I would think that the technology industry is using a lot more energy than Bitcoin
Maybe true, but the entire tech industry is efficiency driven. More computational power for less watts is what's driving the whole semiconductor industry. Bitcoin seems to be doing the opposite. And as the network grows and difficulty increases, transactions per watt actually gets worse. Unless I am misunderstanding it, with the current model it doesn't matter how much hashpower is added, you will still only get 3.3 transactions per second. Growth in computational power does not equal growth in power usage. With each generation the the chips used for Bitcoin are getting more and more efficient. A better metric is the worth of the block reward, as this strongly correlates with how much resources a miner is ready to spend on machines and electricity. With each halving the amount of resources available to miners shrinks - apart from the capital growth relative to Fiat, that is. |
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Umf. So if bandwith is cheap why block the on chain scaling then?
Latency. The bigger the blocks compared to the time between blocks, the bigger an issue latency becomes (ie. unless you're close to a large internet backbone your mining operation would run into the risk of orphaned blocks, leading to yet another centralization factor). |
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I think Bitcoin has the potential to overwhelm paypal but there are two things I'm not sure about Bitcoin that are unstable prices and too long transaction time.
Too long transaction times are already a non-issue when accepting zero-confirmation payments. |
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The times of Bitcoin GPU minings are long gone. The only way to earn Bitcoin with GPU mining nowadays is finding profitable alt coins to mine.
do you mean we better gain profitable by trading way either mining it? Mining Bitcoin directly with GPUs => you'll never see anything Mining alt coins with GPUs => you can trade them for BTC at a bigger sum than you would get when mining Bitcoin directly with GPU (which would be: nothing) |
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Aha.
What is this approach called? I'd like to do some more learning
I remember Primecoin being one of the first alt coins to do that. There's a couple more, but I can't name then on the top of my hat. As far as I know there's no general name for that approach. Some coins also use Proof of Stake (as opposed to Bitcoin's Proof of Work) as less computation intensive alternative. It's a contentious approach, but may be worth a look if you want to get into the guts of cryptocurrencies. |
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I sadly have no proper model for, but think about the (mostly poor) masses will be adopted through cheap LN costs. How much % of the on chain tx will be caused by LN and limilar channels compared to now?
I d estimate more than 90% will. So you end up in huge traffic on such a hub node. Sounds not so cheap...
Bandwidth is as cheap as ever. Even if you can't run it at home you can get virtual private servers with 1TB of bandwidth for as little as USD 5,- / month at digitalocean. |
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Thanks!
Could we not throw useful things into the CPU to create difficulty? Like an emulator or something. Sorry if this is a stupid obvious question.
There are some alternative cryptocurrencies that try exactly that. One of the problems with that approach however is that you lose security. |
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I think if you want to save your bitcoin just put it on your online wallet to keep it safe and secure.
If you want to save your bitcoins don't put them in an online wallet. Use a software wallet such as core or electrum. Or better yet, use cold storage or a hardware wallet. They are not your coins if you don't have the private key. |
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I support the death penalty so that people will be affraid to commit crime, but be sure that the person who commited the crime is the one who is being punished. Not the one who is accused and suffer the consequence.
And here's the problem. You can never be 100% sure that the person being executed was also the one committing the crime. There are a lot of cases where people where found innocent just in time - or to late. How much a margin of error - ie. innocent lifes lost - is it worth to keep the death sentence? |
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Pretty sure he's dead. If he's not, he's probably rotting in some cell somewhere, else we'd already have heard some news from him.
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Good PSA. I still have little pity with people falling for those kind of schemes, since everyone who is participating in a pump and dump is basically hoping for someone else to be the bagholder.
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Why would main-chain settlement be more expensive, when billions of transactions are happening on the Lightning network? Moving billions of transactions onto a higher, more efficient network layer would free space on the main-chain, not congest it.
More expensive than LN transactions, under the assumption that on-chain transactions are at capacity with the fee market taking over (ie. the situation as it is right now, just on a larger scale). |
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In the 2-layer model, the base letter is the settlement layer. The problem is that if you force people not to use that base layer, it doesn't really matter what the layers on top will look like, because institutions become gatekeepers. Define institutions. LN hub node operators? Also, wouldn't you still be able to use the raw Bitcoin protocol, albeit at a higher transaction cost? In LN, that's a bit different, above all because the operation cost of a LN "hub node" is lower - and so pressure is lower on hub operators to work censorship-free.
Wouldn't the lower operation cost of a LN hub node also mean that it's easier to become one, meaning more hub nodes, meaning a lesser chance of censorship? |
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In other words, Dash is claiming to be able to safely scale to 300MB blocks but so far we have no prove of it. Is there a Dash testnet? Have there been any stresstests so far? |
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You'll never reach ROI with cloud mining. Just buy BTC directly if you want to get your hands on some coins.
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Interesting read, but does a settlement layer really need to be fully distributed to remain permissionless? Isn't a strongly decentralized network enough (ie. any user with a sufficient amount of Bitcoin acting as a LN hub)? Or is there something I miss that could prevent the latter from effectively happening?
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The times of Bitcoin GPU minings are long gone. The only way to earn Bitcoin with GPU mining nowadays is finding profitable alt coins to mine.
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What will eclipse Bitcoin? The post-scarcity society. But that's still a long way down the road. The only thing I can think of would be a quantum computer synced with artificial intelligent network version of Bitcoin. But even then I think I believe Bitcoin could've evolved to adopt any of those features that would render it useless.
Are you serious or are you just throwing random buzzwords around? |
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If you actually want to earn Bitcoin you still need to sell goods or services like always. Bitcoin does however make it easier to offer said goods or services to someone on the other side of the globe.
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Virtual payments are fast displacing cash, but not completely and not everywhere. Bitcoin still has a very long way to go before it displaces the likes of paypal.
The fun part being that Bitcoin offers the benefits of both virtual payments AND cash. Once scaling and the fee market is resolved, that is :/ |
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