There are a ton of other options than FB at this point. Partiful is my personal favorite, and has way better features than Apple Invites has after testing.
Partiful is great! A little funky around the edges, but I keep giving them feedback hoping to be able to rely on a non-shitty indie platform for invites.
Nope - the author is incorrectly using total energy / total transactions to get this number. Which, is understandable. However, if there were 2x the transactions, the total energy would stay very close to the same. So no.
There's a lot of energy to secure the network, but the actual energy usage per transaction itself is a small fraction of that misquoted number.
You are correct, but for the wrong reason. Bitcoin's energy consumption[1] does not track with the number of transactions[2]; energy consumption has significantly increased while the number of transactions has not. What the energy consumption does track is the price[3]: mining creates coins, so higher price means more mining. The current ~4% inflation rate will not significantly decrease incentives for decades.
In a sane world, the energy use and price would be tied to the actual usefulness of the currency. They are not. In roughly 100 years the energy use will be set by transaction fees and the number of transactions, but currently it's only proportional to speculative will.
When transaction fees incentivize mining, the incentive to mine will certainly be much lower. Arguably more secure, too- the block reward creates a separate incentive for large players to dominate mining, which lowers the diversity of miners. It's not at all clear that the absolute energy consumption will be lower than it currently is.
Energy per transaction is not a very useful metric since each validated block helps secure previous blocks as well.
Put another way - each validated block helps secure every single transaction that came before it.
I'm not going to argue that the energy consumption is worth it (I don't think it's sustainable myself). I'm only pointing out that energy per transaction is a bad metric if you want to have an honest debate. It's much more complicated than that.
Because blocksize is fixed and blocks are consistently full, it's possible to estimate the next block's energy usage per transaction. All blocks are currently full as miners have an incentive to collect all transactions available, ordered by their attached transaction fee.
If you mean that the same amount of power would be used whether the blocks are full or empty, you are technically correct but in practice it's not relevant until blocks are consistently not full.
Does BTC makes sense if there would be no transactions?
If transactions are critical for everyone, wouldn't that mean that keeping bitcoin mining alive is a fundamental part of transactions?
We could argue that fiat keeps databases running (if we ignore physical money) and bitcoin is keeping blocks mining active.
I don't think it is wrong to say megatwatts per transactions. We could ignore this completly and say 'the baseload of just keeping btc running is x megawatts per hour' and that would just ring the same bells.
I'm pondering if we could also say something like "btc itself as a cryptosystem motivates actors to consume megawatts per hour due to the interest in btc and the current fiat<>btc exchange value"?
First, energy use is not tied to transactions. An empty block uses the same amount as a full block.
And second, the transaction count we’re discussing is the count of settled base layer transactions. This doesn’t include the majority of transactions of value: those that occur off chain or through second layer transactions. An infinite amount of off chain and L2 transactions only need a single on chain transaction to settle.
Total energy / total transactions is a completely appropriate metric to use. If you could meaninufylly scale the number of bitcoin transactions and could amortize the high fixed costs of running the blockchain I'd agree with you but as it stands right now, you can't.
Yes, I'm aware there's off chain solutions such as lighting but it's unclear to me whether those solutions are viable long term.
But there can't really be 2x the transactions (or, at the very least there cannot be 100x the transactions). Transactions/block varies but there is a fundamental limit on how many bits can fit into a block.
Transactions are the thing that matters. Simply securing the network achieves nothing if people cannot move money. That's why people measure the network with transactions/joule.
Isn't the network already saturated with transactions though? To the point where it was needed to implement something like Lightning Network to compensate for that?
It was never needed. What was needed was to increase the max block size.
Instead, new people took it over and kept the throughput to the rate of a 56k modem. Now for the cost of a single transaction you can pay for enough hard drive space to hold the entire chain and enough bandwidth for a billion transactions.
This is like building a sidewalk instead of a freeway then saying you need to build a network of gondolas over it that just plunks groups of people down at different places on the sidewalk to move people.
Ah, yes, I'm very aware of that fact, my use of "needed" here was in the sense it was needed after all the ones making money from transaction fees took over and decided to not increase the block size.
Bitcoin picked centralized, slow, and expensive. Most mining is done in giant warehouses, and the whole point is that more computing power results in zero faster processing.
It remains to be seen if there are good ways to do distributed currency, but there are certainly less bad ways.
More computationally intensive, yes- but computationally intensive may mean "running on smartphones in the background for .1% reduction in battery time" or "a medium-sized country".
Increased cost is certainly not so straightforward. If you're sufficiently distributed, using already-existing hardware, with spare compute on extremely efficient devices, it could conceivably cost less. Even if a centralized server farm would be doing an order of magnitude less math, smaller processors use an order of magnitude less power to do that math.
Bitcoin proper has a central ledger- every miner needs to hear about your transaction to verify it. Lightning is a clumsy way of reducing how many actors need to be notified of your transaction. Better currencies include stuff like that as first class. It's all in the name of getting closer to a constant-number verification scheme that is closer to competitive with the O(1) of registering a transaction with a bank.
Centralized credit/debit cards exist so that a big wealthy firm can say yes, this person has enough money for this transaction and I will guarantee the transaction by paying for it even if they can't. What I would really like to see is distributed, automatic guarantees: when you buy something at a coffee shop, people running validators on wifi will pick it up and use their staked currency as insurance (hedged by the system) that they know accounts who trust this particular account, and the transaction is valid. More people staking and trusting this account means more trust by the larger system, which then only has to validate aggregated transactions. Anyone announcing themselves at a validator plugs in at a given level of aggregation, all of which have different staking/network/latency/storage requirements. Unlike off-chain transactions (eg lightning), the system is guaranteed at every level.
Any given transaction will still be validated dozens or hundreds of times. En bloc it will probably use tens or hundreds of times more energy than the server farms powering VISA. I'll be honest, I'm okay with that. I really like the idea of having a bank account that isn't tied to a company.
My country handles 5 billion electronic transactions a year (thanks to COVID cash practically died last year). Fast and cheap although to be fair not decentralised.
To this day I have no idea what cryptocurrency was supposed to solved.
- when guests book a stay, the cancellation policy is very transparent. If they booked a property with a strict policy, they chose to do so, which influences how listings are priced, etc.
- While health organizations made recommendations about travel, the choice to cancel is wholly the guests in most cases (given that a few may have had flights cancelled that couldn't be replaced).
- trip insurance is a thing and it exists.
Everyone needs to share some responsibility here, so using the term "theft" and saying hosts are "trying to profit off a pandemic" is absurd.
I booked a clearly non refundable flight with an airline prior to the pandemic. The airline did the right thing and refunded (to a credit usable until Spring 2021) it a couple days ago.
I would expect Airbnb to do the similar. It might be up to the government to help landlords out, since the government is forcing the stay-in-place orders.
- Trip insurance doesn't cover pandemics.
- Countries have literally closed their borders, making it impossible in many cases to travel to said Airbnb.
- Guests should not be charged for Airbnbs that they legally cannot stay in without violating local shelter in place orders.
It's hard for me to side with the carpetbagging rent seekers here who still want to keep their guests money even though they are not able to stay at the units. Either a service is provided and it gets charged for, or it is not.
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