Bitcoin proof of work difficulty losing weights
These transactions are then grouped into blocks, which is added to a big blockchain every ten minutes. The reason this happens is that Bitcoin miners are running a special Bitcoin program, that calculates difficult calculations. This is pretty much it, and this makes it possible to continue to the next phase: So why is this so exciting? To understand this, we need to look at decentralization and that it really means.
It seems like a simple idea, and it is. This technology alone opens up a lot of opportunities! A very popular example is payments. But wait a second. I could also argue: Recently, a credit card of mine was stolen — and MasterCard simply just did a chargeback and I got my money back.
So what is best? The centralized or decentralized organization? Every day, we use both central and decentral systems. Google and Facebook are organizations who own everything: They make the rules. Google is very centralized. This has nothing to do with blockchain — everything is made and hosted by Google.
This has a lot of benefits. Very profitable businesses can hire more people, and make their product better. They can pay a very good salary, which is a great incentive for the smartest people in the world to work at them. Businesses usually also rely on having a very good reputation, so they invest huge amounts of money into customer service.
I would argue many of the biggest and most important things in the world is made by companies. Corporations are an amazing invention, which is effective in pushing out great products.
But centralized companies also have problems. How do you plan to write with your friends without Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram? You have no backup plan. At the same time, we also use decentralized systems every day. The e-mail protocol is by itself, decentralized. That is because e-mail a decentralized platform. Gmail is just one of the many programs you can use. Because it is decentralized, it also means you are able to write to people who are NOT using Gmail or Outlook.
You can write to anyone. This is very far away from how Messenger inside Facebook works. The difference is that Facebook is fully centralized, while e-mail is decentralized. However, with most things today, the world works with a fully centralized system. Why on earth would I also bother? Facebook, Uber and my bank work pretty damn great. This question is very important.
Because you can argue two ways, and these arguments are very likely to sway your opinion about blockchain and Bitcoin. If you think decentralization seems unimportant, you are not going to buy into the idea behind blockchain. One argument is centralized systems just work better. Centralized systems are usually corporations with a solid business model.
They can afford the best people by paying salaries. Facebook is so good because they have thousands of engineers to make your user experience better.
The counter-argument is that decentralized systems are better. You own your own data, and if you disagree with how something works, you can just switch provider. No one can disallow you to use e-mail or the Internet. And what is best? Up until today, most things are not decentralized, but a few very important technologies are e-mail and the Internet for instance.
Blockchain, however, makes it possible to make much more things decentralized. Up until recently, I have often been a big fan of corporations and centralizations. But, follow me for a second. Today, we have not split a lot of things between a decentralized foundation and a centralized wrapper. When I look through my day, I rely and mostly used companies which is centralized. However, imagine a world where both Facebook, your bank, the Uber fleet, the Airbnb housing platform and everything else we use was decentralized.
You would own the data, you would have NO commissions to third parties and you could decide HOW you want to use the platform. I believe A LOT of systems could benefit from this. But the biggest problem is most decentralized systems are just not possible — at least not before blockchain. Who should develop a decentralized taxi fleet, without being able to earn money? Why would anyone do that? But this is why Blockchain will potentially change the world. We could easily argue that a decentral Uber fleet would make a lot more sense, but because no one will get paid to put in the enormous work do create it — no one will.
One of the things blockchain make possible, is to pay people for doing work. Just see how much the early Bitcoin adopters have been rewarded — the same logic can be applied to most likely everything. Blockchain makes it possible to REMOVE the underlying protocol — the data and the underlying rules of the system — from the app you use.
And this is very, very big news. This is why many of the smartest people in the world love and work with blockchain. Bitcoin is basically saying: Bitcoin is a protocol; you own the data and Bitcoin defines how the rules are.
You can trust the Bitcoin protocol to actually do as you expect. However, today, we have multiple centralized companies in the Bitcoin space. The most famous is Coinbase. Coinbase is Gmail or Outlook, Bitcoin is the e-mail. This gives a lot of options. An example was when Bitcoin Cash was made as described earlier. Coinbase sent out an e-mail saying: E-mail from Coinbase before the Bitcoin split, which made Bitcoin Cash.
Coinbase gave me as a user a choice on what to do. Imagine if you could do the same with Facebook. And all would be good. When Bitcoin came out, it started as a payment system. However, I would argue something way more important happened. To explain what, I will use an analogy.
Runners tried and tried, but they simply never got under the 4-minute mark. Then, one day, after years and years of trying, Roger Bannister managed to do it! This was impressive, but something even more impressive happened after. Years after, the record was broken many times. The 4-minute mile was made by a lot of runners. When people saw it was possible, they tried and could make it.
I believe Bitcoin to be the Four-minute mile of Bitcoin did something no one was thought to be possible: And when that suddenly is possible, then much more is also possible.
LOTS of inventions happened quickly after Bitcoin came out. Etherium made it possible to run software as decentralized programs, Dash made a decentralized voting system for decisions and lots of smart people are going much further than Bitcoin.
I have a strong belief that Bitcoin simply opened a door. Bitcoin opened a new area of research, and the second you open that door, lots of low-hanging fruits are there. These are the fruits we will start to see in the coming years. Before we move on to phase 3; I want to cover 3 very interesting innovations that will mean a very big deal looking ahead: Today computer programs can be run on your smartphone or laptop.
It can also be run on a server, just like when you go to Facebooks website, it runs a computer program which is your news feed. However, the code that runs on your smartphone and mine, are not the same. A huge part of our lives today are dependent on contracts. Everything you own — your home, your car, your stocks and your bank account — is based on a contract.
Everything you buy and sell in a company — is based on a contract. An invoice is a contract, your relationship with Facebook is based on terms of services which is a contract and so much more are basically contracts. Previous to the blockchain, it was not possible to manage contracts in computer programs, unless you trusted a third party.
When we sign an insurance contract, we trust the insurance company to make the right decisions. You go to a hospital on your travel and you pay cash.
You now go back to your insurance company and file a report to get your money back. This flow is a bit weird. This actually makes very little sense if you think more about it. What if instead the insurance contract was made into code. The second you could prove you were sick and uploaded the receipt, a small computer program verified it and you would get your money without problems. In this scenario, you would not trust the insurance company, but the contract you signed.
This would be a much better experience for you — and — why would we even need the insurance company in this case? The insurance company also needs to turn a profit and — have many people employees — making your insurance policy much more expensive than it could be. This is why Etherium was made. And no, this is not a character from Lord of the Rings despite sounding like it.
Etherium describes themselves in the following way:. So, this description is obviously even worse than the title of the Bitcoin white paper. What is a decentralized platform? What is a smart contract? Etherium is also based on blockchain technology. Just like Bitcoin, it has a blockchain.
Just like Bitcoin, it also has blocks 17 seconds instead of 10 minutes , a block limit not 1mb, works in a different way and you can make transactions. Instead of 21 million Bitcoins, there is no upper limit in Etherium and it grows every year. In Etherium, you have Ether instead of Bitcoins. In Bitcoin, you could send transactions between two addresses.
This contract can be made by developers. So imagine a contract would be: This is possible in Etherium! With Etherium you can, therefore, manage contracts. And this is very, very interesting — because if we start to think a bit more generic about contracts. How much is really not somehow a kind of contracts?
In a corporation, you have an ownership. The owners then decide on a board. The board then hires a CEO, who is the boss. The CEO then hires an executive team, which then again hires people.
You usually have the founder s and some optimistic people who put money into the venture. These sit on the board because they have the stake. The founder s is also the CEO and the executive team. The decisions are pretty clear here. A corporation is not a democracy. Decisions are much more similar to a dictatorship.
Remember the 1mb blocks, so transaction fees became crazy high? How transaction fees today is more than 20 USD? This problem started to get serious back in , and no one did anything. Some people believed it was OK that fees got up, other people strongly disagreed. Bitcoins is 8 years old, and for soon 4 of those years — it has been a problem ignored. If one group believes Bitcoin should act as gold, and another as a cash system — then it makes a lot of sense to diverge into two different things.
However, for many smaller decisions, this is not effective. A very interesting solution is the one the cryptocurrency Dash has implemented. The underlying idea for Dash is to be very cheap and fast to use — so an important goal is both scalability and low transaction fees. However, the reason Dash is interesting, is how they make decisions. In Dash, this is different.
Dash believes people should be rewarded for making the system better. In Dash you have miners who are responsible for mining the blocks, and a new concept called master nodes, who are responsible for running services closely related to Dash. Since Dash is one of the biggest cryptocurrencies, this means a lot of money goes into the treasury system millions of dollars every month.
These are then used to employ developers to work on the core Dash system. In addition, everyone can upload projects they want to do and how much it will cost. Those people with at least 1. This means, those who have 1. This is done by voting every month.
The voting in Dash. Those projects that get votes, get paid in Dash which can be sold for normal cash! Imagine you want to start a website where people can back up their files. A different way to approach this would be to use peoples free space on their computers.
Previously, this was not possible. It was, of course, possible technically — but why on earth would you do this? Why would you store others peoples back-up on your computer? This is where tokens come into the picture. A great example of this is a project called FileCoin. FileCoin believes in this vision: When you do this, you automatically get FileCoins.
This means you get something in return for storing the files. This is pretty amazing, and important to think about for a moment.
This means you can pay people for doing something useful, automatically, in a decentralized way. FileCoins can then be used for two things. And why can you exchange them for money? Just like Bitcoin — because people think they might be worth something! This is a very interesting dynamic. As FileCoin grow, more and more people use the system. This means two things: But because the token is used more, it grows in value. You do not own anything of the underlying company FileCoin, but you own some of the tokens they USE in their system.
Compare this to Bitcoin. Here the FileCoin would be Bitcoin. If you adopted Bitcoin early, you would have been able to mine a lot of Bitcoins early without competition. Not only would you get lots of mining rewards because you mined with low competition, you would also be able to buy lots of Bitcoin very cheap. FileCoin could be the same. Then serious actors would buy HUGE harddisks and set them up, and suddenly you could not compete with your small laptop.
Would FileCoin then be focused small laptops anymore? Instead, it would be professional actors — just like Bitcoin miners — who would put the price exactly above earning money. Even decentralized systems such as e-mail and the Internet, rely on some very big and centralized companies.
I use Gmail, and I would not change it for anything. Nothing gets close to Gmail in my mind. I doubt I Can even export my data in a convenient way. So the question is — does e-mail and Facebook feel different? Facebook is a fully centralized system — you rely completely on their technology and you own absolutely zero data. Gmail is on top of a decentralized system. But, the more I think about it, I do have problems with Facebook.
The problem is — I disagree with some of the things they do. But I cannot change. Especially Messenger and WhatsApp, both Facebook-owned, are a huge part of my life.
These apps are basically all my online interaction with family and friends. But I cannot do anything about it. I am not sure I like how Facebook uses my data to target me.
I do a lot of online marketing, and because of that, Hotjar can target me easily. This is possible because Facebook tracks everything I do. Blockchains allows us to not only build decentralized systems. They allow us to give tokens to the people who are building the network, and therefore pay them.
Bitcoin started out as a cash system — a threat to Visa and MasterCard — and the early adopters got paid. That is very interesting, and I can easily imagine we will see this approach to thousands of industries.
This will not remove companies such as Facebook or Google. Just like Bitcoin have Coinbase, it will just be different. Coinbase have a great business model — they make it easy to buy and sell Bitcoin, and they charge a fee. You could also imagine someone made a new Coinbase but based on ads like the previous generations of Facebook and Google. Then I could choose. You can just take your data and leave, the underlying rules will stay the same. Bitcoin is interesting and blockchain will change the world.
That is what many smart people say. To this, I must agree. Bitcoin is one application. Now Bitcoin seems to plan to replace gold, and Bitcoin Cash — the fork — plans to follow the original vision of Bitcoin. Same goes for Dash. But as we dig into decentralization, we can see the potential is much, much bigger.
Blockchain and proof of work are interesting, but I believe the new innovations we see now — the ones made possible just like the 4-minute mile made it possible for many runners — will be the game changer. To continue down this path, and in this final chapter of the post, I will look into some of the industries that could change. After that, we will look at the even bigger implications on a country and government scale.
Finishing off, we will look at the state today — how far away are we — and how does look? And the question you really want — should you invest in Bitcoin? Bitcoin and blockchain have been criticized for not having any killer apps. Some negative — but smart people — look at it and say: But what changes the game, is the removal of the bank. Because why is it we trust a bank to hold our money? Why is it this is not a protocol? Why is it you are not in control — you, who actually owns the asset?
Why is it you are paying enormous fees to a huge inefficient body such as the bank? Of course, they have. But I believe we are going to do the same we did with e-mail. Take the money layer — the rules of the money system and who owns the assets, and then decentralize that. We are going to have banks.
But the banks are more like big apps — just like Coinbase — who are our gateway to Bitcoin. Of course, we still need someone to store our assets. We need a nice user interface. We need nice mobile apps. We need help if someone steals from us. All of this is still needed — and also has a need to be regulated. Lets look at some very different examples, and how that could play out. I believe there are serious use cases in nearly any industry, but some are significantly more obvious and short-term than others.
Imagine the contract you sign is made in Etherium, and written into code. When you get sick and you can prove it, your money is paid, if certain conditions are met. Because it would be a decentralized token system, no profits would be made to a central party.
This could probably make your insurance bill half the size of today. This system obviously, however, needs some serious innovations. How do you avoid moral hazard people treating their stuff worse because they know they have an insurance?
How do you judge the details if something should be paid out? However, imagine taking the governance system of Dash, and use it here. Every month, you need to buy an amount of InsuranceCoin. This goes into a shared treasury, which is our total amount of money we can spend on paying out. The miners would be professional insurance people, who judge the incoming cases. The master nodes, those who own a lot of our new InsuranceCoin, could vote who should be the professional insurance people who judge the incoming cases.
By doing this, both the master nodes who vote and the miners who are the professional insurance people get paid. There is no profit — and the price for the insurance would change on a bi-yearly basis to be as low as possible. Would this revolutionize the industry?
Is this possible today? Most probably not, because we need to make more innovations in the decentralized governance. I know little about insurance, and an insurance expert could come up with ten reasons why this would never work. But what happens when this insurance expert understands blockchain and decentralization?
I think insurance could be in for a fun overhaul. When Motorola Mobility got sold to Google, it was said a big reason was Google needed patents. Patents are not something most people think about much. Today, all countries have their own patent offices.
As a general concept, it sounds wrong that something that is supposed to be world-wide, is country specific, and you need separate databases to maintain them. Just like insurance, I am not an expert in this field. Again, an expert in patents would probably scold me for even suggesting this could be possible! I am sure there are many reasons why this is completely unthinkable.
I can upload a document at a given date, and I can prove I was the first. This technology is free and available worldwide. Today, when I have an event, I want to sell my tickets to as many people as possible. To do this, I pick an event platform — for instance EventBrite — and start my marketing here. But why is this? Eventbrite and their competitors are centralized companies. That means they have your data, and you cannot use multiple platforms.
Say you also have some tickets you want to give to friends, you need to go to Eventbrite website and remove those tickets from the sale. This works, but it has a couple of limitations. First of all, you cannot have your event published on multiple big event sites. Another problem, which I have experienced myself, is that if I want to buy a ticket from another person, I cannot verify If the ticket is legit or false.
Especially for concerts and festivals, this causes a lot of problems because of fraud. Imagine that instead, the company hosting the event, makes all the tickets available on a blockchain we call the TicketCoin. Now, all users would be able to verify if their ticket is legit.
In addition, we would still have Eventbrite and their competitors, but instead of they own the data, they would just be a frontend that makes going to events easy, but they would not own the data and own your event.
For sold-out events, we would also end up having a marketplace for second-hand selling. If I have a ticket to the world cup, I could sell it to the highest bidder, and the highest bidder would know my ticket is legit. This makes a lot of sense to me, and if I wanted to host an event I would like this freedom.
But just as our examples before, there are multiple issues. Why would EventBrite every accept this? They would lose power. Every company that today relies on donations have a big problem. The problem is you cannot show those who spend money, how the money was spent. However, because every transaction made in a blockchain system is made visible — you can see how the money was spent.
Obviously, you cannot see exactly what you bought , but you could track every time money was spent. Imagine instead that all those hit by the crisis for a cash amount sent to their wallet. By doing this you could much faster and without friction get the required help to the people hit. But people such as Bill Gates has shown serious interest in this, and I can see why this could matter a lot.
However, recent years has shown that having huge companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google owning our social infrastructure has problems. Especially those few that gets blocked from the platform — they simply lose access to a big part of the modern world.
I would be significantly more comfortable with all my profile data is being in a decentralized system. This idea would obviously need some more work, but is this really so unthinkable? Again, you would still have Facebook. Facebook and Messenger are to be the best apps on my phone, and I love them.
But would I prefer the apps more if they were based on a decentralized setup? Today we have a couple of very big e-commerce platforms. We have one type which is Amazon, that sells everything you can imagine.
A different type is eBay, which is for buying and selling stuff between people. Some years ago, OpenBazaar, started out with an attempt to make this.
So far the results have been disappointing — because making a decentralized platform is really difficult. But the idea makes sense. Imagine that we made a new blockchain based system. Everyone can then create their own store, you can see their products, see ratings and buy products.
Everyone can open one. Amazon, however, is a different beast. The reason Amazon is very difficult to beat, is not only because they have the biggest inventory in the world. They also have the best prices. How do you get the best prices?
Well, you mass produce. But imagine we had a huge decentralized EcommerceCoin. Now, we cannot register products in the blockchain because of size limitations — I will come back to this in a moment — but we could definitely store all purchases. We also need an incentive system to host the huge database of products, which would need some kind of miner fee. This would obviously reduce the power of the big platforms, because smaller local merchants could just sell outside Amazon and directly on our new EcommerceCoin.
E-commerce is the obvious, not the first target. The reason I decided to include it, is to show that in every industry — blockchain could play a role. My point with these industries was not that above 6 is the killer apps of blockchain.
I think there are lots of more obvious use cases, especially starting with moving money around. But just like the Internet started slowly. The Internet started with sharing information and some simple e-commerce, blockchain will start slowly too. And then, maybe, it will actually take over every industry. In Silicon Valley, you have a couple of startups that an investor will shoot you for suggesting. At least, you need to have some strong angle on the project.
The reason this is a fucking stupid idea is that of network effects. The reason Facebook is so powerful is that all of your friends use Facebook. Maybe not to post on the wall, but to take parts of events, chats, and groups. Network effects are very difficult to beat. The bigger you are, the more people use your platform. With more people using your platform, the more data. But, this is another reason blockchain is extremely interesting.
They can buy storage much cheaper. If we were to make a competitor to DropBox today, it would be … a fucking stupid idea. FileCoin, however, is an entirely different beast. The second you make a blockchain based system, you have tokens.
These tokens are also called the utility tokens. As we talked about before, the tokens have two usages: If you buy storage, you pay in this token. But the different usage is that the token has a value.
If people believe in FileCoin, this underlying token grows in value. This means early adopter actually go from having the worst experience like you did if you were an early Facebook user with no friends on the platform and Uber user with few cars , to getting rewarded for being early. IF you hit something that is great, you can become filthy rich.
This also brings a different effect. If you become an early user in a system you believe in, what is going to happen? You are going to tell your friends and everyone that has at least one ear. You become an evangelist. The early stages of the product are just as bad as normal startups. This means that early users go from being optimistic test users who get a crazy bad experience, to becoming co-investors and evangelists.
This is super interesting for new concepts, because it will help the early growth a lot. The media cares about money, and people becoming rich. The way a company such as FileCoin work, is that we have a group of smart people. These people make a company, just like today. This coin then develops the technology and write a white paper — which describes their idea. So what these people do is they take a period of days, and sell their first tokens.
In the initial coin offering, the coins are bought and sold, and after the ICO, the token can usually be bought and sold just like Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies. The Blockchain is a Community project, to provide the Market with services that the Market currently doesn't supply. It's relatively 'distributed' and to continue to make a motza of profit the financial sector need to centralize the technology. They may succeed, but it's more likely they won't, as their centralized principle will have a very expensive time to match the hashing power of the distributed bitcoin network.
Give your hashing power to the bitcoin Blockchain, screw the banks. To learn bitcoin and the Blockchain is a useful personal literacy project. It's a kindergarten for learning about encryption and privacy, both skills everyone will need to navigate with over the next decade and onwards. The Blockchain and it's emerging 'ecology' of technologies will replace more than just the "credit " card. Perhaps the coin's limited supply will be its strength and so worth the initial cost of electricity.
Preventing its manipulation and resulting inflationary tendencies may well be a value with the knowledge that it can't be manipulated and rob people of value via the money printing fractional banking system. I absolutely agree with every single point brought up in this article.
When I first heard of the existence of Bitcoin in , I remember trying to think of one single way that such a "currency" could be of any value to humanity in any way. I'm still yet to come up with or be convinced of a single way. It's a shame that there are so many jokers out there who would prefer to increase their own material wealth by burning precious energy, wasting huge quantities of semi-conducting devices that cold be used for serious computing i.
I frankly don't care how much Bitcoin "protects freedom of speech", if you don't feel comfortable with having an online transaction being able to be tracked back to you by the police, perhaps you should reconsider said purchase. The benefit is that its supply is dictated by an algorithm that cannot be manipulated to reduce its value by a government or central bank.
It is also good for making anonymous, instantaneous, cash-like transactions over the internet with low fees. I have found BTC to be a great investment. Have you tried to get into Peer to Peer lending in Australia using Fiat currency? If you could gain access only available to sophisticated investors at the moment I can easily invest fractions of a cent worth of bitcoin over thousands of loans Yes it can be expensive to mine, so you don't, but regardless it's a tiny fraction of the energy used to manage even our currency let alone every currency in the world.
How much energy is used by say Armagaurd to physically transport cash every day? By bank tellers just going to and from work? By all the ATM's and bank servers? Actually printing our currency? I don't like that it uses so much energy but that's simply the nature of the beast and is essential to it being secure.
This article is a waist of time - literally! To state my biases - I think bitcoin is a complete waste of time and would never be bothered with it. I did whoever do some research before coming to this conclusion and have a sound knowledge of what a bitcoin is and the system that it works within. This article is so full of biases, untruths and misconceptions that it would be easier to write a complete factual article from scratch than it would be to correct the error in this one.
I commend you on your effort so far to understand the bitcoin payment network, it seems you have done some research into it. I think what you are missing though, is that the energy used by the bitcoin network is not 'wasted' or 'useless'. The energy consumed is the very thing that gives bitcoin security as a currency. Think about Australian paper currency. But the resulting currency would have no security No, they spend a vast amount of energy and money producing and replacing paper currency, the machines that produce them, the buildings that house them the staff that run them etc.
The energy that the bitcoin network consumes enables the creation of something truly worthwhile: It is one that is not restricted to a few banking institutions, but allows anybody on earth with an internet connection to access it. A really interesting piece John. I can't help but wonder though as at least one person pointed out, what about the coins that have already been mined? Also, once the cost of mining them is more than what they are worth, I understand no new ones will be produced, but wouldn't the older coins still hold some value as a unit of trade, to be dictated by the market pricing?
I'm confused as to why coins already mined would get a zero pricing. That would imply they are worthless - I'd suggest they wouldn't be worthless while people are willing to trade them.
Thanks John for an interesting article. I think the fact that costly calculations of no use to anyone, are used in creating bitcoins, may be a bit of a red herring. Is bitcoin any stranger than people accepting the current economic system? I have often thought that accountants would get better results handing out monopoly money i.
How long until this news 'article' is pulled? If only cash were as traceable as Bitcoin, there would be a lot less illegal activity. Every Bitcoin can be traced; transaction by transaction, back to its discovery, it's called a blockchain.
This is what makes it secure and does away with a single 3rd party approver. The other major flaw with this article is it implies that the mining of Bitcoin will go on forever, and ignores all the environmental costs we currently accept in our stride.
How much electricity does the current system consume? Once a Bitcoin is mined, that Bitcoin will only ever consume energy if it's traded. I'd put a Bitcoin or two on the current system being far worse energy consumption wise. I'd also challenge the author to declare they have no conflict of interest in this article All I've heard recently is banks closing ranks around the Bitcoin issue, and now this. I wonder how the weighted average carbon footprint of all of Australia's paper and metal currency compares on a carbon-per-dollar basis to that of bitcoins, especially considering that notes and coins get retired from circulation and replaced periodically.
Whilst the longevity and stability of bitcoins is a valuable discussion to have, linking their viability to their carbon footprint seems a very, very long stretch to me, and the figures quoted for the energy required to mine one don't quite smell right to me either At least if there is an energy cost associated with creating them it does to some degree put a floor under their price though!
I think that the inevitable way forward for currency is the complete removal of physical cash, and I think it is probably only a decade away. Without cash, consumption tax i. I'm sure that there must be significant downsides to going cashless, and I'd be interested to hear what they are, because I cant really see any of significance and it just seems so obvious and inevitable. I agree with your assessment of the positives.
However, here are a few down sides to a cashless society that can be seen by very ordinary person: Errors are onerous to have corrected. It is difficult even now to change providers, with the accompanying need to advise every other body with who one deals; this would become more so if there were no cash system for small and frequent transactions - again, an invitation to defraud those less able to supervise their financial activities.
AND 4 A system where all transactions are mediated through electronic systems is not only an invitation to forgo our privacy, but a guarantee that we do so. Number 4 is the down side that bothers me most. It is not only about our sense of personal autonomy, but also freedom from being pestered by advertisers. Already I can't buy a book on line without being bombarded by other on-line retailers. I am so tired of this that I no longer use a credit card or any 'loyalty' cards and pay cash when ever possible.
Thanks Connie, you make good points Government payments to the vulnerable are already made electronically - anyone receiving welfare necessarily must have a bank account as far as I understand it. The problem only exists for the homeless who have fallen outside of the welfare net and rely on begging. This is still clearly a problem, but surely not an insurmountable one. Busking on the other hand would be pretty much dead as a pastime, and that would be a mostly sad thing.
Cash is also vulnerable to theft albeit on a small scale , but more generally with the threat of violence around it. Given that a very significant portion of the economy is already cashless, we would not be introducing new risks we already face them , so much as eliminating existing ones. As I said in point 2, a significant proportion of our economy is cashless already, so the administrative burden already exists.
I would suggest that this administrative burden is inherently scale-able however and in the long run would be more efficient than a mixed currency economy. I agree that this point about privacy is the most significant and structurally unavoidable problem.
Whilst the advertising issue doesn't bother me at all a. You cannot walk m down the street in a city and not be bombarded with advertisements, b. I quite like getting new reading suggestions from my kindle and am happy to ignore the unsuitable ones! The fascinating question and potential positive trad-off here in my opinion is the effect that a cashless society would have on crime.
Crime would, by and large be forced into the crypto currencies, but the entry and exit of AUD from those currencies would still be traceable. Quite a few claims of "lack of research", and "what about cost of paper money", but no one seems to have thought to use Google. Ten seconds yields the answer: An unintended consequence of the mining craze, as with all endeavours in their pioneering phase, has been a boom in energy-efficient, low-cost, complex processors.
Anyway Professor Quiggan, if bitcoin is indeed a fatally flawed currency, a person in your position can rest easy, right? Surely Gresham's Law will eventually win out, no? I haven't read all the comments so forgive me if I am repeating someone else.
Surely the problem here is the burning of fossil fuels for electricity rather than the Bitcoin mining using electricity? Oops, I just contributed to the end of the world by using electricity to type this comment, eating Perspective would be a nice breath of fresh air.
In a word tulips? The only slightly longer version is that bitcoins for all the effort you put into trying to disparage them are inherently as valuable or as worthless as any other fiat currency by agreement between those who exchange it.
Trading in them may well in that case take on an aspect of speculative trading in any other commodity. I would argue that hedge funds raking over derivatives and options are also a damnable waste of resources producing adding nothing worthwhile to wealth creation in any truer sense of the word.
Of course that might just be a prejudice of mine that's showing, but isn't this? Those who've the most to fear from crypto currency are probably a combination of the banks and their investors.
We may not like banks but investors include most of us, and all of us who've been sold the superannuation miracle. You may argue in that sense that it can't be allowed to succeed because of some deleterious effects of the stability of other sectors of the market we know and love.
I think ultimately though the technology in a good way questions the viability of currency exchange under the current unnecessarily expensive auspices. There simply is no reason or justification for the fees and charges that are levied on most forms of transaction if you can secure it with crypto technology.
I was wondering when someone was going to point these things out. Advances in parallel computing technology change the numbers somewhat, but Professor Quiggin's overall argument still holds. Actually, bitcoin has a built-in self adjusting difficulty mechanism which aims to keep the creation of bitcoin at a constant rate, currently 25 bitcoins every 10 minutes. Advances in computing won't make any difference, as the difficulty of the computational problem will automatically adjust.
That's just like saying because there is only a limited number of sporting trophies, no-one will use anabolic steroids, HGR, blood transfusions. Of course the individual seeks a competitive advantage even if it doesn't result in a greater number of prizes for the economy as a whole. Yes, this does drive development of optimised systems even though it won't result in more bitcoins overall. Very surprised to see such a one sided and unsupported article written by an academic.
What's your backing and research for this argument? Most articles I've read, growing acceptance of Bitcoin at various stock exchanges and the beginnings of banks to recognise bitcoin services seem to suggest the exact opposite of this.
This article is written like 1st year's facebook rant, too emotional to be taken seriously, and so much so that you almost have to suspect the Professor is actually testing a hypothesis for some research. Probably around testing if the thought on correlation of bitcoin media still has a volatile effect on bitcoin pricing i. Looking forward to reading the results, professor.
What a flawed article. Firstly, Once the bitcoin exists it doesn't wear out or be consumed so its not necessary to create more. At the moment its the end of the gold rush. Once the number of coins stabilizes due to new ones being out of reach the currency will stabilize. Secondly, You mention that it takes 3 tonnes of C02 to produce a bit coin but then said if the price of power doubles the amount of CO2 produced halves.
That makes no sense. The amount of energy produced to build the coin is fixed therefore the amount of carbon produced is fixed. The only variable in the equation is the cost of power. If the price of electricity doubles, then you need to find a way to make a Bitcoin with half the power, in order for it to still be profitable. A by-product would be half the emissions say 1. I'm going to go out on a limb here and congratulate Professor Quiggin for writing one of the funniest, tongue-in-cheek articles I have ever read.
Judging by the number of furious and super-serious replies he's garnered to date I think he may well be in line for a major comedy award complete with a Bitcoin cheque. I thank him for not keeping it until April 1 next year - in a world where conventional business models are breaking down I think it's only appropriate that spoof articles can be traded any day of the year and not have to attract the sorts of penalty rates that keeping them for only that one preordained day in April normally attract.
If I'm right, you must be laughing your nuts off reading what you've generated from the gullible here today. I think this article is a waste of energy. Thousands of computers, reading an article, that the author doesn't even truly understand the concept of bitcoin or alt-coins. I've seen hydro powered bitcoin operations. So your statement for that is invalid Gold is mostly worthless, as the plating in electronics boils down to pennies these days instead of the dollars 30 years ago.
Ask any person or company that tries to recycle gold from electronics. Most of this article is based on misguided information and a lack of fact. I think the author needs to get a clue, or become more educated in what they are tearing down. I was going to make my Daughter a kite, but after reading the worthy Professors argument about the use of "dirty" power I decided that the kite components, paper, string and plastic struts, would have used much of this dirty power to manufacture, and added to the Bitcoin crisis this was way over the top.
So I burnt it. Whilst Bitcoin has many of the advantages that previous posters have pointed out, I think many are also missing the point of this post: For households to acquire Bitcoin equivalent to their current "cash and near cash" holdings would require electricity production equivalent to several times their current annual household electricity consumption. Given we still need our fiat cash to pay our taxes etc. That I think is the point of the article.
That's not how bitcoin mining works. It's not like it costs x electricity to make a bitcoin and then twice that to make two, as if you were physically digging gold out of the ground. It could easily cost less next month if fewer people were trying at the same time. It costs electricity and computing power to secure the network. Not to mention we don't actually need any more to be created.
The world could get on just fine with the 15 million or so that are already out there. The new ones are just incentive to get people to contribute power to keep the network secure. Bitcoin is far more trackable to authorities than cash has it has a record of past transactions called a block chain that logs and displays every Bitcoin transaction in real time, and makes that data available to anyone.
It is not controlled by any government, though it can be taxed. The free market determines its value and not the committee of a central bank or finance minister. Transactions are almost instantaneous and cost free.
Mining will stop because the algorithm is limited to 21 million coins. Each coin is divisible by 8 decimal places allowing fractional exchange. It can operate concurrently with existing fiat money, real currency gold and silver or other crypto-currencies such as Litecoin.
It may be the way of the future, in which banking will be greatly reduced in importance as lending will be peer to peer, all transaction public and coins held in an individuals own crypto currency coin wallet. A currency revolution not less important than the invention of coinage in ancient times. Or a passing fad. In the meantime no harm in having a few Bitcoins as a hedge. This is an incredibly disingenuous article.
The Professor has basically outed himself as a "flat-earther" of the economic world. There wasn't even any attempt to compare the energy use of other currencies versus bitcoin? What about all the mining for hard currencies? Or the towers and towers of bankers sitting at computers that Bitcoin could completely tear down!?
Other currencies are exactly the same, using bank's supercomputers to verify transaction, what's their energy use? Also even the slightest bit of research would have found that bitcoins have become harder to mine deliberately! Bitcoins have several advantages over fiat currencies - one of the my favorites is that they can't be devalued by central governments! They have inherent scarcity! Just crazy, I'm ashamed that my Universities' name is also attached to this nonsense. Lots of complaints about "no research" on my part, but none of any attempts to do research by the critics.
The Bitcoin network does more than mint money. It processes transactions allowing peers to transact without any censorship. It does this in a secure and immutable way without any central trusted party. This nuance seems to have eluded you. John, a section of your article reads "Switching even a small part of a typical household's financial transactions to Bitcoins must therefore entail a massive increase in electricity use". This logic is incorrect. The number of transactions in the bitcoin network is not relevant to the amount of power consumed.
Miners expend energy by solving blocks, not individual transactions. A block can contain zero or many transactions. A block is mined approximately every 10 minutes regardless of how many transactions are being created.
The core software controls this period automatically by altering the difficulty of the cryptographic puzzle. As more miners join the network, the difficulty is increased to keep the block solution period at 10 minutes. As miners drop off the network, maybe because they are inefficient or have higher energy costs then the difficulty is reduced.
It's not just the cost of one physical note, it's the cost of the whole system that secures, transports, regulates and supports that note and its 'value'. Think how much better off the planet would be if all the bankers were out planting trees instead of sitting in air-conditioned skyscrapers, for example. You are right, however, that the computer cycles used in bitcoin mining could be put to better use.
That is a shame, but I think Satoshi did a pretty good job with other aspects of Bitcoin. Because you don't seem to understand that bitcoin is not just the currency, it's the distribution network as well. That said, your point of energy consumption is already well known which is why there are other cryptocurrencies that use proof-of-stake, delegated proof-of-stake, etc.
Every bank in the world is researching ways which they can leverage blockchain technology to reduce their costs precisely because the current system is so inefficient. I can't speak for others, but I never disputed your core claim. Just the background and supporting evidence was anything but. There are many statements in your piece which are misleading at best. When you say this: It may very well be complex, but that calculation confirms all the previous transactions.
It has tremendous value. If you are going to make a connection between this calculation and the electricity consumed to make it work, then it's only fair to compare that against the global financial system's electricity consumption.
For the benefit of me and the hundreds of others who don't know what a Bitcoin is, could somebody please explain. Bitcoin is a form of electronic cash. It differs from regular cash in that it can be transmitted across the internet. There are many types of electronic cash, but bitcoin is the most widely accepted of them. Please note that credit cards, paypal, bank transfers etc.
You cannot use them unless you have a bank account. Your bitcoin is like the computer record in your bank that says how much money you have in your account, with the following differences: The computer record is in a public ledger, visible to anyone in the world.
This ledger is called "the block chain". You can receive bitcoins from, or send them to anyone in the world for a very small fee, and your transaction cannot be blocked by corporations or governments. Most shops don't accept bitcoin payments yet - they're mainly useful for online purchases. You keep track of your bitcoins with a program called a wallet, that runs on your computer or phone.
Your wallet has a number, which identifies your coins in the public ledger. Without your wallet, you can't spend your coins, so don't lose it! This sensationalist puff piece has no grounding in reality. The Bitcoin network along with the bitcoin tokens has enormous utility that seems to go right over the author's head.
The energy used isn't just for creating new bitcoins. The computations and consequently the energy consumed is what secures the network and gives it trust. This trust is distributed across the network, not relying on any central authority.
This is why bitcoin is the people's money. Bitcoin won't go away and the value won't approach zero as the author seems to hope. Wake up, John Quiggin. The world is changing and guess what, technology matters. Have you not learned your lesson? The internet isn't just for geeks. So here are some back of the envelope calcs to check the author's numbers.
The most efficient bitcoin mining machines have a mining speed rated at 0. This is similar to the author's numbers. It seems pretty emissions intensive - and it will become even more emission-y as the mining rate continues to drop - unless a low-carbon electricity source can be cheaper than coal.
The flaw in the argument is that this is only the cost of creating the coin. Among other things, it also includes the cost of distribution, security and auditing. For the value you have calculated to have meaning you would have to compare it with the cost of either: Or - Mining and refining the materials used, turning those materials into a credit card, assigning and adding value to that credit card, transferring the value from the users bank to a credit card transaction clearing house and from the credit card transaction clearing house to the sellers bank, the systems both IT based and people based used to detect and prevent fraud in all three organisations, The systems used to keep internal and external parties from gaining access to this highly sensitive information, The systems used to monitor the other systems for maintenance purposes.
Once people become a part of these "systems" the cost financially and in CO2 emissions goes up exponentially. Bit coin removes duplication and people from the equation. Yes, you make some good points and of course fiat currency has embedded and ongoing emissions. Do you have any data to compare? Do the calculations for bitcoin mining actually need to be otherwise purposeless? If these computers were doing something useful as part of mining Then none of this would matter.
Or if it has to be otherwise useless, can its creation be limited to electricity markets with proactive carbon prices? Professor, What is the cost to the environment of inflation and government regulation of fiat currency? Perhaps you should be doing more research into the possible applications for bitcoin. I was initially sceptical about Bitcoin, that is until I did my own research on it.
Bitcoin will be the single most transformative technology the world has seen since the internet, like many emerging technologies it takes time for the infrastructure to be built. I've become a strong believer and supporter of Bitcoin, it is here to stay, it can't go away and is gaining in popularity and acceptance.
Australia's big four banks have attempted to stifle bitcoin in Australia, that alone should be reason to check out for yourself why they are so scared about it and the benefits to you of a decentralised currency. Also check out what the Winklevoss Twins the guys who started Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg are saying about Bitcoin - In their own words they "eat sleep and breath Bitcoin".
It is far more than just a currency. It is the future and it's here to stay. Just a thought here from someone who doesn't know much about Bitcoin: All the Bitcoin supporters in this comment section repeatedly mention Bitcoin creation is limited to 21 million Bitcoins.
What is to stop an interested party from purchasing every single Bitcoin created and refusing to trade them, essentially making Bitcoin redundant? You will need to have a lot of money. Current market value is over 5 Billion AUD, and this would increase if someone was buying them up. You will have to convince all current owners to sell to you. What's to stop someone buying all the gold in the world?
Really fundamentally the same thing, the only significant difference there is that more people care about gold and the remaining supply of gold on Earth is substantially larger than the remaining supply of bitcoins. Maybe I'm stupid, but I just don't see how this is could possibly result in significant harm to the environment.
This article claims that generating four Bitcoins consumes the same amount of energy that the average US household uses. Taking that on face value, we need to know how many Bitcoins are being generated in order to see exactly how much energy is being wasted. As there are currently somewhere around 53, Bitcoins being mined each year, that's a worldwide total energy equivalent of 13, average US households.
That's a minuscule amount compared to, for example all the energy consumed by the hundreds of millions of US households. The number will halve next year and continue to halve every fourth year.
The article also seems to assume that the amount of energy consumed has some connection to the number of transactions made. Quiggin does not once mention the word "blockchain. Consider this sentence from Quiggin's article: Fortunately, it's unlikely that the digital currency will survive long enough to generate the environmental disaster that would arise if it became a major part of the financial system.
Fortunately, it's unlikely that the blockchain will survive long enough to generate the environmental disaster that would arise if it became a major part of the financial system.
In many cases, arguments for or against "Bitcoin" can be resolved by substituting "blockchain" in the appropriate places.
Bitcoins themselves are nothing more than a way to pay anonymous individuals working to maintain a fully distributed, non-centralized network. There is no Bureau to write to, no phone number to call. It was hypothesized by Satoshi that such payment tokens would have fiat value because they would represent the work that was done to produce a valuable product -- the blockchain. The gold miner Howard in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" insisted that the value of gold "represents the labor that went into the findin' and the gettin' of it.
And what use is the blockchain? I think primarily it will first be used as a worldwide notary public, first by individuals for their own private records and assurance and possibly as evidence in court.
Next, it will be used as a way of absolutely, positively knowing whether or not your database has been hacked into and changed and proving it in public, all for a pittance in cost. And for that purpose it will be used by millions of individuals and institutions. I suspect that eventually governments will actually require banks to back up their hashed data onto the bitcoin blockchain as an act of public accountability, the way individuals and institutions today have to publish Legal Notices in newspapers.
These uses will have a positive cumulative impact on the environment. It sounds trivial at first, but consider the number of car-trips that will no longer be made to your local Notary Public, and the number of Notary Public ledgers that will no longer be printed. Once the blockchain is legally certified for this purpose and it almost certainly will be you will be able to just do it yourself at home.
As for data backup and security, consider the reduction in fraud, lawsuits, and waste once companies can know for certain that the data. As regards blockchain, I have a genuinely open mind, and some questions. Can you spell out how you achieve the necessary proof of work for, as you put it, "a pittance"?
Are you assuming as I read you that it is the specific Bitcoin blockchain that is going to play this role, or blockchain technology in general? If Bitcoin, this would seem to imply a massive increase in velocity; my reading suggests this would raise a wide range of problems starting with the size of the blockchain. As regards trips to the notary, this seems to suggest a problem looking for a solution. There are perfectly workable digital signature systems out there - they don't get much use because most people are happy to accept a scanned signature for the purposes for which they used to get a handwritten one.
Professor Quiggin, I can't follow ShroudWriter's argument, but I think he may be objecting to your assumption that it requires energy to create a bitcoin. That is not so. Creation of the bitcoins associated with a block requires only a tiny amount of energy, a fraction of a joule.
The link that you failed to mention is that newly minted bitcoins are only given out in payment for a service. That service is the secure maintenance of the public ledger at the core of the bitcoin system also known as "the blockchain". It is the securing of this ledger against fraud by discovering a checksum that meets specific criteria that consumes energy.
People aren't really "mining" the actual bitcoins to "create" them. That is only a metaphor. Because of this I think it is a mistake to say, as you do, that "the creation of a new Bitcoin requires the performance of a complex calculation that has no value except to show that it has been done. To be fair, this is not equivalent to the cost of printing a dollar bill. It is equivalent to the cost of running the computerised accounting and auditing systems of all of the banks in the world.
Wouldn't it be fair to say that it has value because people WANT to use it for certain things? Furthermore, what about government currencies that people are required to use that people don't want to use? What happens to the value of those currencies? The article totally misses the point. Yes, there is an environmental cost associated with mining bitcoin, but so is the case for almost everything we find useful.
The question is, what do we get for our money? In the case of bitcoin, what we are buying is a decentralized, anonymous currency that can be traded globally without government interference. How can an economics professor not see the value in this? The writing, transmission and display of this article is a true waste of energy. I blame the liberals for raising the retirement age.
Good to see Professor John rightfully slapped down for a very short sighted article. Professor John's comment "all viable currencies are underpinned by the fact that the currency has a use outside its role as a medium of exchange" is just plain wrong with respect to gold.
And this doesn't apply to just gold and Bitcoins What is the true economic value of gold? Will these items also tend to zero or at least a very low number? How is it an economics Professor doesn't understand this?
Regarding whether bitcoin has "value" and why: There is a value in being able to provably and irreversibly sending money that cannot be counterfeited over the internet. There's a value in doing this with an open-source, decentralized, peer-to-peer fashion instead of being at the mercy of a confiscatory government. The blockchain, and its mining mechanism, provide all of these features provable, irreversible, non-counterfeitable, reliable, trustless, decentralized, peer-to-peer.
Happy to write a follow-up if you are interested in why exactly this requires mining in the form that bitcoin has.
Just so that we understand this correctly: In that case keeping your TV on for the sole purpose of watching TV is a waste of energy or playing videogames on your PC for the sole purpose of playing videogames is a waste of energy. BTW the value of a Bitcoin is exactly where it's supposed to be, that is it's the market that determines the price.
The buyer accepts that the bitcoin algorithm is worth x amount of money. It is no different than banknotes. The intrinsic value of any printed banknote is the same which is the cost of the paper.
Quiggin welcome to the 21st century. Or, as an academic, when confonted with a complicated kind of human behaviour not easily explained in your world view, you might have a closer look to figure out what's going on.
Bitcoin is a triple entry global accounting ledger. Not only are the books balanced, every transaction is notarized through proof of work. Sure a bitcoin is a unit of account in this system and so people assign value to it but it can host any matter of valuable good that can be expressed digitally including equities, real-estate, identity, votes, domains, contracts, you name it. The energy invested in the mining process is the energy invested in the security and verification of this global resource.
It is far from wasteful. This looks like an orchestrated article sponsored by the NSA. The computations keep the network secure and prevent double spending. Bitcoin transaction fees are a lot less than this, and this is partly because the overall cost. Professor Quiggin may be a professor, but he's evidently not very clued up on Bitcoin.
His argument is flawed because he hasn't taken into account the following: That would mean, this hypothetical household's monetary supply could be mined in less than 5 minutes by an average mining rig. Hardly the catastrophic environmental wastage that he is peddling. I know nothing about butcoin, but bought some coin and tried to do a trade in January. Nothing arrived and I presume it is untraceable as it is meant to be.
I wonder if trading binary options perhaps we can trade binary options on bitcoin, why not is a simple way of capturing the complexity of the modern business world.
It seems to me a hoax, and nonsense, to be trying to make money in this way. But perhaps we can take "trading binary options" as a proxy for many other problems that are currently hard to solve - e. Maybe trading binary options, like studying something else exotic like philosophy or art, helps us understand the world better.
Presumably if we spend more time on some activity, rather than less, we are hoping that this will "pay off" in some way, e. When greed, lust for power and human fallibility make their way into the Bitcoin world it will end up like every other currency and every other utopian belief system. It is hard make more of it So are cowrie shells. Bitcoin is still alive!
What a foolish argument. Paraphrasing, "Bitcoin should die because it uses a lot of electricity. What makes mining bitcoin any less valid than searching for ET? If you have inside knowledge of a topic in the news, contact the ABC. ABC teams share the story behind the story and insights into the making of digital, TV and radio content. Read about our editorial guiding principles and the enforceable standard our journalists follow.
Franken-food and plant-based protein — the future of food is coming fast and it's slaughter-free. Supermarkets regularly defend their wanton use of plastic, claiming its what customers want — despite the increasing clamour from unhappy shoppers on social media who clearly don't need their bananas wrapped in clingfilm.
By North America correspondent Stephanie March. In the hillside enclave of Los Feliz in central Los Angeles the playground and classrooms of Immaculate Heart High School are abuzz with chatter about the upcoming royal wedding. Mohamed, a Cairo donkey barber, uses tramadol daily to cope with gruelling work and grinding poverty like an growing number of Egyptians, another example of the opioid crisis that is expanding worldwide.
A chain of block erupters used for bitcoin mining. Comments Add a comment. Alert moderator mike j: Alert moderator John S: Alert moderator David Ferstat: Alert moderator ron n: Alert moderator Old Red: Alert moderator Paul M Covers: Eric Alert moderator worrierqueen: Alert moderator Nick Santamaria: It can also be hacked and stolen as has been shown many times already Alert moderator mark op: Stop spreading misunderstanding Alert moderator Rex: Kindly, Sam Alert moderator worrierqueen: Alert moderator Peter S.: I invest on these platforms Alert moderator Tropicalcat: Alert moderator mark op: Might not seem like a big deal to you, but ask the greeks what they would prefer after having the government dip its hand into their back pocket and take money directly out of their bank accounts Alert moderator Gordon: I don't think its logical or helpful to demonize an entire technological accomplishment because one aspect of it doesn't exceed the current system, especially when almost every other characteristic is far superior Alert moderator James Picone: Alert moderator Mena Reno: I am positive he has a bank account in a brick and mortar bank with millions and millions of dollars in it thanks to people buying and transacting Bitcoin Alert moderator Richard: Alert moderator James Picone: Alert moderator Craig of North Brisbane: Alert moderator Dr Bombay: D Alert moderator notathome: Alert moderator Living Room of Satoshi: Alert moderator mick white: Richard Mullins Alert moderator You what now: Alert moderator Sub Pontem: Alert moderator John Quiggin: Alert moderator Hudson Godfrey: Alert moderator David T: Alert moderator Lee eel: As for data backup and security, consider the reduction in fraud, lawsuits, and waste once companies can know for certain that the data Alert moderator John Quiggin: Alert moderator BTC Vega: Alert moderator fiscally responsible: So ridiculous a waste of time to address his points Alert moderator Homo Sapiens: Alert moderator hec hogan: