Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

A better response would have been to come up with a different definition of what you understand by useful work. A better response would have been to turn my own definition around by saying that bitcoin also brings people happiness. A better response would have been to say nothing and down vote.

Calling me a fucking moron without anything at all to add, after I took the time to reply to your 1 word comment (or to someone else's comment? I'm not clear if you're mr_woozy as well or not; I'm not leto_ii) then I have nothing else to add.

Oh, and accusing me of spewing inane generalities when the real value of art and entertainment has been called into question and vindicated throughout all of economic theory is quite rich.

not sure what you mean to be honest? "to mine state" ?

proof of stake just means the rich get to call the shots, at no expense to them. No disincentive to cheat. All previous attempts, and there were many - have failed to date.

Miners in PoW have to risk incredible amount of capital, and cheating is strongly disincentivized by that.

PoW stood the test of time.

There's also the option of just not generating the energy. I doubt the smelters were closed to make room for bitcoin miners. Reading more about this, it seems that environmental groups in Iceland are fighting the expansion of bitcoin because it is directly driving extra demand for electricity, not simply using the existing production[0] - another obvious problem if we start looking at the environment even beyond global warming. Bitcoin mining is not replacing the Aluminum smelters, it is competing with them for electricity[1], while currently not paying much of anything to the local government[2] and hiring next to no people, like most tech industries.

I'll add that I specifically mentioned scientific data centers, supercomputers, which would be much less affected by lag than an AWS region. For the power transfer issue, I specifically said that attacking the problem would mean being at the forefront of research on the matter.

And it is not my place to have productive ideas for how a country could use its natural resources. My claim was that bitcoin mining should be stopped as soon as possible, as it is driving an overall increase in power needs for the entire world, at a time we should be looking for every possible means to reduce our energy consumption. You came and brought up the extremely singular case of Iceland, as if it disproved anything. It's not like Iceland's economy is dependent on bitcoin, it's an extremely new industry that is not making a huge dent, while consuming more energy than the whole country's housing. In the end Iceland is irrelevant in the discussion of Bitcoin's impact on the world.

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/4/15/iceland-is-a-bi...

[1] https://grist.org/article/bitcoin-gobbles-up-clean-energy-ju...

[2] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/02/14/iceland-bitcoin-ene...

Oops, you're absolutely right, I was thinking of distributed payments and somehow confused that in my head with being trustless...

> the work put into the network is exactly the scarce digital asset

Not even a little. The scarce digital asset is the slot on the distributed ledger. That you currently need a load of energy to reassign digital ledger slots is an accident of history - because it was the first way that anyone worked out how to run a secure distributed database across mutually distrusting nodes where you don't need to know the participants in advance.

The work is not the scarce asset. If you doubt this, consider: the 'work' required to mine a block (and so 'create' the block reward) changes based on how much hash power the network has, and varies quite substantially between the early blocks and now, yet the bitcoins mined then are worth the same as bitcoins mined now. If lots of miners stop mining BTC, then the amount of work required to mine the next blocks will reduce, yet the bitcoins created with the lower work requirement will be worth exactly the same as bitcoins created with higher work requirements.

Obviously, in a PoW blockchain, the work is extremely important, since a PoW blockchain can't remain secure without significantly more work being done by the network than an adversary can marshal to attack the network, but that's an entirely separate thing.

You can take a valuable painting, burn it down to ash and use the ash to make ink to do a stick figure drawing. The stick figure drawing doesn't magically become 'a store of value' because you destroyed a valuable painting to make it.