Comment on Jack Dorsey claims Bluesky is 'repeating all the mistakes' he made at Twitter

• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  That’s not necessarily a given. Ethereum, for example, transitioned to proof of stake instead of mining and seems to have reduced electricity use by 99.5%. I’m not exactly sure where that number comes from, nor do I know a good way to compare crypto to other systems (e.g. do we count all the energy used by banks?).

  But what I do know is that Bitcoin kinda sucks from an energy perspective, partially because they limit the number of blocks (e.g. buckets of transactions) per day, so mining is more valuable than on a currency with no such caps (e.g. more demand to mine each block = more miners = less efficiency per mined block).

  What seems to be true is that cryptocurrencies have a large upfront energy cost due to speculation, and that plateaus as it hits a certain carrying capacity. So crypto scales decently well, and if you do proof of stake instead of proof of work, it seems to scale even better.

  But since it’s so hard to calculate, there’s a lot of bad information, which leads to unnecessary and unfair criticism from people who don’t see value in cryptocurrencies. If you ask a crypto bro, they’ll point to the massive amount of power used by financial institutions, and if you ask someone who’s against cryptocurrencies, they’ll compare POS and minor processing use by credit card companies to an entire Bitcoin block (which has lots of transactions). I’d really like to see an updated, neutral look into it, because all the information I’m able to find has huge holes in methodology.

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  • RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Also Ethereum is extremely inefficient compared to conventional tech (like just a database). All you need is to realize that complete trustlessness is impossible to understand that a distributed ledger has no problem to solve. And that’s why there is no practical application after all these years.

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      But energy use isn’t as simple as measuring transaction efficiency, there’s a lot more to a currency than storing who transacted with whom. There’s:

      • security of transactions - fraud and whatnot
      • coordination costs - international transactions, etc
      • cyber security, websites for managing money, etc

      Or in terms you’ve used, someone needs to maintain that database, that database needs to be in some facility, and someone needs to audit the database. All of that is baked into cryptocurrencies. Yet the comparisons I’ve seen either account for way too much (e.g. bank tech support), or not enough (e.g. only POS and network costs).

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