The energy consumption is because of the number of people choosing to compete for mining (which they do because the price makes it worthwhile for them to do so) – the same volume of network could be operated with no code changes on a fraction of the energy budget.
As they say: you don’t hate X, you hate capitalism.
I don’t think this is true. The limited block size and the difficulty of mining a new block are code features that incentivise everyone to compete for computing power so they can auction off new blocks. You want your transaction to get verified on the next block, well, there’s lots of people who will get it in but only if you pay the right price. With a larger block size, it wouldn’t be so valuable to auction off space in each block.
The network, the code creates scarcity. In the block size and difficulty of hashing. I thought LN was supposed to fix that.
The hash difficulty automatically changes based on how much CPU power is working on mining. So if half the miners turned their computers off, the network would adjust the difficulty down and everything would keep working the same as it does now.
Like JordiGH says, though, it’s not designed to do that. It was intentional on the part of the designer that people would do what they’re doing. There are designs for currency that require hardly any energy to operate. That’s easiest in centralized with distributed checking. People into cryptocurrencies tell me there’s decentralized models that use a lot less energy, too. So, this waste of energy is a result of its design.
I find crypto mostly boring and I find discussing it with people a lot more boring than reading a paper
I am ambivalent about proof of work vs. stake
The only public ones I’m really interested in are zcash and cardano, privately there are some neat systems banks are making
I am so so so so far from an expert
With all that said,
Most transactions will require only a handful of witnesses along a chain rather than requiring network quorum. It probably means more useful work will get done per watt rather than reducing the amount of mining happening unless the drop in transaction fees reduces mining (unlikely? Fixed investment)
I don’t understand what this means.
Does it mean that bitcoin’s stupid energy consumption can finally go down?
The energy consumption is because of the number of people choosing to compete for mining (which they do because the price makes it worthwhile for them to do so) – the same volume of network could be operated with no code changes on a fraction of the energy budget.
As they say: you don’t hate X, you hate capitalism.
I don’t think this is true. The limited block size and the difficulty of mining a new block are code features that incentivise everyone to compete for computing power so they can auction off new blocks. You want your transaction to get verified on the next block, well, there’s lots of people who will get it in but only if you pay the right price. With a larger block size, it wouldn’t be so valuable to auction off space in each block.
The network, the code creates scarcity. In the block size and difficulty of hashing. I thought LN was supposed to fix that.
The hash difficulty automatically changes based on how much CPU power is working on mining. So if half the miners turned their computers off, the network would adjust the difficulty down and everything would keep working the same as it does now.
Like JordiGH says, though, it’s not designed to do that. It was intentional on the part of the designer that people would do what they’re doing. There are designs for currency that require hardly any energy to operate. That’s easiest in centralized with distributed checking. People into cryptocurrencies tell me there’s decentralized models that use a lot less energy, too. So, this waste of energy is a result of its design.
Caveats to what I am about to say:
I find crypto mostly boring and I find discussing it with people a lot more boring than reading a paper
I am ambivalent about proof of work vs. stake
The only public ones I’m really interested in are zcash and cardano, privately there are some neat systems banks are making
I am so so so so far from an expert
With all that said,
Most transactions will require only a handful of witnesses along a chain rather than requiring network quorum. It probably means more useful work will get done per watt rather than reducing the amount of mining happening unless the drop in transaction fees reduces mining (unlikely? Fixed investment)
Lightning was about transaction speed based on prior comments. Here’s a Wikipedia article on it.