All else being equal, building solar panels is a negative; producing and transporting solar panels consumes materials and produces CO2. The reason building solar power plants is usually good is that they reduce the need for even worse forms of energy production. If you build a solar farm, just to waste all or most of the energy it generates, what you have done is a net negative for the environment.

This is in addition to the fact that a whole lot of mining uses existing infrastructure, which negates the gains from building out clean energy and keeps demand high enough to require dirty energy, as /u/oofbey covered.

> All else being equal, building solar panels is a negative; producing and transporting solar panels consumes materials and produces CO2. The reason building solar power plants is usually good is that they reduce the need for even worse forms of energy production. If you build a solar farm, just to waste all or most of the energy it generates, what you have done is a net negative for the environment.

I agree with this in the short term, but my argument is more about economies of scale: The more people want large amounts of solar, the better companies get at producing it and the cheaper it gets. Because of that cheapness fossil fuels could be taken off the table completely resulting in a short-term downside (losing resources and producing CO2 for unnecessary computations), but a long-term win (a world free from fossil fuels)

> This is in addition to the fact that a whole lot of mining uses existing infrastructure, which negates the gains from building out clean energy and keeps demand high enough to require dirty energy, as /u/oofbey covered.

Fair. Just because miners in general are ravenous for solar does not mean that all individual miners are able or willing to use solar “off the grid”. I’m not saying it’s perfect or that PoW is the right direction, I’m only pointing out that it’s not the absolute evil that it’s been painted as.

1. We build 1TW of solar panels, PoW mining uses that 1TW to do useless work.

2. We don't build 1TW of solar panels, and don't do that additional 1TW of useless work.

Worlds 1 and 2 have the same impact on the electricity grid. But in world 1, we're emitting a whole lot of CO2 and consuming a whole lot of rare materials to build solar farms and electronics, while in world 2 we don't. Clearly world 2 is better for the environment?

If solar happens to not be cheap, very sustained, increased demand for non-solar sources increases the likelihood of non-solar success.

1) remote setup, or

2) tax incentives.

Also, green accountants may want to account for solar panel e-waste disposal in a about twenty years.

I would love to see this number compared to the amount of energy PoW consumes.

Show me a smart contract that can issue an undercollateralized loan. Turns out that takes manpower, time, and energy to underwrite this stuff.

This sounds like the typical, “other industry is run by dumb people. They need us tech devs to come civilize them.”

Those numbers were obviously from the POW network, so unknown how they will change post merge, but arguing that current systems waste energy too seems a bit biased.

The switch to PoS is a non-issue from my perspective: a centralized system changed from using method A to method B, I don't understand why I should care.

Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. Having an economic incentive to not flare or emit methane but instead using it for generating bitcoin allows Bitcoin mining to become net carbon negative.

Reducing methane emissions is vastly more effective at preventing climate change than reducing co2 emissions.

Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in electricity. That is a monumentally stupid amount to pay. It's $125 per kB.

Proof of stake incentivizes capital directly. Proof of work incentivizes capital via the ability to find prime numbers, which limits you to people who are willing to spend $1000s to millions of dollars to do it efficiently. Limiting the validators like that drives up costs massively.

> Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. Having an economic incentive to not flare or emit methane but instead using it for generating bitcoin allows Bitcoin mining to become net carbon negative.

No, it is not. Projects like that may be branded with bitcoin, but bitcoin miners are buying the same electricity as everyone else. The rising cost of electricity is causing new sources of power to be exploited.

Instead of being used for something useful, that electricity is being turned into waste heat.

A common misconception. Only a fraction (about 1% at the moment) of Bitcoin's electricity consumption is derived from transactions, because transaction fees account for only about 1% of miners revenues. The average transaction fee is about $1 at the moment, so a transaction "costs" only $1 in electricity because it provides $1 of extra revenue to miners who can subsequently spend it on opex (electricity).

The transaction fee is irrelevant, as the fees being paid were mined in the past and already "paid for" with electicity.

In the end, transactions drive the chain forward. You don't need (a lot of?) them to continue mining, but they are the only "useful" part of the blockchain.

I have no idea if bitcoin operates at max capacity, but I think it does. If so, I think it's perfectly fair to attach mining energy use to transactions.

No, because the energy consumption is the same regardless if a block contains zero or a thousand transactions. Therefore it is misleading to attribute mining energy as the "cost" of transactions. And Bitcoin doesn't operate at max capacity: its lightning network is very under-used at the moment.

As to the transaction fee, it is relevant: even though it was already "paid for", it is being redistributed to miners again, therefore drives energy consumption further up than if it was not being redistributed.

A transactions costs $60, in the sense that all transactions together over some period, say N, cost $60*N over that period.

That is invisible to the user insofar as it is financed through an increase in money supply [1] which accrues to the miners at the expense of all other BTC holders.

[1] Increase in money supply is sometimes, particularly by Austrian economists and crypto acolytes, identified with inflation. The irony...

The increase in the money supply, aka block subsidy, is a value transfer from BTC holders to miners compensating them for enforcing the consensus rules of the ledger. Very similar to if you were paying fees to a mega secure vault company, though no vault company can provide decentralised value storage; value storage without any single point of failure. Considering the unprecedented level of security on offer, the value for money is astonishing.

The miners job is to construct a block. They're paid via a special transaction called a coinbase (a large American exchange named their company after this special transaction), which they can make payable to whomever they wish. They take incoming transactions and may include a certain number of those; the limit is 4 million weight units, as opposed to a certain number of kB as is commonly believed. Each transaction they include will usually include in addition to fixed recipients, a special "spend to anyone" transaction output, this is to encourage a miner to include your transaction preferentially as they can make this portion payable to themselves. They may attempt to include multiple transactions spending the same funds to different recipients, or to insert a coinbase transaction wherein they have made payable to themselves any number of bitcoin, or include more than 4 million weight units worth of transactions, or make some other attempt to break the rules of consensus that any block they published will be tested against by thousands of other computers who will then choose to store locally the new block as the new strongest valid chain tip, or disregard. Before publishing the transaction though, the miner must also solve the double spending problem, by providing proof of work. They do this by going back to that block they're constructing, and firstly putting a random number in the nonce field of the header. Then, they pass the blocks bits into a sha256 hash function, take the resulting hash and hash it again with the sha256 function. The result must meet the current block height difficulty, for example to just happen to start with 18 leading zeroes. If it doesn't, the nonce is incremented in the header and the block is hashed again. Without an appropriately difficult proof, first of all you wouldn't know which valid block had come first, and so would have double spend problems where after receiving payment, the block containing your payment was dropped and replaced with another, or outside of bitcoin, anyone can for example send you a transaction receipt via e-mail stating you have been paid, on its own it's worthless though, you will have to rely on PayPal or a bank to ultimately tell you if you have received a payment, and PayPal or bank payments are reversible in a way Bitcoin transactions are not so even then, you don't have the same degree of certainty (furthermore your funds are not in your custody, instead you have lent your money to the bank; they owe you it). I hope this clears up the difference between these different fees and what they are in payment for, please DYOR next time before speaking on a subject as though you have some knowledge of it, much of the confusion around Bitcoin results from people who have not studied it wanting to sound knowledgeable.

1. BTC holders pay a fee of around 1.7% p.a. of their holdings (until the next halving) to miners (through an increase in money supply),

2. which amounts to around $60 per transaction currently. (Higher if BTCUSD rises or the number of transactions falls; lower if BTCUSD falls or the number of transaction increases, which it cannot much because BTC operates not too far from the limit.)

> please DYOR next time before speaking on a subject as though you have some knowledge of it,

Ah, the old "you just don't understand crypto" chestnut...

On BTC this never happens, on other chains it's quite common, since no one uses them.

That $60 in electricity 'per transaction' is simply not correct, the value of the block reward doesn't come from transactions. The transaction fee does.

Its incredibly fallacious to measure the cost of electricity per transaction on Bitcoin. Blocks can be completely full or utterly empty and still use the amount of power. You're also missing the point of the power consumption. Its not used to move capital from one person to another, its used to secure the network from attacks and preserve its integrity. Measuring the cost of electricity per transaction is like measuring the amount of energy bank vaults and the US army use per dollar transaction. Stats like the one you quoted don't take into account the number of Lightning network transactions happening off-chain but is secured by a past on-chain transaction.

> No, it is not. Projects like that may be branded with bitcoin, but bitcoin miners are buying the same electricity as everyone else. The rising cost of electricity is causing new sources of power to be exploited.

> Instead of being used for something useful, that electricity is being turned into waste heat.

One, value and usefulness is subjective. Because something is "useless" for someone like you doesn't mean its useless to others. I, and many people around the world, find Bitcoin to be incredibly useful and worth the electricity. Secondly, if oil and gas companies could profitably monetize flared methane, they would have already. They don't because trapping and transporting the methane would lose them money. Its an industry standard to simply release or burn the methane instead. So Bitcoin IS useful in that respect.

It has been steady around 1500 tx/block for years.

> You're also missing the point of the power consumption. Its not used to move capital from one person to another, its used to secure the network from attacks and preserve its integrity.

I'm not. That's a completely insane amount of money to pay for that service. It's totally unnecessary.

> Stats like the one you quoted don't take into account the number of Lightning network transactions happening off-chain but is secured by a past on-chain transaction.

They don't have to. All those techniques are equally applicable to POW, but POW doesn't spend $18 million daily on electricity to do it.

> Secondly, if oil and gas companies could profitably monetize flared methane, they would have already.

Oil and gas companies sell oil and gas, not electricity. Bitcoin miners are not running methane gas turbines. Electricity companies are.

>>That's a completely insane amount of money to pay for that service. It's totally unnecessary.

You cant know exactly how many transactions are processed per bitcoin block. The introduction of the lightning network and other 2nd layers mean any one of the ~1500txs per block could in reality be a batch of a 1,000,000 or more transactions being settled. There could easily be 15,000,000,000,000,000 txs per block, think about what that does to any $/tx calculation.

Bitcoin is cheaper than visa because it is designed to process infinite transactions for a fixed security cost.

> Instead of being used for something useful

Bitcoin uses less energy than YouTube. Wether you think having a decentralized, global monetary system that gives everyone an opportunity to own sound money that the government cannot take away is more or less useful than YouTube is of course something everyone is entitled to have an opinion on.

It might be that you are correct, it is too early to tell, but you are no the final judge of what is useful in the world or not, so this quote is just your personal opinion and nothing more.

I believe this is totally wrong - I think Bitcoin uses significantly more than YouTube. Where did you get your numbers?

The 2020 Google Environmental Report [1] lists the total energy consumption of all Google/Alphabet data centers as ~12.2 TWh/year in 2019 and growing at about 2 TWh/year. (See page 32.) So in 2022 the approximate usage for all Google/Alphabet properties, not just YouTube, would be about 18.2 TWh.

Meanwhile, Statista estimates Bitcoin as consuming about 177 TWh/year [2].

So this means Bitcoin consumes about 10x as much as not just YouTube but all Google/Alphabet data centers combined!

There are some urban legends about YouTube using much more energy than it does; some of those urban legends are refuted here: [3]

[1] https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2020-e... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin... [3] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str...

My lifestyle of keeping my high-end PC running all the time, cranking the AC down to 68, turning all the lights on, and so on, would of course use less energy than YouTube. But if everyone behaved as I do it'd be a bad thing (don't tell Kant).

Converting energy into economic value is the opposite of waste. That is what mining does.

No, it's not even close. Bitcoin currently uses as much electricity as 31 million US residents. One transaction uses more than two months of average residential usage.

> (including things like minting and handling physical cash and coin)

Why would you include that? Do you think people won't want to carry money? Do you think bitcoin makes cards, POS processors, and cash obsolete? Do physical wallets not take energy to make and run?

Regardless, the amount of energy used to make and use physical money is very small:

1. coins are irrelevant; the most expensive coins are cents, which cost about a cent to make. The total amount of coins made is much smaller than the amount of paper dollars made, so the value of energy used is small compared to the total cash made.

2. The US spends 1 billion annually to mint currency. Bitcoin spends 6.5 billion USD on electricity directly.

>Why would you include that?

Because I said "all externalities". Bitcoin competes with the traditional financial system, including all the people and infrastructure involved in cash handling. That includes not just minting, but distributing it, collecting it, counting it, securing it, and so forth. And that is a cost borne not just by the United States federal government, but every government with physical currency and every bank on the planet. The idea that doing all this with physical objects is less power consuming than doing it with data is ridiculous.

If you want to make an honest apples to apples comparison, you include everything. Mining power usage is the single largest driver of bitcoin energy footprint granted, but it has a lot less other stuff attached.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_cost

The monstrous energy usage comes from trying to brute force a single hash. It is entirely decoupled from transaction volume.

Fixed costs are amortized. The block's footprint is spread across transactions. Arguing otherwise is like someone taking the power bill of a bank to infer the cost per teller-window transaction, and the manager arguing that teller-window transactions don't burn energy, branches do. Yes, sure. But also irrelevant.

And yes, if the branch tripled in size its energy use would reduce the per-teller energy footprint. (Assuming constant transaction volume.) But that's a hypothetical.

Sure, if you're more interested in talking points then useful metrics. Increasing or decreasing the block size limit would lower or increase the "cost of a transaction" (since blocks are generated on a schedule commensurate with difficulty, which is roughly a function of how many miners there are) without actually changing the amount of power consumed.

What you're doing is basically correlating the world's average temperature versus the number of pirates and declaring that pirates are responsible for global warming. In reality, the two variables are unrelated and not even correlated.

Of course they’re related. It’s trivial.

Assuming constant transaction volume and other factors related to difficulty. You have a point. But it's far from a panacea for proof of work, and certainly not at the threshold to derail coming taxes and regulation. (Though one might find a way to structure the taxes such that they reward a productive increase in the block size.)

The mining process provides a fixed amount of network security. $125,000 per 15000 transactions. The fact that it would still cost that much money even with zero transactions is not a feature. It's not a good thing.

Each individual block is secured. You can't just add more and more transactions to each block without reducing security.

> Bitcoin competes with the traditional financial system, including all the people and infrastructure involved in cash handling.

Right now bitcoin competes with practically nothing. How much pizza is bought with bitcoin vs cash? You're effectively assuming that all those other functions are either irrelevant or that bitcoin can somehow do them for zero cost. Neither is true.

> And that is a cost borne not just by the United States federal government, but every government with physical currency and every bank on the planet.

60% of global federal reserves are in dollars. Dollars are the world's dominant currency. Compared to the massive disparity in energy use, it doesn't matter if even only 10% of global currency is in dollars. Dollars win.

Plus, if you're trying to compare with the places where cash really matters -where they can't use VISA or cell phones to transfer money- then bitcoin is certainly at a huge disadvantage after you have to buy computers for all those people.

> The idea that doing all this with physical objects is less power consuming than doing it with data is ridiculous.

Again, you're not replacing coins with data. You're replacing coins with USB sticks.

But you're right! It IS ridiculous, because it's completely insane how pathetically inefficient bitcoin is.

Completely wrong, you cant know exactly how many transactions are processed per bitcoin block. The introduction of the lightning network and other 2nd layers mean any one of the ~1500txs per block could in reality be a batch of a 1,000,000 or more transactions being settled. There could easily be 15,000,000,000,000,000 txs per block, think about what that does to any $/tx calculation.

Bitcoin is cheaper than visa because it is designed to process infinite transactions for a fixed security cost.

The way that then, for example, (and this is really glossing) Lightning works is to provide a number of hypothetical signed Bitcoin transactions that rely on each other in a way where, if someone attempts to screw you over, you can put down one of the other transactions and move to a different state. You make it sound like Bitcoin is purposefully crippled to prevent this kind of performance enhancement, but one of the few and subtle big changes to Bitcoin was to support this!

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

It seems to me that if nobody transacted, nobody would be able to sell Bitcoin, mining rewards would be rendered worthless, and mining would stop.

Sure, you can't point at any given transaction and blame any particular emissions on it, but surely it's reasonable to amortize it and assign a fraction of the emissions during each block to each transaction, considering that Bitcoin has no value without them.

Here's an example: If, say, the maximum block size was doubled so they could hold twice as many transactions, this would cut your energy usage figure in half, but actual energy consumption by miners would barely change at all. Similarly, if the maximum block size was halved, your figure would double, but the energy consumed would not. If there were no such thing as a maximum block size, your value then scales linearly with the amount of transactions that can be crammed into 10-ish minutes of time.

If the block size was reduced to, say, one transaction, then the economic value of the Bitcoin network would surely drop, mining rewards would be worth less, miners would quit, and the electricity use would fall. It's the economic value of the transactions that end up rewarding miners; I can't see how people transacting on the chain aren't partly responsible for the miners' emissions.

I can't think of any obviously better way to assign a number to that than just amortizing it across the number of transactions. It's a meaningful number that explains something about how much usefulness the network produces per unit of electricity. Doubling that by doubling the block size (or, halving it by halving the block size) would be a meaningful change!

That is strictly true. This is why the concept of a personal carbon footprint (something dreamed up by a British Petroleum marketing team) is inherently inane.

>Doubling that by doubling the block size (or, halving it by halving the block size) would be a meaningful change!

How and why? It would change your metric, but it wouldn't make the network consume one single watt less or more power. Its efficiency is unchanged.

If the bitcoin network is a transaction-producing machine, the more energy it takes to produce the same number of transactions, the less efficient it is. All else being equal, spending more money and energy for the same result is worse than spending less money and energy.

Yes, and then the average cost of a transaction would be even higher than the ridiculously high amount it already is.

Cryptocurrency didn't event the idea of using computer ledgers instead of physical cash and doesn't get to take credit for it. There are dozens of ways to pay by computer that don't involve wasteful PoW.

> Converting energy into economic value is the opposite of waste.

Agreed, but I still don't see the value being produced by the cryptocurrency system. The value (not price, but value) that it delivers compared to traditional visa/mastercard/etc. seems marginal at best (and perhaps even negative once you account for the externalities that cryptocurrency-enabled crime imposes).

Phrasing in this way suggests that Bitcoin is already net carbon negative or can plausibly become it. That is not true.

> Using electricity isn't the problem.

It is, as electricity is fungible and wasting it on bitcoin increases prices for everyone else and encourages greater degradation of shared resources.

BTC miners can be put near the oil pad to consume the electricity there.

It is happening so rarely that it can be dismissed and treated as smoke screen.

1) It is less than 0.01% of all energy consumed by BTC

2) Would still require energy waste on equipment

Arguably, "fossil fuels" are not as fungible as electricity anyway. I can take electricity from any outlet and, with the right adapter, use it to power any electric appliance. I cannot take gasoline intended for my car and use it in a grill, or in the furnace, or in a jet, no matter what equipment I buy.

Even if electricity could be transmitted at any distance without loss we would use basically the same amount of fossil fuels.

I understand that methane is orders of magnitude more significant from a greenhouse effect point of view than CO2, but I don't see how it would be economically viable to burn methane "in stranded gas reserves" to generate electricity for Bitcoin mining but somehow it's not viable for other electrical consumption purposes.

No other use case has been profitable for the gas by products so the sites pump it directly into the atmosphere

Bitcoin mining is profitable and so the methane is not burned into the atmosphere, the molecules are stripped for electricity in simple catalytic converters and energy used on the spot (some sites are completely disconnected from the grid, these are the best use cases of this. others are connected to the grid which gets the most debate. in both cases no other solution exists in bitcoin mining’s absence and there was no political will to meet climate goals ever)

So the solution solves itself simply because it is an environmental solution that is profitable

1) this could ever be a significant enough amount of Bitcoin mining energy to make Bitcoin "carbon neutral", and

2) if it ever did become a significant source of energy for Bitcoin, it would likely also be viable for other uses, eliminating the carbon offset argument

I'm not doubting that you can put a cheap and inefficient boiler generator on top of a methane flare and label it "green energy."

2) Transporting this energy is a cost. Storing and then transporting the energy is a cost. And other kinds of computation on site requires much greater infrastructure, like internet and big box data centers, which these remote sites do not have. Bitcoin mining barely needs any internet bandwidth and doesn't need a low latency connection either. It creates an asset that can be easily sold to people willing to buy that asset at a price far greater than the costs to create it.

Its important to understand that these are partnerships between two companies.

The existing energy producer who is taking a risk on a dangerous operation, largely technophobic and takes far too long to understand how it benefits them. And a separate crypto mining company searching for cheap energy, driven purely by the market.

The mining company sees the energy. The energy producer needs to reduce their waste byproducts.

Its semantics and pure coincidence about whether “less hydrocarbons billowing directly into the atmosphere” meets your criteria for “carbon offset” or “green energy”, its also what happens

Whereas it may be difficult for one reason or another to transmit energy from where it's most abundant (a desert, or other remote areas), it's not hard to co-locate miners in those places & incentivize further development & utilization of that energy resource.

This argument is like energy incentives in the world were mostly fine, except that some energy was stranded and could only be picked up by Bitcoin.

For something that is supposed to "change the System" it for sure is often pitched like the System can never change. That missing (enforcement of) regulation makes it economically beneficial to just vent methane without even flaring, is not something to celebrate. It's nice that the incentives lined up decently, this time. We should work on fixing the incentives so the methane can stay in the ground where it belongs. Don't dig that well.

Say, you have access to cheap hydro power somewhere. The powerlines are not yet completed to export the electricity to where it could be more useful. Along comes a Bitcoin factory and sets up shop. Suddenly, the incentives are not in favour of ever completing that powerline, for benefits amortized over decades, when you can sell that sweet, sweet Bitcoin today.

Of course, the owners of the Bitcoin factory would never try to exert their influence and try to keep their cheap source of hydro power, or keep the methane flowing. /s

I will make sure to bring popcorn for the future culture wars between ETH and BTC, now that their incentives are so divorced.

Bitcoin was never billed to change that system, and yet it is anyway.

You're trying to let perfect get in the way of good, failing all modes of consensus until the world is uninhabitable, while this just works and fulfills the goals of all political parties at the moment: reducing emissions and being economical.

Bitcoin mining on existing fracking sites is a stop-gap solution at best, right now nobody is making new wells with the perk of adding miners or renting space to mining firms. Right now, the fracking operations are just meeting their climate goals, the captured state regulator no longer needs to be in the awkward position to rubber stamp emissions exemptions, the governor no longer needs to run interference for the whole fracking industry. Its only a stop gap solution because if 10x more wells were made after a 90% drop in emissions, then we're at the same place we were, so if you begin seeing that then be vigilant about that. But thats really not a bitcoin issue, thats a fracking issue that you're putting on bitcoin because you've had zero influence your entire life on the oil and gas sector, the separate higher standard doesn't make sense though, as - for now - this stop-gap solution is here and working. "oh no but its bitcoin, that other thing I spent so much of my energy hating" cope, my guy. this is working.

You see how you just substantiated my argument that Bitcoin naturally ends up favoring renewables, linking up the most efficient use of energy?

It’s not like there is (or should be) a limit on renewable energy production.

As opposed to everybody else, who naturally use the most expensive energy they can find.

its not altruism by any means and it doesn't matter

this is what happens, frame it any way you prefer, it doesn’t really matter as the constant is that North America is the best market for this

all levels of government are noticing and investors are noticing and they all need the sustainability framing, I don’t think I had made any framing in my reply

Articles that talk about the “amount” of energy bitcoin mining uses are going to keep coming out, if you’re more familiar with that framing, the source of energy has been more important than the amount for a very long time, to convey environmental impact, and this is just one example

I don't even have a stake in this game, except living on the same planet as everyone else. And it's getting warmer. Any power spent on bitcoin is power not spent solving more practical problems elsewhere.

You're trying to let perfect get in the way of good

The power is never ever ever going to be spent on anything else, the energy used would be purely hydrocarbons in the atmosphere. This is what is happening for decades. Absolutely zero sentiment and protest has or would change that.

Bitcoin mining has changed that. If that is what makes you think of a solution that nobody else has thought of for decades, just because bitcoin makes your tummy ache, be our guest.

> To me, any renewable power going into bitcoin mining, is contributing nothing

I also think it will be helpful for you to get the terms accurate, this benefit comes from stranded energy, using this energy is more sustainable. This doesn't necessarily mean renewable or clean, it can though. Since we are talking about reducing methane emission, this isn't a renewable or clean source, it just has 90% drop in methane and hydrocarbons going into the atmosphere while stripping them apart in catalytic converters just like cars do. This is good!

This statement caused me to do some light research. I discovered that methane is 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

> Methane emissions decay gradually, with an average lifetime of about 12 years (“perturbation lifetime”, which is what matters for climate purposes).

> This will increase by roughly 35% if methane concentrations double, or decrease roughly 25% if concentrations return to pre-industrial levels.

Methane is actually 150x-ish worse than CO2, but it breaks down over time. Ameliorated over a long time it's 25-30x worse.

Rough part is that breaking down methane depends on OH radicals in the air, of which there are a fixed amount. The more methane there is, the slower methane is broken down. If there were a sudden massive release of methane, it would stay at that 150x potency for a very long time. Fun!

To make the complexity really mind-blowing, no, the amount is not fixed. It varies, and temperature is one of the largest factors. But it's not a simple relation, because air currents are also very important, and temperature also changes those.

https://www.iea.org/reports/flaring-emissions

That would be so if all externalities were priced in properly, which is not the case.

And of course, you would never waste energy by purchasing a hardcover, that would be morally reprehensible.

Honestly wouldn’t surprise me if a kid playing minecraft on an old computer had drastically less impact on the environment than your average book snob - especially the “I buy paper for the experience” kind.

Here’s one analysis that takes those factors into account, and eReaders still come out massively on top on average.

Paper isn’t the problem, it’s the fact that’s books are heavy and bulky, so the transportation and storage have massive carbon implications.

On top of that, most books end up in landfill as a result of not selling in stores. If you care about the environment and read books an eReader is a worthy investment.

I honestly struggle to believe this group of people truly care that much about crypto's effects on the environment; from the people I've spoken about this with personally, they always come across as hyperbolic and dishonest.

To some degree I believe it is their brain subconsciously trying to justify their hared because they were "left out," the same way some people, for example, irrationally hate The Avengers because they never saw it and got sick of hearing people talk so much about it around its release. Each reminder of being left out burns you just that little bit more, and it's hard to be objective and come around to something once you feel that way about it.

I'm not surprised this "ya but, crypto still bad" comment is the top comment here on HN. It's pretty funny to me.

The fact is that crypto doesn't really solve any pressing problems for normal people. Fiat currency and related digital networks work just fine, all of the time.

The one thing I will agree with the OP about is, HN had some of the earliest posts about Bitcoin and it was generally poo pood by the audience potentially due to an inadequate analysis. The long term HN readers that missed the boat may suffer from some forms of regret which can surface as disdain or hatred.

I mean, how many assets that come across this site have 20,000,000% to 69,000,000% returns and just require you to pay attention to benefit?

Using that as an excuse to dismiss criticisms out of hand isn't particularly sporting, though. I feel like my criticisms of crypto (such as they are) are independent of whether I'd prefer to have been a millionaire.

Worth reviewing this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=32866339

As in with PoW I can migrate once the ecosystem is damaged (i.e. just mine something else, sell the hardware, w/e) with PoS I need that ecosystem to thrive to profit or to even exit it.

The difference between business and governments is that in business every dollar has a vote, whereas in a democracy every adult has a vote.

"liberation of people" can only happen by having a working democracy. And a working democracy can only exist when there is (democratically elected) government. So it's not like people should be liberated from government, people should be the government.

Therefore I think the best situation is where government controls the money, and we the people control the government.

If 51% democratically voted to enslave the other 49%, that would be a working democracy but far from "liberation of people".

This is why people who give a shit about Democracy talk about minority rights, and free media, and non-discrimination. These are the core tenets of democracy.

51% decide that 49% shouldn’t be allowed to drink alcohol. that’s a comparatively minor example of “tyranny of the majority” (which happened within living memory). now explore all battles you’ve been on the losing side of. abortion access? funding of overseas wars? legality of drugs?

i find it incomprehensible that if you look at things honestly you won’t find at least some instance when you’ve felt repressed by the democratic rule of the majority. “enslavement” is simply that repression exaggerated for the purpose of making you see it.

> This is why people who give a shit about Democracy talk about minority rights, and free media, and non-discrimination. These are the core tenets of democracy.

no, these are the core tenets of egalitarianism. democracy is merely one process by which we may approximate egalitarian ends. if you care about egalitarian ideals (or above, “liberation of the people”), you should be open to other processes which achieve them — not just the one you were raised to know.

Just because sometimes you lose in a democracy doesn't make it tyranny. Quite the reverse. If you can't accept a political system that doesn't always let you get your way, then you're the tyrant.

if “yes”, we have radically different views that probably can’t be reconciled on a HN thread (could talk about them on a different platform — check my bio).

if “no”, then i’m not sure i understand your argument.

for reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Ameri...

But I've never seen a satisfactory answer to the followup question which is what political system do you envision can prevent such bad outcomes? Surely non-democratic societies produce similar bad outcomes more often.

That's why these arguments frequently reduce to one person saying "democracy is illegitimate because sometimes majorities vote for awful things" and the other person replying "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."

That's how all democracies work, 51% can't just make any enslavement-law they want. It is still democracy because the constitution that says so was approved democratically.

Democracy is not a single "thing". It is an adjective describing societies. Some have more of it, some less. Not so long ago women couldn't vote, nor blacks. A clear dividing line in current-day politics is that some people seem to think we should have less of it.

earlier in the thread we touched on (literal) slavery, and it was pointed out that it's basically irrelevant to modern, established states. but how much of this is political, v.s. social and economic/technological? to state the obvious, slaves didn't gain legal rights by voting or participating in the political system. but moreover: if you took a democracy today, picked one race within it, excluded them from the political process and let everyone else vote on whether to enslave that race or not, would they do it?

i can't really imagine it. social norms have shifted so much that the politics just play a substantially more minor role here.

now take the WWII internment camps. if this replayed today, how would it be different? we didn't have RVs in the 40's, but today anyone with one could reasonably escape to the hills and live in only mild discomfort for at least a few months. information flows are generally faster, so anyone at risk of being interned would probably have more time to react. on the downside, surveillance means your bank account might be frozen, and your employment -- even if remote -- jeopardized. who really knows exactly what would happen -- more importantly technology plays a huge role in shaping what at first looks to be a strictly political outcome.

to get to the point: social norms and technology are inextricably linked to the same outcomes which political processes seek to control. to ask "what political system ... can prevent such bad outcomes" is incomplete: because that's only one of three large systems which drive these outcomes.

an extremely simplified view of these systems is something like this:

- social norms: the informal ways we relate to and interact with each other.

- political systems: formal process for legitimizing large-scale power relations between individuals and groups. underpinned -- especially in democracies -- by social norms or myths (widespread belief in a founding body of law like a constitution).

- technology: tools which change the specific dependencies between individuals. often they supplement the ways people relate to each other: in the past if i wanted to read a book i had to purchase it through a bookstore; now i have the choice to print it myself at home.

while political systems are about taking powers which are presumed to be necessary and deciding exactly how they should be distributed across the citizenry, technology uniquely offers a path toward diminishing if not altogether escaping those power relations.

> what political system do you envision can prevent such bad outcomes?

none. in both senses of the word. democracy gets us further along than any other political system we've explored by distributing power, and choice. to bring choice where there was none before, at this point, technology is the remaining lever. a generation from today, that person with the RV in the hills can manufacture their supplies on some 3d printer. they can purchase food through Bitcoin over some P2P internet link, maybe pick it up without exposing themselves with a drone. a generation from then, they can just grow food lab-style. utopian, dystopian, it's not a panacea, but it's better than being locked in a camp. it's better to have the choice.

if "liberation" means choice, and increasing choice means decreasing order, then infinite choice would imply anarchy in the political sense. not as a goal but as a side effect of pursuing desirable social outcomes. that's not to say people wouldn't self-organize into groups within this environment, some of which might have hierarchy and even formal decision making systems (even the most unconstrained successful non-profits leverage such systems) -- just that these would always be escapable: the risks would be minimal whenever those structures turn against you.

now that's a very distant, hypothetical future. we need a state to ensure the negative rights that protect choice in the first place: i don't see that changing in my lifetime. my point is just that we're at the point where the fruitful thing to do is gradually decrease the powers we hold over each other via political systems.

so what kind of political system allows itself to shrink over time? over the last century, the borders between democracies have been largely stable, most of the growth has been inward. in the US, i don't think we'd see any internal warring if we got rid of our central federal government. i think the path forward in my lifetime is just toward smaller democracies, connected by trade and treaties. during covid, here on the west coast CA, OR and WA were already coordinating outside of federal processes. distribute the powers held by the federal government back to the states, and from there on to the metro regions. in the political sphere, that seems the easy/low-risk direction to proliferating choice.

i'm arguing politics in a cryptocurrency thread. so to bring it back: now is our opportunity to remove one of the political levers we wield over each other. OP is right that Ethereum isn't democratic. head-to-head it might not be better than a democratic state's currency. but the coexistence of the two insulates against some possibility of "the majority voting for something awful". if the tyrannical majority vote me out of my home during WWIII, at least it's that much harder for them to vote away my ability to buy an RV and retreat to the hills.

That is because it is a business, not a government elected by people. And I'm fine with that. It's not too different from credit card companies. Problem of course is if it becomes a monopoly.

On a completely separate track, what is described above is just an extreme example of what is actually happening. Some proxy of majority voting forced me to finance, in addition to the things I would gladly finance out of necessity like police and roads; or even unnecessary things I'd gladly donate to like NASA or National Parks; such things as e.g. the continuation of the war in Afghanistan, student loan forgiveness, healthcare subsidies, TSA security theater, etc. They did it by taking some part of my earnings, i.e. forcing me to work extra instead of having more free time for the same salary. Then they used the money to bomb a foreign wedding or give some deadbeat a chance at grievance studies. I guess it's good it is only a part-time enslavement.

Im not just trying to “win an argument”, like you accuse me of, I’m pointing out an inaccuracy of your statement. Through your childish outburst I can see that you’re defining democracy to include other aspects of what you deem to be “good governance” — fine, but that’s confusing given the well known definition which doesn’t necessarily include those things.

But what's usually left out when people bring out that argument, is that the alternative is worse. If the 51% can enslave the 49% in a democracy, then the 1% can enslave the 99% in a system where people vote with their money. In both versions, you need to protect groups with less power, but democracies distribute power much, much better than "capitalocracies" where 1 dollar = 1 vote.

And then the 51% of the other country would perhaps try to enslave the original 49%. But that would not be democratic any more. That would be juts one country starting a war against another.

Weak governments make for failed states, because corporations and other interest groups such as gangs, warlords, control things instead.

Or, if you and nobody in your family is of 'military age', they 'compete' for it, by rolling into your town, and stealing half of what you own. The 'competing' warlord that rolls in next week will, of course, steal the other half. If you're lucky, they won't make an example out of your town for 'supporting' the first warlord.

I'll take a strong, stable government over that horror-show any day of the week, but if you'd like to give it a try, much of Mexico has quite a bit of that sort of thing going on right now. Anyone who moves to the right parts of it can enjoy life amid 'competing' cartels.

All in all it was definitely a more freeing environment than a lot of life in the US.

------------

>Why do you live in the US, then? That should make you think a bit harder about failed states.

If the government wants to leave the territory I'm in, I'm all good with that. I've never demanded the government stay here.

Why do you live in the US, then? That should make you think a bit harder about failed states.

Why does anyone live somewhere under a government they're not happy with? Why do women live in states with abortion laws they disagree with, is it because they're edgy teens? Why don't you personally live somewhere else that is closer to your goals of governance, surely US is not the most ideal for what you seek?

I don't really think you want to go down the road that presumes someone isn't thinking hard enough if they don't run away from where they're currently living. Personally when I did leave the US I did it to help the Kurds, not to abandon my own family, and without the permission of the mother of my child to expatriate it isn't exactly proof I'm not thinking 'harder' because I live here right now. Regardless of how fucked up the US government is I have certain obligations to my family who happen to be here more for logistical reasons than political reasons.

If it were just about me, or if I had permission from the mother to expatriate our child, sure I'd likely not be where I am right now.

This ad-hominem attack on another person's beliefs is non-productive at its very core & doesn't help in the examination & introspection of ideas.

I'll take this one step further.

My credit card company has caught every instance of fraud on my card. So I've had zero hours of frustration yet multiple instances of people trying to use my credit card number. One time they even had the card - they had stolen it that night and tried to use it at a local gas station. A fraud alert woke me up.

Usually, the credit card company is the one absorbing the cost of this fraud - the food or physical goods that the fraudster purchased doesn't just magically leave their possession.

It is entirely possible to build a company that holds custody of your crypto, extracts rent on transactions or borrows with your deposits, and uses their profits to give you some financial protection up to a certain limit. Most likely within 10+ years your local bank will have some account that will custodially hold some limited amount of funds in crypto that are FDIC insured. But not everybody in the world wants this system, and not everybody wants all of their assets to be held in this way.

That information is practically public already, since you have to provide it to everyone you purchase from online with your card. If you regularly buy things online with your credit or debit card it's less a matter of if the credentials will leak than when. Regular checking and savings accounts are at least as bad given the existence of Direct Debit, a system where practically anyone can take money out of any account just by knowing the routing number (public information) and account number (printed on every check).

Cryptocurrency aside, just compare that to something like PayPal, where the authorization happens directly between you and the payment processor: the merchant never gets your credentials and can't take money out of your account without your express permission. The traditional banking system has the worst security procedures; the design is reminiscent of the early days of the Internet where plaintext passwords were commonplace in protocols like rlogin, FTP, SMTP, and unencrypted HTTP, when authentication was used at all. The only thing keeping it from complete collapse is the absolute fortune they spend on statistical anti-fraud analysis, which completely coincidentally requires them to have deep insight into every transaction passing through their network. Not that they would ever think of using that immensely valuable data for their own gain, of course. Perish the thought.

In any case, Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies weren't built to replace credit cards, but rather to replace cash. If someone steals your cash or you somehow manage to hand it to the wrong person or simply destroy it you can't just call up the U.S. Treasury and expect them to put things right. Holding cash and transacting in cash has its downsides, and yet those same risky properties can be extremely useful if proper care is taken. Escrow and human-mediated reversible payments can be implemented on top of a system of irreversible transactions. The reverse doesn't work; you can't very well run an escrow service where the payer can reverse their payment into the escrow account without following the escrow procedures after getting the goods.

Compared to physical cash, as a digital good crypto has several advantages and a few disadvantages. In the latter category you have the obvious risk of hackers compromising the wallet; IMHO a separate, secure, hardware wallet is mandatory if you keep any significant amount of self-custodial crypto. On the flip side, however, it's not all that difficult or expensive to make your crypto more secure against would-be thieves than the gold in Fort Knox if you're willing to put in a modicum of effort, and the possibility of geographically-distributed encrypted backups makes it much harder to separate you from your money if you plan ahead a bit.

The fact that security is built around a 16 digit number and 3 digit pin that you share with everyone and can be reused is embarrassing for credit card companies, not a win. Amazing.

And you need the private keys to conduct business so obvi they can exit the HSM

And if my 1M USD bitcoin is in some hardware wallet, won't that just incentivize someone to kidnap my kids until i send bitcoin, much like bitcoin breathed new life into ransonware economy after banks mostly shut it down?

Perhaps, despite the examples of ICOs, EVM smart contracts, NFT rugs, and the general flood of fake discords and so on, people assume the central banks and retail banks are a bigger threat than the criminal minds attracted to untraceable and unreversable payment methods?

While I agree with you in general, this is false; the whole point is that the HSM can sign transactions using the keys inside it but will never expose them to outside.

For instance, my retirement now such as it is, remains pretty safe. I would have to read some financial meme (in the old sense of reproductive ideas) online and go thru a number of complex paper work steps to remove it from the boring fiat place it is now and send it to a much riskier place. The massive too big to fail institution could fail and not have 401ks bailed out, or society could collapse.

If it were some digital wallet, I could loose it just by signing something unrelated to “take all my money” with my private key and boom my wife and my self and my kids and other dependents are SOL.

Given that I have to trust society not to fail anyways to enjoy “stored value” where all value is embodied in and protected by society, i can’t find a way in which the irrevocable transactions benefit me more than the risk of my own laxness and occasional errors endangers the well being of my loved ones.

> good luck building a good UX for a financial system where a small OpsSec error can wipe out your family's fortune

Define "small" lol

As I understand it, people have lost their wallet contents due to trusting email, Discord, DNS and SSL protected websites. So if there is no basis for trusting the other parties in an online transaction, it seems any action whatsoever could lead to financial ruin. Even moving my assets to cold storage makes the scenario that my heirs forget how multiparty sig recovery works or just some eager relative throwing away the box of USB drives away.

The flip side is that it’s creating new opportunities for massive privacy problems which would be irrecoverable. People who are trying to hide their activity will take precautions like using shell companies but normal people won’t think to do that or realize that they’re making that level of trust by using a wallet, exchange, etc.

There are some obvious big problems (“do voters know you paid for this porn site 15 years ago?”) but also more personal ones: imagine if employers, insurers, dating apps, etc. started data mining? Again, there are possible ways to mitigate that risk but I’d hesitate to make a lifetime commitment on those being effective and perfectly operated.

I think this begins the search for another trustless transaction system that is neither PoW nor PoS.

Why can't these hypothetical powerful people rent time on a mining farm?

PoW is PoS, it just has some extra steps that have the minor side effect of using huge amount of resources for no reason.

They can, but so can the rest of us. Unlike under PoS.

This argument is straining so hard to find a way in which these two things are different but PoS and PoW are absolutely the same thing, just one of them is cheaper, more decentralized, and cleaner. PoW doesn't imply greater decentralization, in fact it implies the opposite. I can go build a $100 computer right now, load it up with 32 ETH, and begin validating transactions in minutes. I am on an even footing with every other participant investing a similar level of resources. If I want to mine some PoW BTC, for example, i first need the industry alliances to get the latest greatest mining ASICs (which are mostly not available, because the manufacturers are strongly incentivized to use them for themselves and a small group of allies) or I had to get a team of engineers to design one and contract a custom silicon foundry to produce one, wait a year or two, and then plug in my new miners with an enormous capital investment.

It sure seems like one of these is more decentralized, and I don't think it's the one you want it to be.

It's also wasting by actively destroying storage disks.

However, if a much more powerful criminal spies on your credit card # as you send money to Wikileaks or a bunch of truckers who drive to Ottowa for a protest you can never fix it when your card is cancelled and your bank account is seized. Or when you face a variety of other sanctions and persecutions for spending or donating your own hard-earned money.

>Crypto? No. It may, eventually, have some other benefits though that’s yet to be seen.

These benefits have already been seen and realized by people targeted by authoritarian governments and banking cabals all over the globe.

It is all about motives. If you think that the government is doing something wrong, change that, don't make it impossible for anyone to enforce laws at all.

I disagree completely. Motive is completely irrelevant. Mass surveillance and government spying (among other things) on people who have done nothing to suggest they are engaged in criminal activity is absolutely wrong and a violation of human rights and human dignity no matter what the motive.

>If you think that the government is doing something wrong, change that, don't make it impossible for anyone to enforce laws at all.

The issue is that people with morality and dignity believe that the government is doing something wrong by violating the privacy and human dignity of every citizen (by spying on their communications and tapping their phones), while those who don't see the value of privacy or human dignity don't believe the government is doing anything wrong. That is the crux of the issue. Trying to explain the importance of privacy and human dignity who people who don't believe that privacy and human dignity have any value is like trying to explain what blue looks like to someone who has been blind since birth.

>I mean, prison is authoritarian an oppressive. There are innocent people in them. Do we make it so that it is not possible to track crimes and put people in prison?

We have a Constitution that theoretically prevents the government from violating the rights of every person so that it may catch those few people who are committing crimes. Unfortunately the system of checks and balances that is supposed to be in place to stop the government from violating our privacy, rights and human dignity is entirely broken (if not non-existent) as abundantly chronicled for everyone who has paid attention.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-29/fbi-searc...

https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/united-states-v-moalin-n...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/a-brief...

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fisa-court-issues-rare-order...

I was speaking of the motives of the institution with the power. In the crypto case, the people with the power are motivated by greed. In the government's case, it could be anything, but at least they are theoretically accountable in a representative democracy.

> The issue is that people with morality and dignity believe that the government is doing something wrong by violating the privacy and human dignity...

What does this have to do with reversibility of financial transactions? If you think there is some government conspiracy with the 'bankers' against you or your group, what is taking away basic consumer protections going to do to help you?

You define centralized control over wealth and the ability of an individual to send and receive payments to whomever they choose, without sanction, as "basic consumer protection", while I define it as unacceptable authoritarianism. Yes, it is true, an all-powerful governing entity that has complete control over how everyone sends, receives and stores their own money has the power to reverse fraudulent transactions, which is desirable in some circumstances. It also has the power to monitor, regulate, control and prevent individuals from sending and receiving their own money, as well as punishing them for sending, receiving, or trying to send or receive, money from those who are frowned upon by the controlling authority - which is incredibly undesirable.

>If you think there is some government conspiracy with the 'bankers' against you or your group

There's no conspiracy - this is happening right out in the open - and the powers-that-be are happy to brag about their unfettered power.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60383385

https://www.wired.com/2010/12/wikileaks-congress-pressure/

No, I define that as 'oversight' which is necessary for a functioning macroeconomic system. If we can't do that then we can't collect taxes. If you are opposed to all taxation then we have a fundamental disagreement on the function of society.

> There's no conspiracy - this is happening right out in the open - and the powers-that-be are happy to brag about their unfettered power.

You linked to two things from the past that were proposed and never occurred. What does that prove? The government is working as intended and bad ideas are usually stopped in their tracts. The difference is that if money is the be-all-end-all of power, then any rich person can just make their own laws, and I fail to see how that is a better option than a government accountable to its citizens.

If you think that the government should have the power to monitor every transaction, communication and movement of everyone, all the time, so that they can make sure people aren't cheating on their taxes, then we have a fundamental disagreement on the function of government and society. If the government can't figure out how to raise revenue without violating the privacy and human dignity of every American then that government should not exist.

> The government is working as intended and bad ideas are usually stopped in their tracts.

We clearly live in two different realities. In my reality, people have had their ability to send and receive funds to a wide variety of locales and causes blocked by the government. In my reality, the credit card companies blocked the ability of individuals to send donations to Wikileaks just after they were publicly threatened by Senator Joe Lieberman (but before the founder of Wikileaks was thrown in a dungeon at the behest of the US government).

>The difference is that if money is the be-all-end-all of power, then any rich person can just make their own laws

Money isn't the be-all-end-all, but centralized control of money comes very close. It is very different to be a rich person with a lot of money and to be a government entity that decides, at the point of a gun, who is allowed to have and/or spend money and what they are allowed to spend it on. The right to privacy, the right to human dignity, the right to autonomy, and the right to send your hard-earned money to whoever you want to send it to is all part of the same struggle for human rights and freedom. The push to eliminate privacy, to eliminate cash, to consolidate the power of government to control every facet of your personal, medical and financial life are all inextricably linked, and are all leading to an incredibly dystopian future that in many respects has already arrived.

A conversation about the power of the government to have real-time, granular information about every dollar you spend, send or receive and total control over whether to allow or prevent your transactions is a conversation about state surveillance.

To me, the immutability of an actual blockchain is non-negotiable. I've given up on Ethereum after the DAO fork out of principle.

But that's the beauty. Unlike our current financial system, you're not bound to use Ethereum. You have sovereignty and can make your own choices (and drive change).

-- (I only discuss part of your comment, don't have time for the rest)

Just FYI, the biggest problem for crypto fraud is phishing, not theft. A thief can't get your private keys from a hardware wallet. And there are many, many, MANY strategies you can use against phishing.

Any attempted tampering would be highly visible and why would anyone with control of that much ETH risk loss of trust in their valuable asset?

How many smaller players in the crypto scene have received that kind white glove treatment, going against the "code is law" principle, when they've lost huge sums of money? Code was law right up until The DAO massively screwed up and was deemed Too Big to Fail. No different than traditional financial institutions.

As the mining resources of the various trustless Proof of $X models needed to makes crypto work are increasingly centralized into the hands of massive players in the field the principle of crypto democratizing control of money & finance is becoming an Emperor With [increasingly] No Clothes.

With proof of stake there will be no more abstraction layer to hide this fact any more either. Majority will mean the very small number of organizations holding a majority of ethereum, not the majority of __people__ holding ethereum.

Very roughly by eyeballing the numbers here [1] about 450 walled own about 51% of ethereum. Out of about 0.000225% of ethereum wallets in control of 51%, and that's not even taking into account whales that may control multiple of those largest wallets.

So your what's your definition of "majority" here when it comes to future governance issues, the 450 or the 200,000,000 other holders?

True democratization of crypto would have it be the latter, but that's not where I see things going.

[1] https://etherscan.io/accounts/

If someone told you otherwise, I am sorry that you were misled.

All your statement does is agree with my sentiment that crypto like ethereum is controlled by a very small number of very large players in the field. It is not the democratization of money & finance that proponents & crypto idealists use in their rhetoric to promote a supposed revolution in the field. It's substantially similar to traditional systems with a few minor (relative to the proposed revolution) features that might offer improvements on the traditional systems.

And yes, lots of people have told me otherwise-- that crypto will put the the aggregated power of traditional financial systems into the hands of the people and all sorts of things along those lines. It's not hard to find such crypto evangelicals. But no I have __never__ been misled by them.

It's always been obvious to me that any actual promise that crypto may have in improving financial systems falls massively short of promises made.

Yes, nobody ever suggested that irreversible transactions would make it easier to address fraud. You don't have a central entity to appeal to.

> All your statement does is agree with my sentiment that crypto like ethereum is controlled by a very small number of very large players in the field.

No, it does not agree with that. But the value of ethereum is determined by willingness to pay. There are not a "very small number" of actors with willingness to pay for ethereum.

Crypto is explicitly anti-democratic in that you cannot democratically (ie. by vote) decide to take away someone's asset.

If all services sitting on top of bitcoin were equal to the USD (settlement, fraud protection, PayPal/Venmo, etcetc) then you’d really need to compare the “tokenomics” of the currencies. With bitcoin, you have complete predictability in terms of when new bitcoins are created (inflation). With USD it’s purely up to the government.

Of course you also have the option of running an honest bank, one which simply holds its customers money (for a fee) without lending it out, and perhaps offering separate investment products for those who are interested with full disclosure of the risk involved should the investments fail.

Fractional reserve banks are very honest about the fact they reuse your money until you withdraw it. What you are describing is a full-reserve bank.

Yeah, like I said: an honest bank.

It's an open secret that money "in your bank account" isn't actually in your account waiting to be withdrawn—the banks will openly acknowledge that if asked, though it's not something they like to draw attention to in their advertising or when you're opening an account—but they aren't so open about the fact that this practice comes with investment risk, including the possibility of losing any money you've deposited with them, or at least being forced to wait longer than usual to get it back because the bank is having cash-flow issues. (Which, naturally, causes even more severe cash-flow issues for the depositors.) They have the mandatory insurance, of course, but the FDIC is more of a placebo to prevent bank runs than actual protection against systemic issues affecting many banks at the same time. The FDIC can bail out any one bank easily, but if everyone wanted their deposits back there wouldn't be nearly enough to cover the banks' obligations. The only way to avoid bank failures in that scenario would be to print more money, which would drive inflation and penalize those who put their money in less risk-prone, higher-reserve banks.

Anyway, back to your point. Why should a layer on top 'eliminate' the layer underneath? Card companies did not eliminate cash.

Because that is the single innovative aspect of crypto: circumventing regulation (by virtue of not having a central authority). Every single other thing can be done better by a non-decentralised system.

> much of the cynicism around crypto comes from a position of privilege.

Boo-hoo. I would think that more rich people are circumventing capital controls in China, Korea, and Argentina using crypto than poor, unbanked people are using crypto.

”Stripe nuked my business”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528

Visa/MasterCard is never going to be a solution for everyone, everywhere, even if it is a solution for a particular Orignal Poster.

Remember, Stripe is not known to be reliable, just convenient. People will go for the convenience with cryptocurrency as well, there is no reason to believe otherwise.

It is much easier to create a VISA alternative when the ledger and transaction processing are taken care of.

Currently, it's by far easier for everyone to use Visa: most people have access to that system, services are widely available for businesses of all sizes, etc. The primary drawbacks are transaction costs and businesses being on the hook for most fraudulent transactions.

Switching to Ethereum would make things slower, but that could improve. Since it's not tied to a hard currency, however, there's a much bigger problem cost management: I know exactly how much a Visa transaction will cost but gas fees are unpredictable and volatile, and the exchange rates for ETH vary both independently and more than most currencies. Similarly, there's a real appeal to not automatically being on the hook for a disputed transaction but that's significantly undercut if you have to worry about being one mistake away from irrecoverably losing everything in your account and so far customers have not been jumping to take on more personal risk either.

The big question here is also what competitive businesses do in response: for example, if at some point in the future Ethereum actually became cost-competitive what happens when Visa simply lowers their transaction fees until that's no longer the case again? They have a lot of margin to do that and the merchants don't need to change anything about how they do business. Similarly, Ethereum is nowhere near the speed of a traditional credit card transaction but even if it hit that speed it'd be playing catch-up with Apple/Google Pay – businesses care a lot about things like that since it's often highly visible to customers and can affect things like retail lines, so the question is whether that can be improved faster than companies like Apple/Google, Stripe, Square, etc. can improve their services.

Right now, on layer 2, you can transact for a $0.01 fee no matter the size of the transaction. I’m not a Visa expert but from what I understand they take a percentage of the transaction. Visa could lower their fees but I see that as a win-win. They faced competition and either way consumers win.

Granted if Eth exploded in popularity the fees would go up potentially 10x. However there are upgrades on the way to lower fees even further. Namely danksharding (excuse the silly name).

Things like UX, and fraudulent transactions are much harder. However UX can get better and there are actually things we can do about fraudulent transactions. A Visa competitor could build their own smart wallet where the financial institution has keys to the wallet as well as users. This would allow them to administer the wallet for the user similarly to current bank accounts.

A competitors could also create their own layer 2 which would only confirm transactions on the main ethereum network after X amount of time. This would allow the company to revert fraudulent transactions within that time window.

The competition is P2P interbank transfers, which are being rolled out to be free in the U.S. (And are free in Europe.) Credit card transactions come with additional perks for the consumer, like anti-fraud and rewards, which bias the coin. Someone not caring for those protections can, again, use interbank transfer.

They’re not as uncertain as I made it sound though. Smart wallets already exist and layer 2’s exist where users can submit proof of fraud. Danksharding isn't going to take 8 years like proof of stake.

The biggest issue I see is building trust, which takes a lot of time. A smart wallet is great but it’s going to take years before the community trusts the builder of the wallet.

With that said, I do think crypto has a chance of offering things that the current financial institutions will find very difficult to compete with. I’d love to see Visa reduce their fees to a flat $0.01 per transaction but that that would massively reduce their profits.

Also, with a standardized financial API it opens the door to more competition in other areas. For example, a fairer and more transparent alternative to credit scores. Current credit score providers rely on the fact that their system is opaque. Competing with a transparent credit score would be very difficult.

The reason I’m so interested in crypto is the possibility of taking away power from these large institutions.

That's 60 times lower than Ethereum's transaction fee. Now, an L2 service could go lower but then they're taking on more risk which they'll want to be paid for and it's basically reinventing Venmo or Square Cash.

> Also, with a standardized financial API it opens the door to more competition in other areas. For example, a fairer and more transparent alternative to credit scores. Current credit score providers rely on the fact that their system is opaque. Competing with a transparent credit score would be very difficult.

There are two problems here. The most obvious is that it's at cross-purposes with privacy but the more subtle one is that as people build layers on top of the Ethereum network to compensate for design deficiencies, that transparency evaporates and you're left with the same need for individual companies to share data with each other and near-certainty that in the absence of regulation they will do so even when it's not in their customers' best interest.

IMO L2's are fundamentally better than Venmo and Square Cash. Firstly, they are much more transparent to the user. Switching to a different L2 is usually as simple as selecting an option from a dropdown in your wallet app. There are also protocols for allowing users to buy crypto straight on L2 without paying L1 fees and transferring from one L2 to another (for a small fee). Additionally, if an L2 goes down there are escape hatches that allow users to pull money out onto L1. The same cannot be said for Venmo or Square. This transparency also means users are less tied to a single provider. If I want to accept money on Venmo I have to sign up for a whole new app, vs selecting an L2 from a dropdown like I mentioned before.

Regarding credit scores and privacy, there is strong reason to believe that zero-knowledge proofs will be very useful here. These are much more cutting edge but zk-proofs allow people to prove things about themselves without giving away their private info. This could allow a privacy-respecting credit score where users can prove certain things about their financial history without giving everything away.

I will admit privacy is still very much a concern. The recent controversy over Tornado Cash proves that governments are not comfortable with total privacy. However, I will say that this isn't the first time the government has tried to stop cryptography. Originally, there were legal battles over public-key encryption when it was first invented but now we use it every day.

Aren't venmo and cashapp FDIC insured?

You can use an L2 escape hatch at any time. The L2 doesn’t need to be online or functioning.

It feels like there is a subtle misunderstanding here: Credit cards are at least L2 systems, not L1. Physical cash, the foundational raw-unit-of-account layer most comparable to Bitcoin or Etherium, is the L1. Something like Venmo or Square Cash would be L3, built on top of the credit networks or electronic bank transfers which are themselves a layer of abstraction over transacting in cash.

The bureaus are regulated because of their power but they were not created by the government but by the value to lenders to having a trusted third party to merge and reshare the customer data in a safe fashion.

And I would have to guess most people can master "understand your credit score" better than we can master "good ops sec for a 100K dollar private key"

>With the merge & staking that abstraction layer has disappeared and it’s still the organizations with the most money who control it.

In the prior state, the folks with control were the ones willing to invest in it. In the after state, the folks with control are the ones willing to invest, OR the ones willing to get others to invest - i.e. coinbase.

No, you can't.

It if someone hacks you mobile bank and transfers money to another country, all you can do is go to police, which can do fuck off.

Now, all big players have to do to print money is nothing. It is now actually impossible to ever overcome the mechanisms.

My young son the other day said “I’ll get money from the store and buy what ever I want”.

I explained you had to exchange work for money. So you can work for the store, then they give you money to buy things.

Then I thought about how banks or large lenders just give people money. They magically create a loan, which people have to pay back with interest. The bank assesses the risk they won’t and profit they want and that’s the interest rate. The FED works the same way, just handing out money. Those people don’t work for their money. They just get free labor for controlling the money.

Here it’s like the store printing money at 5-8% a year or what ever just for having money in the bank. They can then spend 4% or what ever of that and still always guarantee growth in their money supply. It’s the exact same.

Theoretically, someone can make something the store finds valuable enough in the real world to trade their reserves. However, they’d have to find it more valuable than the static growth rate.

The difference in POW is that anyone can enter the market. And large lenders won’t have an advantage. Sure they could PAY for more processing power, but they have no advantage of printing money over the next guy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: I know this sounds harsh, but there's a ton of history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687129.

I still feel like absolutely bonkers stuff is posted about crypto and they get a pass - extremely low-effort lies and drivel - then I post my counterpoint hot take and it’s “You flame bait moron!”

Similarly I am passionate about China and communism given… the murders in my family… but again, we are supposed to call out certain topics but not others.

My defense, but noted on I’m on my final final warning.

But if people feel like that makes it ok to break the rules themselves, we end up with a downward spiral [3], so that can't be right. The solution is to stick to the site guidelines no matter what other people do, and let us know about the other cases by flagging them or emailing us.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Turnabout should be fair play here. Dang's continual low-value abuse of users to enforce suppression of seibelj and others' speech should be met with flagging and every possible option to reduce the effect of these threats.

If it is possible to ban dang, we need to be finding ways to do so. If not, consider his abuse behavior like the payment processor 'Stripe.' Robust alternatives must be used to minimize the deterretive effect of threats.

Either way, we should stop cutting slack to Dang's efforts and focus on how to ensure adjusting of behavior is bilateral. Our slack for Dang is not infinite. If Dang does not enjoy the comments of others perhaps he should move to another platform :)

The number two crypto left Proof of Waste and that’s good, yay! But the whole scene is still in the shadow of Bitcoin’s Proof of Waste, and until that does the same, or shrinks to an irreverent shitcoin, people are gonna hate on all crypto for its energy usage.

You just made a great case for why crypto as a backend for balance transfer that's abstracted by centralized payment options built on top of the transfer network for funding balances but directly interfaces with POS outside the crypto network will almost certainly continue to grow into a thing as crypto grows.

Get rid of bank accounts, and then firewall balances behind 3rd party abstractions powered by your crypto wallet.

By all means charge my vendors 3.25% of the transaction to firewall and insure my wallet against theft.

Give me 1-2% cash back and I'll be even more excited about the prospect.

The fact that these types of get off my lawn comments get voted to the top of HN that make me wonder if I'm on a ship of fools that is no longer the center of gravity of interesting and creative tech thought.

Crypto has been around for over a decade and isn't going away, and it's an complex technology that has massive depth and a lot of interest. These sorts of negative superficial comments that get repeated ad infinitum are tiring and provide no value.

If you prefer credit cards then use them. No one is taking that away from you. That isn't the main use case that Ethereum is going after.

No, absolutely not. I'm saying it's controlled by those with the most money, and history has show as that transactions __can__ be reversed when those large players throw their weight around in a too-big-to-fail sort of way.

I'm also saying that I don't mind there being a human layer of judgment, but also that it goes very much against the trustless ethos of crypto. And also that the currently layer of human judgement is vastly less accessible to the average crypto hold than it is in traditional banking & finance.

A singular huge change is just not comparable to credit card chargebacks that can be executed by anyone. Not comparable at all. Chargebacks are part of the CC protocol. Eth has no such mechanism.

(1) in both traditional finance and crypto, a relatively small group of big players control the rules of the game

(2) in traditional finance, there are established ways for small players (Eg consumers) to appeal to big players (eg retail bank) to make exceptions and provide redress

(3) in crypto, there are not yet established pathways for small players to petition big players for redress in this way.