashpower almost by accident. In Bitcoin, you can get it almost unilaterally, by buying from ASIC manufacturers who have no stake in the currency. To get 51% of NXT, you have to persuade people who own NXT to sell to you. Likewise, to sell afterwards you'd have to persuade someone else to buy. Nxt has been running for 8 or 9 months now, and has had the third highest market cap for much of that time, but no-one has done the attack you describe.

Barriers to entry for proof of work?  Can you design and manufacture ASICs using the latest manufacturing techniques?  Can you get economies of scale necessary to do the work profitably?   Proof of work is all about who ever is willing to do the most work for least gain and no one is more effective at that than government.

If someone bought up 51% of the BitShares then you thank them for their money and start a new chain without them.  Without the barriers to entry represented by Proof of Work you can easily start a new chain.  With proof of work however, there is nothing you can do to start a new chain.   

It doesn't matter what POW algorithm you use, economies of scale will always favor government.

So what are the barriers? Intellectual barriers? Perhaps you'd be better off siding with the commie bastards that claim that bitcoin is too complex for the average joe thus distribution is not fair.

How can we know for certain that someone will not buy out Bitshares or Nxt to gain 51% or that the distribution was fair to begin with, you do get issued more currency the more you have after all. The current banking system is wasting such significant resources that if they all switched to Bitcoin it would cost less than 1% of the resources that the banking system is wasting currently, it's nothing more than propaganda aiming to harm BTC that the whole system "wastes" anything.

All that energy is allocated towards securing a monetary system in a decentralized manner and it does so in an extremely secure way requiring a fraction of the energy that centralized monetary systems use and I would rather have it take up 100,000 times as much energy as PoS and have it secure rather than based on words of tyrants.

Don't assume that POS means that an elite can issue and reverse transactions or get issued new currency.   Sure that may be the case with Peercoin, but it isn't the case with Nxt or BitShares.        

In fact, I would argue that POW means an elite can issue and reverse transactions because they can control the POW with their access to the latest manufacturing and economies of scale.   Regular users get debased with all POW systems.   So sheeple will tolerate POW based upon the bogus cost-theory-of-value economics.  

You see it isn't technology that rules, but the people using the technology the define what is "valid" or "legitimate".   So POS and POW are protected against inflation and arbitrary rule by the same social process.  POW just consumes 100's of millions in resources every year that make us all poorer while creating barriers to entry that protect the bitcoin elite.

So the ones they listed are a bunch of no name altcoins
Well if I get owned by them it's a fair point that I would not see those three coming.
That said one is the leader and one needs to be proven and that is going to be Bitcoin.

"sustainable" 

Proof of stake is shit, why would I use a currency where an elite can issue and reverse transactions as they please and only they get issued new currency, kind of reminds you of the existing monetary system doesn't it? The whole argument that if the elite would become tyrannical in a PoS system they would hurt themselves the most by devaluing their own assets is incredibly stupid, doesn't nearly every major monetary system create inflation in excess of the "ideal" or "projected" rate and the sheeple still eat it up? The sheeple can put up with a lot of abuse like razor thin safety margins, defaults, uneven distribution and even gambling away their life savings by letting criminal tyrants control them financially as long as you have a couple of clown experts in suits saying that it's all for the best.

lmao.  "proof of state"...that's rich!