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Bitcoin breaks above $20k

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11–20 of 473 posts

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#11
post #2

What's the carbon footprint of BTC like these days? Has any progress been made on mitigating this fundamental design issue?

BTC works perfectly fine without carbon output, its depends on energy creation though (just like any other form of money). The Paris agreement was a big step moving humanity towards sustainable energy. US made progress in voting for a politician who promised to join the Paris agreement again. We'll see whether it will really happen.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#12
post #2

What's the carbon footprint of BTC like these days? Has any progress been made on mitigating this fundamental design issue?

Ah HN, where the utopian cyberpunk dreaming of a decentralized uncontrollable currency meets the utopian environmentalist to whom any cause is evil that uses carbon.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#13

I wonder where the money comes from that funds this price. I'm very afraid that people who should know better, like pension funds, start buying this crap, in search for any return. This game of musical chairs will come down eventually.

https://www.coindesk.com/ruffer-confirms-744m-bitcoin-invest... https://www.kevinrooke.com/post/microstrategys-bitcoin-debt-... https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/08/square-buys-50-million-in-bi...

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#14
post #2

What's the carbon footprint of BTC like these days? Has any progress been made on mitigating this fundamental design issue?

BTC works perfectly fine without carbon output, its depends on energy creation though (just like any other form of money). The Paris agreement was a big step moving humanity towards sustainable energy. US made progress in voting for a politician who promised to join the Paris agreement again. We'll see whether it will really happen.

The Paris agreement was not enforceable, and the US is one of the countries that has actually done most to reduce carbon output.

But hey, at least the rest of world leaders are virtue signaling about their greenness, that’ll help the planet!

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#15
I am NOT a fan of Bitcoin, but...

Watch a real-time visualization of the global Bitcoin transaction flow, as it is happening right now:

https://dailyblockchain.github.io/

Each square is a bitcoin address (like a cryptographic public key)

Each graph component is a transaction. The components appear as transactions are broadcast into the bitcoin P2P network (but before they are verified and committed to the blockchain)

Each transaction simply transfers bitcoin: from one or more input addresses, to one or more output addresses. In other words, money flows from one or more previous owners, to one or more new owners. That's how a currency works

Coin ownership flows from green to red (yellow is in/out: I pay you and take some change back at the same address)

When the output of one transaction becomes an input for a new transaction, the components are pulled together

This illustrates how Bitcoin is used. What do you notice?

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#16

I wonder where the money comes from that funds this price. I'm very afraid that people who should know better, like pension funds, start buying this crap, in search for any return. This game of musical chairs will come down eventually.

How long does the "game of musical chairs" have to go on before you consider the possibility that this isn't one? It has been a decade since BTC was launched.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#17
post #2

What's the carbon footprint of BTC like these days? Has any progress been made on mitigating this fundamental design issue?

BTC works perfectly fine without carbon output, its depends on energy creation though (just like any other form of money). The Paris agreement was a big step moving humanity towards sustainable energy. US made progress in voting for a politician who promised to join the Paris agreement again. We'll see whether it will really happen.

> BTC works perfectly fine without carbon output

I’m not sure I follow this (admittedly I don’t know much about how BTC actually works). Doesn’t mining also serve the purpose of verifying transactions?

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTC works perfectly fine without carbon output, its depends on energy creation though (just like any other form of money). The Paris agreement was a big step moving humanity towards sustainable energy. US made progress in voting for a politician who promised to join the Paris agreement again. We'll see whether it will really happen.

> BTC works perfectly fine without carbon output I’m not sure I follow this (admittedly I don’t know much about how BTC actually works). Doesn’t mining also serve the purpose of verifying transactions?

Yes- the OP means to say the issue isn't necessarily the tech but how the energy powering the tech is generated. For example a large amount of miners in China run on the cheapest local electricity source which happens to be hydroelectric.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#19

I wonder where the money comes from that funds this price. I'm very afraid that people who should know better, like pension funds, start buying this crap, in search for any return. This game of musical chairs will come down eventually.

> this crap

Sounds like your opinion. Not seeing much in the way of justification.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#20
post #5

Bitcoin is a pure computer-science phenomenon. Regardless of whether you personally feel this is a good or bad investment, I think the magnitude of this success over such a short time frame, the impact on the world, and the interest it and the wider crypto ecosystem receives from the non-tech world, is absolutely stunning. HN should accept that Bitcoin is an achievement of massive proportions.

But it's really not. Bitcoin isn't anything special. If there were any real-world use cases for it (which there don't seem to be), this would have been done long ago or would have been done organically. As it stands, interest in bitcoin was largely null, until people realized that it's a great investment opportunity where everybody can get rich (tulips, anyone?)... The rest is history. Now alt coins were popping up like mushrooms because you can make even more money when you own the coin and can keep half the stock or more for yourself.

1. There is no use case for crypto currencies, except fraud and crime.

1. There may be use cases for centralized ledgers, however it seems like people are desperately trying to "find" use cases just the same way they are trying to find machine learning use cases. It's a marketing hype.

If crypto currencies were actually "required" to solve any major use case, the implementation would follow easily from the requirements. The things its being used for right now are essentially crying out for crypto currencies and it doesn't take a genius to derive a crypt currency implementation for those requirements. However I would argue that 99% of these "use cases" are made up and would work as well or even better on a centralized architecture.

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