Een andere invalshoek, waarom energiegebruik een feature is, en geen bug:
Every bull market the lie of "faster" altcoins resurfaces. Litecoin is not faster than Bitcoin. Dogecoin is not faster than Bitcoin. Bitcoin actually settles in LESS time than any other cryptocurrency. But to understand why that is, you have to understand what settlement is.toon volledige bericht
In a theoretical sense, final settlement doesn't exist at all on any blockchain. What settlement assurance you do get from a blockchain is a function of the energy an attacker would have to expend in order to rewrite your transactions or spend their own coins twice.
But with enough electricity, any blockchain can be rewritten by hostile miners who want to go back in time, change or delete transactions, then re-mine everything that happened up until the present.
What keeps hostile miners from doing so is the electricity they will need to overpower the friendly miners and satisfy the proof of work difficulty of the blocks they are trying to rewrite.
So let's consider the imaginary example of Coin X. It features 5 second block times and claims to be "faster than Bitcoin." So you download the Coin X node software, or a Coin X wallet for your phone, and withdraw your Coin X coins from an exchange.
5 seconds later you get a "confirmed" notification because the Coin X miners have included your transaction into a block.
But despite what the software says, in reality you have no assurance that this transaction can't be rolled back until a significant amount of electricity has been spent by the entire Coin X network to make it prohibitively difficult for an attacker to erase your transaction.
In Bitcoin it is common practice to wait 6 blocks for settlement assurance. With 10 minute blocks, 6 blocks is just Bitcoin-speak for "about an hour." It means that your transaction is buried under the electricity consumption of the entire network for about an hour.
So how much electricity is that? Well no one knows exactly how much energy Bitcoin miners consume, but the estimates are anywhere between 55 to 120 Terawatt hours per year. So let's take the average and use 87.5 TwH.
87.5 Terawatt hours = 87,500,000,000 Kwh hours
There are 8760 hours in a year
That equals 9,988,584.47 Kilowatts used in 1 hour.
This amount of expended energy is what secures your transaction. Not the block time. Not the "confirmed" icon. Not even cryptography.
So let's compare Bitcoin to Coin X. Let's say for the sake of argument that Coin X has 1 megawatt of constant power on it's network. This would be less than Bitcoin, but still it would be a lot of electricity.
1 Megawatt = 1,000 kilowatts.
1,000 kilowatts for 24 hours is 24,000 kilowatts.
So in order to get a Coin X security guarantee that is equivalent to Bitcoin, you'd have to wait for 7,191,781 Coin X blocks, which would take 416.19 days, or 1.14 years.
Last year, Bitcoin moved anywhere between $5 billion to $48 billion in value every day. A network moving that much value requires the fastest and most trustworthy settlement assurances possible. Bitcoin provides this through the way miners consume energy on the network.
This is why any time you read about "faster block times" you know it's 100 percent pure bullshit.