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Thoughts on Cryptocurrency? (programming.dev)

submitted 8 months ago by actual_patience@programming.dev to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Kindness@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I like what you're saying, but I see it differently.

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

What people should do is not what people will do. Because of the hype, people are still investing into ever more expensive rigs and consuming ever more electricity competing in races they have no chance in until they realize they can compete in other races.

should primarily be excess green energy.

Yeah, it should, but it isn't. Personally I'd prefer excess energy drive electricity prices down, rather than demand increasing reliance on more stable and constant sources.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 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).