Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: The state of crypto - The only serious thread on the subforum
by
smooth
on 09/09/2015, 20:29:25 UTC
Delegated is not the same as decentralized.

Satoshi created Bitcoin as a proof of concept and didn't actually engineer any of the end game variables in his system.  The result did not lead to decentralization.  If it wasn't proof of concept, it would have been engineered a specific way from start to finish, but it wasn't, there's far too many loose ends and unaccounted variables.

True. He clearly left an unfinished development for reasons unknown.

Quote
It's unknown if he was even adamant on forcing the system to run on PoW forever.  He seems like a relatively smart person, so I kind of doubt he would purposely engineer a system to consume something like one fourth the world's power if it became world reserve currency on purpose.

That's clearly not the case since the block rewards go to zero and the bigger question is whether there would even be enough PoW, not whether there would be too much.

The concern over PoW going gray goo over all the world's power is based on the bizarre premise of moonstruck fanatics that it becomes the world reserve currency tomorrow, despite not even being able to figure out how to scale above 5-7 tps. After a few more block halvings this would not be the case at all.

Here's a chart showing energy use assuming 1 BTC = $100 000. World electricity production is in the neighborhood of 2 TW, so anything after the first few eras is not particularly problematic.

Code:
    Original target      Subsidy    Est Fees   Power
Era   starting year    BTC/block    BTC/hour      GW
--- ---------------  -----------  ----------  ------
  0            2009  50.00000000  0.00000000  270.00
  1            2013  25.00000000  0.00000000  135.00
  2            2017  12.50000000  0.00000000   67.50
  3            2021   6.25000000  0.00000000   33.75
  4            2025   3.12500000  0.00000000   16.88
  5            2029   1.56250000  0.00000000    8.44
  6            2033   0.78125000  1.31250000    5.40
  7            2037   0.39062500  3.65625000    5.40
  8            2041   0.19531250  4.82812500    5.40
  9            2045   0.09765625  5.41406250    5.40