You're the one arguing against scientific consensus, not me. Next thing we know you are asking me to prove that the earth isn't flat. I won't bother going down that road, thank you very much.



Yes, except cyclically speaking we'd be up for a new ice age soon, rather than a steady increase in temperature.



You're right, it's not. That's also not the carbon emissions being referred to when talking about climate change. If you believe that that's what people think is causing climate change then yes, that would make no sense

Read the following carefully, it may be something that you have missed and that may cause you to reconsider some of your positions:

It's not the CO2 that humans breathe out that is causing problems. That CO2 is already part of the ecosystem.

The problem is "new" CO2 being reintroduced to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. Coals, oil, etc... that's all carbon that had been taken out of the atmosphere and bound in solid form millions of years ago. That's where the imbalance comes from. Not from people breathing.

Think of it like inflation. It's the central banks printing more money that's causing inflation. Not people spending their money.



Point taken.



To rephrase one of your statements above:

I am not saying that lithium batteries are a perfect system but it is best we have so far with energy storage.

Also that's completely ignoring the enviromental impact caused by oil and coal extraction. You know, the "other crap" that big corporations are digging up. At much larger quantities.

That being said, shifting electricity from coal to renewables -- the aspect actually relevant to Bitcoin -- has very little to do with lithium extraction. Lithium is currently relevant for getting cars off fossil fuels, yes, but less so for how electricity is produced. The lithium batteries in your laptop, smartphone, etc. care very little about whether the electricity comes from renewables or not.




Again, not what I said. Actually quite the opposite.

The conspiratorial part I am referring to was the statement about big corporations buying out scientific consensus to shill climate change.

It's almost close to the truth though. Shell and Exxon had suppressed data on the impact of carbon emissions since the 80s, so there was some corporate meddling regarding climate change. Except the money to follow would have been fossil fuel companies.

The fee a sender is willing to pay may depend on the amount they are transferring, but that's irrelevant for the protocol. How low you can set your fee and still have your transaction be included within a reasonable time depends on how many inputs are being spent, not on how many coins. So if you received a lot of small transactions you'll pay a much higher fee for the same amount of coins than if you received just one large transaction.


Block size limit has been effectively 2-4MB since SegWit's activation in 2017.

--

The problem with dynamic block size limits is that in the end it's pretty much like having no block size at all.

Reducing blocksize limits in times of low demand will do nothing but artificially increase mining fees without saving any storage space -- the blocks would have been half empty anyways.

Increasing blocksize limits in times of high demand, based on the amount of fees paid relative to the amount being sent, would not only inflate the blocksize to whatever upper bound you'd define for the dynamic blocksize range -- which would in practice end up us the blocksize limit anyway -- you'd actually even penalize efficient transactions over inefficient ones (e.g. transactions consisting of a lot of small inputs like faucet rewards and thus take up a lot more blockspace). That is, you'd have a system that would incentivize detrimental behaviour which is rarely a good idea for something that is supposed to be self-regulating.

Also note that due to the use of change addresses it's not even possible to reliably determine the amount that is being sent. If I spend USD 10,- worth of Bitcoin with USD 90,-worth of Bitcoin going back to a change address, your proposed system would have to base the fee on the total of USD 100,- being moved.

FTFY

Die Lösung ist nicht die atheistische Dominanz sondern die kryptographische

Würd ja auch gleich generell das Problem mit fallenden USD / EUR Kursen lösen. Ein Kurs kann nicht fallen wenn es keinen Kurs gibt! *auf die Stirn tipp*

We probably went to school in very different countries at very different times so I doubt we have a common frame of reference as far as a "broken educational system" is concerned. Not meant as a dig or anything, I just don't think it's possible to make meaningful, time-independent blanket statements about educational systems around the world.

Also, who the fuck gives a shit about social media?



...which is exactly what I wrote in my post.

I disagree with your statements about the severity and cause of climate change.

I do agree with your statements that PoW is not the culprit and that PoS is not the solution.

I won't be going into detail about the former because this is not the outlet to discuss this and I neither will be able to convince you nor do I care. My thoughts on the latter I already posted above; just know that it is my honest opinion that (1) PoW is the only viable option for realizing permissionless finance, (2) Bitcoin's current environmental impact is overstated and that (3) Bitcoin's potential to holistically reduce the environmental impact of finance is underestimated.



Edit:


Australia and Chile! I'm staying clear of the stuff that I deem conspiratorial but please get at least the simplest of facts straight. China may play a bigger role in some of the other rare earths, but as far as lithium is concerned China is far behind Australia and Chile both in terms of production and reserves.

Yes we are and utterly disregarding the scientific consensus won't change that. And I'm telling you that as someone who hasn't had a TV for two decades and isn't even sure what counts as mainstream media these days. Not like I care anyway.

That being said, PoS is a red herring. All that talk about PoW and Bitcoin mining being bad for the environment is just political posturing to distract from the real issue, ie. unnecessarily high reliance on fossil fuels and coal. It's just much easier to attack something as alien as Cryptocurrencies and PoW rather than, you know, try to actually change some of the systemic issues. Want to actually mitigate some of the climate issues? Vote the parties out that continue to subsidize coal mines and airlines over renewables and rail traffic. (well, the latter from an European perspective. I'm afraid the US rail system may be a lost cause at this point in time)



The code is open source and anyone is free to make their own fork of Bitcoin. Not sure what more you want.



Just because you can't mine BTC using a bunch of GPUs in a corner of your living room anymore doesn't mean it's centralized.

Also staking these days requires an even larger amount of capital -- e.g. 32 ETH for Ethereum which amounts to USD 83,000,- as of right now, or as another example 1,000 DASH for a masternode, which amounts to USD 160,000,- today. That's a significantly higher level of entry than mining. Unless you want to keep your money in a... you know... centralized exchange.



*CPUs. It wasn't like 1-2 years later until GPU mining became a possibility.

It is also worth nothing that while the ratio of Bitcoin vs altcoin market cap is currently roughly the same as late 2017/2018 there's currently more than 7 times as many cryptocurrencies listed than just 4 years ago (11,156 as of today vs 1,514 in December 2017 [1]). This means on average alts performed only 1/7th as well as Bitcoin.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20171204031615/https://coinmarketcap.com/

Yes, the EU is only targeting crypto-asset service providers such as exchanges and custodial wallets. Peer to peer transactions are not covered by this proposal, nor does it aim to do so. Actually person-to-person transfers -- at least in the form of non-commercial activites -- are explicitely excluded:

There's more than 10 thousand alts and tokens in the market but only one Bitcoin. Sure, you might pick the outperforming unicorn but the odds are not in your favour. For every coin that performs well there's literally thousands that never fully recover after the bull market ends and there's a lot of survivorship bias. The top 10 now look very different from the top 10 during the bull run before or even the years prior to that. Just check the charts.

2017 waren ja auch Bitcoins Teenager-Jahre, da wirken die Emotionen im nachhinein immer überdramatisch

10k... 13k... 16k... 19k...

Wenn's nur so einfach wär Dann ist man zwar nicht in Deutschland steuerpflichtig, aber immer noch dort wo auch immer gerade der Lebensmittelpunkt ist. Kann natürlich signifikant günstiger sein als dein Herkunftsland, muss es aber nicht.



Aber auch nur dann wenn sie nur Titel aus Brasilien, UK oder Hong Kong halten, sonst fällt nämlich immer noch die Quellensteuer an

Ich glaub der klassische Trick sind tatsächlich einfach nur steueroptimierte Firmenkonstrukte sowie ein privater Wohnsitz in einem Land wo keine Kapitalertragssteuer auf die "Dividenden" anfällt. Ganz ohne dass man sich ständig in Internationalen Gewässern aufhalten muss.



In Thailand hast du aber trotzdem Einkommensteuer. Ob Einkommen aus Staking tatsächlich als Einkommen "außerhalb von Thailand" gilt würde ich da eher noch mit Experten abklären bevor ich da aus Versehen Steuern hinterziehen würde. Thailändische Gefängnisse sollen nicht ganz so schick sein wie thailändische Strände.



Aus Sicht eines Hodlers außerdem eine Steueroase!

Dem stimme ich zu, die Staking Rendite scheinen tatsächlich ein großer Faktor zu sein. Ich fürchte nur dass das ganze neue Blut was da momentan in Defi strömt und eigentlich nur den Bullenmarkt kennt noch ein böses Erwachen haben wird -- Erstens weil je nach Einstiegspunkt die Staking Auszahlungen den im Bärenmarkt kommenden Wertverfall nicht ausgleichen werden können (bei manchen Alts wahrscheinlich sogar langfristig) und zweitens weil die Staking Profite ja trotzdem in Fiat versteuert werden. Da kanns bei größeren Preisschwankungen schon mal dazu kommen das man für Profite besteuert wird die man gar nicht realisieren konnte.



Seit wann ist man als Digital Nomad von der Einkommenssteuer befreit? Ich mein klar man kann auch in die UAE emigrieren aber ob das langfristig so geil ist weiß ich nicht.



This time it's different™

An dieser Stelle ein herzliches Dankeschön an die Shorts, den ohne diese hätten wir wahrscheinlich noch ein paar Wochen auf die 40k warten müssen

Yes! Or if they continue to target business clients instead they could create something like an array of gates with programmable fields 🤔


But yeah, to get back on topic: ASIC miners as used for Bitcoin can do literally nothing else but process hashes. You could use the excess heat for heating, but that's about it as far as consumer use cases are concerned.

Ah I see! You mean like what if instead of making circuits that are application specific to Bitcoin mining, they would make processing units that could also be used for, let's say, graphics? 🤔

What else would you do though? Hire mining inspectors that regularily check mining operations around the globe whether they run hardware according to regulation?

Seriously tho, at the end of the day the most straightforward solution would be to simply get in touch with major mining pool operators. Given an attractive enough sponsorship deal you'd surely find operators willing to add your tagline to whatever blocks they mine. Whether this advertising money wouldn't be better spent elsewhere is a different question. Depending on ones intent this would digress from the original idea of incentivising people to use specific mining hardware though, leaving only the advertising aspect.

Bitcoin klammert sich gerade mit Fingerspitzen am > 40k Bereich aber wenn ich mir das Volumen so anschaue würd ich eher davon ausgehen das der Kurs kurzfristig noch mal ein bisschen absackt. Trotzdem denke ich das wir den < 35k Bereich jetzt endgültig hinter uns gelassen haben. Es bleibt spannend in Bitcoinland.

True! Ignoring some of the other practical issues (e.g. pool mining vs solo mining) this brings up another interesting problem though:

1) Assuming non-hardened child private keys, once the private key of a single miner is compromised, the private keys of all miners are compromised [1]. Keeping private keys secure from someone who has full physical access is somewhat possible, but quite a challenge. Especially if the pot is not the contents a single hardware wallet but a whole network of mining hardware.

2) Assuming hardened child private keys, you get rid of the security concern above, but the manufacturer would not be able to verify the signatures [2]. Unless they derive and store each hardened private key in advance which comes with a different host of issues.


[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/90627/what-are-the-consequences-from-the-leak-of-xpub-and-child-private-key

[2] https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/extended-keys

Here's the full proposal btw:
https://ec.europa.eu/finance/docs/law/210720-proposal-funds-transfers_en.pdf

I've only skimmed it, but at a first glance it only seems to affect the likes of exchanges and custodial wallets:



Where crypto-asset service provider is defined as:


So while not especially pretty at least to me it doesn't seem much worse than existing KYC/AML regulations. Except it sounds like a lot more paper work for exchanges.

For a high level overview of the core concepts I'd recommend this article:
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3136559

It's a quick read but nonetheless manages to introduce most of the fundamental rationales behind the design of Bitcoin.

Those "labels" could be easily faked and it would be impossible to reliably verify whether the coins have been mined on hardware by a specific manufacturer.

The only way to "advertise" your hardware brand on the blockchain is by running a pool yourself and some manufacturers actually already do that. (AntPool for example. Bitfury used to run a pool as well, not sure what happened to them. Maybe they just stopped advertising their hashrate)