"People who do math don't have credit card debt."

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by myself

When Bitcoin reaches $10K, a single Satoshi will be worth one dime. So much for micropayments. Transaction costs are going up.

Said I myself a month ago. Steam no longer accept Bitcoin as the transaction fees are prohibative. As of posting 1BTC=US$15760.9.

arstechnica.com:Bitcoin’s insane energy consumption, explained

subheads
The Bitcoin network consumes massive amounts of energy
Bitcoin’s energy use should decline in the long run*
Can we reduce Bitcoin’s energy use?

*There's a widespread misconception that Bitcoin mining is based on a mathematical process that gets steadily harder as more and more bitcoins are produced.

That's wrong. The Bitcoin network is designed to automatically adjust the difficulty of mining to ensure that one block is produced every 10 minutes, no matter how much (or how little) computing power there is on the network.

When Bitcoin launched in 2009, each block came with a 50-bitcoin reward for the miner who created it. This figure is scheduled to fall by half every four years. It fell to 25 bitcoins in 2012 and 12.5 bitcoins in 2016. The reward will fall again to 6.25 bitcoins in 2020. When the mining industry's revenue falls by half, its energy consumption should fall by the same proportion, since, if it didn't fall, mining would become an unprofitable activity.

The reward halves again in 2024, in 2028, and every four years after that. So, if the price of bitcoins stabilizes, the Bitcoin network's energy consumption will steadily fall over the coming decades.

Another important point: that fixed 12.5 bitcoin reward doesn't depend on the number of transactions the Bitcoin network processes. Miners do also collect per-transaction fees from Bitcoin users, but those are currently much smaller than the fixed per-block reward.

This means that the Bitcoin network could easily be upgraded to handle more transactions—potentially a lot more—without significantly changing miner revenues or energy consumption. So it's not the case that a growing Bitcoin network will necessarily lead to a growing environmental disaster.

[Xist]

If everyone mined half as much, everyone would mine the same amount, for half of the effort, but nobody is going to cut back on good faith.

If everyone just stopped working so hard for money...

[freebeard]

Per-zackly.

Once all the Bitcoin have been mined, the miners will have to subsist on transaction fees. The server farms shall be re-purposed for surveillance or prioritized HTML traffic.

Or our AI overlords. Dunt-dunt-dunnn.

[Xist]

In the beginning, there were 5 per minute. Now there are 1.25 per minute, and will be .3125 per minute, 18.75 per hour.

When will we reach peak bitcoin?

According to this, there are currently 16.5 million bitcoins, but there will never be more than 21 million.

According to https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply, there will never be 21 million. Also, this is an amazing amount of nonsense. tl;dr!

[freebeard]

Not nonsense, math. It's been a white since I read the White Paper, and I forget the mechanism, but to increase the total number of blocks would require either a fork or consensus.

Don't forget that about 20% [citation needed] of all Bitcoin have been lost. The original (8 million?) in the very first block, assigned to Satoshi Nakamoto, have never been touched.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Per-zackly.

Once all the Bitcoin have been mined, the miners will have to subsist on transaction fees. The server farms shall be re-purposed for surveillance or prioritized HTML traffic.

Or our AI overlords. Dunt-dunt-dunnn.

After a decade of use, the servers from those farms will find their way to the scrapyard, just like most obsolete electronics. At this point in my IT career, I won't take free computers if they are over 5 years old.

Great info on how Bitcoin transactions are processed and rewards dived. I thought it was an ever expanding complexity to authenticate each transaction, which would clearly be unsustainable since the reward would diminish as the computational effort continued to increase.

I still don't understand why immense computational resources are required to validate a transaction. It takes nothing to flip a few bits.

[freebeard]

Proof of work.

Permalink #66

As a first approximation. It's been a while since I was following it closely, but there are wheels within wheels. Side chains are one example. There is something else i can't remember the term for, that effectively rolls up older uncontested segments of the blockchain that hashes or compresses it so that it's possible to unpack it again if the need should ever arise. Old blockchain is old.

Merkle tree. the term I couldn't remember is Merkle tree.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdrSP0V-KLg

Love You Like A Bitcoin by Kryp Tina was posted to Youtube when Bitcoibn was $12.00.

"...ASICs dying from all the heat-heat-heat-heat...

edit:
Things move fast here in the Matrix. I found the full interview with this guy, I'd seen excerpts before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0-I...ature=youtu.be

He takes you from Sofia runs on Ethereum to the crypto-ruble. I like this guy a lot, he's relaxed and hopeful and totally bonkers. The interview reminds me of the basement in That 70s Show.

[Xist]

The more that I read about bitcoin, the less I understood and cared.

[redpoint5]

Approximately 0% of the people I know who run Bitcoin servers have calculated the energy consumed in the process, or the financial impact to their electricity bill. While a company with a large server farm will do this calculation, the average Joe will get screwed.

[freebeard]

I bought a hardware wallet at Fry's maybe four winters ago, and then totaled my Superbeetle on black ice the next night. I haven't had a spare $50 since.

I'm not too concerned about missing the appreciation (I've never had a good relationship with money). I consider Bitcoin a 'proof of concept'.

I am concerned about the 'Gang of One' that Sophia represents.