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> If you really want to talk shit about Bitcoin

I don't. And I don't think many people do (perhaps those buying put options might). That said, it's not hard to see the cost in power usage, and thus waste heat, that is/will be spent computing hashes that match ever-growing computational requirements.

You're right that I could spend a month of my time learning more about this tech that does obviously have solid implications in the form of distributed untrusted consensus.

That said, it took me maybe 30 minutes researching to understand the huge global power requirements, and in years of observing the tech, nobody has been able to quickly and easily dispel this concern. If it takes a month of in-depth research to make people feel better about bitcoin and dispel years of observing the currency and its ever-growing requirements, then maybe something is wrong. It could be that after a month of very hard work, you have an unconscious cognitive bias because nobody likes to waste a month of work learning something they decide to throw away.

I'd be glad to find an article that, in less than 30 minutes, can change my mind about the waste that bitcoin generates. It's happened plenty of times with other tech (not necessarily waste, but other misjudgments), and often in closer to 5-10 minutes. I don't expect Bitcoin would be any different, because I have no horse in this game. In fact, I'd be really excited to be proven wrong, because of the potential benefits that the tech has to offer.

Have you factored in the energy costs of running the thousands of financial institutions and associated infrastructure required to maintain them? I personally don't have time to run an energy audit of the entire financial industry, but I can tell you theres a lot more infrastructure required. factor in the engery required to: - construct giant buildings for financial offices - maintain financial offices - commute to and from offices - construct, deploy, and maintain ATMs - construct and maintain physical bank locations - server infrastructure how much of the energy required to build and maintain all of this infrastructure is from a renewable source? Proof of Work miners are at least incentivized to find the cheapest possible source of energy. Renewables! Almost free, unlimited energy!

Everyone is pretty equally incentivized to migrate to the cheapest possible energy source, I would think. The problem is that the CapEx cost of migrating is nonzero, and usually prohibitive unless you have high confidence you can make it up in lower OpEx over a long period of time. I can say pretty confidently that banks and financial institutions are much more likely to stick around long enough to realize the full financial benefits of renewables than miners are. It's just too risky that you'll eat your renewable investment if bitcoin loses too much value, particularly given the recent huge swings in the market, and the added uncertainty of so many people forecasting doom.

I'm not in a position to estimate the waste energy of a financial institution either, but you're right that it probably is quite large, but it's hard to say which is more wasteful.

How easy is it for a financial institution, who probably doesn't even control their own datacenter or buildings, to opt into using renewable energy sources? Seems like a big decision for an institution to make and a lot of beurocracy and political obstacles. For an individual who wishes to mine, they have a simple choice to make based on electricity prices. Is it profitable or not based on their current rate. Most miners will naturally exist where energy is cheap, renewable, and abundant. I'm making a hell of a lot of assumptions, though.

>Have you factored in the energy costs of running the thousands of financial institutions and associated infrastructure required to maintain them?

I don't like this argument. It's garbage. Bitcoin does not replace the functions of the entire financial system. I can't take out a loan using the blockchain. Banks do far more then act as a ledger. Bitcoin's utility today is a little more than P2P value transfer. A centralized solution - something like Transferwise - does not use as much energy as Bitcoin.

> A centralized solution - something like Transferwise - does not use as much energy as Bitcoin.

Then your choice comes down to this: Use a centralized system for less energy consuming transaction but greater centralization of wealth -- or -- Use a distributed system that requires more energy but distributes wealth amongst network participants. Personally, I would choose the system that distributes wealth at the expense of additional energy cost. Ideally, I would choose the system that distribute wealth and has the least environmental impact.

This feels like a false choice. Why should I buy that the "decentralized system" distributes wealth at all? After all the top 1000 wallets hold 35% of bitcoin, and the top miners are factories that keep the best mining hardware to themselves. All of which compounds the fact that the participants in bitcoin were already wealthy enough from the "centralized" solution to buy into it.

Bitcoin obviously has flaws, but Bitcoin is still doing a better job at distributing wealth than the banks are, thats for sure. Bitcoin may not be doing it efficiently or as well as it could be, but its doing it. Also... there are other cryptocurrecies with different intents and purposes. If you are unhappy with bitcoin, build an alternative. Ethereum proves that its possible. Our financial system, laws, and government are all malleable, and from the looks of it could use some serious change.

You are comparing oranges and apples.

But let us assume that all those thousands of financial institutions and their associated infrastructure are just there to handle transactions.

Bitcoin is doing about 20 tx/s and Bitcoin mining uses as much energy as the nation of Denmark.

Visa is doing about 1700 tx/s.

> Renewables! Almost free, unlimited energy!

Oh man, I should have been reading your last sentence a bit better. With all those cryptomaniacs my sarcasm detector is a bit confused.

> Bitcoin is doing about 20 tx/s > Visa is doing about 1700 tx/s

combine the tx/s of all the cryptocurrencies out there right now and I assure you it exceeds Visa's 1700 tx/s. NOT ALL TRANSACTIONS HAVE TO HAPPEN ON THE BITCOIN NETWORK! There are thousands of coins!

When I combine all tx/s of all the cryptocurrencies I need even more energy.

Also Visa is only just one company, there are also Master, American Express, Paypal, SEPA transactions and a lot more.

So I don't understand what you try to tell me and how screaming improves your argumentation.

I'm not sure I understand. Proof of Work is not the only game in town anymore. It shouldn't take you more than 30 minutes to find that out. Look at the state of bitcoin, it's dying and the alts are finally seeing the light of day (Over the past two months).

Please name one of the alternatives which is secure as the "Proof of work", needs less energy for mining and doesn't have high transaction costs.

Sure, take a look at Raiblocks, NEO, Lisk.

Bitcoin mining uses as much energy as the nation of Denmark. Each transaction confirmation uses as much energy as nine American households do in an entire day. What “deep knowledge” am I lacking here?

> What “deep knowledge” am I lacking here?

The cognitive dissonance associated with having money at stake on Bitcoin.

Agreed. I see rejecting a job in Bitcoin for environmental reasons as quite similar to rejecting one working for an oil company. Most people don't care that much, but for some it makes sense.

Other newer cryptocurrencies don't have the same power requirements.

Your comment sounds repeated from somewhere else. Do your own research, everyone is trying to manipulate everyone else in this space.

Thats because the bitcoin network is over relied on and the cyptocurrency space is still infantile and not decentralized enough. Once people realize that bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency out there, they will switch to other, less expensive coins and the pressure on bitcoin will, hopefully, be relieved some. Thats the beauty of this space! There can be so many coins and all with unique and improved attributes!

Until we have functional decentralised exchanges, using a common protocol would be a nice thing for humanity. Most people don't care about the bigger picture, they just want to get rich quickly, rather than try and make the world a better place by working together.

I'd add a fourth bullet point, "This person probably won't have a job in 3-6 months".

If you consider that and budget in the costs of looking for a new job, and account for the frankly non-trivial chance that the salary will end up being a lie, given the skeeviness of this space (I'd bet the first paycheck shows up, but my confidence in that goes down rapidly as the weeks wear on), it may not look like such a great offer.

Obviously, there are things that can be taken into account when you know more specifics (i.e., "it's VC backed by a reputable firm" would score some points on the "they at least have some money" front), but absent those I wouldn't start from a high degree of confidence.

The author rejected the offer on principle, which is a very good reason to do so.

I see that the author has done significant open source work, so it's possible he just received an offer. But I'm thinking the more likely path was that the company reached out with a pitch and asked him to interview, and I wonder why his principles didn't stop him then.

Been in the same boat where people pitch me a cryptocurrency job or I see job listing match in experience in cryptocurrency and I decline to even interview - I already know how I feel about it and it would be a waste of my time and their time to subject both sides to an interview.

While turning down the job is just fine, here's what happened instead....

Sure, if you're just looking at one job, then yeah someone else is going to come along and take it. But if enough people start feeling the same way as the author, there will be fewer qualified developers in the hiring pool for blockchain work. This will likely result in fewer companies and less work being done in the area, and more work being done on other technologies. (Other technologies that are more useful and beneficial to society, if you happen to agree with the author of this post.)

Instead of ranting how stupid everybody else is you could give us unenlightened souls a hint how the proof of work problem could be solved without wasting lots of energy.

To not use Proof of Work and use one of the many other ideas for achieving consensus in the blockchain world currently.

Or alternative to turn your proof of work into compute power for AI and other heavy computational yet beneficial tasks.

> accepting a job that's much higher paying, and lets you explore a new edge technology, all while being able to work remotely, all sound like a game you can't lose

If that's what you want. But, the author didn't.

I spent most of last year working on a high-paying project for a huge company that was the dumbest shit imaginable and everyone on this thread would heap scorn if they saw it. I earn more than I know what to do with and would love to work on something actually useful for a change even if it meant less money and 10 year old tech.

What tech stack are you working on, so that I can replace you in the future when I get bored chasing unicorns?

The stack we used to build the expensive nonsense was all super modern and cutting edge. I'm still looking for emotional fulfillment in a Perl/CGI environment.

> lets you explore a new edge technology

A little bit off-topic, I find very interesting how blockchain is regarded as a new technology. All the underlying technology has been available for ages: cryptographic hashes, Merkle trees (patented in 1979!!), peer to peer protocols. It's crazy how putting together some already established technologies/techniques/mathematical instruments can generate such a big movement. A lot of people refer to it as a cutting edge technology that will.. disrupt (I hate this buzzword) the current status quo. In my opinion it's just a very elegant solution to a problem (decentralised trust) that's been put together with already existing simple blocks.

It would be good if we could cut down on the uninformed hype and just appreciate the elegance in it.

It's a new technology because it enables a new human behavior.

With your logic, everything is an old technology.

> It’s a new technology because it enables a new human behavior.

And what is that? Most of what it’s credited with seems shakey at best. E.g. it’s not really decentralized is the vast majority of the mining is done by two or three large groups.

Anonymous trustless peer to peer exchange of value.

Bitcoin (which as far as I know is the largest blockchain project) has been de-anonymized.

You have to trust the other peers aren’t secretly working together to use a 51% attack.

Take out the “anonymous” part and it’s pretty much correct. Trustless value transfer is very powerful.

Bitcoin hasn’t been “deanonymized”. It’s never been anonymous. Some of its value actually comes from its extreme transparency.

That said, privacy is important when it comes to money and there are various ways people implement privacy. Both on top of bitcoin and outside of bitcoin.

I don’t know what 51% attack has to do with anonymity though.

The 51% bit had to do with ‘not needing trust’, not the anonymity.

Please do not make arguments about how proof of work != global warming until you've spent at least a month studying global warming.

I'm pretty sure you can convince someone in less than a day with a reasonably simplified version.

Well said. I couldn't have said it any better.