What in the hecktual heck?! Bitcoin is already set up so that no matter how much energy is flushed straight down the waste drain, it takes ten minutes for each block and the reward for each block is awarded in a lottery where the more you waste, the more entry tickets you get, in a race to the bottom unprecedentedly dumb by the measure of any other economic structure humanity has ever haspled forth in stupor.
But there’s also the backwardly named “Halving”, designed to double the resources spent on mining each bitcoin every four years!
In other words, the “waste the most” lottery runs at a little over three minutes for each bitcoin now which will, by sadistic design apparently, increase to six and a half minutes after the next “halving” in three years. It’s still one block per ten minutes but it takes increasingly more blocks per bitcoin; currently 0.32 which will double to 0.64 in three years just like it doubled in ‘24, ‘20, ‘16, and ‘12. Scarcity becoming artificialler by the minute.
Pull the plug already!
Just to be super clear: the halving and the difficulty factor are two different things.
The difficulty factor sets the block rate. It’s adjusted every 2016 blocks so that there’ll be about one block every ten minutes. No matter how much people burn there will not be more blocks. That’s why the analogy of it being a lottery where the biggest wasters get the most tickets is good. It’s unlike other economic structures and has had disastrous consequences with the network using as much resources as entire countries. It incentivizes waste.
Since blocks are necessary for the network and ledger to work, the fixed block rate is bad in many ways, most apparently in the form of transaction congestion.
Separate from the difficulty factor (which limits the block creation rate), the halving sets how many bitcoins are created per block. Since the block rate is fixed per time, that means that bitcoins per time is also fixed, at a rate that the very misnamed “halving” changes by, every four years, making each bitcoin take twice as long to make and twice as many blocks to make and twice as many resources to make.
The halving makes bitcoins a limited resource since it’s a converging series which means a fixed amount of bitcoins will exist after all the halvings are over.
Which also will remove the block creation incentive, making the network as a whole unreliable and the bitcoins worthless, leaving all the suckers holding the bag. Unfortunately that’s not set to happen until 2140 so those bagholders will be the biggest suckers on the cinder, I guess.
Climate change was the talk of the times in ‘07, ‘08 when Bitcoin was first made in the wake of the IPCC’s fourth assessment report.
But yeah, maybe “lack of foresight” is a better, less ableist way to put it than “stupid”. Lack of foresight that people would burn entire countries worth of energy chasing a nothingness, or want to send more than 0.7 transactions per minute.
It’s like the nano grey goo dystopia. We created a death algorithm fueled by human greed and the prisoner’s dilemma. As such, it’s the best satire of market capitalism ever created but the joke stopped being funny almost immediately. The way out is to change our resource distribution protocol entirely in a way that’s not compatible with bitcoin and that probably means making it not compatible with money either. 🤦🏻♀️
It might seem like energy rationing is another way out (and I do advocate for energy rationing which we had as late as the 1970s) until you remember that Texas exists and it, or any one place where there’s drills, plants, and chips, can singlehandedly wreck the world as long as their money is worth something. Or until even they see the light (the flickering light of the roaring flames around them).
In the digital world we already paved the way beyond quid-pro-quo when we created Debian and Wikipedia and GNU and all those RFCs and torrents. Sharing is caring. Yeah, yeah, the post-scarcity gift economy is amplified digitally so maybe that was easy mode, comparatively, but as a trial run I think we can chalk it up as a ✌🏻.
I mean not that easy and a lot of us died but at least it works, it runs, it’s useful, and it’s probably the only way to defeat the grey goo of 💸.
And yes, using the word “we”, as in “we built this”, this digital Anarres of you-don’t-owe-me-anything, I-give-you-thanks-for-receiving of FOSS apps and free culture, that even I who did the absolute least work possible, like maybe corrected one stray comma in a PR that didn’t even get merged, that’s a point of pride for me because if even I could help then so can you!
There was a foundation of Goldman, Kropotkin, Bakunin in Debian at least as I first encountered it in the late 90s, and in the wider GNU world. Anarchist texts on a Debian CD was how I first found out about anarchism back then.
However, unlike market capitalism which, besides being set up to find and crank up externalities loopholes recklessly like blasting maximum amounts of fossil fuels, rewards/amplifies/creates human greed and misery, we had a system that actually did make it so that contributions even from libertarians and self-described “anarcho” capitalists, could be useful and make the whole better. A patch could be good even from them, is my point.
And there were a few.
These folks weren’t exactly welcomed and appreciated but the motto of the IETF was “We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code” and when it was good, it was good. (Now Debian does have some condorcet voting for some things but everyone can and do fork when they feel differently about communal decisions.)
We didn’t have the same “eww that code is nazi code” problem that we have today because the cleavage shift from labor vs owner to pluralist vs populist (while the owners are laughing all the way to the bank) hadn’t happened to the extent it has today. Nazis were a threat, a fringe threat, but they weren’t on the throne the way they are now with brown shirts and red baseball caps. The enemy was capitalism more directly; a mainstream political right that was an unholy alliance between the two contradictory ideas “conservatism” and “liberalism” where the capitalist owners can cherry pick from either at any time to defend their system. “Free trade” one day, “preserve tradition” the other. A capitalism that was defended explicitly a la the aforementioned Ayn Rand. In hindsight a quaint and joshing foe now that they’ve instead unleashed the goose–steppers and rabid dogs to do their bidding; “vote for us because capitalism is ‘virtuous’ somehow and, uh, ‘tax is theft’” became “vote for us because we will ‘protect’ you from Muslims, Mexicans, HRC, CRT, HRT (by riling up your hatred against them with lies)”. The former became incredibly easy to argue against as we all could see plainly how market capitalism’s bugs are literally burning up the planet; a climate change that’s being increasingly denied by the political mainstream as they are digging our own graves and charging for the shovel rental.
(And by owner I don’t mean a person. I mean a structure, such as a corporation, set up to maximize profits and mad decision. The fact that sometimes a single person is set up to benefit from those profits (your gateses, bezoses, and musks) is part of the problem but not the entire problem.)
This all was a downhill battle of listening to ogg vorbis, hacking on a free system, and playing Angband until one day it suddenly stopped working when the corporations realized that they too could use the free code, something Microsoft had been deathly afraid to do but Apple and Facebook had no qualms of doing. They could pick our raisins and schmear a gilded cage all over them. We had desktops that were beyond caught up and roaring and ready to go but in the span of one cruel winter they had the public trapped in pocket computers and cloud silos, platforms that they owned completely while leeching off of the community garden of free code.
And that can easily happen again to you folks, any way we set up this system, be it digital or real world. The proprietarians can wreck things. This is a crisis for ancom thought: how our traditional tool box, so awesome for civil rights and against labor exploitation, has nothing to fix the global problem of climate change and even risks making it worse. Everything we build, if it’s good, they will copy it into a gasoline version until everyone on Earth is toast. Would be good if we could figure out a fix for that.
And the economics of mittens and socks are beyond the ken of Ayn Rand worshipers.
When we build and give and build and give and build and give, and create a garden of endless delights, the Rand set calls that “looting”.
And when they own and hoard and own and hoard and own and hoard, like Roark with his buildings, Galt with his motor, and Satoshi with his nothingness, with his charging for the privilege of burning up the planet in a “waste the most resources” race, they call that “the unknown ideal”.
Not that adherence to a specific older sect’s exact tenants are necessarily conducive to thought on how to make the world better. Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Goldman, as prescient as they were, were writing in a world before TCP/IP, before immediate copying, and in a czarist land where they had no say in any political process.
One thing that had started happening in a way that was clear even back then was the reckless destruction of the environment in the name of industrialism and profits. A problem that’s only grown more urgent as we’re knock-knock-knocking on the Dragon’s door here at the end of all things.