MaidSafeCoin (MAID & eMAID) - Price & Trading topic (Part 2)

“All those arguing “bitcoin mining is a waste of energy” are actually saying that to them bitcoin has no value that warrants such use. However, bitcoin has immense value as an internationally available non-state money and monetary network - one with a strictly limited supply, unparalleled security, that’s uncensorable and with a proven track record of uptime and reliability.”

That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m not saying Bitcoin doesn’t have benefits that warrants its use and clearly it is better than nothing for the unbanked and the whole concept of a fixed supply is better than endless printing of debt based currency.

Also, when all’s said and done it was the thing that kickstarted the whole industry and showed the way for all the other projects like it (although not Safe I understand because that was already in development years earlier!).

Bitcoin is a bit like Stephenson’s Rocket. It proved the concept, proved it made sense commercially (Rocket was used on railways for several years), was (relatively) safe and popularised steam powered transport. So why isn’t it in use today on railways all over the world? Because it was hugely inefficient and Stephenson immediately started work on better designs and other engineers improved on those, etc.

I’m saying the way that Bitcoin works is very wasteful. I don’t want to deprive you of your coffee. But if the coffee machine in your local shop is boiling 100 gallons of water instead of a few ounces to make each cup then it’s a wasteful machine.

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You have to think in terms of attacking a global network that is the veins of economies and almost every activity surrounding it. At the moment Bitcoin is the MOST secure network because it’s nearly impossible for any country or entity alone to focus all their resources to do a 51% attack.

Bitcoin = Digital Money = Blood and Veins of Economies in a truely decentralized and autonomous way

Hopefully something better will come along with consensus mechanism that can establish something resembling bitcoins POW without the need for massive amounts of energy, like the SafeNetwork!

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If you read what i said, it wasn’t that its a waste, but does not help the power grid, 2 different things. Maybe I implied it wastes energy, but that is only in terms of wanting better ways to do the same job. Like not being able to use power hungry devices to mine. But BTC is what it is and waste determination really is down to its value now.

Waste has to do with value and usefulness.

Some out there want to conflate the 2 and thus they have to argue the “good for power grid” while not realising that many things are not good for the power grid, but we work around that because its valuable to have them. Your coffee example is a good one for that.

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Could you theoretically use mining to dump unneeded renewable energy when the demand is low?How do they currently deal with over supply ?

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Yes, exactly, as mentioned in the video above, Bitcoin mining faculties are the only industry that can respond quickly to an increased user demand on the grid by turning off when the user demand increases and on when the demand decreases. Miners can obviously invest in their own solar to use a long side this when the grid needs them to ramp down, which is usually when the sun is out.

Apparently, to be profitable miners need 10 cent per kwh or less. The day rate in many countries exceeds this making it not profitable. Many grids have an issue at periods when the demand drops, bitcoin can use this energy making it more balanced and profitable for supplies.

Bitcoin mining can be like a PID loop for the grid. Battery tech can also help but we haven’t yet got the quantity of batteries to make up this gap, and we might never have. A combo of the two seems like a good solution for now.

The money made from the extra sale of energy that would otherwise be lost could help provide funds for further solar and wind farms.

For further information on this please watch those two videos I posted. I feel many here haven’t explored this rabbit hole at all or very far. I’d be interested to see if their opinion remained after a deep dive into this topic.

Two other things I’ve noticed recently about SAFE in comparison.

  • The SAFE network farmers would struggle to turn off like this in response due to the node aging system in place. Is this true?

  • We say SAFE has no waste, but apparently all data uploaded will remain forever on the system, with the majority of it never been used again. I’m not saying this is bad, but is this not also a “waste” to those seeking the perfect system?

BTW, although I’m getting a lot of push back on this, I’m enjoying the discussion and challenge because it helps me understand and grow on this topic. I am by no means stuck on this, but this is my current understanding that I’m exploring a lot at the moment.

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And the best market to do it is Texas. Miner I know calculated, that based on prices last year he could go from electricity buying on spot market at 7.5-7.8c/kWh to 4.5-5c/kWh if he goes with SLA from 99.8% to 90%.

I really good to hear that you have a good event :slight_smile:

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Not sure how the LN will grant privacy if it grants exactly the opposite.

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Also if the founder of the lightning network, Elizabeth Stark, is mentioned by the WEF, I’d stay far, far away from it :wink:

Mining -via proof of work- has always been an abomination. People seem to have forgotten what is the point of mining, it is just a way to randomly distribute the subsidy of the initial supply of the currency, plus securing the network by randomly selecting a miner to add new transactions to the Blockchain. Period.

If you can achieve those two objectives without wasting a crazy amount of gigawatts with a different solution, without sacrificing on reliability and security, then in comparison PoW it is by definition wasteful and inefficient.

The whole point of the existence of projects like peercoin, nxt and nem with their innovation on proof-of-stake, was precisely because they wanted to fix this nonsensical waste of energy.

Projects like curecoin attempted to at least replace the hashing function with something useful like folding proteins, doing actual useful work in their “proof of work”.

It drives me nuts how the narrative kept being mutated, moving the goalposts, and how Bitcoin maximalists are doing mental gymnastics to redefine externalities as benefits.

Just remember this, the first Bitcoin clients came with a pickaxe logo, because the whole idea was that every user was supposed to be mining as well as being a full node.

Whatever we have now is way way waaaaay distorted and deviated from what Bitcoin was supposed to be.

Litecoin attempted to correct that by replacing the algo to scrypt to attempt to avoid that centralization on powerful FPGA and ASICs, shows how in the early days we recognized that it was harming the decentralized network (the issue of energy consumption wasn’t on the radar yet, we were still in the very early stages)

The fact that a large and established project such as Ethereum decided to recently abandon PoW for PoS should be telling you something.
If they didn’t crash and burn, if their level of security is still the same, if now the eth mining has enabled any Ethereum holder to stake their funds while securing the network, effectively turning every eth holder into a miner, then try to justify the absurd amount of gigawatts burned in those GPU farms.

Stop doing mental gymnastics, bitcoin’s PoW is an abomination. That’s the whole reason I bet the house in 2014 in maidsafe, it is more Bitcoin than Bitcoin.

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Although I am myself critical of the WEF, it doesn’t mean every person or system they talk about is bad.

If you can achieve those objectives whilst staying decentralised and nuetral then it is interesting. I’m yet to see that.

It would be more interesting if you’d address any of the specific arguments bitcoiners talk about and mentioned above.

Ethereum is the next best example which to me looks more centralised than I once thought.

Ethereum is as centralized as Bitcoin.

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If that’s so, how easy would it be to change the consensus mechanism and inflation rate on BTC? I don’t see any person or foundation that could do that.

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How easy was it to implement segwit?

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Good point. But segwit didn’t change anything drastic and obviously came up against a lot of contention hence BCH. I don’t think the inflation rate could ever be changed though, which obviously can give more confidence for those holding it. Any changes seem to be slow to adopt and small.

Now eth is POS it does seem it would be easier to attack the network from a few large holders of coins. It’s obviously a trade off, but it looks like one that has traded some security for energy efficiency. Time will tell if that is a problem.

If people are finding use cases for bitcoins energy consumption I think it does open up the waste argument to some scrutiny.

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In Satoshi’s original vision the strength of the network was supposed to come from the almost impossibility of controlling 50% of the network, considering that every user in the planet was a miner and a full node.
So to make any manipulation, you would have to reach a consensus of maybe half billion people.

Right now, in the way the system has been perverted, it would take the collusion of only 2 mining entities to exceed 51%. (I just checked right now, I can’t freaking believe it)

The adoption of Bitcoin didn’t translate into the increase of the security of the network, as nowadays nobody is using the official clients to become full nodes, the practicality of lightweight clients are limiting again the full nodes to a handful of companies. Those are who were supposed to control the miners.
Even if the number of Bitcoin nodes have increased a bit (about 17000 nodes), it is nowhere close to what it was supposed to be.
You have to remember that those are getting absolutely zero rewards by hosting the whole blockchain, and it wouldn’t be crazy to assume that lightweight wallet companies are hosting a number of nodes in the cloud (making the effective number of entities controlling those 17000 nodes, way smaller, way worse than it looks)

So it is the worst scenario possible, an absolute failure of the main mission of the Bitcoin dream: it was supposed to be a trustless system!!
But instead we ended up recreating the same old model “with more steps”.

It is a cautionary tale that no matter the good intentions, humans will try to attempt to optimize the system as much as possible, and usually the easiest way to do it, if the implementation allows it, is by centralizing it.

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That is a fair choice you make for yourself, as i said for me it is a red light. Add to this all Piluso just brought to the table, now the Safe Network becomes an even brighter green light.

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This is obviously a concern if large miners collaborate to attack the network, but the difference compared to POS is that more miners can join the network to defend against this issue because the only limit is mining rigs and electricity. With POS the limit is the token. If large holders of the tokens have control there is nothing that can be done to create more coins to defend against them.

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