I wonder if current Bitcoin dominance has to do with newcomers in general finally catching up with what a shitshow the majority of the alt coin market is. Back when the 2017 bullrun was in full swing it was like everybody and their dog had found out what the next Bitcoin would be and poured their money into whatever alt coin was the flavour of the day. Maybe this has changed by now.

But... I'm not fully convinced of this. I guess most people that are currently buying coins and trading are the ones that have followed the market since the last bullrun and thus by now know the treacherous reality of the alt coin market (ie. the newcomers of 2017 are the veterans of today).

I don't think the general public is yet aware of cryptos reawakening.

In other words, the n00bs are yet to come and the alts are yet to be pumped. I guess when BTC breaks USD 30k,- the latest (if it breaks USD 30k,- any time soon) we'll have a new influx of newbies that will fall for whatever alt looks the shiniest and drive Bitcoin dominance down again.

Don't forget that there's also a couple of testnet faucets around:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Testnet#Faucets

Unless you need huge amounts of testnet coins for whatever reasons those faucets serve fairly well.

*cheers in European*

Now let's hope that our British friends soon follow suit as well! Brexiting is no excuse for lagging behind in reaching 10k

Interesting, I wasn't aware of the Corsia Agreement, thank you.



I'm not taking the word "tax" too literal, it's just that the Corsia Agreement apparently isn't having people "pay more for aeroplane tickets" yet as it's been only obligatory since the beginning of this year with the obligations being:


It's a start, but mere reporting is not exactly the "taxation" that you claim it to be. I fly on a fairly regular basis and have yet to feel the impact of the Corsia Agreement on my wallet. In fact I see cheaper and cheaper flight routes popping up all over to place. It may just by weird anecdotal happenstance but I call bullshit on your claim of people paying even remotely enough on plane tickets to offset its environmental impact.




So you found one project of literally dozens that you personally think is a waste of money. Good on you.



Which is a complete bullshit statement and having been around long enough you should know better.

The only thing that moving from GPUs to ASICs did was that mining from 600W worth of GPUs changed to mining with 600W worth of ASICs.



On that I agree with you. Which is why I would neither move away from PoW, nor try to use PoW's work for "useful calculations" but rather introduce a CO2 fund that works similar to the developer funds of other alts.

Yeah, but good luck with getting the devs, let alone the miners on board with that

Also that's the faintest of an idea with not much thought put behind it, so there's probably other reasons why such an approach might be problematic. Still, maybe this idea gets ahold of the right people and gets turned into something useful down the road.



Yep. Using PoW for "useful" calculations appears to be a fruitless approach at trying to eat your cake and have it too.


---


franky1's post is unfortunately completely beside the point but I'm still curious about a few things:


Kerosone is tax exempt on an international level:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_fuel

Living in an European country I never paid any taxes besides various unrelated airport fees and VAT (YMMV, maybe some European countries have an environment tax, but I'm not aware of any in my country of Austria). Going by train within Europe is often 3-5 times more expensive than going by airplane (which is pretty fucked up if you think about it).

The US seems to pull in all sorts of taxes, but non related to the environment:
https://www.travelzoo.com/blog/information-air-fees-taxes/

So which taxes are you referring to and in which country? Serious question, I couldn't find anything.



Did you even look at which projects they are supporting?

https://www.atmosfair.de/en/climate-protection-projects/

Which hostel are you talking about? O.o

Atmosfair is just an example, but one that has been very well vetted by both governmental bodies (BMU) and trusted, well known NGOs (Stiftung Warentest), supporting only projects that follow stringent standards (CDM-Gold-Standard):
https://www.bmu.de/themen/wirtschaft-produkte-ressourcen-tourismus/tourismus-sport/nachhaltiger-tourismus/tipps-zum-nachhaltigen-reisen/
https://www.test.de/CO2-Kompensation-Diese-Anbieter-tun-am-meisten-fuer-den-Klimaschutz-5282502-0/
https://www.goldstandard.org/

I've only recently heard from them but from what I've found about them so far that's about as vetted and transparent as you get.


That being said, to repeat:
1) atmosfair is just an example
2) even if there are countries that charge an environment tax on aviation that's a wholly separate issue from trying to reduce PoW's CO2 impact.

We'll know more once said vulnerabilities have been officially disclosed, at this point we can only guess. However since luke has been referring to those vulnerabilities as "minor" I doubt that any funds are at risk.

Why do you assume that one has to go through "all" 4.2 billion hashes to successfully mine a block? After all PoW mining is a probabilistic affair.

Just a thought, for anyone who like me doubts that a secure, permissionless alternative to PoW will be found:

What if one were to create a PoW based alt coin that automatically pays part of the block reward to an environmental organization offsetting PoW-caused CO2 emissions?

The problem is of course finding consensus on which organization to support, but IMO that's probably easier to solve than the double-spend problem as the incentives are less mis-aligned. At worst you would have a developer-based "dictatorship" where devs would decide on which organization to support, but that still wouldn't be much different from alts where a predetermined, transparent percentage of newly issued currency goes into a dev fund, only it would be a CO2 fund instead.

As for which environmental organization to support, there's already a couple of well-vetted non-profit organizations that help people off-set their air-traffic-caused CO2 emissions on a voluntary basis such as atmosfair: https://www.atmosfair.de/en/

In theory one could also try to get this into a Bitcoin hard fork but let's not kid ourselves.

What would be everyone's thought on this?

I too, am very happy to be on the far far end of the losing side

Usually competitions where "everybody wins" are rather lame but this sort of winning I could get used to.

(Also I'm silently still rooting for Ipwich~)

Ah, you're right. I forgot that you'll have to retry nonces due to the changing block time field.

But yes, like MagicByt3 pointed out they might have simply had multiple machines running? Even if satoshi was the only one running the client until Hal Finney came along a few days later this doesn't mean that they only had the client running on a single machine. It only needs a second or third machine for the numbers to make sense.

I think this is the math you are looking for:
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/903870/probability-of-guessing-correctly-after-x-tries-with-multiple-right-answers

Applied to the mining example at hand, if it takes 23 minutes to go through all possible combinations, the chance of finding a correct block within 7 minutes of mining with 3 MHash/s is higher than 50%.

I wouldn't be so sure about miner production carbon footprint far outweighing the carbon footprint of mining itself, but it might be a quite signficant portion of it.

For perspective here's a study from 2011 according to which "as much as 70 percent of the energy needed to make and operate a typical laptop computer throughout its life span is used in manufacturing the computer" [1]. With mining hardware having a much shorter lifespan than your average consumer laptop that impact is definitely not to be underestimated, even assuming efficiency improvements in hardware production since 2011.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2011-04-factory-energy.html

I think it's mentioned somewhere during the mixing progress? Either way that's just general advice for enhancing your privacy when using any sort of mixing service (ie. waiting a week before moving coins will make blockchain analysis harder than waiting an hour) and should usually have no effect on your experience with ChipMixer (which will greatly improve your privacy regardless of how long you let coins lie).

As a general rule any changes that require a fork will most likely be largely announced and thus hard to miss. No mentions regarding a fork means no change in the transaction and block format.

Check the changelog for anything that may cause troubles if you rely on specifics regarding the implementation rather than the protocol:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/release-notes/release-notes-0.18.0.md#0180-change-log

Luckily iasenko took care of this lapse of mine in his post

But is it just me or has the alt coin section become less spammy again? I just checked some random samples and there seem to be less shit posts than I remember. Or maybe I just checked the wrong threads.

Many coins that are hardly used. It's nice to argue about scalability and security when no one uses a coin, in practice the reality usually looks quite different. So far the only "consensus" algorithms that seem to be both scalable and secure without relying on PoW are permissioned ones at which point we're back at square one.

That being said, which of the "many coins that use hardly any energy but are still secure" are you referring to precisely?

I largely agree with you, but Bitcoin always seems just one good or bad day away from switching into crazy gear. Admittedly crazy gear has a slight upwards bias though




It seems almost within reach, doesn't it? USD 9000,- appears to be a tough one to crack first though.

Well there's still 16 days to go guys While it would make absolutely no sense for Bitcoin to break below USD 6000,- until then, Bitcoin's market behaviour rarely ever makes sense.