Here in Brazil, we have that since last month. The new money transfer system (Pix) allows anyone to send money to a key, which can be a person's CPF (the tax ID number nearly everyone has), a phone number, an email, or a randomly-generated number. These all map to a bank account (you can also use Pix to send directly to a bank account number); the directory with these mappings is kept by the Brazilian Central Bank, and the mappings are inserted by the participating financial institutions.

So assuming my email was [email protected], and I had asked my bank to map the Pix key "[email protected]" to my bank account, anyone could "send cash" through Pix to my [email protected] email; the cash would arrive at my bank account nearly instantly (even during weekends and/or holidays).

From this description it sounds like just name resolution that still uses the regular banking system.

The name resolution is just part of it (though the most visible part); there's also a new message exchange protocol, over the national inter-bank network, which does the instant transfers (before this new protocol, inter-bank transfers were only instant during banking hours, not on nights/weekends/holidays).

Fascinating, this is the first time I've heard of Pix. Can you own the private key? Can you create an account without having a bank account?

Can't talk for Pix, but UPI, a similar system implemented by Indian banks, wouldn't accept "private keys" or not having a bank account. No international payments either.

UPI is more like venmo on steroids, but it is no crypto-currency replacement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

No, PIX is directly tied to your Bank Account. You need to have a bank account opened with an institution that connects your account to PIX.

Can you get banned from Pix?

Thats a good question. PIX is directly tied to your bank account, so I imagine if your bank decides to ban your account, you won't be able to use PIX through that account/bank anymore. But, I suppose you could open another account in another bank, move your previous PIX keys to it or create new ones.

Not how it works.. One banks bans you and you are screwed for life. That's the value proposition of bitcoin

Oh, didn't know that. Can you point out where it says that? From what I understand of PIX, it is tied to your transactional bank account. If you have multiple bank accounts and you are banned by one bank, your account on the other banks are not automatically banned and you can still transact with it, I would imagine PIX would still work.

Many coins are experimenting with alternative consensus algorithms, the most promising imo is proof of stake.

No wasted energy beyond the cost of running a normal computer.

Is this 2021 or 2015?

Sure, you just need to trust people.

You got Pos wrong there is no trust involved

Sure, not until some entity gets over 50% of the stake

Sorry you do not understand how the system works. You can't buy 50% because the price would be worth more than all world gdp since each order is incrementally how gher and the supply of coins is not unlimited. Good to dig into things before you mindlessly dismiss them. Did you actually believe that people are designing and talking about Pos as a breakthrough when the main idea is "nobody rich enough will want to buy 50%"?

For newer PoS protocols, they would need over 66% and they would lose money if they misbehaved making it likely uneconomical to do so. This is the big advantage of PoS over PoW. There are both positive incentives (e.g. block rewards) but also negative ones (e.g. getting slashed for trying to stage a double spend attack).

Polkadot, Cardano, Stellar, soon to be Ethereum 2.0. Proof of Stake is where it's at if you are concerned with the power consumption of Proof of Work.

Yes. Proof of stake coins like nano don't require any proof of work. Peercoin, too. Ethereum is considering PoS IIRC.

Ethereum has a proof of stake chain in production right now, in the sense that it is running with over a billion dollars worth of real ETH. But it won't run user transactions and contracts until the EVM migrates over, probably late 2021, and that's when PoW will go away.

What about cash that you can send like an SMS on a network that offsets its CO2?

Celo is proof of stake based and also issues part of its block rewards to Project Wren. It has a native stablecoin and a decentralized phone verification protocol that lets you send money to any phone number.

Check out celo.org and ValoraApp.com

Is this vulnerable to sim swap attacks?

No. Funds are still protected by a private key once you create an account, so stealing a phone number doesn't help you spend someone's money.

How much electricity do you think traditional money printing and transfers consume?

Much less? Bitcoin currently powers almost none of the world’s transactions, yet consumes all that energy.

The entire us consumes 75 twh in a year, the same as bitcoin’s global energy use.

Of that, the entire commercial sector is about 12 twh. That’s not just banks. That’s every company. Banks alone are surely far less. Maybe 2-3 twh? And the us is 15% of global gdp. So, global finance might consume about 14-32 twh.

Again, that is while doing all of global finance. Bitcoin powers a rounding error of transactions yet consumes 75 twh.

There’s just no comparison energy wise. My math could be off by several orders of magnitude and bitcoin would still consume more if it were actually powering the world’s transactions.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

The US consumes about 4 PWh/year, so bitcoin isn't comparable with the nation as a whole. However, that is more power consumption than many individual states, so your overall point remains completely valid.

Your units are funny. Using W-hr (energy) and then making it a rate by making it per year which gets you back to power. You could have just said, “the US consumes energy at a rate of 450 GW”.

There’s no need to introduce hrs and years to the mix. Watts describe precisely what you’re attempting to quantify.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=4+PW+hr%2Fyear+in+GW&o...

Whoops yeah that should have been 9.4 quadrillion BTU. The online calculator I used for TWH conversion was very wrong. Looks like the correct value is about 2,000 twh for the us commercial sector?

If we assume banks are 10% of that, then it’s 200 twh. 3x bitcoin. But also, handling literally all finance and banking in the US. Vs essentially nothing for bitcoin, compared to the scale of the us economy.

It'd be really nice if I could find a study on this, but just because bitcoin doesn't power the majority of the transactions doesn't mean it couldn't do so without the energy needs scaling linearly with transactions. If anything I'd imagine it could become more efficient as more transactions were taking place. I see people argue this a lot and I think it's too narrow of a view on the situation.

Of course it'd be much better for us to adopt a crypto currency that uses a different algorithm that has even less energy usage. Even without that though I think it could prove to be more efficient than existing financial systems.

Your numbers are totally wrong. The fact your own link suggests that bitcoin uses as much electrical energy as Chile should tell you it's not close to the USA. Recheck?

Bitcoin transacted way more money that PayPal etc

People actually buy stuff on paypal. They processed 2.5 billion transactions in 2020. Bitcoin processed about 250 million transactions.

The total amount of reported money transacted might be higher for bitcoin but that doesn’t come from contact with the real economy. So that depends on the valuation of bitcoin rather than economic impact.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/277841/paypals-total-pay...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-b...

When confronted with relatively concrete studies on Bitcoin's wasteful energy use, are you going to point to the fact that physical money printer energy use has not been studied to muddy the waters? The reason it hasn't been studied is that it doesn't use a huge amount of electricity.

Anyway, as another way of answering your question, physical money printing and transfers require no electricity at all, predating the invention of electric power by thousands of years.

Pretty sure the modern machines that

1. Print the money

2. Harvest the Cotton and other raw materials

3. Transport the money

4. Secure the money (even in electronic form)

5. and about 100 other things

All use "energy" the point of the OP's comment was about "wasted energy" which i would image is tied to climate change

The idea that "printed money uses no energy because it is old tech" is just ignorant

Zero bitcoiners going "BUT WHAT ABOUT CONVENTIONAL MONEY HUH" provide numbers.

Since you're too lazy to, I will:

* Bitcoin: 0.1% of all electricity in the world, 7tps.

* THE ENTIRE REST OF HUMAN CIVILISATION, EVERYONE IN IT AND EVERYTHING THEY DO: 99.9% of electricity, a hell of a lot more than 6,993tps.

Bitcoin is the most inefficient payment system in history.

Bitcoiners' usual objection at this point is to claim that transactions per second is a bad measure, for some reason - though if you're comparing how much each system achieves for the resources it uses, it's precisely the obvious and correct measure.

But if tps doesn't matter, then the entire bitcoin ecosystem should be replaced with a small rock. A whole country's less electricity use, and only 7tps less! Also, it'd be hard currency.

> Bitcoiners' usual objection at this point is to claim that transactions per second is a bad measure, for some reason

You've probably been told before but I'll tell you the why again. Bitcoin's energy consumption is not proportional to the number of transactions it's processing.

The energy used is proportional to the block reward, the reward that miners get from mining a new block roughly every 10 minutes. They won't spend more money on energy than they get from mining, or they would go out of business. That mining reward goes up with price, (because it's paid out as a fixed amount of BTC) and goes down with each halving event (every ~4 years the block reward is cut in half in BTC terms).

The network can be doing 7tps or 7 million tps, doesn’t really matter for energy use, although higher usage can have indirect effects on price or other things.

> * Bitcoin: 0.1% of all electricity in the world, 7tps

And? Who are you to tell anyone how they should use their electricity? Do you want my advice on what you should be doing in your home?

> Bitcoin is the most inefficient payment system in history.

I think the "hauling big rocks between islands" currency was probably less efficient, at least on a per capita basis.

> then the entire bitcoin ecosystem should be replaced with a small rock

Then go ahead and do that. If people have trust in your rock then that will work fine.

You appear to have written two books about money. Do you not understand how it works yet?

The vast majority of dollars in circulation exist only in accounting records and do not exist as actual physical tokens. Printed money uses no energy because we do not print money anymore, we write it in a SQL database (or, god forbid, an Excel spreadsheet).

A lot less per transaction than Bitcoin?

But I'm no expert.

Looking solely at that criterial, ACH transfers work.

ACH is US Banking only. You can not do Direct person to person transfers, you must go through a US Bank for ACH

ACH is also SLOW and painfully insecure relaying on the banking institutions to stop gap the security and its built in slowness to allow for reversals of fraud or error transfers

ACH is not a model people should be promoting as good method to do money transfer

Thanks, I didn't know ACH was US only. As for slow, I've had things go through literally instantly, where I make the transaction, login to my bank account, and see it posted. When it's been slow, that always seems to be a factor with the sending entity (like PayPal) not my receiving bank. (Could be bank specific though)

Might be something else going on (wire transfer, maybe?); ACH payments are batch-processed a couple times a day, and so can't be instant.

Bank transfers don't have to be slow. Within the UK they are almost always instant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service

Does it work internationally though?

Edit: Or I should say, “Could it work internationally?” Because afaik it does not currently.

Not across countries.