Afaik it is true to some degree.
From what I’ve read some producers in China allow the extra elec to be utilised for by mining by selling it at very low prices.
Of course as a whole its not the case, I feel confident saying that overall there certainly is not an energy surplus, but there are certain areas / times where it does happen.
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We’re deep into the planet’s energy overdraft. The fact that their may at times be under-utilised and further wasted energy from fossil fuel burning does not mean we have a surplus. It’s a sign that we need to urgently find more sustainable ways of living.
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“We cannot solve problems with the same thinking we used to create them.”
– Albert Einstein
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the big question is if safe network have any major hurdles to achieve, before launch. I mean is the project derisked, are you positive now 100% that the network will work as designed, if not than it should only be a matter of time when the popularity of the network grow.
of nothing at all in life 
We will only know looking back but we cannot see any hurdles at the moment.
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In my opinion, not yet, but it’s close. Testnet needs to prove it can overcome data loss and be stable for an extended period of time (even if it is very slow).
I’ve no doubt the team will get there though 
#keepthefaith
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At present balancing sustainability and security is difficult.
When power shortages occur, electricity charges rise and unprofitable miners move to another place or go out of business.
In the event of a global power shortage, the hash rate will drop then affecting prices. (assuming that the hashrate and the price are correlated)
Since hashrate is growing steadily, at this point, it’s reasonable to think that the power directed to Bitcoin mining is justified as the cost of the world’s strongest security in fact.
These will start to make sense if major upgrades like Taproot were implemented and had more security usescase.
Additionally, as in the automotive industry, the issues will not be discussed in terms of essential global environmental concerns.
IMO, it’s just an argument arises from ideology, so alternatives have no choice but to make own security stronger and closing to bitcoin, and uselessness reducing.
People who starts the discussion is the one who benefits from it.
Without a doubt, it may begin in earnest once Ethereum succeed 2.0.
I think the situation is serious and complicated.
I don’t want chains like BSC to get the last laugh.
By the way I’m noob but I like the idea of Safe network.
BTC is not wasteful if you compare it to classical finance. Goverments can not shut down BTC. MAID, if it releases, will be successfull very quickly due to immediatly being the best platform ever for piracy of movies and software. I am looking forward to it.
Isn’t that just a wee bit of whataboutery though? It is quite literally wasteful by design whether or not you compare it to classical finance.
I don’t really think we should accept the premise that it is less wasteful than classical finance, and thus superior, on several levels.
- It is unproven. A supposition.
- These two things co-exist, and I haven’t seen any evidence that there has been a net reduction in energy use from finance since BTC came along
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It’s about belief and trust. As long as enough people believe BTC is the best place for a large enough and growing amount of money, it will survive. But that looks shakey in more than one respect to me.
The quotes @mav collected together are evidence of one of those respects. I’ve noticed this sentiment growing a lot and bleeding into mainstream Twitter over recent months, and I find those words very encouraging from Safe Network’s point of view.
Firstly because I think we answer all those points, and secondly because these are technically savvy comments, not emotional, and shows that there are people who will recognise the value in the product and who will listen.
All we need to do is to have the solution to those problems and more importantly demonstrate and justify our claims. If we do that, they will become supporters and evangelists, as well as users, farmers and investors.
The biggest threat to Bitcoin is competition right now, and the isn’t any yet.
For the last seven years I’ve regularly thought, dang if only Safe Network was ready now, this is the perfect time. And every time I’ve seen a few months or a year later, it seems like an even better time than the last.
I think until there’s something as good as Safe Network this will continue. The pressure for something to do what Safe Network can do just grows and grows. So it feels really good. Bitcoin will keep going long enough for Safe Network to launch and will be a perfect demonstration of how good Safe Network is by comparison. Same wrt all the storage projects. All the privacy and security projects etc.
We shouldn’t tell people this immediately though because it will sound like hubris and hype to anyone who hasn’t discovered this from studying or testing, or watching others doing so over a long time. But we can have answers ready, encourage people using those alternatives to look and compare and demonstrate the capabilities in each area.
I was trying to help a decentralised ID specialist on Twitter this week and all I was doing was answer her questions, but she suddenly took my giving an example of how to create a DID on Safe Network using safe nrs create <her Twitter handle> as “trying to sell me your namespace”.
So people may be suspicious of outsiders claiming to have a solution to things they are specialists in. I think she’ll probably remember the conversation and Safe Network and may be still be curious enough to look into it if she heard from other sources as its profile grows. But I think we need also to be sensitive in his we approach this too.
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This is the case right now, you cannot see who or what made those transactions. Only they were made, but unless we can reverse hashes (we cannot then it’'s not possible to find that transaction. The only way is if the person published their own Dbc
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Where have you seen this?
I’ve never heard of anyone being asked for pvt keys.
It just seems an unreasonable ask, it’s like saying " give me all your funds and I’ll decide if you get them back".
I can understand pub keys, but why pvt?
Edit. I guess with privacy coins, they could need pvt keys, but certainly not for non pvt chains.
Don’t publish your Dbc, it’s a simple as that.
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It isnt wasteful. Its the basics of energy and thermodynamics and moving complexity into a form of storage which is mathematically provable. it may seem wasteful as your looking at it from a different lens. You can say the buying an NFT for 150,000USD is wasteful and could be used to fund healthcare 
The network should not be compared to Bitcoin at all. The entire premise of security primitives are different. Safe is an encompassing network that has tokenomics built in to help it function as a PaaS type system.
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Let’s not argue about subjective terms like wasteful.
If using an increasing proportion of the world’s energy to do less is better than all alternatives, then bitcoin has nothing to threaten it.
I think it has several problems, not just those, but for now it has no real competition for the very small niche in which it operates.
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To me the issue is that BTC is intentionally wasteful in its block mining algorithms in terms of energy to solve a problem that can be addressed other ways. Real competition is coming. No other industry wastes energy intentionally, not gold mining or traditional finance. There is no such thing as “extra” energy. And using mining’s heat generation to heat homes doesn’t cut it either. Electrical resistance heating is absolutely the most inefficient way to heat a space. This is all basic thermodynamics. If someone can solve a problem while generating less entropy that will tend to always win out in the long term.
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Well, if we’re talking thermodynamics… *** pulls up chair ***
How are we defining waste then? I think it’s important in this case.
Let’s say I want to store some energy. I pump some water up a hill, and it takes 1 million joules to do it. Then when I want to use that energy, I send it down the hill through turbine, and I get 750,000 joules back. Still useful to me, and worth it, but 250,000 joules were wasted in the process, due to friction, heat etc.
Bitcoin requires all this energy in order for things to run, and more importantly be secure. But that is not the purpose of Bitcoin itself. It’s inefficiency. Wasted energy in the process of doing what it is intended for. It’s nessecary, because bad stuff happens, but it still doesn’t mean it isn’t wasted energy.
Another analogy.
The purpose of my car is to transport me from A to B. It’s purpose is not to hold airbags. Moving those airbags about is wasted energy. The waste is especially obvious when if drive a massive Volvo down to the shop, by myself, to buy a pint of milk. I moved all those passenger airbags down a road and wasted energy. A trip that would have been much less wasteful to have been completed by bicycle.
So I think we need to accept that yes, Bitcoin wastes energy. A massive amount of energy.
The Safe Network will waste it too (for example, through having 10 copies of each file, or whathaveyou, because bad stuff happens), but it should be an an order of magnitude smaller that the alternatives built on blockchain.
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Yes, and every order of magnitude is worth it at this point.
We do have an infinite source of power. It is called the sun.
There are huge leaps forward right now in solar, price and efficiencies; and the problem of storing the suns energy for night time and down time has been solved too.
There are now many different ways to collect the solar energy through solar windows, and even a kind of paint that can be used to collect the energy, which means you could turn your entire house into a power generator.
Granted these technologies are new, and need to be perfected, and implemented. But It is now cheaper to generate electricity with wind and solar than with coal.
There is also more than just wind and solar coming online in the future.
Fusion power is actually a thing now. and there has been small scale experiments in creating electricity with fusion, but that will probably be coming online in the next 20 years. There is a potential tidal ocean generator too, thermal generators, and water batteries.
So It is only a matter of time for renewables to take over. until then we need the safe network for more orders of magnitude.
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Several exist already - I was part of a small team working on small scale “personal” tidal generator codename Tidal Spark - units before the UK govt pulled the plug on all renewable subsidies and killed the project. Tests had already started in the Denny Ship Tank. Each unit would have been ~3m long and would provide power for a small house - a 3 bedroom semi would likely have needed two such units. Placed in water too deep for paddling and too shallow for trawling with a tidal stream >2kts for 16/24 hrs. Many units all up and down the coast do that slackwater time affected different “fleets” at different times each day. One of our problems was the inefficiencies involved in AC -=>DC power to shore then DC =>AC conversion to hook to the grid. A underwater hub that would use the power from several units to mine BTC was already being considered in 2015 before we had to shelve the project. Also 2-300m of ethernet cable is cheaper than copper wire carrying tens of amps and the insulation/sheilding required is much less. Yes wi-fi links were considered as well 
Obligatory Ayrshire content - There is a constant circular current runs clockwise around the Cumbrae Islands in the Clyde. Had we got further this would have been one of our testing sites.
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I am sure this was the case at some point. Just like the argument that gold mining uses (or probably used to use now) more energy than farming BTC. However, that’s not good enough as any additional waste = waste. Rather than ignoring the elephant in the room, projects who work towards a greener alternative will benefit in the long run, and their investors also. I am not a BTC hater and still hold it but I hope to see more green projects as well the number 1 project to overtake BTC to be its Green alternative.
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