151–160 of 325 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree, point still stands though. There's pros and cons to everything. Why focus on the latter?
Do y'all just expect people to put their head in the sand, accept your currency of the future and accept their stupidity when compared to the crypto-Evangelists? I'm in a position where being able to make fast and cheap transactions between countries would benefit me, I don't even care for anonymous. Can I use crypto for that without a massive overhead? No, I can't. Should I stop focusing on the fact that I can't? If…
I think in the context of making business decisions you are absolutely right.
All I'm saying is that the benefits of an idea that has the potential to disrupt banking are much greater IMO than the cost of ironing out faults (that are sometimes exaggerated as in this case).
I'm not saying there aren't valid cons to it or that we should ignore them from a practical standpoint. We need to know what they are to fix them.
I just noticed that people are quick to dismiss something because it's not perfect and that sort of mindset is counterproductive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, Bitcoin won't raise global average temperatures by 2°C. This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. I too was asked to review it (recently, post-publication) and the gist of what they did wrong in their analysis is: * They overestimate (probably by 3x-5x) the present power consumption of miners because they assume the distribution of types of mining machine is homogenous in this table: https://github.c…
* They assume the proportion of CO2 emissions per kWh never improves over the next 100 years (great progress of renewables coming to a sudden stop?) I mostly agreed with the first two bullet points, but please show me a significant country that managed to reduce their CO2 emissions with renewables. For instance, in China, where a lot of Bitcoin mining happens, the share of renewables increases in many countries, but…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, you need to spend some sort of resource to ensure the integrity of your money supply. The dollar is backed by a few million troops. Bitcoin is backed by a few million tons of coal.
That's a pretty roundabout way of thinking. Plenty of countries have troops but an unstable currency (e.g. Venezuala). Plenty have a stable currency but no significant troops (e.g. Iceland).
Commenters are applauding the environmental implications of this policy, but I’m curious why no one is considering the human side of this ban. There are a billion people living under authoritarianism who are stuck with an increasingly devalued Yuan and steadily losing the ability to obtain other currencies. Is that not also a problem that can result in humanitarian disaster? I don’t think we should be comfortable wit…
Bitcoin trading is already essentially banned in China.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, Bitcoin won't raise global average temperatures by 2°C. This Nature article was debunked by other researchers. I too was asked to review it (recently, post-publication) and the gist of what they did wrong in their analysis is: * They overestimate (probably by 3x-5x) the present power consumption of miners because they assume the distribution of types of mining machine is homogenous in this table: https://github.c…
* They assume the proportion of CO2 emissions per kWh never improves over the next 100 years (great progress of renewables coming to a sudden stop?) I mostly agreed with the first two bullet points, but please show me a significant country that managed to reduce their CO2 emissions with renewables. For instance, in China, where a lot of Bitcoin mining happens, the share of renewables increases in many countries, but…
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/klima/treibhausgas-emis...
Renewables are the biggest increase in new power supply in Germany.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There have been previous threads on HN with some back-of-the-envelope comparisons of Bitcoin's energy consumption vs the global banking systems, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18325430 . If these rough calculations are correct, the global banking system uses ~100TWh/year (including datacentres, branches, heating in offices etc.) while Bitcoin is around one-third of that at ~30TWh/year for a negligible perc…
do these calculations take into account energy equivalent of running all the armies in the world, funding their wars and conflicts? because entire banking system exists on a premise that there is an army behind every fiat currency, so it's not really honest to exclude that from communication. bitcoin security on the other hand is backed purely by energy spent by miners.
Hint: wars predate fiat currency. You’d still need army without fiat.
When people realize that Bitcoin mining is a mechanism to prevent fraud, the energy consumption suddenly makes a lot more sense. How much waste in the world is the result of fraud and lack of trust? Quite a lot of it. That said, reducing the energy consumption of Bitcoin should be an absolute priority. Lightning Network and other such technologies help.
It doesn't really prevent fraud that isn't already a solved problem. When was the last time you had to deal with wire transfer fraud? If you buy counterfeit goods with bitcoin there's not much you can do. A credit card protects you from fraud over $50. What exactly is this bitcoin waste getting us?
As a techie and a math lover, I was initially excited with Bitcoin, and did a bit of mining, transactions, etc. But after learning about the environmental impact, I no longer support Bitcoin. It's just not worth the cost, a very beautiful idea but with a serious flaw (which I hope can be fixed in the future). So this sounds quite sensible to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Miners are literally there to skim value out of a transaction. They're middlemen. And it is a waste. There are plenty of more efficient ways to make a transaction. I get that bitcoin is designed around this waste but that's hardly an excuse.
There is zero waste. You don’t understand bitcoin. Bitcoin is not about transaction efficiency or throughput, use MySQL for that. Bitcoin is about secure ownership of money, peer to peer exchange and immutable fiscal policy. What you call waste is simply price for some level of security that isn’t backed by any armies. Edit: also, no, miners aren't middlemen, that's just another misunderstanding on your part. middlem…
Hold on, the response to “Bitcoin is inefficient with energy” is that efficiency doesn’t matter? That isn’t moving the goalpost so much as removing it.