Re:A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
by geofft on Monday February 18, 2019 @07:17PM
(#19195701)
There's a few big differences between gold and energy. First, energy is consumable and gold is generally not. If I mine a bitcoin, the coin itself is reusable, but the energy is turned into heat and lost. If I mine an ounce of gold, I can turn it into jewelry and melt it back into gold, so the mining of gold serves to make the resource more accessible, not less. Second, gold has limited uses beyond being a store of value - while it's useful for jewelry, electronics, etc., most manufacturing processes have little use for it. Increased demand for gold does not compete with much. But energy (either as electricity, or as fossil fuels) is useful for approximately everything. Increased demand for energy drives up the cost of production of everything because everything uses energy. A shortage of gold does not hurt a working-class family earning minimum wage; a shortage of energy does. And, finally, that's assuming that the process of mining isn't inherently harmful. Mining gold has none of the environmental externalities that mining bitcoin via burning fossil fuels does.
So I don't think there's a comparison in how the economy correlates. As long as gold is mineable in the earth, a growing economy mines more gold. But a growing economy demands more energy, which can go either to the economy or to Bitcoin. Bitcoin has no way of saying "I want this portion of the energy in the world, and no more," the way that mines are naturally filled with resources other than gold; all it can say is "I want all the energy possibly available."
(If you could store energy and use it as the basis of a Bitcoin-style network, such that your limited resource was energy itself and not loss-of-energy-per-unit-time, it would kill basically all of these arguments. There would be other arguments about the fairness of OilFuturesCoin, but it wouldn't be these, and it would basically be the arguments about any natural-resource standard.)
And yes, the benefit of Bitcoin is a permissionless network, but the entire question is whether this energy-monster property of Bitcoin is required to have a permissionless network. You could donate to Wikileaks just fine with, say, Stellar's consensus protocol, could you not?
So I don't think there's a comparison in how the economy correlates. As long as gold is mineable in the earth, a growing economy mines more gold. But a growing economy demands more energy, which can go either to the economy or to Bitcoin. Bitcoin has no way of saying "I want this portion of the energy in the world, and no more," the way that mines are naturally filled with resources other than gold; all it can say is "I want all the energy possibly available."
(If you could store energy and use it as the basis of a Bitcoin-style network, such that your limited resource was energy itself and not loss-of-energy-per-unit-time, it would kill basically all of these arguments. There would be other arguments about the fairness of OilFuturesCoin, but it wouldn't be these, and it would basically be the arguments about any natural-resource standard.)
And yes, the benefit of Bitcoin is a permissionless network, but the entire question is whether this energy-monster property of Bitcoin is required to have a permissionless network. You could donate to Wikileaks just fine with, say, Stellar's consensus protocol, could you not?