As for the Princeton study...Ill have to look at it but I'm skeptical they consider things like more batched transaction volume per tx in the future which could be harnessed to also have a more concentrated fee structure providing stability to the chain. Also changes can be made through consensus if needed...like segwit.
The energy usage combined with proof of work is the backing. If you break that for Bitcoin als is left is trust. The energy used and consumed is like the USD tied to gold (which it is no longer since quite some time)
Why? If OPEX is reduced (lower electricity costs), it's logical to assume that it will be replaced with CAPEX, given how competitive mining operations are. If that's the case, that will mean electricity being used to power ASICs being replaced with chemicals required to fab semiconductors (along with electricity for those fabs). It might be better in terms of GHG emissions, it would be a wash for overall environmental impact.
If you're referring to memory-hard hashing algorithms, I believe those are just resilient to ASICs/GPUs, but still require significant CPU energy. I'm not convinced those would be better for the environment, so if you're referring to those, do you also have an explanation for why they'd draw relatively less power?
They use less power simply because people are going to spend the same total amount of money in terms of compute hardware + energy, however RAM consumes less energy per per dollar spent on it than ASICs/CPU’s etc.
3W per 8GB of DDR4 is a reasonable baseline. https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq-memory/how-much...
Did they end up solving the "nothing at stake" problem?
See https://eth.wiki/en/concepts/proof-of-stake-faqs (I can’t link to the paragraph).
Yes they do, it takes even longer to move physical dollars or gold around and depending on where and who you are sending them too it might be impossible.
Sure in some mainstream cases you can send the digital derivative of gold and dollars to someone but those aren’t the actual asset just a representation issued by a centralized entity or a collection of them. Visas payment network isn’t moving dollars it’s moving digital dollars. Same with gold etfs. Let’s see them try to seize bitcoin and stop transfers it’s much harder
To get low latency on dollars/gold you have to go with centralized digital representations, but Bitcoin has to do the same to get more than 7 tx/sec.
I might still be a fan if that were the only option, but with other blockchains eliminating this restriction I have a hard time seeing the long-term value proposition of Bitcoin specifically.
Greater amounts still would attract even more scrutiny due to AML and KYC regulations in most jurisdictions.
If you're dealing with capital controls, which many large economies now have, the complexity is exponentially higher. You're also assuming that telecommunications networks, physical infrastructure, particularly power, are in good working order when you want to do the transfer. That may be the case 99.99% of the time, but the edge case should also be a consideration.
the same is true of bitcoin, right? I mean gold will continue to be gold in the absence of power, but will bitcoin even exist?
The most damning critique of bitcoin is that it requires power to be free and infinite.
For comparison, "the global average download speed on fixed broadband is 85.73 Mbps as of September 2020"[1] so even if block sizes were triple their historic values it would still be possible for average global users to wait less than a day to complete the initial download.
[0] https://decrypt.co/42427/bitcoin-blockchain-grows-to-300-gig...
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/internet-...
A pruned state can be downloaded with no more trust assumptions than that required to trust the software distribution channel where you download the Bitcoin software from to actually serve Bitcoin.
Anyway, every one in the world doesn't need to run a full node. Even a few thousand geographically distributed full nodes is enough to offer resistance to network shut down, and there are more than a few million people that are capable of running a full node of a hypothetical Bitcoin with 1 GB sized blocks, which only requires downloading 1.67 MB/s of transactions to keep up with validation. That's a 1000 expansion of Bitcoin's throughput, letting Bitcoin become the world's most widely used currency.
The entire small block narrative is built on a shaky foundation that ignores the massive benefits of enabling more people to transact directly on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Nonsense. Bitcoin software releases come with widely publicized checksums and signatures from reputable sources.
More importantly, Bitcoin is ideologically opposed to the idea of checkpoints, as they run counter to the Longest Chain Rule that says the true state is whatever valid chain has the most cumulative work. Even if that chain is the result of a very deep reorg that invalidates the last checkpoint.
It's a lesser issue if you can support a large number validating nodes using cheap hardware, they are frequently and randomly assigned to verify different portions of the history, and they always act as secure light clients of the other portions.
In fact, it might even compare favorably to the handful of major mining operations that mostly run Bitcoin, on expensive ASICs.
I worked at a retail store that turned over lots of cash — as much as $1M on a holiday weekend. The costs, risks and time associated with dealing with that amount of currency was very real.
The question then is whether 7 tx/sec really is sufficient to support broad global adoption, even if it's just for savings. Dollars and physical gold have no such limits. Other blockchains are vastly expanding scalability, as well as eliminating the energy usage.
Another issue is whether Bitcoin can maintain its monetary policy for the long term. Here's a paper from Princeton saying that if miner rewards are dominated by transaction fees rather than block rewards, the chain destabilizes, suffering frequent long rollbacks.
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CC...
If they're right, some future generation of bitcoiners will have to choose between keeping the issuance schedule, and having a blockchain that functions reliably. There's no way for us to know which they will pick.
Personally, I think the right choice is a functioning chain. That last percent or two of inflation isn't a problem for maintaining value, because economies grow at the same rate. So does the supply of gold in the economy.