I was wondering what viewpoints and opinions this community has when it comes to cryptocurrency.

Personally, I’m not against it, but I’m not for it either. I like the concept of bringing back cash anonymity, and also decentralization (obviously). Although I don’t think it will be viable for at least another decade.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      9 months ago

      energy wasted on solving increases exponentially

      Which is balanced by decreased value of additional coins, so less interested miners should drop out.

      But the energy itself is kind of misleading, because miners will flock to lower cost energy, which should primarily be excess green energy. If we actually adopt this at scale, I expect energy companies to help in mining crypto with their excess energy generation, which should work well since that excess should be fairly consistent I’m a global scale.

      That said, I’m extremely interested in seeing how proof of stake works out for Ethereum, since it just seems wasteful to mine coins for verifying transactions. But I think it’s a lot less wasteful than opponents make it out to be.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          9 months ago

          Well yeah, another problem is that there’s always another cryptocurrency. Since there’s no widely adopted coin (Bitcoin is closest), people jump to the next one hoping that they’ll get in early before it takes off.

          So the problem isn’t that a given cryptocurrency takes too much energy, it’s that speculators jump from coin to coin. I think that will settle down as well, and we’ll be left with mostly serious miners looking for actual profit who optimize costs down with cheap excess energy.

          So what we’re looking at is kind of a worst case scenario. Bitcoin rewards halve every four years, and Bitcoin valuations are unlikely to keep up. Lots of cryptocurrencies are also switching to proof of stake. Both of these together should result in drastically less energy being used.

          So I’m bullish on crypto energy usage falling going forward, even if it gains mainstream adoption as a currency (unlikely).

    • Pup Biru@aussie.zone
      11·
      9 months ago

      you’re saying a buzz word without understanding the trade offs in designs… POW doesn’t have to imply higher energy cost for more transactions: shove more transactions in a block and POW cost is the same… that’s a trade off sure because then a block becomes a more valuable thing to 51%

      POW is also only 1 of a lot of different consensus algorithms, all with their own trade-offs… POS benefits those with money for example (although you can still form mining pools - TBH i’d argue it’s exactly the same in this respect to POW in practice - good luck mining anything of value in POW without investing $ millions)

      some blockchains aren’t built to be entirely trustless and uncoordinated, merely semi trusted and loosely coordinated (think a consortium of banks - they don’t trust each other entirely but a blockchain means no individual member working alone can cheat. in this case because it’s semi-organised they can use POS with a special token and delegate those “mining tokens” 1 per member of the consortium or something… you can even set this kind of chain up as an ethereum side chain!)