Isn't cryptocurrency unsustainable? The amount of energy used as the blockchain gets longer is like exponential?

I read somewhere recently something the amount of energy used to mine crypto is more than an the power used by Argentina.

To me it seems like all this blockchain & cryptocurrency stuff is a technology that's fascinating and elegant but not all that practical because they have to be as inefficient as possible in order to be viable for security reasons(see 51% attacks n shit).

But I guess if you know how to market stuff you can sell this concept to non-tech managers in a way you make money before the whole thing implodes. And that's how you literally get companies to boast about using 5 blockchains simultaneously, or people talk 30 minutes about blockchain in some completely unrelated field while they obviously don't have the slightest idea how it works. Or, more recently, NFTs which already look kinda questionable at first glance.

I'm not saying it's completely unviable, it's just ~99% baseless hype.

All the while the price makes it worth it, people will search for more and more efficient ways to mine. It's hugely power hungry yes, but as long as people can make a profit, that won't stop them.

@deadlyRants well the big one is Coinbase.... The market cap is 63B....

And yea financial companies are like revolting blockchain.... and NFTs....

Am I'm sorta going has the whole world gone mad... Trying to kill ourselves...

Or some believe we have infinite energy... Already.

These mining machines I think mostly run on normal power, not clean energy?

@AlmondSauce we're now supposed to be taking climate change seriously...

And then you got crypto... And it's sorta like everyone's thinking "we're not gonna be around when the **** hits the fan"

And then also got all these ppl protesting/warning about climate change or talking ESG...

And so I'm sorta scratching my head "huh? How can you have both?"

@AlmondSauce not really? Until energy companies jack up prices and basically throttle big users like mobile data... BTC price go up, miners keep mining.

I think we need to wait for all the bitcoin to be mined to actually make good use of it. And the price will most likely rocket, since there's a limited amount and then FOMO will hit because everyone wants a piece of the pie. And then we can finally start using it to purchase things, instantaneous money transfers globally, etc. etc.

PS. I'm not an expert. Take what I say with a grain of salt.

@codecrow but then there's all these alt coins that offer mining as well. So it'll never stop!! Aaaahhhh we've doomed ourselves!

@codecrow if it maxes out, who would keep mining? If no one mines, who validates and basically processes the transactions on the network?

@donuts *revolting == pushing

@donuts sorry, I wasn't aware of this fact.
Just looked it up:

"But even when the last bitcoin has been produced, miners will likely continue to actively and competitively participate and validate new transactions. The reason is that every Bitcoin transaction has a transaction fee attached to it.

These fees, while today representing a few hundred dollars per block, could potentially rise to many thousands of dollars per block, especially as the number of transactions on the blockchain grows and as the price of a bitcoin rises. Ultimately, it will function like a closed economy, where transaction fees are assessed much like taxes."

So basically we've already doomed ourselves by expediting global warning.

It is a waste indeed.

@AlmondSauce profit is not everything. That's damn cursed shitty useless capitalism.

@AlmondSauce

I think one of the catches is that a lot of mining is now supposedly ... illicit.

Plenty of stories of third / second world countries where the local government run power plant has a basement of mining machines presumably owned by local officials who ...aren't paying.

They past the costs and environmental costs on to the locals.... and everyone else.

@iiii Of course profit isn't everything. But all the while there's at least some people who think it is, then they won't care about the environmental consequences in order for them to make money.

Is it immoral to think like that? Sure. Is it sustainable? Sure, as long as there's power available and greedy people to use it.

@donuts Problem is there's no way for energy companies to work out *how* that energy is being used. They don't know if you've got a rack of servers being used for protein folding or bitcoin mining, and they don't really care - the more energy you use, the more money you make them.

If you try to stop them, they'll just *pretend* to be doing something else and actually still be mining.

I understand the technology a bit enough to appreciate it. But by me I can't understand how there is value in bitcoin.

"it takes a lot to mine and create" is just not enough for me really.

@AleCx04 There's value all the while someone is willing to pay money for it - it's really as simple as that (it has no intrinsic value.)

NFTs are kinda similar. Arbitrary worthless things that people so happen to be willing to pay money for.

@AlmondSauce brother I had stupidly enough never thought of it that way. That actually makes sense. But isn't the point of it to pass and move away from our current currency format and have it not depend on it? or is the idea to move all of our currency INTO crypto in order to remove the idea of world bank powers?

That kinda makes sense to me....I guess the idea of a decentralized network of currency makes sense in a world wide open market....if that is the point then there was a big whoosh for me somewhere down the line and I feel even more stupid

The "work" (the famous work that you hear about with GPUs and shit) associated with BTC is not validating the chain, it's guessing the Nonce. The difficulty on that is much worse than exponential, it's synthetic, and based on competition. Validating the chain is computationally nothing (by comparison).

Every two weeks the system automatically updates the difficulty (up or down) by seeing how long on average it took to guess a correct block. It should take about ten minutes and if the average is any less, the synthetic difficulty is increased. You can read the current difficulty and its history here (its currently about 24 TRILLION):

https://blockchain.com/charts/...

Market cap of BTC is (current value: 60,370.20 total in circulation: 18,684,525) 1.1trillion (USD)

51% issue is self-solving for now. Nobody wants to spend the money required to get 51% hash rate just to crash their own economy (which they would essentially own at that point). It has happened before...

...the bitcoin mining pool that achieved it backed down their hash rate in good faith.

BTC mining will die down as the great halving continues. In four years the reward will be just over 3BTC. The price is exploding, yes, but its doubtful the price increase will keep up with the schedule of the great halving and while BTC won't die (because of transaction fees plus block rewards, called the coinbase, not to be confused with the BTC wallet company called coinbase) the competition will decrease significantly as the price either decreases or plateaus (both of which are less attractive for investors) and the difficulty will automatically decrease, saving our precious GPUs and electricity.

TL;DR just hang in there, its gonna get better on a timescale of about a decade.

@AleCx04 The idea varies depending on who you ask. Crypto has no opinion and wasn't created with any particular purpose in mind as far as anyone knows - it's literally just a thing some people decide has value.

For some, sure, they want it to overtake world banks. Others just treat it like a stock and buy it because they think they can sell it for more in the future. Others buy it to anonymously trade illicit goods without being tracked. The balance between all of those beliefs, and more, is all that sets the value.

@AlmondSauce Bitcoin did have an intended purpose. It was implemented during the 2008 world financial crisis because of distrust in banks. Read the very first message in the very first block of BTC, comments made by Satoshi himself:

"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"

Leaded gasoline, the tobacco industry, and the market dynamics of current proof-of-work-based crypto currencies are pretty good examples for teaching the concept of greed.

The problem is consensus algorithm, Bitcoin uses Proof-of-work which is known for consuming lot of power, other implementations like Ethereum are experimenting with Proof-of-stake which claims to be better, Blockchain can be successful in concept, that's why research is going on to find perfect consensus algorithm.

@AlgoRythm Sure, it was *implemented* due to distrust in banks. But that doesn't say anything about its purpose or end goal. That's just speculation.

@AlmondSauce can't we pew-pew those greedy bastards?

@AlgoRythm except we will be fucked already after a decade of those idiots mining.

@bad-frog calm your butthurt

@iiii lel
butthurt about what?
thay you eat crayons? or because you are tools?

now that the ad hominem part is done with maybe you can write something that could pass as an argumentation that i will then proceed to dissect and rectify

@iiii I gladly would, but I don't think Bitcoin is the answer there.

@donuts You can have both, I mean for years, there are crowds of people alerting about climate change and advocating for green approaches; meanwhile, you have those who wouldn't give a damn about the environment if they earned money from mining or whatever.