I'm a fan of bitcoin, but there are clearly serious environmental detriments, and i see it ultimately becoming another regulated entity (it's already happening in india).
Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin
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Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin
#62As a Bitcoin proponent who is also concerned about it's long term sustainability, this post is an embarrassing read. The author clearly has a very poor understanding of what value Bitcoin currently has in our current macro-economic situation, and why investors (and corporations) are choosing to allocate larger parts of their portfolios in cryptocurrencies. Calling out the BTC network on its energetic inefficiency com…
The scarcity has nothing to do with the complexity in proof of work. The complexity made it costly to attack it. The scarcity comes with the idea of the number of bitcoins will be available is a hard limit.
There's a second order effect IMO: people put specialized resources into mining it. Thus people have a sunk cost. In general, people also have a sunk cost fallacy which means that the sunk cost will stay into the object/subject it was sunk in.
Due to the sunk cost fallacy, Bitcoin has more value. I know this means I'm relying on the irrationality of humans, but why wouldn't I? It's more predictive than assuming humans will be rational with regards to this subject.
Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin
#63I'm no fan of Bitcoin, seeing the project as essentially coopted and sabotaged, but I see this 'green' criticism as totally baseless.
As I wrote a couple weeks ago:
If you want to take a Puritanical attitude, any luxury product/service can be argued to be wasting resources that could be expended on essentials. In other words, its alleged lack of utility doesn't provide a justification for destroying or banning it. It's up to others to decide how to spend their resources.
If CO2 emission, and its negative externality, is specifically the problem, then the principled position is to advocate that production of all non-essential/luxury products/services use non-CO2 emitting energy inputs.
Unless the measure is agnostic to what category of non-essential activity it targets, you'd just be singling out cryptocurrency, because it's not a non-essential that you personally believe is worthwhile enough to pollute the environment in order to produce, unlike say gaming, and the massive amounts of energy that gaming GPUs use.
Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin
#64As a Bitcoin proponent who is also concerned about it's long term sustainability, this post is an embarrassing read. The author clearly has a very poor understanding of what value Bitcoin currently has in our current macro-economic situation, and why investors (and corporations) are choosing to allocate larger parts of their portfolios in cryptocurrencies. Calling out the BTC network on its energetic inefficiency com…
> the work put into the network is exactly the scarce asset that is being invested in. No! No it isn't! Gah! I'm sorry but it is so frustrating to hear this nonsense repeated over and over. Bitcoin is not valuable just because you wasted shedloads of energy to make a bitcoin! It's valuable because somebody else will exchange something of value for it. It's incredibly maddening how so many crypto-libertarians suddenly…
Scarcity is the important thing here. Making Bitcoin hard to compute increases their scarcity.
The amount of work that was put in, does not directly drive the price.
The point of "Marxist" labor theory, is that you shouldn't pay workers less, than the value of what they produce. I don't think Bitcoin miners ever made that claim, unionized and found their class consciousness to get paid the real value...
Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're going to follow this analogy, what are the beneficial side effects from bitcoin? Better ASICs that do nothing but calculate sha256 hashes? Easier money-laundering? New venues for tax evasion? I guess censorship-resistant online value transfer is worth something, but I'm not sure it outweighs all the negatives.
Forcing budget reform because the government wouldn't be able to rely on printing money.
.. but should instead increase austerity, cut social programs, and raise taxes?
Besides, the seignorage revenue is pretty tiny in western economies..
Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're going to follow this analogy, what are the beneficial side effects from bitcoin? Better ASICs that do nothing but calculate sha256 hashes? Easier money-laundering? New venues for tax evasion? I guess censorship-resistant online value transfer is worth something, but I'm not sure it outweighs all the negatives.
Forcing budget reform because the government wouldn't be able to rely on printing money.
You would still need a lending infrastructure outside of bitcoin to handle the economy, and then it would be trivial to return to fractional reserve banking with bitcoin instead of dollars. As long as people don't all call in their debts at the same time, which would be catastrophic either way, the system would work with bitcoin just like it works today (if bitcoin weren't so ridiculously slow and expensive to register a transaction, that is) .
Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin
#67As a Bitcoin proponent who is also concerned about it's long term sustainability, this post is an embarrassing read. The author clearly has a very poor understanding of what value Bitcoin currently has in our current macro-economic situation, and why investors (and corporations) are choosing to allocate larger parts of their portfolios in cryptocurrencies. Calling out the BTC network on its energetic inefficiency com…
> the work put into the network is exactly the scarce asset that is being invested in. No! No it isn't! Gah! I'm sorry but it is so frustrating to hear this nonsense repeated over and over. Bitcoin is not valuable just because you wasted shedloads of energy to make a bitcoin! It's valuable because somebody else will exchange something of value for it. It's incredibly maddening how so many crypto-libertarians suddenly…
But why are people willing to exchange something of value for it? Because they can trust in it serving as a secure way to transfer tokens of ownership. And that is only possible thanks to the PoW computations, which have to be expensive enough that attacking the system would be more costly than the value you could extract through an attack.
So, in a sense its value indeed derives directly from the work put into the system. Which is not to say there aren't alternatives (I'm really curious how Proof of Stake will change the Crypto landscape), but at least for BTC, that's how it is currently.
Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin
#68The author misses the point. The root of the problem is that electricity is not carbon free. What the electricity is used for is irrelevant. What the author suggests would be similar to saying, "let's stop climate change by minimizing our driving instead of transitioning to electric transport."
But that's exactly the best way to reduce global warming, minimize consumption.
Obviously to minimize consumption you should cut away the things that provide the least value for the highest reduction. So for example turn of lights during the night in empty buildings is much better than using renewable energy to power the lights.
Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin
#69There is fundamentally no way to reduce bitcoin or blockchain energy consumption, it is the very thing which enables decentralized trustless transactions and the quality required implies a minimum power use. Everything else uses authority in one way or another, and is vulnerable in ways btc is not.
Reducing energy use for environmental reasons is ridiculous, the sun gives plenty of power and we have fissile materials to last for many millennia. The problem isn't power use, its power production, which requires global enforcement of carbon emission laws.
Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin
#70As a Bitcoin proponent who is also concerned about it's long term sustainability, this post is an embarrassing read. The author clearly has a very poor understanding of what value Bitcoin currently has in our current macro-economic situation, and why investors (and corporations) are choosing to allocate larger parts of their portfolios in cryptocurrencies. Calling out the BTC network on its energetic inefficiency com…
> Calling out the BTC network on its energetic inefficiency completely misses the point that the work put into the network is exactly the scarce digital asset, and hence the store of value.
Why would that matter? The problem is the huge amount of greenhouse gases getting released because of this store of value. Whether it makes some economic sense or not is irrelevant to the discussion of whether it should be allowed to continue on environmental grounds.