Topic: Sustainable alternative to bitcoin (Read 347 times)

if we have 100 points of electricity in the world doesn't mean that 10 industries are are allowed to use 10 points each equally. Energy consumption and costs should be weighted on the technology that are available at the moment. There are worldwide spread technologies in both conventional (Visa/Mastercard) and crypto world (ETH) that have a way to do transaction in a faster way. It would be a nice trip for one time do a tour with an old vintage train but that doesn't mean everyone should you use in 2024, for multiple reasons, sustainability is one of them.

From a safety prospective considering the current market cap of ETH an attack could cost a lot more for ETH than BTC probably, as posted here:
https://unchainedcrypto.com/51-attacks-on-bitcoin-and-ethereum-impossible-coinmetrics/

Even though I thought that a deflationary asset as a currency for transaction was cool when I first heard about bitcoin, examples in the last 100 years of deflationary period have not been good. On the other hand to money printing that we witnessed during and also after COVID wasn't good either for example. Therefore I do not think it will ever be the main type of currency, but like gold nowadays, a store of value better than cash but less than stocks once it will reach a fair market evaluation.

Moreover, I do not think a lot of people (including me) really know how crypto really works. I cannot find really good data published recently but even among long term holders around me that is little knowledge on the differences between one crypto or another, how can you run a node, how much does it cost, so no one really cares about the impact.

The concept of environmentally friendly has actually been answered because the consumption of mining if you look at several industrial plants or so on actually looks the same but only bitcoin is considered not environmentally friendly because they always give their best and some people don't like it so the concept of bitcoin even though it is always updated even for El Savador which is currently planning to develop resources with its volcanoes as an alternative to supporting electricity still will not be used as an innovation to change environmentally friendly because bitcoin will not be considered like that for some people.

Indeed bitcoin will use a lot of power and this is considered environmental destruction but in the end if you look at the current conditions with several industrial plants that are always working and trying to dispose of residual waste and even exploitation in several countries to find alternatives such as fuel for battery manufacturing in the end this also becomes another version of environmental destruction that is not considered because only bitcoin is always considered to damage the environment.

Thank you. You convinced me to NOT go all in to BTC with my crypto portfolio, I do not see it as a strong viable option in the future (long-long term) unless it changes. For now it is has the advantage to be the first, the most known and everything else, but I have doubt in the future, and, to remain to the most known alternatives, ETH community showed the will to change in a more sustainable and scalable way. Speculative bubbles come and go, from the tulip bulb to the financial crisis of 2008, but paradigm shift on the way we do transaction and more and more will stay here for quite a while. That's my take for now. I will keep looking for alternatives. Have a nice bull run!  

as far as I know since most of government already starting to approve BTC mining anyway, they might advocate to use greenery and renewable energy in the future, seeing the urgency, also government around the world can incentivize the use of green energy for this kind of thing, including AI computing power if they are really willing to develop that sector in their country because I consider mining and AI sector to be the same in regard of energy utilization, they have no choice but to support it eventually.

so far there's no better alternative compared to current bitcoin, proof of work is a necessity for the biggest crypto there is in the market i wouldn't expect things to change soon.

there has been coverage about mining farm where they build their own source of electricity which make it "green" but the news like to inflate number on electricity usage of BTC without considering that those green energy solely built for these mining farm by the miner doesn't exist if BTC didnt exist.

Presumably because they do not have a long holder mentality then, because those are situations in which is mostly just a matter of time to become a long holder, and a large holder at that since the longer they leave a spare CPU working at it the larger as well as longer holder they will become.

Frankly if they don't have long term dedication they are just part of the background ups and downs, probably no help to mere investors since they'd probably just keep jumping ship from hype of the day day to day as it were, feeding the traders more than the investors since the traders thrive on the downs as well as the ups.


-MarkM-

I always see topics about greener energy for Bitcoin. People should look at the mining farms and see what kind of energy they're using. Most of the biggest farms have already concluded something to also save money from the mining expenses and so they are investing in renewable energy too.

It's impossible to have no consumption of power for mining Bitcoin.

There's a need for that and the asic miners need to consume power for them to work and that's why green energy or not, there's a need for it to be used. Elon Musk tweeted about this before and the market suddenly plunged.

Hello it seems there are some project trying to address this issue.
I have heard about this few months ago but i forgot  about it.

chack this
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/minima-potential-coin-in-the-future-5521916

or this

https://www.minima.global/

from their claim is possible to run mining on any device even mobile phone.
don't know what effect could it have on the device.

Maybe is worth to check.

Ok yes this is something different. We are talking here about projects that are under the radar for years, but if you talk with people to join such project, 99.9% tells you that it will jsut benefit the long holders.. No one wants to take even a look on the projects.

That ("At the moment it is imposible for small regular people to participate in crypto world") is not true at all.

That you imagine it is so seems to me to indicate that you either lack the gumption to pick an under the radar coin to mine or are presently mining as many such coins as you have a CPU core each to mine and are hoping by your post to discourage others from also throwing a few cores at them since if someone else points a core at one you are successfully mining each and every block of all by yourself with just a single core they will double the difficulty and halve the number of coins your under the radar mining will gain you over however many months or years it manages to continue to stay off the radar.

Back when BBQcoin was first introduced for example it fell off the radar pretty quick but that led to almost a year or so I think of being able to mine it with just one core each for a few people until some greedy person with a GPU came along and blew its difficulty back up. Before the resurgent enthusiasm for it managed to get it back onto an exchange I sold off most of mine, going down as low as only 70 bitcoins per hundred thousand BBQcoins by the time an exchange listed it and promptly tanked the price. That was a DOGE-like coin before DOGE came along, maybe the first actual memecoin arguably.

I dumped it completely because as nothing but a memecoin I did not think it worth bothering with at that point but nowadays for anyone into memes in reality rather than just as a scam to take advantage of like some people participate knowingly in ponzis just to take advantage of them knowing full well they are ponzis BBQcoin might make sense being earlier even than DOGE thus presumably of historical significance.

Do you have the gumption to actually stick with a coin and build it?

Remember that as the minter aka miner who mines aka mints the IOUs known as coins it is really ultimately your responsibility to actually build a decent buy-side for it as if you the issuer of the IOUs don't value them nor honour them it doesn't really make any sense for anyone else to do so...


-MarkM-

Sad thing is that latest release crypto currency projects dont follow the initial idea behind crypto as such (to make people free from the broken fiat system). All the projects are hyped by paid influencers. Crypto has lost its spark. When I talk now with people and tell them lets create a simple crypto which will be mined by regular people (for which it was created) no one wants to help with it. But I still think that it might be worth it to try it. At the moment it is imposible for small regular people to participate in crypto world.

The fact you mentioned profit as less important shows you can fit in with other alternatives, aside from privacy what else is considered important. Don’t know why you’re getting this impression of changing bitcoin or adding something you consider important, unfortunately nothing will change but let’s assume there’s a good alternative. Even if there’s any I’m sure bitcoin would surpass definitely, secondly no alternative has ever gotten to this level meaning bitcoin needs no change rather it’s perfect IMO.

Who care about Energy most of us are investors or traders let the miners care about that SHIT 

you can find many alternatives to bitcoin out there that claim to offer more than what bitcoin offers, but these alternatives are still alternatives and do not replace bitcoin completely. bitcoin is used by more people, is trusted, and has been proven over time. even if there are some issues that people raise about the bitcoin network, such as that it is still supported by mining activities that use fossil energy and contribute to carbon emissions, but that should not be a serious problem because the use of fossil energy by miners has been drastically reduced and mining equipment is more efficient and effective now, making the bitcoin network more eco-friendly.

Well this is not technically true.

It's true that you can't force the change, but change can happen if majority of the people and miners want that to happen. However i can't see this happening because any forks / radical changes to code, takes away the main thing bitcoin code has over others, and that's the test of time. Also it would create division with bitcoiners and distrust from investors.

Bitcoin not only encourages the development of better energy production but also provides a way to monetise it even in areas where population has not yet congregated around the new energy source to take advantage of it, so it seems more a part of any potential solutions than a part of any actual problems.

Any idea how much energy fiat and gold burn per year?


-MarkM-

Yes, Pow is more secure than Pos, due to the computational power required to validate transactions on the Blockchain. Which the difficult increases after 2016 blocks. Although, decentralized, not everybody can participate due to the cost of energy, it's hard for any group, firm or even government to sponsor the expenses needed to perform an attack on the network. POS on the other hand doesn't look secure compared to POW.

Both methods have their own problems (PoS and PoW).
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/pools
From this charts it is clear to me that mining is centralized, as more than 51% of it it's done by big companies, because the computational power to mine and secure the network is so huge that normal people can not compete with them on securing the network. If PoS defeats the purpose of decentralization by risking the future of the currency in the hand of few, PoW does the same with mining. Of course big mining companies will probably not attack BTC because it will drag the price down, but that could be said as well for the big whales in PoS, it is the same logic.
I am just trying to analyze the situation here, I will definately put a small % of my portfolio in BTC but I am questioning if the decentralization is still in place. One solution could be to give mining back to people with an easier PoW if BTC does not really wants to switch to PoS, but from the link of the https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html it seems (but I am ignorant) that big wallets have a really tiny tiny part of the whole pool. The same entity can have more wallets true, but here we have 4 mining/pooling companies with more than 51% of the mining against the biggest 100 wallets with less than 1%. At a first glance PoS to me could be better. And apart from the controlling power of more than 51% of the coin value reason, are there any other reasons while it is less secure than PoW?

I still don't get the main point of your question, are you questioning Bitcoin (BTC) with its consensus which is said to be not environmentally friendly, then you question about other alternatives that should be used such as the use of PoS. Or are you wondering about altcoins that are suitable as alternatives to Bitcoin (BTC).

When it comes to consensus, I think PoW is the best for Bitcoin (BTC), because if it switches to PoS, $BTC will lose its main strength, which is decentralization.

When it comes to sustainability, we have no questions about bitcoin because it is proven and tested. Bitcoin has nothing to prove, now that other alternative cryptocurrencies actually have it.
It's up to us how we conduct research on them.

Because we know that the risk is high in other altcoins, especially in these times when many are emerging that I can also say have potential
because of its partners who support them and the tokenomics is also good.

I mean BTC must be less power consuming before, since mining difficulty was also less but later on it increased a lot, however it might still be lesser compared to those big factories and similar. If we don't like how it works, a better solution would be is to just don't use it or just go with other cryptos.

There are plenty of them and I'm sure we can find what we are looking for on the other. There are already lots of forks of BTC as well but creating our own can be good option too. so that we can achieve what we really want. It can only cost us more money and then some of our time but that must be worth it at the end. The anti-BTC power blah blah blah, is still there but it is only sleeping, and other FUD's are only in action for a while.

Are you really buying those narratives saying that bitcoin is destroying the nature? I don't know why there's lots of people believe such nonsense thoughts since if you look at the other causes for sure those big companies producing toxic waste pollution and car dealers is the one who's destroying our planet. Also for sure that we cannot see some changes which you think for bitcoin since provably that Bitcoin will remain like that. This is the reason why there's lots of institution likes bitcoin since from current state bitcoin is cannot be controlled by anyone.

You may try to find some alts that may fit on what you are seeking, but Bitcoin will remain great compare to other alts out there.

I agree that we can generate energy in a lot of other ways, it doesn't mean that we can generate it forever, it just doesn't really feel that simple. Most green energy methods still can't even cover a tiny fraction of what we have, and that means we are going to run out of energy sources eventually, so lowering the consumption is still the better method we have, because generating more isn't sustainable in the end.

What we need is to figure out the security part of bitcoin, because otherwise, we can just make it a proof of stake just like ethereum and be done with it, but we are not doing that because it would not be a simple thing to move all of this to a new chain and have the same security on it. It took ETH many years to do it and that was ETH, it would be near impossible for BTC.

why so fixated on reducing power consumption if you can seek greener energy like from nuclear plant?

moving forward I'd expect we will see cheaper electricity and energy in general because technology advances, at that point bitcoin's power consumption will just be a measly little consumption compared to the produced energy.
even right now so many of bitcoin miners are using green renewable energy.

even without bitcoin's big energy consumption we will eventually run out of fossil energy anyway. as for the reason why bitcoin consume that much power, it's because to mantain security of the blockchain, there's alternative like PoS, but the security is doubted.

honestly, even right now I don't think bitcoin consumes that much energy.

No. Until today nobody has been capable of innovating after what Satoshi did 15 years ago and it is also too soon to expect any revolution in the cryptocurrency world.

I don't know what you have in mind when you use the term "industrialized" but a PoW coin can be attacked only if mining were centralized. Something that is not true about bitcoin.

That would be like opening your fridge to cool down your house.

No, that is not possible. As I said above, there has been no revolutionary innovation after Bitcoin. The PoS algorithm was created a very long time ago and it quickly became obsolete because of the fundamental flaws in it. But because it helps shitcoins with premine to give the centralized authority a lot of profit, many shitcoins like ETH use it.

I liked you're reply. Thanks! Isn't there anything at the moment that similar to BTC but that has transaction acceptable for day to day use (like in a second or something), and that doesn't need an ASIC to be validated, but the computational power of a good phone or a normal pc, with a random reward? So big companies will not be that interested in the validation process if everyone could validate transaction just having their phone turned on that they have anyway btw



You should compare apples to apples, not apples with oranges. From a sustainability point of view Visa wins over BTC for example. For one BTC transaction I could make hundreds of thousands with the same energy consumption. If I want to mine BTC at this moment at home just for "believing in it" I will lose money in electricity everyday and polluting the environment for no reason



It would be cool to crowdfund to fork it right? Thanks for the reply. Sorry, but denying that bitcoin doesn't use that much energy it is a bit like saying that you believe that the earth is flat. There are trustable sources online that states that it uses more energy than entire countries. And it is not still that spread worldwide, imagine if everyone uses it multiple times a day. Maybe when it was thought the environmental impact of the technology wasn't taken into account? I like BTC over any other fiat currency, and satoshi and the community in general did a great job, but is it perfect? Can it be improved with this in mind? Is there anyone in the community working on it? or the "zealots" as you say are gone?

We’ve been here before with green energy zealots. Bitcoin really doesn’t use that much energy, if you don’t like the way it works you’re welcome to crowdfund to fork it & do your own thing. The anti Bitcoin power consumption rhetoric is dead, you’ll have to find something else to FUD about.

The gaming industry requires way more GPUs than Bitcoin technology. Companies with big infrastructures require frequent upgrades and updates in their machinery. I have never seen people talking about the trash being produced for all those things, but people start questioning Bitcoin and its technology as soon as they come to know it is mined using GPUs. The world was producing too much trash even before Bitcoin was created. So let's not consider that being a huge issue for human existence.


That doesn't matter. If you know its use cases and how it can benefit you, you can use it that way. Let people use it the way they want.


Here: Top 100 richest Bitcoin addresses

Every algorithm sooner or later tends to centralization.
The problem is that every protocol promotes competition instead of collaboration.

In proof of work the advantage is on the side of the entity(ies) that invest more energy
and efficiency in the process of mining therefore the ones who have more money
to invest in hardware have more chance to win the lottery.

In prof of stake the advantage is on the side of the entity(ies) that have more coins
and locks more coins into the process of staking therefore the ones who have more money
to buy the coins have more chance to win the lottery.

In both cases there is a limit to participation by the flawed design.

To be more sustainable and democratic the algorithm should allow everyone to participate without limit
and not favoring persons or entities with more money, otherwise is not better that the current fiat (financial) system.

I hope that sooner or later someone will find a better algorithm and protocol that will achieve this
but until then we have to live with what we have.

What makes bitcoin unsustainable?
What do you mean by "greener BTC"?

In future, I don't know what can happen but as things stand, I don't see any other coin that can have an overall better technology than Bitcoin while also having other features of Bitcoin.
developing another coin just like Bitcoin will just make it a copycat and people won't trust that kind of coin. Also, nobody will create a coin like bitcoin and not like to gain from it. I doubt people would like to do what Satoshi did with bitcoin.
The power consumption of bitcoin is something that is very overrated. A lot of other consumption we use every day consumes more power than Bitcoin. This power consumption gimmick was just another anti bitcoin gimmick.

Yeah but forget about the price, I do not really care if an altcoin is low in value, as it was BTC when it was born, if a tool fixes a problem it will get its evaluation correctly eventually. The main problem is that even if we use green energy every 6months/1 year a new ASIC miner comes out, way more efficient. What about the life cycle assessment of the old ones? It's not just about electricity. The amount of trash that gets produced is unimaginable and at the current state the main usage of BTC for normal people is to buy and hold or to speculate, not the "electronic cash" meant in the white paper. Is this PoS that big of a threat now that BTC is relatively well spread worldwide? Is there a way to trace wallets with a huge amount of BTC that can pose a threat to the system? Have those information ever been evaluated?

No, bitcoin would never switch to proof of stake, that would be 100 steps backward for the network, proof of stake consensus algorithm also promotes centralization, we can agree that it is not the best for a decentralized network.

Bitcoin functions just fine the way it is now, and some of the things you read about it in the mainstream media is just propaganda published to discourage people from using and supporting bitcoin.

This is been a long debate Bitcoin can be sustainable and can be much greener if all the miner using renewable energy that most of the bitcoin mining company trying do their best to fullfill this and a lot other gonna follow. The chip manufacturer of ASIC miner also always creating new efficient chip each year

Sustainable alternative to bitcoin if you want the altcoin than you can pick the Ethereum that already transition from the Proof of Work to Proof of Stake that much greener.

There are alternatives to bitcoin. But the question is are they worth it? Example is litecoin which is just a bitcoin carbon copy. But if you check its all-time high and compare it with today's price, you will noticed that it is not worth going for. Also is monero which most people will say is better than bitcoin when it comes to privacy, but if you check the price, you will also be discouraged. Others that I know are either centralized or not worth. Even bitcoin is far better than the altcoins as they are pump and dump. In term of adoption, no coin like bitcoin.

The concern is that it might make Bitcoin centralized, as those with substantial holdings could have greater influence over the network. Transitioning from PoW to PoS isn’t easy as well, as it requires community coordination. This idea has been discussed before, but Bitcoin has still operates using PoW, so I doubt that will change in the future. Miners will just need to find sustainable energy sources to keep their operations running.

Oh, and BTW, here's a unique source of energy use in mining (this will be added to the other sources we have - solar, wind, and hydroelectric).

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/el-salvador-bitcoin-news/el-salvador-plans-241-megawatt-renewable-plant-for-bitcoin-mining

Completely understand that, but mining is heavily industrialized at the moment and POW could suffer attacks from it, correct? I think this kind of defeat the whole purpose of decentralization. There are videos online of people that mine just to warm up their houses in winter and breaking it even. I do not think that is sustainable. Can BTC switch to PoS in the future and remaining safe at the same time?

No one can change how Bitcoin's system works, it’s built to consume a lot of power for mining. But the real solution isn’t to change Bitcoin; it’s to innovate in how we generate energy. with that said, renewable energy sources like solar and wind power are the key to addressing this.

As technology advances, we’ll have better ways to produce cleaner and more efficient energy. So, in the long run, power consumption won’t be as big of a problem. Instead, it’ll push us toward adopting more sustainable energy solutions, which benefits everyone, not just Bitcoin.

Could BTC become more sustainable for the planet in the future? Can a greener BTC become the best alternative to itself? If not, are there alternatives out there that share the same good aspect (safety, decentralization), without the power consumption of this technology? As a daily use, BTC is at the moment unsustainable from what I know. Are there technical aspect that can change in the bitcoin technology itself? is there another alternative?