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China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

reuters.com

211–220 of 325 posts

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#211
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…

Bitcoin certainly has its share of problems. There is nothing true, however, about Bitcoin causing climate change.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#212
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…

* It becomes relatively speaking more profitable for Chinese ASIC manufacturers to directly sell their miners compared to mining themselves. This will diminish their oversized power in the ASIC market and decentralize mining in terms of operators.

Don't see this equation actually changing. Like you mentioned, operations will just be moved elsewhere. ASIC manufacturing and mining "tech" will still be hoarded and profit maximized.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#213
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…

The funny part about Bitcoin news is that for supporters, anything is good. "This is good for Bitcoin", as they say.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#214
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…

> The term originally referred to lies coming out of Microsoft

No. It originally referred to the marketing strategy of IBM, which basically consisted of casting doubt on the viability of their competitors. "No-one's ever been fired for buying IBM."

It specifically did not mean outright lies, but the strategy of pointing out that when the market consists of an 800-pound gorilla and hordes of chimps, the chimps might be nimbler to respond to your needs and offer better prices, but you never know when one of them gets bulldozed, and if your infrastructure depends on them, that might be really bad for you. It is not necessary to lie to do this, and good FUD explicitly just consists of carefully selected verifiable factual statements that cast doubt on your competitors.

It is an extremely ballsy marketing strategy: "Yes, our product is worse and costs much more, but you know that we have done this for decades and will still be doing this and supporting you for decades to come." It sold mainframes like hot cakes, even when competing systems sometimes were literally an order of magnitude less expensive.

The association with Microsoft comes from how Gates was really impressed by it, and copied it for Microsoft, once they got big enough to use it. Unlike IBM, Microsoft used the term FUD internally, as revealed in the various documents that were leaked and/or published through discovery.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Bitcoin certainly has its share of problems. There is nothing true, however, about Bitcoin causing climate change.

It seems like someone along the way cleverly changed the valid and reasonable talking point about the intense and excessive energy use/costs away to a narrative Bitcoin (et al) are causing climate change - which is of course absurd; one of the bigger problems of Bitcoin (et al cryptocurrencies) is that their defence mechanism depends on using a higher amount of energy than someone who'd want to attempt 50%+1 attacks (or lower % take over attempts are still possible, just not guaranteed to allow double spend).

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Of all the fantastical things bitcoiners believe, the idea that the mining industry isn't directly responsible for a huge amount of CO2 emissions is one of the most egregious.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Bitcoin certainly has its share of problems. There is nothing true, however, about Bitcoin causing climate change.

Citation needed! Renewables are not free of externalities. Hydro damages environments.

Wasting renewable energy on crypto mining prevents that energy being used for something productive and so drives the need for more renewable capacity or drives further use of fossil fuels.

Bitcoin is an environmental disaster in the making. I see mining as akin to a religious rite that diverts potential away from useful activity and towards a fantasy instead.

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#218

I wonder if bitcoin will try to go the Ethereum route and move to proof of stake [1] instead of proof of work. [1] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ

Why am I being downvoted? Is my question not valid? Is there this much hate towards ethereum from the bitcoin community?

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#219
post #82

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…

I have half a suspicion that it's the fact that it's burning through lots of fuel that is driving it's adoption. Processes in general seem to be driven by a kind of 'pressure' between low entropy and high entropy regions. This includes life itself. If life has a purpose it is to increase the flow across these low/high entropy regions. I don't think it's too outlandish to suppose some kind of hidden process that drive…

95% of transaction data is fake. We have no idea what adoption actually looks like. [1] The bitcoin price is "based on a true story" in true Hollywood fashion. Its design makes it impossible to stop the rampant and obvious manipulation. The game is rigged. No amount of technical analysis or philosophy is going to help you predict the outcome of a rigged game.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cbovaird/2019/03/22/95-of-repor...

Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining

#220
post #82

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…

I have half a suspicion that it's the fact that it's burning through lots of fuel that is driving it's adoption. Processes in general seem to be driven by a kind of 'pressure' between low entropy and high entropy regions. This includes life itself. If life has a purpose it is to increase the flow across these low/high entropy regions. I don't think it's too outlandish to suppose some kind of hidden process that drive…

Replacing an oppressive apparatus that is relying on proof of military/police power to establish trust in banking with some form of an algorithm that is relying on proof of work/energy may be energy saving at the end. Just compare how much police/military has to be maintained and related resources spent to the naked energy for mining/transactions.
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