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@CryptoWyvern

Joined 25 February 2021 · 140 posts

For anarchy, free-markets and on-chain scaling.No bio yet...

120 KT

0 KT · $2.14 received · 0 KT · 50¢ given

Posts

@CryptoWyvern

Ten days ago, I chaintipped someone who was like "Bitcoin mining is destroying the environment!!! We should ban it!!!" over $50 of BCH; and it wasn't returned, so... Everyone has a price, I guess. Keep spreading the good news, my Bitcoin Cash disciples. LOL.

@CryptoWyvern

Elon Musk doesn't owe you anything. He doesn't owe any particular crypto community anything. It's more productive simply to buy and use BCH than begging for Elon's attention. The livid BTC maxis in his replies are especially cringe. Don't be like that.

@CryptoWyvern

Scrolling through local news, I'm always righteously annoyed by the clickbaity headlines about product recalls from local stores that DON'T tell you what the product is. You need to click the article and read like three paragraphs to find out.

@CryptoWyvern

Giving the Cuban Vegueros another try. Vegueros are one of the more accessibly priced (read: cheaper, lol) Cuban cigars which I sampled a few months ago. I found them invariably tight and an unenjoyable smoke. Just because it's "Cuban" doesn't automatically make it good! This one is still tight but definitely less so. The flavour actually more than makes up for it. Might be buying more of these if they're usually this way! Very pleasant, medium strength flavour with notes of cedar, leather and cinnamon. #Cigars

@CryptoWyvern

Bitcoin Cash BCH: The Environmentally Friendly PoW Cryptocurrency Lately a large portion of the talk among environmentalists on social media has been about how much energy cryptocurrency mining consumes and how wasteful it is. "Did you know cryptocurrency mining consumes more electricity than all of Argentina, and that it can wreck a brand new SSD in 6 months?" https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 https://twitter.com/vappywave/status/1392128326559481859 Understandably, most of the talk concerns Bitcoin BTC, the most popular cryptocurrency, but BTC long ago decided to be a different sort of cryptocurrency with a different sort of energy demand. How do you explain to people that Bitcoin Cash BCH (arguably the one described in the Bitcoin whitepaper) is a *far* more energy efficient cryptocurrency than Bitcoin BTC? It may seem like a difficult task because most people who know even a little bit about bitcoin mining know that the amount of energy used to mine a Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain is directly proportional to the price/value/market-capitalization of the token. There are other factors that affect this such as funds being siphoned off for governance (DASH, BCHABC, etc.) and the balance between fees earned in each block and the block reward, but they are relatively minor. As such, if the value of the BCH token rose to match that of BTC, then the energy use of the BCH blockchain would be statistically equal to that of BTC. This is bad, because mining is *sooooo* bad for the environment, right? Why value one PoW blockchain over any other if they're all going to use the same amount of energy for mining? No matter which blockchain we use, it's going to be a disaster! Even Elon Musk, mere weeks after announcing Tesla would accept Bitcoin for payments, rethought his decision when he realized how much energy bitcoin mining actually uses. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1392602041025843203 So are we stumped? Whether we use BTC or BCH, one or the other doesn't seem to matter; they'll use the same amount of energy because it all depends on price of the coin (actually market cap, but BTC and BCH will have the same number of total coins, so price per coin works as well). Isn't that the end of the story? Well, no. There are two key points, reasonably simple to explain, that will make even the most stubborn anti-crypto-mining advocates acknowledge that BCH is far more energy efficient, and therefore more environmentally friendly, than BTC. They may still believe crypto mining is a useless and wasteful endeavour, but they'll no longer be able to deny that BCH is *orders of magnitude* more efficient than BTC as a system for commerce and payments. Price Doesn't Rise Forever & Energy Output Isn't Fixed Most crypto-journalists seem smarter these days, but there was a time when those with a very poor grasp of economics looked at the seemingly parabolic graph of Bitcoin mining energy use and predicted that at some time in the future the act of mining PoW cryptocurrencies would use 100% of the energy output of the entire world. These headlines were unimaginable! Catastrophic! Greedy miners in their ASIC-filled bunkers would starve the entire world of precious electricity to keep Bitcoin alive. How utterly dystopian and apocalyptic. The truth, however, is much simpler and based on sound economics: It's practically impossible for the globally accepted value of any particular resource to become infinite. In other words, the price of a PoW token can't rise forever. At some point it will gain the maximum value people are willing to trade for it and thereafter stabilize. At the time of writing, one Bitcoin BTC token was worth about $50,000 USD. How much further could this value realistically rise? Leaving aside the desire of the BTC crowd to replace gold rather than spendable fiat currencies, we'll consider the scenario where a cryptocurrency replaces all other currencies in terms of value. According to this article, the "broad money" definition places the value of all global currencies and related liquid assets at around $90 trillion USD, about 95x the current BTC market capitalization. (For comparison, the total value of all the world's gold is about $9.5 trillion USD). https://www.rankred.com/how-much-money-is-there-in-the-world/ https://www.goldeneaglecoin.com/Guide/value-of-all-the-gold-in-the-world So if the perfect storm happened, and Bitcoin BTC replaced all the "broad money" on earth, that would result in it having a value of around 95x higher than its current $50,000 USD value - or about $4.8 million USD per coin. All other aspects of the global economy aside, this is the maximum value to which BTC could rise[1]. At that point, there wouldn't be any other significant source of liquid value people could (or would want to) convert into BTC to raise its price further. This would become the stable price of Bitcoin that the world's citizens would learn to price other goods in. By the same token, since hash-power follows price, we can infer that the total energy use for profitably mining such a PoW blockchain would be 95x higher than the current energy use of the BTC blockchain. According to Digiconomist, the current maximum estimated energy consumption of the BTC blockchain (at the time of writing) is 115.85TWh/year. Multiply by 95 and we get about 11,000TWh/year. Next, according to Enerdata, the global output of electricity in 2019 was about 27,000TWh/year, and rising by about 500TWh/year. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://yearbook.enerdata.net/electricity/world-electricity-production-statistics.html 11,000TWh/year is roughly 40% of the entire world's electricity output in 2019. It's certainly a *huge* chunk, but obviously not a value that will overwhelm the Earth and consume 100% of its energy output. Remember also, that the 95x multiple represents the "perfect storm" where use of Bitcoin in commerce and investment replaces *all* liquid and semi-liquid assets. As well, the 115.85TWh/year value from Digiconomist is a *maximum* estimate, the lower estimate being just 53.99TWh/year; less than half. The reality will be a much lower multiple of the actual Bitcoin mining energy consumption. We are in absolutely no danger of bitcoin mining overwhelming our ability to generate electricity. The energy used by bitcoin mining will not, and indeed cannot, increase unbounded forever. It will hit some maximum % of global electricity output based on price and from then on vary with the value of the global economy as a whole. And remember when we talked about global electricity output increasing by 500TWh/year? It's very likely our ability to produce power will continue to increase and easily outstrip the amount consumed by bitcoin mining. The Lynchpin: Energy Per Transaction All the discussion up to now has been to show that the energy consumption of Bitcoin can't increase forever. It will increase to match the price of the coin, but the price of the coin itself will reach a maximum value and stabilize. This will happen regardless of what PoW blockchain you choose to replace the world's money economy. So why does this make a difference between Bitcoin BTC and Bitcoin Cash BCH? They both have 21,000,000 coins. Regardless of which coin wins out, the one that wins will still rise in price to the maximum, therefore requiring the same bitcoin mining energy to support. Seems like a wash, right? The key difference is **transaction throughput**. Bitcoin BTC has a maximum transaction throughput of about 7 transactions per second. This may be increased by Lightning Network transactions, or Liquid sidechain transactions, but both of those types of transactions require at least one on-chain transaction to initiate. It's fair to say that any side-chain or layer 2 solution that *doesn't* touch the blockchain to perform on-chain transactions is no longer Bitcoin anyway. Taking our maximum estimate of Bitcoin energy use of 11,000TWh/year, we can estimate the maximum energy used per transaction on the BTC blockchain. 7 transactions per second amounts to 221 million transactions per year. Dividing energy use by transaction count, we get: 0.0000498TWh/transaction, or 49,800kWh/transaction. Checking in with the US Energy Information Administration, the average American household uses 10,649kWh... **in an entire year!** https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 Transacting on such a blockchain would be insanely costly. To confirm just *one* transaction would consume almost as much electricity as five typical American households consume in an entire year. If ever there was a useless and wasteful blockchain, BTC is definitely it. Since we can't lower the total amount of energy the blockchain uses for mining (*that's* driven by the price), the only way to make using such a blockchain practical is to drastically reduce the energy used per transaction, and the only way to do that is to increase the transaction throughput. This is exactly what Bitcoin Cash BCH is aiming to do. Very soon after the BTC/BCH split on August 1st, 2017, a group of developers led by Bitcoin Unlimited and Peter Rizun proposed a "Gigablock Testnet" to test the feasibility and identify bottlenecks of a global network mining gigabyte bitcoin blocks rather than BTC's megabyte blocks. We can use this as a starting point to examine how the energy per transaction varies based on how many transactions the network can process per second. https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info https://twitter.com/PeterRizun https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip065-gigablock-testnet-initiative.2610/ By definition, a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, therefore a gigabyte block can process 1024x the number of transactions/second as a megabyte block. In other words, around a maximum of 7,000 transactions per second[2]. If BTC, with its 7 transactions/second uses an estimated maximum of 49,800kWh/transaction, then a blockchain processing 1,024x that number of transactions would use 1,024x less energy per transaction or just 48.6kWh/transaction[3]. This is not just less than 1% of Bitcoin BTC's energy/transaction, it's less than 0.1%! Great! Now we're down to the amount of energy the typical American household uses in about a day and a half (remember it's a *maximum*). Still a lot, but since the gigabyte blockchain allows 1024x the amount of commerce as the BTC blockchain, we would need 1024 BTC blockchains to do the same amount of work as just one gigabyte blockchain. Now we finally get to the incredible mind-blowing conclusion of all of this. The Reason Why Bitcoin Cash BCH is the Environmentally Friendly Choice As we've discussed, the energy use of a bitcoin PoW blockchain rises in direct proportion to its market capitalization, which is equivalent to price-per-coin in the case of BTC and BCH. However, it cannot rise indefinitely. Because things can't have infinite value, there are only so many liquid and semi-liquid assets that can be replaced by a bitcoin cryptocurrency. This puts an upper limit on the price, and therefore an upper limit on the mining energy that will be used to support it. Over time, the maximum amount of energy a PoW bitcoin blockchain could ever *possibly* use follows an S-curve with the price, levelling off once there are no more liquid or semi-liquid assets left to trade for it. At the top of the graph, the maximum amount of energy used is just 40% of (remember our calculation from before?) the electricity output of the entire world in 2019. So it's impossible for bitcoin mining to overwhelm our ability to produce it. At the same time, if we take it as a economic given that cryptocurrency is going to succeed someday, then *any* PoW blockchain (either BTC or BCH or also any other) that becomes globally dominant will follow this path and there's very little we can do to change it. However, the amount of work (transactions/second) a PoW bitcoin blockchain could perform is in direct proportion to the size of the blocks the mining nodes can process, and that's something we *can* change. The transactions per second the blockchain *could* process is essentially unbounded, only limited by the ability of our technology to process the blocks. *And our technology is getting better at it every day*. So here it is, the mind-blowing reason why Bitcoin Cash BCH is many orders of magnitude more efficient and therefore more environmentally friendly than Bitcoin BTC: **The energy required per Bitcoin Cash BCH transaction gets lower and lower as we allow the blockchain to do more and more work.** As a very simple concluding example, why stop at the gigabyte blocks we mentioned earlier? Surely in a decade or two even terabyte blocks will be within the realm of possibility. A terabyte block could process 1024x the transactions/second as a gigabyte block, and the resulting energy cost per transaction would be a *maximum* of 47.5W/h (that's *watts* per hour, not kilowatts), or about the same amount of energy the average compact fluorescent lightbulb uses in three hours. You would need 1 million Bitcoin BTC blockchains to perform this same amount of work. Now, just think about making the blocks even *larger*... You can clearly see that while the total energy use of an entire PoW blockchain will reach an inevitable maximum, we can make that same blockchain do an amount of work approaching infinity, only limited by block size. Meanwhile, the world's ability to generate electricity will continue to increase in a linear fashion, leaving the mostly static amount of energy bitcoin consumes behind in the dust. The main reasons its energy consumption would continue to increase slowly would be the increasing size of the global economy, and the fact that more transactions in a block means more fees miners can use to pay for more electricity. This would be enough to provide the security the blockchain needs to survive indefinitely, and this is in fact the way Satoshi originally designed bitcoin to work. https://bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf Because the Bitcoin Cash community is dedicated to increasing the block size to as large as current technologies can support, it is Bitcoin Cash BCH that is pursuing a course to becoming the most energy efficient and therefore most environmentally friendly bitcoin blockchain. In truth, the more people who transact on-chain using Bitcoin Cash BCH, the less energy it uses per transaction. So if you're worried about the impact of cryptocurrency mining on the environment, I suppose the best thing you could do would be to try to get everyone to stop using it. The *second best* thing would be to tell everyone you know to use Bitcoin Cash. You know the one; it's the *greenest*. Notes 1. At least in the above "broad money" scenario. In reality though, you can pick any value for the liquid assets Bitcoin would replace and the conclusion is the same: Bitcoin's price will rise to a set value and level off. 2. It would actually be closer to ~4,500 transactions per second in practice since most transactions would be larger than the minimum size of 250 bytes or so. 3. Segwit on the Bitcoin BTC blockchain supposedly allows for up to an *effective* 4MB size (or weight) to a block, but we're just spitballing here. All the Proof-of-Stake advocates are probably pulling their hair out that PoS *never even got mentioned* in this article. The simple reason for that being that I personally believe Proof-of-Work provides economic incentives which are far superiour to Proof-of-Stake. If you think I'm wrong about that, please write your own article.

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@CryptoWyvern

Big block Bitcoin Cash is the low cost, low emissions cryptocurrency you're looking for, Elon.

@CryptoWyvern

Weather's warming up! It's a great afternoon to try this Macanudo Inspirado Broadleaf. A bit tight on the draw, but otherwise light chocolate notes and easy on the retrohale. I don't know why I don't buy more of these; they're pretty reasonably priced. 👍 #Cigars

@CryptoWyvern

There is a very real chance that BCH will be worth $500,000 or even $1,000,000 in the next few years if adoption trends continue. Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that hyperinflation will be the driving force behind most of that price rise.

@CryptoWyvern

Remember when the BCH/BTC ratio dropped to <0.01? A lot of people thought this spelled the end for Bitcoin Cash as 51% attacks would get ever easier. I have to admit, even my own commitment wavered a bit. Now we're up to 0.026 and pressing on. Those trite clichés can sometimes be true: It's always darkest before the dawn; good things come to those who wait; yada yada yada. But personally, I won't get *REALLY* excited until we hit 0.1. So let's GO!

@CryptoWyvern

Wake me up when we have a 0.10 BCH/BTC ratio. Until then, just noise. :/

@CryptoWyvern

Watching the recorded Elon Musk SNL episode with a Hugo Cassar torpedo. No spoilers! #Cigars

@CryptoWyvern

I literally spent ALL of yesterday thinking it was Tuesday. Thinking back, there were a dozen times or more where things I saw or heard should have clued me in that it was Thursday. I still had a minor brain short-circuit when I saw a #FusionFriday post, then checked my phone calendar. What an odd feeling.

@CryptoWyvern

Digging into my package of Flor Isla Habana coronas this morning with my coffee. This cigar is a budget brand produced for export by Tabacalera in the Philippines. If you live anywhere in the Americas where the cigar conversation is dominated by Cuba, you may never have known the Philippines did any significant cigar rolling, but it's a business that goes back to the 1500s there! Like it's name, the cigar has a slight floral note but otherwise not much to write home about. It (usually) burns well and has a decent draw. This one in particular is actually doing rather well, with a rich, creamy smoke output. It's still pretty chilly for May, but the weather says it'll warm up soon! Can't wait to dig into the rest of my humidor. :) #Cigars

@CryptoWyvern

Very interesting idea that could be introduced in noise.cash a great deal easier than on Twitter. Default to zero-cost replies, but allow tweet authors to set a cost for those posting replies. What do you think?

@CryptoWyvern

#BitcoinCash up 45% in the last 24hrs! If you're feeling your $BCH wallets starting to weigh on your mind, it might be a good time to #CashFusion your stash. Don't let your excitement overrule your privacy.

@CryptoWyvern

Back when Bitcoin BTC was around $350-$450, I remember reading with intense interest a forum discussion on how many bitcoins you would need to comfortably retire. The guesses ranged from ten BTC down to just one coin. I still think about that thread today and whether or not the same range of guesses would eventually transfer to BCH. If you have just one BCH, will it one day become valuable enough to retire on? It sure is taking a long time, but just looking at the price action in the past couple months and taking into account how much room wrt adoption BCH has yet to grow, it just might be happening.

@CryptoWyvern

You can't have a productive argument with someone who values $$$ gains over economic and monetary fundamentals, which accounts for 95% of $BTC maximalists. To them, everything else is a "shitcoin" because $BTC went up more and #HFSP. Forget about them.

@CryptoWyvern

Oh boy. Today's the day I stay off all social media to avoid the lame Star Wars puns. 😩

@CryptoWyvern

Windows 10 blocking uTorrent as a "potentially unsafe application" (PUA), not allowing me even to whitelist it, ends up making me less safe, because hey, I'm just gonna disable PUA checking entirely if you're going to do this to me Microsoft. F*ck you.

@CryptoWyvern

Today is a great Sunday for a Mexican Casa Turrent. Since the plain label laws came into effect in Canada, all cigar labels need to be a plain green with standard type, but several brands including Casa Turrent just wrap the plain label over-top their normal, beautiful label, which is nice! Just remove it and you're good. The cigar itself is very smoky and flavourful. I don't think I've ever had one with a bad draw; very well constructed. Highly recommended for a first-timer's smoke. #Cigars

@CryptoWyvern

Between the first and sixth volumes of the Dragon Goes House Hunting manga, Letty's arms definitely get smaller. At first they're normal sized dragon arms and now they're teeny tiny T-Rex arms! I wonder if this is part of the story, or just artist drift. 🤔 #Manga

@CryptoWyvern

I don't know who needs to hear this, but you don't need to think about your investment and crypto portfolios every day. Take some time off. Enjoy nature. Have a campfire. Burn your worthless stock certificates that you should have sold when they were worth 10,000x more. 😭😭😭

@CryptoWyvern

Wow, I haven't touched purse.io in a while; in like over a year. Just checked and I have $250 worth of BCH in my wallet there. Now I can't say I don't own any crypto anymore!

@CryptoWyvern

Why are things so much cheaper on American Amazon compared to Canadian? The exchange rate is just 1USD = 1.22CAD but lots of items I'm looking at on US Amazon are HALF the cost as on Canadian Amazon or EVEN LESS. What gives?

@CryptoWyvern

A rainy, overcast afternoon deserves a mild Alec Bradley Connecticut. Can't say I like the draw on this one a whole lot. Makes me want to try one of those "perfect draw" tools that's supposed to improve it. Still quite tasty though. #Cigars

@CryptoWyvern

Cryptocurrency could be a HUGE scam. Lucky insiders who mined 1000+ or 100,000+ coins just need the price to stay up while they unload to n00bs for $$$. The issue is... if the n00bs look at what they received and collectively decide "hey, this is useful!" then the scam FAILED. #Cryptocurrency

@CryptoWyvern

To Your Eternity. Fumetsu no Anata e. 😭😭😭 You know it. 😭😭😭 #Anime

@CryptoWyvern

Back in the 1990s (maybe even 2000 or 2001) I picked up a Techno / Electronic music CD from the used record store in Canada. I forget whether it was all from one artist or if it was a compilation/mix. I lean to the latter. The cover of the album was dark black and blue, with I believe a city theme. I know the cover looked interesting because I bought it based on that alone. One of the songs clearly has a train conductor voice state at one point: "last stop, New York. Capital of the world." Another song has a clip of a fearful voice talking about what sounds like a monster: "It's wires and it's metal but the [unintelligible] is huge!" I sold most of my CDs years ago and at the time I guess I didn't feel attached enough to this CD to burn it to mp3 first. But now I can't help remembering it every now and then. Any help remembering what it might have been?

@CryptoWyvern

Attacks on $BCH are going to become more common as the market for $BTC shrinks. Keep an eye out for slander trying to tell people #BitcoinCash is just a scam, or that it's doomed to have the same scaling issues as #Bitcoin . Be better than them.