The vitriol that Bitcoin evokes from HN commenters can really only be explained by jealousy, the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.
Obviously some people are jealous that they didn’t hold Bitcoin earlier and make a lot of money.
But equally, people who hold Bitcoin now are incentivized to dismiss any critique of Bitcoin, since they stand to profit directly from Bitcoin’s reputation.
Therefore the motivations of all participants must be borne in mind, and no ad hominem carries any special weight since all participants have incentives for motivated reasoning.
I remember when I first heard of Bitcoin. I quite frankly found it technically intimidating. It was a totally new concept. I didn't get it. I took my own discomfort as a sort of signal that it was really important; something totally new. So I studied it. I had to put time and effort to read the books, play with the code... Eventually I got it and found it to be one of the most elegant pieces of technology and sociology of my lifetime.
I think a lot of geeks never made that first push past the intimidation. As the value has gone up, the sour grapes have as well. This is a group of people that should have been first on the wagon, but instead many of us found out the hard way we weren't on the cutting edge as much as we liked to think. Myself included, I have some Bitcoin but I'm not a BTC millionaire, like I would have been had I pushed harder through my intimidation faster.
There is something to say for incentives. The positive incentive loop is what drives adoption, innovation, security etc.
I too wish I’d made more effort to buy it earlier. Presumably that sentiment applies to the majority of humans on earth, whether you are now a Bitcoin millionaire or not.
If I come across something that works without PoW, is safe against quantum computers and somehow eliminates the threat of forks (seems impossible), I'll invest in that.
The pedigree of the team behind it is ridiculous, most notably its creator: Silvio Micali - one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs as well as other cryptographic primitives.
EDIT: it's not quantum-safe yet, but that's a problem they're actively researching, and given the team they seemed credibly positioned to solve it.
See: https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/chris_peikert_joins_... and https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/algorand-contributes...
You fell for the meme...
Energy consumption as compared to what? What energy sources? This line of argumentation feels very misleading to me and always has because it is presented with a very specific framing. Here's an alternative framing for example:
https://unchained-capital.com/blog/bitcoin-does-not-waste-en...
At least you sold high, so good on you!
It’s not too late, you can get back in, though you will have a tax bill. Maybe it can be a wash trade.
But if FUD that’s dishonest about bitcoin mining scared you off then you haven’t learned enough about bitcoin yet.
This us how bitcoin seeks the strongest hands. HFSP
My take is HN commenters try to typically reason through articles with thought and an open mind. I would wager there are so many bitcoin bros who hype ad nausea that beckons the skepticism you see here.
The argument was that PoW can not not scale. Its an obvious objectively verifiable fact and its completely irrelevant what kind of environmental side effects bitoin has or will have in the future. For all we know it could run on fusion reactors and biodegradable ASICS only and it still would not scale.
Bitcoin can and has scaled. And that is a fact, from Segwit and Taproot to Lightning the capacity and cost have improved dramatically.
Compared to FBA solutions with block times in the single digit seconds and TPS way over 1000 These improvements are as irrelevant as its gets. There is no proposed way to make bitcoin scale to any level that would make it useful on a global scale. And the fun part is, even a proposal that could do this would not go trough. It would just lead to another fork.
But, I think that one way the "energy per transaction" framing is misleading, is for exactly the "if you scaled up the transactions, the power use would scale proportionally" idea. First, it isn't clear to me that it is even possible to scale up the transaction rate without either making the security worse or substantially modifying the design (or possibly both), but if you did manage increase the transaction rate, it isn't clear to me that this would impact the total energy use rate at all.
Well, ok, it might influence the power used by influencing the price or the issuance rate. But, aside from that, I expect that the power use would be determined by whether someone profits by increasing the amount that they spend on power in order to mine bitcoin. This doesn't depend on the transaction rate. Err, ok, I suppose technically if the transaction rate were higher, miners might get more transaction fees, and really the relevant thing is issuance rate + transaction fee rate, but I suspect that the average transaction fee would decrease if the number of transactions were increased, so that impact should be small I think, because those two should largely cancel out.
Hm, ok, so if the transaction fees are determined essentially as an auction, what is the effect on the average fee per transaction, of multiplying the number of items (slots in the block) available per amount of time? I think this depends on the demand curve for transactions. I don't know what that curve looks like. If we pretend that it is linear (just pulling that out of a hat. Though I guess if we zoom in far enough it should look locally linear, unless we zoom in too far and then it will look piecewise constant due to discrete numbers of people... whatever.), then, --- I should get back to work, shouldn't be doing this calculation right now.
