Oh that's not allowed in this thread, you can't use energy to do something useful under any circumstances! Cold people must run on the spot wearing heavy clothes, or move to a warmer region of the world! (energy cannot be used to move there of course, using energy is bad!)

Exactly, Bitcoin mining is commonplace in regions where electricity surpluses (and correspondingly cheap prices) exist.


However, the overriding point here is simple:

Blockchains use energy for hashing. More hashpower is better than less, because it's more secure.



Sorry OP, but that's the end of your thread. If you want to do it a different way, go right ahead, but asserting everyone is wrong without providing any reasoning is a one-way ticket to creating your own cryptocurrency that subscribes to your vision.

Latest developments are that CT's won't need any more additional space than standard transactions if they are coin-joined. And there are possible further optimisations that could improve the specification, the original CT spec used much more space per transaction than this latest set of improvements.

Re: "Consciousness" - It's probably better to leave religious beliefs or politics out of the Development & Technical sub-forum, that would be off-topic.


Re: the costs of producing a block - you've misunderstood the economics.

The fees don't pay for the block reward, the miners are incurring the electricity costs in order to profitably mine the block reward + transaction fees (profiting from transaction fees is in most respects out of the miner's control). The vast majority of the electricity used to solve a block must (at this stage of the block subsidy decrement schedule) be comparable to the market price of the block reward in order for it to be profitable for the miner. The miner cannot continue mining if they pay more to mine the block reward than the block reward can be sold for. The transaction fees are a largely insubstantial part of how a miner evaluates profitable operation, as fees are a small proportion of the block reward's BTC value.

Do you have a different economic model in mind?

Indeed, thanks Coding Enthusiast

This feature already exists in Bitcoin, since version 0.12.0 I believe (i.e. nearly 18 months ago).

Transactions unconfirmed after a configurable time limit are kicked out of the local mempool. Default time limit is 1 week. Of course, the mempools of other nodes may retain transactions for a length of time that is not 1 week, because the option is configurable.

You haven't explained why energy consumption is such a problem for you.

The miners are naturally incentivised to get as many hashes per second for their available watts of electricity as possible, as this means they have a higher chance of solving a block. Don't you think that the miners are aware of the issue also?

Well, increasing the size of blocks is the worst way to increase the rate of transactions. There are other much better ways to do it.

And, the blocksize was increased 2 months ago. The max blocksize was 1MB, it's now 4MB.

That's what the whole Lightning Network concept has always been based on: users can hop channels.

So, if I've got a channel with you gentlemand, and you've got a channel with ChromticStar, I can send BTC to ChromaticStar via the channel I have with you. And so everyone can send to anyone, as long as there's a viable route across the network.

You're getting 2 different things confused.


Bitcoin still has a 10 minute block target. That didn't change in the last year.

What has changed is the transaction volumes. And if you don't want to pay higher fees, your transaction won't get into a block (i.e. won't get sent) until a miner thinks that your fee is worth it. This can be handled with Fee Replacement option (which let's you bump up the fee of your transaction so it doesn't get ignored by miners)


Bitcoin Cash doesn't really solve the problem so well. If BCash was really successful, with everyone using it, the blocks would be so big that people would switch to a less demanding cryptocurrency (Bitcoin Cash has the biggest blocks of all the cryptocurrencies, 8MB max right now, but less than 1MB of that is actually used because no-one really uses Bitcoin Cash).

So, why don't you tell us how low the hashrate should be to keep Bitcoin's blockchain sufficiently secure?

No-one can answer that question definitively, Satoshi's cryptocurrency concept isn't sufficiently mature to make such non-empirical judgements. If you've actually got a meaningful, empirical way of analysing the issue, please tell us. Until then, the hashrate will simply follow the price, and self-interest will drive miners to compete as efficiently as they can (and hashrate security will continue to be a by-product of that).


I mean, what's the actual idea being proposed by the "hashrate is too high" contingent? Anything?

Someone asked a similar question on the lightning-dev mailing list, apparently the different teams independently implementing their own software based on the Lightning protocol are now at a fairly late stage of their development paths: testing the interoperation of their separate Lightning implementations. How long that takes is down to them though. Maybe someone will do a launch in Q1 2018? Not sure tbh.

No.

Bitcoin Cash can be either very very fast, or very very slow. This is because of the way they changed the difficulty adjustment from Satoshi's design; sometimes there are more than 12 BCH blocks per hour, sometimes there are as few as 2 or 3 per hour (Satoshi's difficulty scheme is less dynamic, where 6-7 blocks per hour is the historic norm)


Bitcoin Cash proponents may like to make a big thing out of how there's a hard fork on the BCH blockchain this week to change it back to Satoshi's difficulty scheme. But all that will change then is that Bitcoin Cash will simply be the same speed as Bitcoin, 6 blocks per hour



Riiiiight

So, this is a deceptive way of presenting the situation. If either coin is going to "win", then when did the competition start? And does the competition only end when the BCH price is $0.01 above the BTC price? Oh please

Don't let the door hit you on your way out


But let's be honest: they won't leave. It seems that Xapo, Coinbase, Bitpay and Blockchain.info have collectively decided to throw everything they've got at bullying or blackmailing Bitcoin users into accepting their ideas for developing Bitcoin. All they ever seem to achieve by force is forcing the Bitcoin developers to make the software more resilient.


And all this, despite having their own special crypto (Bitcoin Cash) that gives them everything they want, and yet they're still not happy. Which makes one question what it is they really want...

Um, do you realise that this is a completely pointless observation?


The reason why proof of work secures the Bitcoin network is because of the "work" part You're essentially asking for something for nothing, security for zero effort. You may as well fantasize about time machines or anti-gravity boots.


So the "using too much electricity" rhetoric is no different to saying "Bitcoin is too secure". What exactly do you people want, insecure money?

Really?



That would be an advantage if Bitcoin blocks were full. And Bitcoin Cash still can't fill 1MB blocks, let alone 4 or 8MB blocks. So that's not an advantage.



Blocks on BCH are still 10 minutes apart, so it's exactly the same speed, not faster. Fees are cheaper, but there's also less hash rate (and fewer users).



Case closed. (how come you forgot about Bitcoin Cash's advantages over Bitcoin, lol)

No it hasn't, money laundering has only existed for less than around 75 years, maybe less than that.

Risk of what

What are your security worries? You seem to be afraid of Lightning transactions, but not about anything specific.

This is not true.

Lightning does not need to be settled on-chain. This is wrong. Once money is on the Lightning network, it can stay there until a user wants to use it on-chain instead. Settling on-chain is not necessary at all, and so because mining is not involved in Lightning transactions, fees can be cheap or free (the only cost is running your computer and it's Bitcoin node, basically nothing).

For instance, if your friend sends some money directly to you with Lightning, you can charge a fee if you like. Just don't expect them to still be your friend if you do (or to receive the money soon )


This will not require 100 MB blocks or anything like that, as there can be huge amounts of money on Lightning all the time. Lightning transactions don't use block space, they are off-chain.