@rothgar @chabicht @FranckLeroy
Crypto (including bitcoin) relies on the ability to exchange it for functional currency in order to be more than Monopoly money.
Exchanges have proven, invariably, to be Ponzi schemes.
And with regards to your link, I don't see where you posted one.
But here's one.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/05/04/cryptocurrency-energy/
@ralf @rothgar@mastodon.uno @chabicht @FranckLeroy Bitcoin existed before the exchanges. Maybe the problem is not with bitcoin itself, but that some people (exchanges) tried to scale it far beyond what it can handle. If it aspired to replace the banking system, maybe it was meant as a first-draft proof-of-principle, rather than the optimized ubercurrency.
@marcel @DecaturNature @ralf @rothgar @chabicht
The system was designed to burn a constant share of transfered funds in energy. ASICs or not, it was inevitable that the energy consumption would linearly follow the adoption and become insane.
@FranckLeroy @DecaturNature @ralf @rothgar @chabicht The original #Bitcoin paper is devoid of economics. So I doubt any deeper thoughts about the economic impact were made at the time of writing.
So I doubt burning massive amounts of energy (or even a growing value) was a design goal.
However, I agree that this was a result of the design decisions and the economic motives of rational (=greedy) agents.
And, as such, inevitable, as you say.
@DecaturNature @ralf @rothgar @chabicht @FranckLeroy My interpretation of Nakamoto's design is that they never expected it to run on more tha a few thousand machines. It was a technology demo. For that, it may be good.
It is a technology paper, not a socio-economic paper. They never considered the impact of the economic incentives. And this is where the failures come from. Unfortunately, *that* is the real world, not the handfuls of computers it was supposed to work on.