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China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

reuters.com

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Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#201

Post by ThomPete »

deelowe wrote: post #170
mrpopo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 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…

The US led the world in overall reduction of CO2 emissions in 2017 mostly due to the deployment of cheap renewables with an overall reduction of 0.9%. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36953

No, it was mostly due to shale gas, not renewables.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#202

Post by [deleted] »

soVeryTired wrote: post #185
PycptN2MH wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of a nation failing to repel an invasion yet maintaining the integrity of its currency?

You're shifting the goalposts. Lack of protection against invasion doesn't mean you're going to get invaded. Maintaining a standing army isn't protection against invasion either.

[deleted]

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#203

Post by shawabawa3 »

jfk13 wrote: post #175
atrus wrote: post #107

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.

And armies. Why doesn't some gang just march into a few of the big hydro-powered ASIC mining centres and take over control, thus enabling them to steal all the bitcoins. What prevents that? The armed power of nation-states to enforce a generally-agreed order on societies.

> thus enabling them to steal all the bitcoins

Just FYI, a 51% attack doesn't allow you to "steal all the bitcoins"

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#204

Post by asdff »

tudorizer wrote: post #94
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #79

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.

As a techie, you should still apprectiate the fact that Bitcoin mining is the first financial system that can be measured in terms of energy impact. Existing systems, banks and all adjacent institutions and companies, are close to impossible to track and measure.

It's still impossible to measure if you are getting into semantics here. How much energy does it take to keep the coinbase servers running? How much energy does it take to keep the coinbase IT people's houses heated? How much energy does it take to keep the lights on in the coinbase office? That's also impossible to track if you wanted to jump down the B.S. rabbit hole.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#205

Post by crimsonalucard »

trickstra wrote: post #133
crimsonalucard wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mining bitcoin with renewables is still a waste. You are now wasting renewable energy instead of nonrenewable energy. Both which despite the wording are limited.

"Waste" means you have no use for it. Yet some people are willing to pay for the Bitcoin, they obviously see some use for it... the fact that you don't or can't even imagine what use that might be doesn't make it a "waste". Let's say you go to such place with cheap electricity, start your own business, use that cheap electricity and produce something. If you cannot generate the same profit with your product as the bi…

Humans are not rational beings. They do not always purchase things they need. Fentanyl and Heroin are obvious examples.

Obesity is a problem in the united states and represents the over purchasing of food.

- Let's say you go to such place with cheap electricity, start your own business, use that cheap electricity and produce something. If you cannot generate the same profit with your product as the bitcoin miners, then that's a waste. You just wasted electricity on your business that could otherwise be used to mine bitcoins and turn them into more dollars - more value for somebody.

Value cannot be produced out of thin air. Mining a bitcoin without doing "work" is the equivalent of having a printing press and printing money. No work is done.

When you print money it is a form of theft not a form of work. Most countries recognize it and classify it as counterfeit. When you exchange a counterfeit dollar for a real product that required work, you are doing an act of thievery. When you mine a bitcoin then exchange it for real money, it is similar to theft. The only difference is the person you exchange the money with has knowledge about what bitcoin is, and the "work" (nothing) you did to get it. Sort of like how when a drug addict buys some heroin he's either in too deep or for users just starting out, he's ignorant.

A currency that constantly uses up energy is more wasteful than a currency that does not. Simple logic.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#206

Post by keymone »

Nursie wrote: post #190
keymone wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are middlemen and your slaims are ridiculous fantasy this is an assertion from your previous message. > Miners are the middlemen this is an elaboration for your assertion, that was missing from your previous message. you don't have to lie, it's fine if you admit your mistake and fix it. > Miners are the middlemen, complete with fees this is false. middlemen have control over the process. miners don't control…

> this is an elaboration for your assertion, that was missing from your previous message. Not really. Who else was it going to be, it's not like I'm the first to point this out. > miners don't control who can transact with whom Of course they do. It's up to them which transactions to include in a block. > transaction fees are still orders of magnitude lower than the actual flat block reward People who like bitcoin li…

> It's up to them which transactions to include in a block.

and "them" is not a single entity or even small number of entities. miners compete for block rewards and every transaction with a fee contributes to the profit - whatever malicious miners choose to leave out will be included by non-malicious miners making them more profitable.

calling miners middlemen when they would only have actual control over which transactions appear on the chain if majority of miners colluded (destroying the value proposition of bitcoin in the process) is very disingenuous.

> talk about inflation and QE as theft from their pockets. The block reward is a fee extracted from the ecosystem in the same way.

i don't even... QE and other fiscal measures are short term decisions made by bunch of powerful humans behind closed doors. Bitcoin emission schedule was decided ten years ago and has virtually zero chance of being changed without destroying the project and it's value. you must be trolling right now if you say you don't see the difference.

as for why is there bitcoin emission schedule at all - because that's probably the most fair process of distributing bitcoin.

> So yeah, you did, you said it was monetary value expressed as pure energy, which is meaningless

either you start reading and quoting me correctly or this discussion is over, i'm done with your manipulative tactics.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#207

Post by keymone »

jcranmer wrote: post #193
keymone wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why obsolete? i never said that. bitcoin will just decouple money security from state security. which is why when you compare energy consumption, you need to include at least some chunk of resources dedicated to army, defence, etc.

You said "do these calculations take into account energy equivalent of running all the armies in the world, funding their wars and conflicts?" That's not "at least some chunk", that's the entire cost that you're trying to wedge in there.

ok, feel free to only include partial cost. how does that change my point?

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#208

Post by jsutton »

asgionio1234 wrote: post #188
kaolti wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny and sad to see how, instead of seeing opportunities, the forum with the most open minded tech people will rather go with "SHUT IT DOWN"

Yeah, and I'm closed minded for refusing to try crystal healing. Open-mindedness is a virtue only if it helps you find the truth. Often it is more useful to judiciously discard ideas which have been debunked.

Which ideas in this thread have been debunked?

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#209

Post by ryanlol »

asgionio1234 wrote: post #195
sekai wrote: post #161

Why a Chinese Bitcoin mining ban is good news: * It kills the narrative that China controls Bitcoin. * It severely diminishes the Chinese state's ability to disrupt the Bitcoin network by commandeering hashpower. * The Chinese miners will move their operations overseas, leading to higher geographical/jurisdictional decentralization. * It becomes relatively speaking more profitable for Chinese ASIC manufacturers to di…

>This likely makes overall Bitcoin mining greener, hurting the Bitcoin climate change FUD. I dislike the fact that Bitcoin fans have commandeered the term "FUD". The term originally referred to coming out of Microsoft, but you are using it to refer to well-intentioned people saying things that are true. It's the same as what happened to the term "fake news." Bitcoin has some very serious problems. We all know what th…

But the whole bitcoin climate change story isn’t true, the people making the claims may very well be well intentioned, they just aren’t correct.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#210

Post by thisisit »

mrb wrote: post #82
kevintb wrote: post #17

Good. There are few things more wasteful in energy and minimal in doing good for the world. Widespread bitcoin adoption would be catastrophic for the Earth and climate change efforts [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8

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…

I am really curious about the points you make in your post.

> This Nature article was debunked by other researchers.

Who are these other researcher? Care to link to their research on this?

> when in fact 60-70% of the mining power comes from a single row in this table: Antminer S9

How do we know that?

> It is not unrealistic to imagine the proportion of CO2 per kWh could be in a century 20% of what it is today.

Again, how do we know that?

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