A step in the right direction to prove that a certain percentage of Bitcoin miners are using renewable energy but I imagine the chinese miners aren't really interested in things like this. Regulations is far more lax there, as you can imagine why.

How about the opportunity cost? Would the renewable energy have been used for uses other than mining and thereby reducing the reliance on renewable energy? I think it would be a far better viewpoint (and perhaps a counterpoint that opponents of PoW would use). Elon Musk has been pretty active on Twitter and loads of people have been convincing otherwise, to not much effect.

It would be fairer to consider Bitcoin as a currency and compare it to the next best alternative, which is the fiat system. Unfortunately, there really isn't any reliable estimations other than this[1] made about that but I would argue that they contribute far more carbon footprint as compared to Bitcoin mining, considering the numerous banking branches, offices, ATMs, etc.


Renewable energy in many regions are cheaper than coal and for most parts, the cost of purchasing the electricity offsets the R&D of that as well.
There is a PoS version of Bitcoin, which I'll argue is a shitcoin. I don't see a need for Bitcoin to change, personally. PoW is working as intended, hence the cries about its electrical consumption (which is arguably overblown by both Elon and the media). In general, Bitcoin has pretty much always adopted the mantra of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". There really isn't any reason as of now (perhaps ever) for any shift to a different algorithm.

[1] https://twitter.com/glxyresearch/status/1393166955864117248/photo/1

Possibly something to do with the inability to access a secured computer or device and OP also wants to check the balance on the go? I would never attempt to check my actual cold storage balance on any unsecured computer. Although it isn't accurate by any means, it would be sufficient for a quick reference for an albeit out-dated transaction history.

That is a lot but it is far from the truth.

Trying to measure Bitcoin's derived carbon footprint (as noted in the earlier reply; isn't directly) is fundamentally skewed. You cannot assume electricity generation to be equal, there are tons of renewable energy plants around the world that Bitcoin miner relies on. Why do Bitcoiners have to assume the responsibility of offsetting the carbon footprint? Are companies penalized enough for polluting the environment? Do they provide the same amount of utility as Bitcoin?

Clearnet nodes cannot connect to a Tor node. The DNS won't recognize and route onion addresses as they're contained within the Tor network. You need to have the node connect to Tor via a proxy.

The converse is true, Tor nodes can connect to clearnet nodes.

Not necessarily. The cost of mining is bound to decrease with time due to increase in the efficiency of ASICs and possibly a decrease in cost of mining. The electrical usage as it is currently is of some concern, given the limited utility of Bitcoin in it's day to day usage. You cannot argue that the electrical consumption will not increase or will decrease to a sustainable level; if you want adoption, that simply won't happen. However, if you can scale Bitcoin to become something that is capable of replacing the financial systems around the world, then there is quite a bit of benefits as compared to the cost.
It is not.

Regardless, you will face significant opposition from the miners.

Scaling is a far greater concern and would be easier to solve first. The problem right now is really not the power consumption; most banking systems, and fiat does incur quite a bit of environmental costs when compared to Bitcoin, perhaps more as every country has their own system. The actual problem is the utility of Bitcoin. If Bitcoin's transaction volume increases exponentially, then there is really no reason why you can justify having a lower power consumption. The ASICs and indirectly their power consumption secures Bitcoin and makes it far harder for any single entity to be able to attack Bitcoin as it'll be difficult to have that much resources.

If renewable energy gets even cheaper, then I foresee even more miners to be shifting to them. Problem with PoS and other algorithms is that it isn't secure by itself, you're not risking anything or incurring any costs by building on a fork. Given how the current distribution is skewed, can't see how it'll help at all and only serves to monopolize mining even more.

Actually, it's fine if you aren't. You're still validating and relaying transactions and blocks to the peers that you're connected to.

It'll be more than 10 peers actually. 2 of the are designated as block relay only peers that you're connecting to.

You can. GPU farms are pretty big and CPUs are pretty small. It wouldn't be hard to customize them and upsize it to become a whole farm. It all depends on the motivations behind it but it is definitely possible and would be done without ASICs anyways.

So if we're CPU mining or even GPU mining, they're profitable. You cannot blacklist or exclude anyone from the network; the nature of Bitcoin makes it extremely hard to single out miners actually. The reason why we know who mined the blocks is because mining pools put identifiable information within their mining pool.

Sorry, I missed this:
Partly that yeah. Of course, Bitcoin shouldn't come under the influence of any third party as it simply doesn't make sense to conform to his ideas. Shifting Bitcoin's algorithm would spawn an altcoin instead. It won't be considered Bitcoin.
Proportionally... It depends on how much hashing power you have. You'll probably earn a miniscule amount with a single ASIC and might not even be profitable depending on your electrical rates. Pool is a concept whereby people mine together and split the rewards. Big pools and smaller pools are all the same.

Probably the largest transaction volume and the easiest to get. Anonymity doesn't matter because it'll be quite easy to mix them around and be untraceable.

An antivirus can only do so much to protect their user. If you're a company that is of interest to any attackers, an antivirus would provide VERY little resistance to them. Your antivirus can only detect using their heuristic and suspicious behavior but it wouldn't matter if the attacker is able to use certain zero-day exploits or something similar to evade detection. Your best bet is to reduce your attack surface, airgapping for example but Stuxnet has proven that less than effective.

You can recover using your 24 words seed. The private keys of the addresses that you use in Trezor are all generated from that seed. You'll be able to recover all your addresses if you ever break it using a BIP39 compatible wallet with the appropriate derivation path or just another Trezor.
That is possible. https://wiki.trezor.io/User_manual:Recovery__TT#Important_remarks_before_you_start

Proof of Stake. Ethereum has plans to shift from PoW to PoS but the security of that is actually quite debatable, IMO.

The complexity of PoW attacks lies with your ability to amass sufficient resources to attack the network in the first place. As the current mining climate is dominated by ASICs, there is no use for them after an attack and thus making pretty much all of the ASICs useless as the price is bound to tank after any successful attack. It really doesn't make sense for people to be able to mine by not incurring any real costs and would definitely be weaker than PoW.

Bitcoin having a huge electrical consumption by its nature is not incorrect. However, there are far more activities that incurs more carbon footprint than Bitcoin and provides far less utility as well. If we were to replace all of the financial systems with Bitcoin, the energy consumption could be far lower while providing numerous benefits. Any more efficient algorithms will probably not replace Bitcoin's PoW as it is pretty much impossible for the community to gain consensus on this issue. It is important to note that you're not wasting electricity by mining, you're being compensated and the benefits that arises from mining is the security of billions of dollars of transaction volume each day. The argument weakens as Bitcoin gets more adopted and its utility increases.

No. By default, running Bitcoin Core behind Tor sets listen=0 but you can configure it to allow incoming connection.

By running a node, you're by default supporting the network as you're still validating and relaying blocks and transactions to your peers that you've connected to. It would be even better if you're not restricting yourself to onion-only nodes, as you're able to act as a bridge between the nodes inside Tor and the clearnet.

Technically, it is not wrong. Miners can signal their support for various protocol changes to ensure a smooth transition for any soft forks or hard forks. It is always better to have support for all of the parties involved in the network before implementing any significant changes. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we need their consent in order to change any network rules. UASF was something that was proposed after the miners were not willing to signal support for Segwit and it would've resulted in a forced activation of segwit without the participation of majority of the miners.

Most of the soft forks were MASF, up to this day. But it doesn't mean that we strictly require the miner's consent to implement any network changes, though that would potentially introduce certain side effects for non-upgraded nodes, etc.

If it is your change address, then you shouldn't have only received 0.00185387BTC. The change address is used for the remainder after subtracting the value of the inputs with the amount sent and the fees. Is the balance in your Bitcoin.com wallet correct or is it missing the 0.00706326BTC as well?

Import the private keys on your offline PC and you should get all the addresses, at the starting wizard, select "Import Bitcoin addresses or private keys". Copy all of the Addresses down and import it into an Electrum on another computer with an internet connection, using the same way but with addresses this time. You'll be able to see all of the transactions in the wallet and that is your watch-only wallet. Go to Send and input all the parameters accordingly and press Pay. Adjust the fees accordingly at the lower right corner and press finalize.

After finalizing your transaction, go to Export > Export to File. Transfer it to that offline computer, go to Tools>Load Transaction and select the file. Load it and check the transaction again, afterwhich press Sign and Export to file again, Export > Export to File. On the online computer, press Tools>Load Transaction and select the txn file. After that, check the details again before pressing broadcast.

The offline computer should ideally be cleanly wiped and has never had internet access before. Do validate your Electrum installation with PGP beforehand as well.

It depends on the kind of changes implemented. If the change impacts the older client such that they can no longer continue to be on the same chain as the newer client, then it is a hard fork. This can be something like a change in block size limit, sigops, TXID structure, anything that results in the older clients being unable to recognize something that gets implemented in the newer client.

The nature of the open source codes gives the user a chance to review and decide which kind of changes they want to include or omit. Just because they've merged any changes, it doesn't mean that you have to follow them as well.

Probably a price crash due to the ease of carrying out an attack on the network, given that they constitutes such a huge proportion of the network, it would definitely have a lot of repercussions. The security of the network functions on the fact that it costs more to attack the network than what you stand to gain from it. If all of the big farms were to disappear, an attacker has to outpace the rest of the network, which is far easier than outpacing the bigger farms that disappeared.


No. ASICs made Bitcoin more secure (and less in a way). Before ASICs, CPU and GPUs dominated the mining scene and if were to still be the case today, there would be large botnets profiting off Bitcoin mining as everyone has either a CPU or a GPU but most won't have an ASIC. The difficulty is in essence a measure of how difficult it is to mine a block or to attack Bitcoin by re-organizing the chain. Proof of work works best if it is significantly more difficult and expensive to attack the network than the potential profits.

Unfortunately, One CPU One Vote was never possible. You would have people running giant CPU or GPU farms sooner or later and that is akin to running an ASIC farm as well. Individual miners would probably not profit from that either ways.

Fees are not always dependent on any of the parties that you've mentioned. It is determined by the fee market where (or rather assuming) miners prioritize those with a higher fee and it is limited by the number/size of transactions that the miner can include. Whether we're CPU mining or ASIC mining will not make a difference to the fee market, it is purely limited by the capacity.

In most cases it does.
Bitcoin miners provides the derived demand for electrical consumption. If the cost of energy generation for fossil fuel is low, miners will use it. It is a blanket statement to say that Bitcoin miners are not contributing or otherwise exacerbating the problem because the truth is that they do, just perhaps to a lesser extent than most. Most renewable energy still have plenty of concerns with regards to the environmental degradation arising from this.

---

There is a stark difference between the scenario you've described and the predicament that we're in right now. The energy consumption doesn't have to be extrapolated over a larger timeframe for it to be enough of a concern; the network already consume a lot of energy. There is really nothing wrong with that and you really cannot debunk that. Whether it is worth for us to be mining silicon, building farms, wasting electricity for 2000 transactions per 10 minutes needs to be tackled from a completely different perspective. If you have a solid argument as to why the tradeoffs is worth, then you have a point to be made. Personally, Bitcoin deals with a huge transaction volume and the nature of PoW requires some form of resource exchange which is the electricity in this case and to a certain extent the environmental impacts. The point weakens as Bitcoin grows and scales to a much larger network, if that happens.

Elon Musk has gained such a huge following that the movement of the market hinges on what kind of content he tweets. Remember, when Bitcoin was at 30-40K, Elon Musk announced support for Bitcoin and it spiked quite significantly. It isn't wrong to say that the rise is due to Elon Musk's endorsement of Cryptos/Bitcoin in general. Having such a prominent figure insinuating that Bitcoin is intrinsically bad for the environment without having some form of qualifiers is terrible for Bitcoin.

Notice how he said he would switch back to Bitcoin if it adopts a more eco-friendly solution? Yeah, not a chance. He is as good as gone. The community doesn't have to budge for him.