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…
China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
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Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#212Why 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…
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
#213Why 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…
Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#214Why 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…
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
#215Earlier 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.
Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#216Earlier 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.
Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#217Earlier 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.
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
#218I 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
Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#219Earlier 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…
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cbovaird/2019/03/22/95-of-repor...
Re: China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
#220Earlier 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…