Hacker News Reader

Comment by doc_gunthrop | Hacker News Reader

Anybody with a general understanding of how blockchain works should not find this conclusion surprising. Each subsequent block in the chain gets larger, increasing the cost of the necessary resources to sustain the cryptocurrency.

> A single transaction of bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as 680,000 Visa transactions or 51,210 hours of watching YouTube, according to the site.

And it will continue to increase. Common sense may suggest that, consequently, the seigniorage of BTC should naturally dip below zero. But then again who could've predicted its value would ever have exceeded $50K USD?

View on HN

> Each subsequent block in the chain gets larger, increasing the cost of the necessary resources to sustain the cryptocurrency.

That's not correct.

The effort put into any block, past and future, is (long-term adjusted) directly connected to the payout, since the effort is algorithmically self-adjusting. It follows, that the effort put into any current block is worth ~$300k, and therefore worth ~$300k of electricity.

If bitcoin is ever going to be valued less again, the necessary resources to sustain bitcoin will shrink accordingly.

Additionally, they automatically shrink, by design, in ~2024, ~2028 and ~2032.

I miswrote the part regarding the size of each subsequent block getting larger. However, the part about the rising cost of resources to sustain the cryptocurrency is valid in practice (assuming the current trend continues and BTC continues to gain further widespread adoption).

> If bitcoin is ever going to be valued less again, the necessary resources to sustain bitcoin will shrink accordingly.

If I'm interpreting correctly, this will occur because the number of miners will decrease as the reward incentive decreases. Or do you mean something else?

You are interpreting correctly.

> Anybody with a general understanding of how blockchain works should not find this conclusion surprising. Each subsequent block in the chain gets larger, increasing the cost of the necessary resources to sustain the cryptocurrency.

This is 100% incorrect. Energy is spent mining Bitcoin, which has an adjustable difficulty to average mined blocks at rate of ~once per ten minutes. A basic home computer could easily mine all of the blocks if the difficulty was low enough (i.e. there were no other miners).

> A basic home computer could easily mine all of the blocks if the difficulty was low enough (i.e. there were no other miners).

It's pointless to suggest hypotheticals that aren't even remotely applicable in the real world.

Nevertheless, this thread did raise some questions, particularly about scalability (ie. if each block has a max capacity and blocks are mined every ten minutes, how to account for an ever-increasing amount of transactions per time-period between blocks?). There appear to be some proposed solutions to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem

Reply on news.ycombinator.com