398
Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin
(arstechnica.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
398 points (94.8% liked)
Technology
59312 readers
5261 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Instead of using an independent RNG to determine the next block producer Bitcoin miners are essentially flipping coins and whoever manages to flip like 78 tails in a row gets to create the next block. How crazy is that?
What's even more astonishing is that when someone creates a new Crypto wallet, it creates an obscenely long random number as a seed, and just starts using it. As long as the number is sufficiently random, the chance that someone else has generated the same random number is so small as to be functionally zero. So you don't have to ask for anyone's permission first before using Crypto. You only have to ask the Universe for some of its entropy, and off you go.
It's the same math of large numbers that leads us to conclude that every time we shuffle a deck of cards, the result is a deck that nobody in the history of the Universe has ever seen before. 52! is an insanely large number, which is on the order of 10^67 .
https://quantumbase.com/how-unique-is-a-random-shuffle/
The math behind Crypto is sound, and ensures that everyone's wallets stay secure. Noone but their owners can move funds out of their wallets, and once a transaction is sufficiently confirmed, it can't be undone. The only real threat to this is Quantum Computing, which might be used someday to Crack the relationship between public and private keys which is unassailable now. We'll see whether the people who run these Crypto networks are able to change their algorithms to be Quantum resistant in rhe future.
Oh yeah, Quantum computing won't ruin crypto. Cardano already has plans to transition to quantum resistant crypto primitives. We just need to wait for some standards to form around which algorithms should be used in the future instead of current ones. I'm not worried about quantum computers at all.
Oh, I have confidence that we can develop quantum-resistant crypto. My concern is in the governance of all the projects. Cardano seems to be in good shape, but it put some thought into how to make decisions that have at least some community involvement. But the market is driven by BTC mainly, and they have some issues in how they run themselves.
BTC's protocol has gotten steady, incremental improvements for 15 years without a single hour of downtime. Lightning was deployed a few years ago and continues to grow each year and get easier to use and deploy. Migration to quantum-resistant algorithms is in the interest of all parties who use the system including miners, banks, hedge funds, developers, users, etc. It's a very easy problem compared to other questions they faced around blocksize, taproot, etc.
Quantum computing is not a threat at all tbh. Computers that can crack public key encryption are "20 years away" and require some fundemental shifts in our ability to control physics. And that's the lab production version, not one available on the open market.
Quantum-resistant algorithms already exist and continue to be refined. Things will get migrated long before they become a realistic threat.