Crypto, Bitcoin, ICO

[MisterNo]

Till something new comes out with this band, just to pass the time, are you guys into this?

 

I think it's gonna be huge in few years.

[soon]

I havent been able to wrap my head around crypto-currency completely. But I see lots in the news about bitcoin minings heavy energy use/environmental impact. Of course the bit people call it an overstatement, but from where I stand with reputable outlets claiming it takes so much energy, Im a little concerned about that aspect. From my limited understanding of the rest of bitcoins machinations and implications I definitely like the cyber-punk thing and privacy.

In Italy they have Cheese Banks and that I can wrap my head around. I guess Im much more analogue. Im 100% pro-Cheese Bank, lol.

Id love to learn more about crypto-currency.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/17/bitcoin-electricity-usage-huge-climate-cryptocurrency

Bitcoin’s electricity usage is enormous. In November, the power consumed by the entire bitcoin network was estimated to be higher than that of the Republic of Ireland. Since then, its demands have only grown. It’s now on pace to use just over 42TWh of electricity in a year, placing it ahead of New Zealand and Hungary and just behind Peru, according to estimates from Digiconomist. That’s commensurate with CO2 emissions of 20 megatonnes – or roughly 1m transatlantic flights.

That fact should be a grave notion to anyone who hopes for the cryptocurrency to grow further in stature and enter widespread usage. But even more alarming is that things could get much, much worse, helping to increase climate change in the process. 

Burning huge amounts of electricity isn’t incidental to bitcoin: instead, it’s embedded into the innermost core of the currency, as the operation known as “mining”. In simplified terms, bitcoin mining is a competition to waste the most electricity possible by doing pointless arithmetic quintillions of times a second. 

The more electricity you burn, and the faster your computer, the higher your chance of winning the competition. The prize? 12.5 bitcoin – still worth over $100,000 – plus all the transaction fees paid in the past 10 minutes, which according analysts’ estimates is another $2,500 or so.

This is a winner-takes-all game, where the prize is guaranteed to be paid to one, and only one, miner every 10 minutes. Burning more electricity increases your chances of winning, but correspondingly decreases everyone else’s – and so they have a motivation to burn more electricity in turn.

The economic outcome of all of this is laid bare in a Credit Suisse briefing note published on Tuesday: the network as a whole will reinvest almost all the bitcoin paid out as mining rewards back into its electricity consumption. (Credit Suisse’s ballpark figure assumes that 80% of the expenses of bitcoin miners are spent on electricity).

At current prices for electricity and bitcoin, the bank calculates a maximum profitable power draw of bitcoin at around 100TWh – two-and-a-half times higher than its current rate. Any higher and the miner will lose money.

But it gets worse. If bitcoin were to become the global currency its supporters hope it will, its pricewould increase. And if its price increases, so too does the amount of electricity miners can afford to burn. 

Credit Suisse estimate that a bitcoin price of $50,000 – five times its level as I write – would increase the electricity consumption tenfold. And at a bitcoin price of $1.1m, it would be profitable to use almost all the electricity currently generated in the world for mining.

The bank views the latter prospect as not worth worrying about, for two reasons: it doesn’t think bitcoin will ever reach that value, since the competition from other cryptocurrencies is too strong; and it thinks that power consumption of mining will fall over time as better technologies are used for miners. Credit Suisse explicitly compares bitcoin to marijuana cultivation and data centres, two other industries that once sparked fears they would have huge power draws.

I’m not convinced we should be so blasé. It’s true that bitcoin may face competition from other cryptocurrencies, but almost all its competitors use essentially the same wasteful mining system it does. If they took over pole position, it would be out of the frying pan and into the fire. (One major competitor, Ethereum, has long discussed moving to a “proof-of-stake” system, which would radically change its power use for the better, but the switchover still hasn’t happened. It’s currently scheduled for mid-2018.)

And while marijuana farmers and data centre engineers managed to reduce their power demands, the fundamentally wasteful nature of bitcoin mining means there’s no easy technological solution coming. 

Mining computers have become more power-efficient, with the latest generation of machines able to do roughly 20% more useless calculations per MWh of electricity. But in the zero-sum game of bitcoin mining, that just means a miner can afford to run more machines at the same time, leaving their power usage roughly stable.

In the end, there’s only one real reason why bitcoin’s energy consumption would fall, and that is if the price of the currency drops. 

On that point, there is good news to be had: bitcoin is down to just over $10,000, almost half the level it was trading at a month ago. If it continues to fall, we might be able to return to worrying about more conventional sources of climate change, like the automotive industry, plane travel, and Donald Trump.

[MisterNo]

I've been into it for a long time now, and I hold a part in 20 cryptocurrencies. But I'm not a bitcoin miner, and I agree with this huge power hungry mining being an eco problem.

But mining is only a part of the crypto world. There ara many advanteges that crypto brings over the classic fiat currencies and assets.

Also, you can find some reasoning why power consumtion is not only problem no solution kind of a deal:

https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/waste-electricity/

 

Overall, I see the crypto and especilly the blockchain being the new tech revolution that could change our lives  dramatically in ten years or so. We are still in the early adoption phase, but crypto is slowly gaining momentum to the mainstream.

 

If and when crypto becomes fully used, maybe bitcoin will not be THE currency (and most of the crypto's will fail in the end IMO) but I think some of them are here to stay for a long long time, and will ultimatelly change the world as we know it.

[soon]

Thanks for this info! Some fascinating stuff there. Some of it seems like padding the subject, but other points really resonated with me. Up-cycling the excess heat is a concept that really rings my bell. I try to do that type of thing in my home.

I was totally lost with how cryptos role in IoT is an eco friendly aspect though?

I think lowering carbon foot print mostly comes down to the growing popularity of the tech creating demand for higher efficiency. I hope the market takes care to push even beyond what consumers demand. But powering ming with solar and then essentially 'doubling' the solar output by also using for heat is a very exciting concept imo.

But I still dont get the basics, like if I buy some currency and people keep mining, doesnt the value of my investment depreciate? How does that work?

 

[Gracii Guns]

Any currency which is exclusive isn't a currency worth having. Money already causes so much division. Adding another degree of "haves" and "have nots" is not going to be good for any community. 

Edited July 5, 2018 by Gracii Guns

[MisterNo]

2 hours ago, soon said:

Thanks for this info! Some fascinating stuff there. Some of it seems like padding the subject, but other points really resonated with me. Up-cycling the excess heat is a concept that really rings my bell. I try to do that type of thing in my home.

I was totally lost with how cryptos role in IoT is an eco friendly aspect though?

I think lowering carbon foot print mostly comes down to the growing popularity of the tech creating demand for higher efficiency. I hope the market takes care to push even beyond what consumers demand. But powering ming with solar and then essentially 'doubling' the solar output by also using for heat is a very exciting concept imo.

But I still dont get the basics, like if I buy some currency and people keep mining, doesnt the value of my investment depreciate? How does that work?

 

Mining "creates" coin. And when all coins of one currency will be mines, miners will produce only transactions on the blockchain. So in short, generally, mining will not depreciate value of a coin.

 

In regard to IoT, what is being said... Is that blockchain technology is already a solution for machine to machine payments, that will be needed in  IoT.

[MisterNo]

12 minutes ago, Gracii Guns said:

Any currency which is exclusive isn't a currency worth having. Money already causes so much division. Adding another degree of "haves" and "have nots" is not going to be good for any community. 

You are wrong there. Fiat currencys are heavily controlled and manipulated by countries, dividing people and worlds wealth. Ultimatelly, cypto is a chance for clean start. Can be used globally, isnt controlled by states, and it hase defitive number. No money printing!

[Crazyman]

I sold about 2/3's of my bitcoin once the run-up hit 10-15k last year. Paid a huge capital gains tax because I got lucky and bought them for an average of like 3k per. 

I would've got them at an average of like 1k if my bank didn't fuck me over (ironically, considering what crypto is), because I wanted to bet on who would win the MVP in football but got denied. Ended up using a business bank account to do it a few months later.

Also dabbled a bit in some alts. I want nothing to do with ICO's, though. I gamble enough when I buy/sell options 

[soon]

24 minutes ago, MisterNo said:

Mining "creates" coin. And when all coins of one currency will be mines, miners will produce only transactions on the blockchain. So in short, generally, mining will not depreciate value of a coin.

 

In regard to IoT, what is being said... Is that blockchain technology is already a solution for machine to machine payments, that will be needed in  IoT.

Oh, so blockchain is an enclosed system? And though all bitcoins are called "bitcoins", they belong to individual groupings (mini-economies) wherein their value remains static?

I understood that aspect of IoT, but the example was presented as being part of an eco-friendly argument? I dont understand how that helps in that respect?

[Gracii Guns]

34 minutes ago, MisterNo said:

You are wrong there. Fiat currencys are heavily controlled and manipulated by countries, dividing people and worlds wealth. Ultimatelly, cypto is a chance for clean start. Can be used globally, isnt controlled by states, and it hase defitive number. No money printing!

And how do you proopse children spend their allowance, or families pay their electricity meter with bitcoins? How about the elderly people who collect their pension from the Post Office every week?

Technology continues to be a barrier for many individuals. WiFi isn’t a priority for those struggling to feed themselves.

Any idea that crypto currency is going to be a cause of economic equality seems deluded and narrow minded. 

[MisterNo]

Im not saying it will solve the problem, at least not at first , just that it will be better then fiat.

 

Fiat money is one of the few things cousing that inequalty, so bitcoin can only come as a better solution.

[Silent Jay]

I bought a lot of ripple stuff when it was at 0.20$ last november. It went at 3$ in January. Now it's dead.

[Ace Nova]

Crypto is extremely volatile and the only reason it's doing so well is because most of the world is in an economic boom.  It's a hotbed for money laundering, drug trade, trafficking, etc.  As soon as the economy slows down and countries decide to regulate it, etc...it could crash harder than anything anyone's ever seen, imo.  It can also be hacked, as seen in recent months, causing HUGE dips in value.   

I dabbled in Litecoin for a few months, lost a few hundred bucks and said, "Nope, not for me". 

 

[soon]

So there are socio-economic and environmental issues facing crypto. There are moral issues about its use in the criminal underworld. And people who still wanted in on it lost cash and divested. Kinda seems like crypto-currency sucks?

I guess one could say that all money and banking is involved in organized crime? 

But I dont understand the tech; when I use crypto am I supplying my device as part of the crypto infrastructure? Like TOR? If that is the case, then I would say that supplying my device to the encrypted network is a moral issue and I would not want to contribute my device to the network that is used for human trafficking.

[spunko12345]

On 05/07/2018 at 1:54 PM, soon said:

Bitcoin’s electricity usage is enormous. In November, the power consumed by the entire bitcoin network was estimated to be higher than that of the Republic of Ireland.

 

Thats not really saying much though as the Irish are quite simple minded and havent really got to grips with electricity so don't consume much. A lot of them still wonder where the sun goes at night time.

[soon]

36 minutes ago, spunko12345 said:

Thats not really saying much though as the Irish are quite simple minded and havent really got to grips with electricity so don't consume much. A lot of them still wonder where the sun goes at night time.

And here I am with a bit of Irish blood in my veins not understanding how crypto-currency works.

[Dazey]

44 minutes ago, spunko12345 said:

Thats not really saying much though as the Irish are quite simple minded and havent really got to grips with electricity so don't consume much. A lot of them still wonder where the sun goes at night time.

The Welsh just use less power because wool is cheaper.

[spunko12345]

27 minutes ago, soon said:

And here I am with a bit of Irish blood in my veins not understanding how crypto-currency works.

That will be why then.

[spunko12345]

23 minutes ago, Dazey said:

The Welsh just use less power because wool is cheaper.

Fuck off you 😄 this is between me and the Micks. If you northerners want some beef go hijack your own thread.