blahblahblah wrote:
Mining is a (maybe) necessary evil so that trust can be built on immature networks where no naturally trustworthy leaders have emerged yet. Bitcoin allows proof-of-stake to be added. Whereas perpetual POW crappyness is implausible.
I strongly disagree. Mining is not a necessary evil, because it helps process the transactions, which costs energy, which in turn provides energy. Bitcoin miners are simply fish in a pond.
I'll throw some numbers out to illustrate what I mean.
As a rule of thumb, mining cost tends to asymptotically "catch up" with price, kinda.
So let's say 1
BTC costs $800 to make.
A block with 25
BTC = $20k of cost.
Now,
putting ideologies and general awesomeness aside for a moment, in a different system those 25 bitcoins might have been printed for free. OK, call it "$5" because even typing some numbers into a database must cost something.
The other $19.995k is basically global warming, burnt coal for electricity, and landfills stuffed with dead ASICs. As some would it, "economic devastation" and a cancerous dead weight.
And how many transactions are packed into each block? A few hundred? Sweet! Only $50 of socialised habitat destruction (per transaction, that is) to pay for the "provable inflation rate". At least it's not as bad as that extortionate minimum fee. *sigh*
But surely I've misunderstood something? What about the awesomeness of decentralised proof-of-work, making it all transparent and honest? Well, the cost is so extreme that I'm questioning whether it's worth it. AnonyMint did not want to have that discussion. He would rather repeatedly shout out his conclusions and his
pre-existing, US-centric rationale about centralisation and evil governments. However, when questioned about the heart of the issue, he kept deleting my posts.
Another reason for my questioning is the high volatility. It's clear that a
"transparent, honest, provable rate of increase in the money supply" does not produce nice smooth exchange rate graphs in practice. "Trust in the maths" is all over the place:
1
BTC = $800 of trust-in-the-maths one week,
1
BTC = $600 of trust-in-the-maths the next week.
Obviously something doesn't quite add up, there. There must be some other factor/s affecting exchange rates. How about liquidity, flow, chaotic changes in holdings? Scale of adoption might have an effect, and it could be argued that exchange rates will become more stable as the market saturates. 4~5 years might not be long enough to see a long-term trend on log charts. (More on that, later.)
To be fair on Bitcoin, it does seem extremely well thought-out and elegant in its simplicity:
Block rewards are reduced over time, and tendencies to centralise and form natural monopolies (think: mining pools) are not cock-blocked by ideology. Innovation and evolution: from CPU mining, to GPUs, FPGAs and custom ASICs was free and unhindered all the way. However, some people would prefer a design that is deliberately crippled (read: micromanaged and prematurely optimised) to block these natural processes. AnonyMint himself argued extensively about entropic force and power law distribution -- so why the blind spot?