They will not increase it. I am merely pointing out the idea "to do twice the number of transactions it would consume twice as much energy" is not correct, because raising the block size would not necessarily increase energy consumption.

That’s not the point I’m making. The point I’m making is it takes more energy per transaction even after factoring in all specified and unspecified externalities because it’s not thermodynamically possible for visa to use as much energy per transaction. Visa would have to consume roughly 3X the entire worlds power output to match the sheer waste of Bitcoin.

"Until then it’s strictly fair and accurate."

Your argument is about as convincing as "well you couldn't make a payment billion dollars because a penny weighs 1 gram, and their combined weight would be too heavy to transport"

How so? I said on a per transaction basis by falsification it’s not possible, factoring in all externalities for a Bitcoin transaction to be more efficient than visa. It is not. End of story. The scaling is a thought experiment not a plan.

Your counter example is nonsense.

Could it be in the future more efficient given unspecified future changes? Who knows but it sure as shit isn’t today. I was pushing back on Nic’s theory on pricing in externalities.

"Future changes"? "Who knows"?

The more efficient changes ALREADY HAPPENED years ago in the form of Lightning network.

The Bitcoin blockchain is the bedrock of this new peoples currency and upon it has been built the Lightning network which is a Bitcoin integrated sidechain for cheap and small transactions.

Lightning facilitates Bitcoin transaction capacity to scale in a ludicrously efficient manner and has now been technically maturing for years now. Please keep up.

The number of lightning transactions and channels rounds to zero, so in a way, I did include them. Same number of channels, about half the capacity per channel, same quantity of locked up value (about 1000BTC total) and the same number of users since 2019. [1]

Of course it's not a solution to scaling, because it requires one on-chain transaction to open, one to close, and if an intermediate node happens to go down your funds are locked. It's garbage. Vastly overcomplicated garbage.

By the way to just open a single channel for everyone on earth today and close it will take about 70 years, so right around the year 3000 if you (very optimistically) factor in births and deaths. And about $265 billion dollars at current fee rates - $18.99 as quoted today. Elon better pony up! This of course assumes the blockchain isn't used for anything else in the interim.

How small can the transactions be if a channel open/close costs almost $40?

The only L2 solutions that scale are permissioned, centralized and/or trustful. Because that's how you scale. And you can back those with anything as none of the guarantees of the underlying asset are conferred to these L2 networks simply because they notionally operate on top of Bitcoin for net settlement and the (soon to be unlawful) non-custodial wallet.

[1] https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning

> By the way to just open a single channel for everyone on earth today and close it will take about 70 years, so right around the year 3000 if you (very optimistically) factor in births and deaths. And about $265 billion dollars at current fee rates - $18.99 as quoted today. Elon better pony up! This of course assumes the blockchain isn't used for anything else in the interim.

LOL. Nice. I like it even better than my other favorite example, that issuing a paycheck in Bitcoin to the 125 million full time employees in the US would take about a year to process.

> ... climate change doesn’t care about hypotheticals.

But increasing the block size limit wouldn't reduce the energy consumption. It would just make Bitcoin support a higher maximum transaction count per second, which perhaps the market doesn't even need or care about.

I would love to see you defended active tire fire in your backyard with the same logic.

Can you explain what you mean?

The power consumption of Bitcoin is proportional to the price of Bitcoin, it is not related to the demand for making transactions or how many transactions are being made.

You folks keep saying that like it’s a good thing but in my opinion that is a scathing indictment of the system. You’re talking about something that’s intentionally anti-efficient. It’s the only technology I’ve ever seen in my entire lifetime but becomes less efficient when more people try and use it. It’s horrifying.

[edit; to your reply: that sounds like a bad solution and I think you know that lol]

That fact says nothing about the efficiency. What it says is that market forces will decide what level of energy they want to dedicate to the security of the network. Whatever the market is willing to pay, it will be 100% efficiently spent on outcompeting attackers on the network.

> that sounds like a bad solution and I think you know that lol

I don't think it's a good or bad solution. It is basically just the same as how market forces control the values of fiat currencies which in turn affects how much energy is required to secure them.

Through a proof of waste of limited resources system. Just spell it out and I’ll agree.

[edit: this isn't about the army. this is about currency. stay on track, stay on topic - both of those things can be bad and having two of them can be additively much worse; having a debate with you is like trying to grab a fistful of jello, absolutely impossible]

Exactly, just like how with fiat currencies, the military serves as a proof-of-waste system which does nothing productive except to compete with other militaries. They compete by intentionally burning their limited resources (young individuals' lives) so as to make an enemy attack cost-prohibitive, thus securing the network.

> The army is to defend the country and its people, and would not be reduced in a bitcoin powered world.

Yes, they also defend other things besides the country's financial interests. So you'd expect them to cost a little more than Bitcoin, which only defends holders' financial interests. I am simply pointing out how they use the same proof-of-work system to accomplish it.

If the widespread adoption of Bitcoin led to a devaluation of existing fiat currencies, then you would expect military spending to go down (in terms of bitcoins). But I don't think that Bitcoin's adoption will decrease the use of fiat currencies (by any significant amount).

> both of those things can be bad and having two of them can be additively much worse

It's not clear why they would be additively worse. Creating a new place to store wealth doesn't increase the overall amount of wealth.

I agree that it is not a good thing that proof-of-work systems are wasteful, but perhaps it's the only way of solving the problem.

Proof-of-stake systems look promising but there are still some open questions about how it should be implemented and what the implications are for network security, and it will be at least a few years before they become battle-tested enough to have the same level of trust as Bitcoin.

> I agree that it is not a good thing that proof-of-work systems are wasteful, but perhaps it's the only way of solving the problem.

Obviously not, the other solution is by fiat, which has been working for milennia, and it's not about to stop.

Yes, but I just explained how fiat is secured by a system almost the same as proof-of-work (which you dismissed as "off-topic").

When I say "number go up" I'm not being disrespectful to you, I'm borrowing a turn of phrase from the Bitcoin community which they use to justify just about anything. Apologies if that or anything else I said rubbed you the wrong way, tone often fails to carry on the internet.

What I'm saying is that I have, quantifiably and mathematically, shown that it's not possible for a crypto to take less energy than a visa transaction, due to thermodynamics.

Your retort continues to be that "the state spends way more energy and resources defending the currency that you're not factoring in" -- but you've failed to quantify that in any way. It spends some quantity, ok, I understand that. You haven't replied how much, you haven't done any analysis. Without any justification you state that it's at least as big if not bigger than a Bitcoin transaction.

I want to know why, when I've shown it's not thermodynamically possible.

I'd love to know how much of the state's "energy expenditure" you apportion to "currency protection," and how much that would decrease in a world where the entire economy is denominated in cryptocurrency. Some justification - anything - would be a great starting point, but so far you've just stated it as fact, in many unrelated contexts. This is not a generally accepted or understood fact.

Thanks for the clarification.

Regarding your crypto energy argument, I think I addressed this in the other thread but I will try to explain again.

With the current 1MB block limit and current valuation of Bitcoin, you are absolutely right that the transaction rate per kilowatt can't exceed Visa.

The argument in Nic Carter's post which you are missing is that transaction rate per kilowatt is just one possible way of judging the usefulness of a monetary system.

Monetary systems can be useful for reasons other than their high transaction rate (for example, they might support a particularly high transaction volume, or have a particularly high cost to attack).

Increasing the maximum possible transaction rate per kilowatt would be as simple as increasing the maximum possible block size, since transactions are effectively free (it is only finding blocks which costs money).

There are trade-offs associated with changing the block size limit, but those trade-offs have nothing whatsoever to do with the energy usage of Bitcoin. Changing the block size limit won't affect the energy usage. If the market had enough demand for increased transaction rates, either Bitcoin will be forced to increase the block size or it will simply be outcompeted by a different coin which already has.

> Your retort continues to be that "the state spends way more energy and resources defending the currency that you're not factoring in" -- but you've failed to quantify that in any way.

I actually don't know that that is true, and I didn't mean to imply that I know that for sure.

But, it is what you would expect assuming the market is accurately pricing Bitcoin for the value it provides them.

If it weren't true, and USD is actually cheaper to secure for the value it provides, then it is an easy arbitrage opportunity where you can short Bitcoin and buy the relatively-cheaper-to-secure USD instead. Eventually with enough market participants it is sure to eventually reach the "fair price".

It's completely off topic, because the existing financial system is an emergent property of the state. It's a free-loader. Very limited energy is expended specifically to maintain the financial system. The bulk of it is to maintain the state which you have to do whether the financial system is shells, legos, gold or bitcoin. It's an irrelevant point, a red herring, nothing more.

After all far be it from replacing Visa and Mastercard, Visa and Mastercard have simply added crypto so you actually have to remove them from your energy savings estimates.

Further I disproved the energy utilization point in the original conjecture as impossible. If you have something to add add it and show you work.

Sorry man, you're just not right on this one. Number go up, we get it. That doesn't make it a fundamentally good, useful or interesting technology. All this flailing/pointing at everything that moves with no calculation, no evidence, is just to distract from the fundamental fact that it's a wasteful, borderline useless casino.

Show. Your. Work.

> the existing financial system is an emergent property of the state. It's a free-loader. Very limited energy is expended specifically to maintain the financial system. The bulk of it is to maintain the state

It isn't a matter of how much the financial system consumes. It is a matter of how much the state consumes to protect the wealth of its citizens (of which fiat is just an emergent property like you say).

> Further I disproved the energy utilization point in the original conjecture as impossible. If you have something to add add it and show you work.

You will have to clarify what point you mean or what work you want me to show.

> Number go up, we get it.

Please don't talk to me so disrespectfully. I have no interest in speculating on the price of cryptocurrencies.