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A comment on BadEconomics: Putting $400M of Bitcoin on your company balance sheet. Parent comment

Re:BadEconomics: Putting $400M of Bitcoin on your company ba... by Siira on Monday January 04, 2021 @03:52PM (#25637764)
Energy "waste" is in the eye of the beholder. The energy is doing useful work by making the system more secure (at a rough rate of 50%, which is actually rather efficient as energy consumption goes). Of course, having some better solution that doesn't need energy as its source of trust would be great, and perhaps proof-of-stake will one day work. But the fact of the matter is that there is no better alternative today, and the traditional governmental currencies don't count.
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Re:BadEconomics: Putting $400M of Bitcoin on your company ba... by benlivengood on Monday January 04, 2021 @05:12PM (#25638982)
> But the fact of the matter is that there is no better alternative today, and the traditional governmental currencies don't count.

I can spend USD almost anywhere I want at maybe a 1.5% transaction fee depending on merchant, with 1%-2% cash back (I calculated a 1.67% rebate for 2019). Technically this is only nominally government currency since it's just bank credit denominated in USD.

Bitcoin's blockchain does around ~100K BTC in volume a day at ~100 BTC in fees and ~1000 BTC mined (since May) which both are effectively costs going to the miners' electricity. 1.1% vs 1.5% with cash back isn't a huge argument for bitcoin. If transaction fees stay around .1% until the block reward hits .05% then the efficiency argument eventually goes away because miners will be competing on transaction efficiency and not block rewards any more.

I like the technology; it's cool and the fact that it works at all is amazing. If overall costs were closer to .1% and speculators were not the primary users it would be revolutionary.

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Re:BadEconomics: Putting $400M of Bitcoin on your company ba... by mangus on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @08:26AM (#25645232)
> perhaps proof-of-stake will one day work

It already works. https://why.cardano.org/en/introduction/proof-of-stake/

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Re:BadEconomics: Putting $400M of Bitcoin on your company ba... by Siira on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @10:35AM (#25646563)
That link has no description of the consensus algorithm they are using, and links to a youtube video, not a paper. Not that I feel like reading new crypto papers, there are dozens of unproven claims around. When something gains actual traction, I’ll read its paper to see how rigorous and secure it is.
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