Rightwing? We are so liberal that we consider "Progressives" a dangerous compromise. Here is what a typical Free Stater looks like - http://flamingfreedom.com/
Don't believe the propaganda, as anarchists come in many different flavors just like atheists.
The etymology of the word is actually greek and means without rulers -
ad. Gr. , n. of state f. - without a chief or head,
Semantics and etymology aside, I am quite familiar with many schools of anarchists and almost all of us support governments and local rules decided upon through consensus or unanimously depending upon the school of anarchism. There is perhaps 1-2 schools of anarchist thought out of the 20+ that oppose all governments... most just make a distinction between state government and anarchist government, and yes there are differences between the two.
You are very correct, we do not want to pay taxes but are quite happy to voluntarily pay for public roads, water treatment , electrical infrastructure , and education. Something my community does without coercion and 100% voluntarily. Please try to understand that we want to be productive and contributing members of society but we also do not want to fund programs like the NSA spying programs and the military industrial complex. Do we have have a right to not pay for these institutions of corruption and violence or will you support sending armed men to kidnap and torture us for not shouldering the responsibility of ignoring your own constitution's due process provisions and supporting the destruction of villages where 90% of the families killed are innocent targets - https://theintercept.com/drone...
I checked out their website and saw them asking for donations.
That's enough to know they're full of crap.
You can't claim self reliance while asking for donations.
If they got something so basic wrong, what else are they lying about?
Charities and non-profits aren't incompatible with libertarian and anarchist philosophies. Even gift giving and sharing economies can exist and are perfectly fine.
You would have a valid point if the Free State Project accepted a grant from the feds or state and that would indeed be hypocritical.
Solidarity with your neighbors is actually a more important attribute than individual self reliance in anarchism because without state governments, communities must work together and find consensus in a peaceful and voluntary way.
This is an excellent point and one most anarchists would agree with, which is why we support balkanization or localization and refer to Dunbar's number - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... as supporting evidence why societies should be organized as a bunch of small communities which cooperate and trade with each other.
People forget that one of the functions of a government is to protect the rights of its citizens, otherwise society will end up being the strong dominating the weak.
Most anarchists do acknowledge some good that comes from the states and the important roles governments play in society. One common misconception is the idea that Anarchists oppose governments which isn't true(They just oppose state governments who use coercion and violence). I have lived a number of years in a community where our government is completely voluntary with no taxes supporting our roads, water and sewage treatment, and we even built our electrical infrastructure. All of this is voluntary and works just fine. We do acknowledge some good the state regulators , lawyers, policeman, and military do indeed do for their citizens but the contention is that you get pennies back on the dollar due to inefficiencies and many of your programs you pay for actually create cycles of corruption and violence like the NSA spying program which assists dropping bombs on families at a failure rate of killing 90% innocent civilians which ends up breeding more terrorists.
Then it turns out that the people who did move were mostly part of some sub group, like SJW men's rights activists or homophobes or something.
Anarchists are much like Atheists in the sense that they come from extremely diverse backgrounds, skillsets and philosophies. The only monoculture that may be expected is there tends to be a disproportionate amount of males to females , just like with atheists where it is usually a 9 to 1 ratio. The only matter that may curb this is since this project is requiring the whole family to move you will get a more balanced ratio of sexes moving in because an anarchist/libertarian father will drag along his less libertarian wife and children. I am familiar with the Keene community of anarchists/libertarians and while there are indeed some anti-feminist egalitarians there exists no "homophobes" as you suggest to fit that demographic moving in(I'm sure a couple within that 20k are indeed , but much lower per capita than the general population). In fact they tend to be higher amounts of gays and lesbians with several NH gay anarchist radio shows and podcasts . I.E... http://flamingfreedom.com/
They are simply newcomers, who want to impose their views on people. And, of course, isn't there something contradictory in trying to impose "Freedom" on anybody?
Anarchists and Libertarians typically don't care how others live their lives as long as you don't use coercion, violence, kidnapping , and torture against them to go along with your agenda. People should have a right to voluntarily be enslaved and a right to live under their ideals because you own the effects of your body and it isn't our right to impose upon you our ideals through coercion. This means that we are perfectly happy to live and even cooperate with communists , socialists, democrats and republicans as long as they don't impose their agenda upon us. Where it gets complicated is when statists feel bitter about some people stepping outside of the "social contract" that we never agreed to in the first place and not shouldering some public burden along with them. Since anarchists aren't necessarily against governments but state governments I believe a truce can be brokered between the communities where anarchist collectives pay for the public services they do use, and can refuse to pay for the ones they disagree with (murdering innocent families with drone bombs 90% of incidents and NSA surveillance used to murder those people)
While Bitcoin had a great year in most metrics of 2015( https://blog.coinbase.com/2015... ), expect even more rapid growth in 2016 when years of development and investment compound with another disinflationary bubble driving media and user interest. Several more bitcoin "killer-apps" (I.E.. https://openbazaar.org/ ) will come online while banks continue to poor money into block chain development to play catch-up. Crypto-currency developers will be the biggest winners as more fintech VC money pours into innovative startups and "blockchain" consultants.
Banking alts will begin to roll out in late 2016 with some eventually becoming massive failures and some private blockchains winning out providing slight benefits from removing some interbank inefficiencies. Both bank alts/tokens and bitcoin will coexist and serve different purposes as the key benefits to bitcoin will never be replicated by the banks: immutability, privacy and security with no KYC, sovereignty, open source and decentralized allowing limitless innovation and ability to onramp billions of unbanked and underbanked.
I do agree with the parent -- to trade BitCoin, it can be purely physical (as in from bitcoinpaperwallet.com). However, if Alice gave a piece of paper with a wallet's private key to Bob and the identical one to Charlie, the first one who gets the transaction in the system and through the blockchain gets the BTC, the second is screwed.
True, you should trade physical bitcoins with people you trust.
As for the blockchain, there are supposedly shortcuts (mainly letting people run it for you...) but same problem with those as with exchanges. Said group can easily change results in order to snag your stuff or delay it enough for a double-spending attack to take place.
This applies to most online wallets(not all) , somewhat with SPV nodes but not really , but nothing to do with pruned nodes that are around 1GB in size.
Bitcoin does me no good as I have to both pay to have it converted to hard currency and take the risk that it will devalue significantly in the time it takes to make the conversion. Today alone, interday fluctuation of the value of bitcoin was 3%, and 14% in the last week. There's no value in that kind of uncertainty in my income.
You are correct that bitcoin is far more volatile than the USD and does indeed have several shortcommings. A few points of clarification though:
You don't need to pay anything to convert BTC to Fiat , as merchant processors like coinbase and bitpay don't charge anything for this
You don't need to pick between Fiat and Bitcoin. You can use both and save a lot of money. When bitcoin is down 5-10% I spend my fiat, when it is up I spend Bitcoin and everything just became cheaper. In fact I can already save 20-30% on amazon with bitcoin , so spending it when it appreciates makes everything 25-40% cheaper!
Americans are spoiled because the US dollar is a relatively stable reserve currency. There are many countries that have currencies with insanely high inflation (vs US low 5-8%)and more volatility than Bitcoin. In fact, on a week a week basis bitcoin was more stable than the euro for 3 months this year.
In many places outside the US and europe store owners give a discount if you use cash rather than a credit card. There are significant costs to accepting credit cards. In my country merchants get hit with 6-8% + chargeback costs, thus have a 8 to 16% overhead for accepting credit cards vs cash or bitcoin.
I was wondering that too. A cashless economy only makes one more dependent on banks because if the card doesn't work, one is SOL.
BitCoin is another alternative... but it requires Internet access or else one is at risk of being the victim of double-spending, and to be really sure, one needs the entire blockchain (going on 40+ gigs.)
You don't need the internet or even power to trade bitcoin. (Physical coins or paperwallets). The security concerns of physical bitcoins are the same with physical fiat. You do not need to download the full blockchain now either as you can use an SPV wallet, online wallet(I.E. circle/coinbase) , or have a pruned full node at about 1GB of space.
Sorry for responding a second time as I didn't realize you were the same person. The bottom line is that you may have been misled into thinking that Proof of Work is the only security mechanism for bitcoin and it will scale indefinitely as an arms race wasting power. This is a fair concern to have but also one that is exaggerated because PoW is only one security mechanism and in the future 99% of transactions will be done either off the chain or through inter-payment channels where there won't be direct payment to fund the "waste of resources" therefore no incentive to fuel a never ending arms race of "wasting electricity". To give you an idea of where we are right now -- there are between 100k -150k Tx per day but this represents only a small fraction of the volume as most volume right now exists "off the chain" and therefore not fueling the arms race of ASICs. In the near future Inter-payment channels will make settlement of on the chain a very small fraction of 1 % of the total volume. Bitcoin is actually much less environmentally dangerous than traditional fiat and payment rails.
Economics is already forcing some users to recycle the heat from ASIC's as space heaters and this demand will continue to grow. Additionally, the coinbase reward for mining is slowly being replaced by Tx fees which will continue to grow rapidly especially when sidechains and inter payment channels like the lightning network are scaffolded on top of Bitcoin to really scale bitcoin up from 4-7 transactions per second to over 100k tx per second. These proposals do not depend upon PoW (proof of work... but certainly supplementing security by this mechanism helps secure the network verses pure PoS. ) and upon other means to secure bitcoin like oracles, ricardian contracts , and mutisig. Thus the amount of energy needed for PoW does not need to scale proportionally with the transaction volume and the environmental concerns are wildly exaggerated.
Then consider those compute cycles could have been used for Folding@Home and actually helping humanity.
Economics is already forcing some users to recycle the heat from ASIC's as space heaters and this demand will continue to grow. Additionally, the coinbase reward for mining is slowly being replaced by Tx fees which will continue to grow rapidly especially when sidechains and inter payment channels like the lightning network are scaffolded on top of Bitcoin to really scale bitcoin up from 4-7 transactions per second to over 100k tx per second. These proposals do not depend upon PoW (proof of work... but certainly supplementing security by this mechanism helps secure the network verses pure PoS. ) and upon other means to secure bitcoin like oracles, ricardian contracts , and mutisig. Thus the amount of energy needed for PoW does not need to scale proportionally with the transaction volume and the environmental concerns are wildly exaggerated.
Yes, that is out of date. It really isn't worth the botnet operators time to mine with CPU's and GPU's these days. They are better off holding the computer hostage with malware like crypto locker which encrypts their hard drive and demands ransom with Greendot cards and bitcoin.
I'm willing to bet that a single Bitcoin costs a whole lot more to produce than a credit card transaction takes to process.
Or to put it another way, if you were to replace the entire existing credit card system with Bitcoin, would it use more or less power than the current system?
---
Or perhaps if you were to be honest about the whole thing... Even with Bitcoin, you still are using the existing system, since very few places take bitcoin and most that do convert it into dollars or euros right away.
So you now have twice as many transactions, once for bitcoin, another for the "old guard" banking system.
Fair point. There are some initial costs to upgrading fintech and creating a fairer form of currency that doesn't rob people with unexpected inflation, bail outs, and bail ins. Even if you prefer inflationary fiat currencies instead of dis-inflationary ones with a planned social contract owned openly by the users you should be grateful that this competition will at least temporarily keep governments and banks slightly more honest.
Yeah but your counter argument doesn't account for the sheer scale of what VISA and the banking system do compared to Bitcoin. OK the banking system uses more electricity, but what is the amortized cost on a per transaction basis? That's the question. Accoring to TFA the answer is VISA is HUGELY more environmentally friendly and cost effective than Bitcoin and, and this is the point, always will be because by design Bitcoin makes it harder to obtain coins depending on how much processing power (energy) is being expended to obtain those coins at any given time.
If all bitcoin machines went solar however, then we might have a different outcome. The practicalities of that, given that Bitcoin assumes distribution of computing power, are not in Bitcoin's favor either.
Proof of work through ASICs is a very good security mechanism as attackers must spend real money on machines and electricty to attack the network and create 2-3 double spends before being caught and shutdown, but not the only method.
Already there are inter-channel payment protocols (https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper-DRAFT-0.5.pdf and http://impulse.is/impulse.pdf are two examples among many) and off the chain transactions (Coinbase/circle/changetip are a few examples where there is no fee and wildly used). Right now there is ~118k transactions per day - https://blockchain.info/charts... but in reality the number of bitcoin transactions per day is much much higher as those numbers represent on the chain transactions. with the lighting network Bitcoin will be able to scale to higher levels of transactions per day than VISA , and without having to similarity increase the amount of ASIC's because those payment channels use multisig and ricardian contracts to secure while being ultimately backed up by PoW on the main chain.
Additionally, be aware that wasted electricity will start to be recycled as heaters(Whether hot water or space heaters). I already have some friends doing this to save on their heating bills and make money at the same time.
Thank you. Despite bitcoin being more efficient than traditional payment rails networks, there is some truth to what the article you mention is possibly alluding to. Decentralized network security is indeed expensive and much more costly than a few shared database ledgers. This is especially true for bitcoin at the moment with only 118k transactions per day and the massive overhead being spent to secure those transactions. There are two important reasons for this one must consider:
1) Bitcoin having a market cap of 3.7 billion and having immutable transactions needs to be extra vigilant on protecting the network and ledger from attacks whether coming from gangs of hackers or governments. There are some fixed costs here that are needed to superseded the hashpower of an attack and that once a certain level is reached the network will scale more cheaply.
2) Bitcoin primarily uses PoW(proof of work) as a security mechanism but other protocols are being layered upon it like sidechains and payment channels (lightning network) which dont require more hashing done by ASICs and add other security mechanisms like mutisig and ricardian contracts to add different layers of security which supplement bitcoin and allow it to scale past VISA in transactions per second while not adding blockchain bloat or more wasteful energy use.
Bitcoin already uses 5000 times the energy visa does to record a financial single transaction. If parasites learn to use the bitcoin network for their own computations, that will get even worse.
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
The cited study is flawed as it doesn't account for the massive investment in call centers, offices, employees, auditors, and regulators that are needed to sustain the VISA payment rails network and the massive energy use and environmental impact those variables demand.
Nevermind the arguments why: The current 40 GB came to be under a cap of at most one megabyte added to the blockchain every ten minutes. If 40GB is too rich for you already, under a 1 MB per 10 mins cap, then a 20 MB cap certainly is, and a doubling of the cap every year even moreso.
BIP 100 and 101 request no such change as you are representing. The limit will likely be raised to 8MB in the final revision of the proposals and this is more of a temporary measure to allow more time to test for sidechains and interpayment channels like the lightning network - https://lightning.network/ligh... which allow bitcoin to scale to VISA level tps without bloating the blockchain.
Additionally, remember that merkle tree pruning has already been merged in as of 4/24 which allows for full nodes with only 1.3 GB of storage.
Slashdot Mirror
Rightwing? We are so liberal that we consider "Progressives" a dangerous compromise. Here is what a typical Free Stater looks like - http://flamingfreedom.com/ Don't believe the propaganda, as anarchists come in many different flavors just like atheists.
ad. Gr. , n. of state f. - without a chief or head,
Semantics and etymology aside, I am quite familiar with many schools of anarchists and almost all of us support governments and local rules decided upon through consensus or unanimously depending upon the school of anarchism. There is perhaps 1-2 schools of anarchist thought out of the 20+ that oppose all governments... most just make a distinction between state government and anarchist government, and yes there are differences between the two.
You are very correct, we do not want to pay taxes but are quite happy to voluntarily pay for public roads, water treatment , electrical infrastructure , and education. Something my community does without coercion and 100% voluntarily. Please try to understand that we want to be productive and contributing members of society but we also do not want to fund programs like the NSA spying programs and the military industrial complex. Do we have have a right to not pay for these institutions of corruption and violence or will you support sending armed men to kidnap and torture us for not shouldering the responsibility of ignoring your own constitution's due process provisions and supporting the destruction of villages where 90% of the families killed are innocent targets - https://theintercept.com/drone...
I checked out their website and saw them asking for donations. That's enough to know they're full of crap.
You can't claim self reliance while asking for donations.
If they got something so basic wrong, what else are they lying about?
Charities and non-profits aren't incompatible with libertarian and anarchist philosophies. Even gift giving and sharing economies can exist and are perfectly fine. You would have a valid point if the Free State Project accepted a grant from the feds or state and that would indeed be hypocritical.
Solidarity with your neighbors is actually a more important attribute than individual self reliance in anarchism because without state governments, communities must work together and find consensus in a peaceful and voluntary way.
How much _real_ broadband is available in New Hampshire? Where it is available is probably not too cheap, cost of living-wise (see first point).
You are acting like NH is a third world country, lets just get the facts- http://www.speedtest.net/award...
Most Free state people are moving to locations like Keene which has Xfinity with 114 Mbps download average and the same prices as elsewhere
There is also Low unemployment and plenty of jobs available. Portsmouth is one of the 30th top markets to find a job.
Here are more resources for plenty of jobs in NH - https://freestateproject.org/r...
People forget that one of the functions of a government is to protect the rights of its citizens, otherwise society will end up being the strong dominating the weak.
Most anarchists do acknowledge some good that comes from the states and the important roles governments play in society. One common misconception is the idea that Anarchists oppose governments which isn't true(They just oppose state governments who use coercion and violence). I have lived a number of years in a community where our government is completely voluntary with no taxes supporting our roads, water and sewage treatment, and we even built our electrical infrastructure. All of this is voluntary and works just fine. We do acknowledge some good the state regulators , lawyers, policeman, and military do indeed do for their citizens but the contention is that you get pennies back on the dollar due to inefficiencies and many of your programs you pay for actually create cycles of corruption and violence like the NSA spying program which assists dropping bombs on families at a failure rate of killing 90% innocent civilians which ends up breeding more terrorists.
Then it turns out that the people who did move were mostly part of some sub group, like SJW men's rights activists or homophobes or something.
Anarchists are much like Atheists in the sense that they come from extremely diverse backgrounds, skillsets and philosophies. The only monoculture that may be expected is there tends to be a disproportionate amount of males to females , just like with atheists where it is usually a 9 to 1 ratio. The only matter that may curb this is since this project is requiring the whole family to move you will get a more balanced ratio of sexes moving in because an anarchist/libertarian father will drag along his less libertarian wife and children. I am familiar with the Keene community of anarchists/libertarians and while there are indeed some anti-feminist egalitarians there exists no "homophobes" as you suggest to fit that demographic moving in(I'm sure a couple within that 20k are indeed , but much lower per capita than the general population). In fact they tend to be higher amounts of gays and lesbians with several NH gay anarchist radio shows and podcasts . I.E... http://flamingfreedom.com/
They are simply newcomers, who want to impose their views on people. And, of course, isn't there something contradictory in trying to impose "Freedom" on anybody?
Anarchists and Libertarians typically don't care how others live their lives as long as you don't use coercion, violence, kidnapping , and torture against them to go along with your agenda. People should have a right to voluntarily be enslaved and a right to live under their ideals because you own the effects of your body and it isn't our right to impose upon you our ideals through coercion. This means that we are perfectly happy to live and even cooperate with communists , socialists, democrats and republicans as long as they don't impose their agenda upon us. Where it gets complicated is when statists feel bitter about some people stepping outside of the "social contract" that we never agreed to in the first place and not shouldering some public burden along with them. Since anarchists aren't necessarily against governments but state governments I believe a truce can be brokered between the communities where anarchist collectives pay for the public services they do use, and can refuse to pay for the ones they disagree with (murdering innocent families with drone bombs 90% of incidents and NSA surveillance used to murder those people)
While Bitcoin had a great year in most metrics of 2015( https://blog.coinbase.com/2015... ), expect even more rapid growth in 2016 when years of development and investment compound with another disinflationary bubble driving media and user interest. Several more bitcoin "killer-apps" (I.E.. https://openbazaar.org/ ) will come online while banks continue to poor money into block chain development to play catch-up. Crypto-currency developers will be the biggest winners as more fintech VC money pours into innovative startups and "blockchain" consultants.
Banking alts will begin to roll out in late 2016 with some eventually becoming massive failures and some private blockchains winning out providing slight benefits from removing some interbank inefficiencies. Both bank alts/tokens and bitcoin will coexist and serve different purposes as the key benefits to bitcoin will never be replicated by the banks: immutability, privacy and security with no KYC, sovereignty, open source and decentralized allowing limitless innovation and ability to onramp billions of unbanked and underbanked.
I do agree with the parent -- to trade BitCoin, it can be purely physical (as in from bitcoinpaperwallet.com). However, if Alice gave a piece of paper with a wallet's private key to Bob and the identical one to Charlie, the first one who gets the transaction in the system and through the blockchain gets the BTC, the second is screwed.
True, you should trade physical bitcoins with people you trust.
As for the blockchain, there are supposedly shortcuts (mainly letting people run it for you...) but same problem with those as with exchanges. Said group can easily change results in order to snag your stuff or delay it enough for a double-spending attack to take place.
This applies to most online wallets(not all) , somewhat with SPV nodes but not really , but nothing to do with pruned nodes that are around 1GB in size.
Bitcoin does me no good as I have to both pay to have it converted to hard currency and take the risk that it will devalue significantly in the time it takes to make the conversion. Today alone, interday fluctuation of the value of bitcoin was 3%, and 14% in the last week. There's no value in that kind of uncertainty in my income.
You are correct that bitcoin is far more volatile than the USD and does indeed have several shortcommings. A few points of clarification though:
You don't need to pay anything to convert BTC to Fiat , as merchant processors like coinbase and bitpay don't charge anything for this
You don't need to pick between Fiat and Bitcoin. You can use both and save a lot of money. When bitcoin is down 5-10% I spend my fiat, when it is up I spend Bitcoin and everything just became cheaper. In fact I can already save 20-30% on amazon with bitcoin , so spending it when it appreciates makes everything 25-40% cheaper!
Americans are spoiled because the US dollar is a relatively stable reserve currency. There are many countries that have currencies with insanely high inflation (vs US low 5-8%)and more volatility than Bitcoin. In fact, on a week a week basis bitcoin was more stable than the euro for 3 months this year.
In many places outside the US and europe store owners give a discount if you use cash rather than a credit card. There are significant costs to accepting credit cards. In my country merchants get hit with 6-8% + chargeback costs, thus have a 8 to 16% overhead for accepting credit cards vs cash or bitcoin.
I was wondering that too. A cashless economy only makes one more dependent on banks because if the card doesn't work, one is SOL.
BitCoin is another alternative... but it requires Internet access or else one is at risk of being the victim of double-spending, and to be really sure, one needs the entire blockchain (going on 40+ gigs.)
You don't need the internet or even power to trade bitcoin. (Physical coins or paperwallets). The security concerns of physical bitcoins are the same with physical fiat. You do not need to download the full blockchain now either as you can use an SPV wallet, online wallet(I.E. circle/coinbase) , or have a pruned full node at about 1GB of space.
I wonder if these items are available from the physible section of torrent tracking sites?
https://thepiratebay.mn/browse/605/0/7/0
DD response to the attack on the first amendment by the state department- http://www.scribd.com/doc/2699...
Sorry for responding a second time as I didn't realize you were the same person. The bottom line is that you may have been misled into thinking that Proof of Work is the only security mechanism for bitcoin and it will scale indefinitely as an arms race wasting power. This is a fair concern to have but also one that is exaggerated because PoW is only one security mechanism and in the future 99% of transactions will be done either off the chain or through inter-payment channels where there won't be direct payment to fund the "waste of resources" therefore no incentive to fuel a never ending arms race of "wasting electricity". To give you an idea of where we are right now -- there are between 100k -150k Tx per day but this represents only a small fraction of the volume as most volume right now exists "off the chain" and therefore not fueling the arms race of ASICs. In the near future Inter-payment channels will make settlement of on the chain a very small fraction of 1 % of the total volume. Bitcoin is actually much less environmentally dangerous than traditional fiat and payment rails.
Economics is already forcing some users to recycle the heat from ASIC's as space heaters and this demand will continue to grow. Additionally, the coinbase reward for mining is slowly being replaced by Tx fees which will continue to grow rapidly especially when sidechains and inter payment channels like the lightning network are scaffolded on top of Bitcoin to really scale bitcoin up from 4-7 transactions per second to over 100k tx per second. These proposals do not depend upon PoW (proof of work... but certainly supplementing security by this mechanism helps secure the network verses pure PoS. ) and upon other means to secure bitcoin like oracles, ricardian contracts , and mutisig. Thus the amount of energy needed for PoW does not need to scale proportionally with the transaction volume and the environmental concerns are wildly exaggerated.
Then consider those compute cycles could have been used for Folding@Home and actually helping humanity.
Economics is already forcing some users to recycle the heat from ASIC's as space heaters and this demand will continue to grow. Additionally, the coinbase reward for mining is slowly being replaced by Tx fees which will continue to grow rapidly especially when sidechains and inter payment channels like the lightning network are scaffolded on top of Bitcoin to really scale bitcoin up from 4-7 transactions per second to over 100k tx per second. These proposals do not depend upon PoW (proof of work... but certainly supplementing security by this mechanism helps secure the network verses pure PoS. ) and upon other means to secure bitcoin like oracles, ricardian contracts , and mutisig. Thus the amount of energy needed for PoW does not need to scale proportionally with the transaction volume and the environmental concerns are wildly exaggerated.
There is plenty of evidence that most bitcoin mines are moving to use hydroelectric power and geothermal. They aren't doing so out of a sense of environmental altruism , but simply because "greener" power is less expensive. http://gizmodo.com/why-bitcoin... http://www.datacenterknowledge... https://www.cryptocoinsnews.co... http://dealbook.nytimes.com/20... http://www.coindesk.com/my-lif...
Yes, that is out of date. It really isn't worth the botnet operators time to mine with CPU's and GPU's these days. They are better off holding the computer hostage with malware like crypto locker which encrypts their hard drive and demands ransom with Greendot cards and bitcoin.
Per transaction, or total?
I'm willing to bet that a single Bitcoin costs a whole lot more to produce than a credit card transaction takes to process.
Or to put it another way, if you were to replace the entire existing credit card system with Bitcoin, would it use more or less power than the current system?
---
Or perhaps if you were to be honest about the whole thing... Even with Bitcoin, you still are using the existing system, since very few places take bitcoin and most that do convert it into dollars or euros right away.
So you now have twice as many transactions, once for bitcoin, another for the "old guard" banking system.
Fair point. There are some initial costs to upgrading fintech and creating a fairer form of currency that doesn't rob people with unexpected inflation, bail outs, and bail ins. Even if you prefer inflationary fiat currencies instead of dis-inflationary ones with a planned social contract owned openly by the users you should be grateful that this competition will at least temporarily keep governments and banks slightly more honest.
Bitcoin is up 4% today, so its now $52k.
Yeah but your counter argument doesn't account for the sheer scale of what VISA and the banking system do compared to Bitcoin. OK the banking system uses more electricity, but what is the amortized cost on a per transaction basis? That's the question. Accoring to TFA the answer is VISA is HUGELY more environmentally friendly and cost effective than Bitcoin and, and this is the point, always will be because by design Bitcoin makes it harder to obtain coins depending on how much processing power (energy) is being expended to obtain those coins at any given time.
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
If all bitcoin machines went solar however, then we might have a different outcome. The practicalities of that, given that Bitcoin assumes distribution of computing power, are not in Bitcoin's favor either.
Proof of work through ASICs is a very good security mechanism as attackers must spend real money on machines and electricty to attack the network and create 2-3 double spends before being caught and shutdown, but not the only method.
Already there are inter-channel payment protocols (https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper-DRAFT-0.5.pdf and http://impulse.is/impulse.pdf are two examples among many) and off the chain transactions (Coinbase/circle/changetip are a few examples where there is no fee and wildly used). Right now there is ~118k transactions per day - https://blockchain.info/charts... but in reality the number of bitcoin transactions per day is much much higher as those numbers represent on the chain transactions. with the lighting network Bitcoin will be able to scale to higher levels of transactions per day than VISA , and without having to similarity increase the amount of ASIC's because those payment channels use multisig and ricardian contracts to secure while being ultimately backed up by PoW on the main chain.
Additionally, be aware that wasted electricity will start to be recycled as heaters(Whether hot water or space heaters). I already have some friends doing this to save on their heating bills and make money at the same time.
That is insightful.
Thank you. Despite bitcoin being more efficient than traditional payment rails networks, there is some truth to what the article you mention is possibly alluding to. Decentralized network security is indeed expensive and much more costly than a few shared database ledgers. This is especially true for bitcoin at the moment with only 118k transactions per day and the massive overhead being spent to secure those transactions. There are two important reasons for this one must consider:
1) Bitcoin having a market cap of 3.7 billion and having immutable transactions needs to be extra vigilant on protecting the network and ledger from attacks whether coming from gangs of hackers or governments. There are some fixed costs here that are needed to superseded the hashpower of an attack and that once a certain level is reached the network will scale more cheaply.
2) Bitcoin primarily uses PoW(proof of work) as a security mechanism but other protocols are being layered upon it like sidechains and payment channels (lightning network) which dont require more hashing done by ASICs and add other security mechanisms like mutisig and ricardian contracts to add different layers of security which supplement bitcoin and allow it to scale past VISA in transactions per second while not adding blockchain bloat or more wasteful energy use.
Bitcoin already uses 5000 times the energy visa does to record a financial single transaction. If parasites learn to use the bitcoin network for their own computations, that will get even worse. http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
The cited study is flawed as it doesn't account for the massive investment in call centers, offices, employees, auditors, and regulators that are needed to sustain the VISA payment rails network and the massive energy use and environmental impact those variables demand.
Nevermind the arguments why: The current 40 GB came to be under a cap of at most one megabyte added to the blockchain every ten minutes. If 40GB is too rich for you already, under a 1 MB per 10 mins cap, then a 20 MB cap certainly is, and a doubling of the cap every year even moreso.
BIP 100 and 101 request no such change as you are representing. The limit will likely be raised to 8MB in the final revision of the proposals and this is more of a temporary measure to allow more time to test for sidechains and interpayment channels like the lightning network - https://lightning.network/ligh... which allow bitcoin to scale to VISA level tps without bloating the blockchain.
Additionally, remember that merkle tree pruning has already been merged in as of 4/24 which allows for full nodes with only 1.3 GB of storage.