[Cryptography] Standards Trolls: Re: Bitcoin is a disaster.

[Matt Corallo]

> On Jan 4, 2021, at 18:35, Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Jan 02, 2021 at 08:04:43AM +0300, Ismail Kizir wrote:
>> 
>> I don't want to enter into "horrible" details of energy consumption!
>> Bitcoin is "flawed by design"!
> 
> the result will not be a reduction in energy consumption, but an
> increase in Bitcoin mined.  This could be great for transaction speeds,
> if such efficiency propagates quickly across the network, but
> effectively have zero direct effect in reducing energy consumption
> overall.

This is fundamentally not how bitcoin works. If more hashes happen, no more bitcoin is mined than if less hashes happen - bitcoin just gets harder to mine instead. Thus, miners which cannot reach the efficiency levels of their competition go out of business. This is why you see significant investment in using otherwise-unused interruptible power and green energy for bitcoin mining - it’s cheaper than the competition.

> Unfortunately, effectively restricting Bitcoin energy consumption
> worldwide without some (currently thought impossible, probably) paradigm
> changing advances, seems to give rise to scenarios much worse for
> humanity than the energy consumption problem, in the form of turning the
> real world into improbable realizations of dystopian novel plotlines
> where some central tyrannical entity controls the state of energy policy
> with an all-seeing eye and an iron fist, or where Bitcoin itself is
> *effectively* suppressed worldwide -- which, again, requires some
> central tyrannical entity.

Or you could just limit the bitcoin supply and then trying to mine with more expensive energy is a net loss, so you’d be forced to stop.