I had a concept that used crop futures as a virtual currency, deforming a "cloth" with "root growth" to generate randomness.
The money would go to finance food production and the currency would accrue an actual dividend once it reaches the market.
Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
301–310 of 1001 posts
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#302Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways. The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so. Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking r…
Follow the big money. Michael Saylor from Microstrategies: $1B. Elon Musk from Tesla: $1.5B. GrayScale: not sure how many dollars, but they own >550,000 bitcoins. Big money is of the opinion that bitcoin is an excellent store of value. Only a matter of time before it becomes a medium of exchange. And later on, a unit of account. By that time, you won't be asking yourself what 1 bitcoin is worth anymore. Things will b…
Bitcoin will never become a standard currency, it's slow, it has zero privacy (if I send you money once you can see ALL my transactions), it is EXTREMELY energy inefficient. Even if you believe crypto will one day become the standard (which I dont), it won't be bitcoin because there are better alternatives; proof of work is dumb, bitcoin has a finite supply of bitcoins, etc.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#303I do not understand the motivation behind the alarm of BTC mining energy utilization. In terms of pollution there are much easier targets with obvious net negatives for civilization. I'll give you one example, Teflon is a fantastic product but it does not need to coat every piece of cookware. PFOA's are likely in the blood of every American.
What motivations must one have to not see freeing billions of humans from the control of central banks as something good for humanity? Could the energy consumption of bitcoin mining be merely an engineering problem or are we being asked to eschew bitcoin mining (an cryptocurrencies) for the oh-so energy efficient global financial system?
Something smells...
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#304Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways. The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so. Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking r…
Do you understand what the purpose of money is? It allows you to abstract your work into a (near) universally acceptable intermediary. For instance: I am great at writing web APIs in golang, but unfortunately for me the people coming to my house today to deliver a dumpster (we're doing some spring cleaning) do not accept "golang apis" as a method of payment. So I find somebody wants "golang APIs", agree to exchange w…
what does this have to do with cryptocurrency?
You already do that now. its called a job.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#305Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways. The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so. Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking r…
Determining fully decentralized consensus between arbitrary participants (or at least one of the best approximations of that). In Bitcoin that consensus is limited to transactions, in Ethereum with smart contracts it can be used for much more (though that might require additional layers of incentivation to work properly, depending on the use case).
Nobody actually wants fully decentralised irreversible consensus between arbitrary participants on a public ledger because it is slow, costly and doesn’t solve real-word problems of identity verification, trust, reversible transactions, private transactions etc etc. People have tried and failed for years to find a compelling use for it.
It’s a very interesting experiment in social engineering but I find it difficult to find a concrete example of bitcoin being useful. Making some people very rich at the cost of others is not sufficient justification. If anything fewer people are actually using bitcoin now for real transactions not involving speculation on prices than in 2015 say.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#306Please put on your critical thinking hat for a minute. Using electricity is not the same as contributing to carbon emissions. Bitcoin is mostly mined in areas overflowing with excess green energy, and thus contributes negligibly to carbon emissions. The idea that all electricity generation is bad and therefore all electricity usage is bad is completely ridiculous. Instead of working so hard to figure out how to hate…
(1) power is not free, even green energy. It has production, labor, and material costs. (2) using the term 'excess' green energy is a false statement. There is no such thing as excess green energy while a bulk of the grid is still coal/gas/etc. (3) Bitcoin has led to a drain on GPU availability and in turn on the finite capacity of our semiconductor fabs. Arguably for nothing.
> There is no such thing as excess green energy while a bulk of the grid is still coal/gas/etc.
Are you saying transporting and storing electricity is free or easy? Can you source that please? As far as I know many megawatts of electricity go to literal waste every day because it's actually extremely hard to store or transfer.
> power is not free, even green energy. It has production, labor, and material costs
Indeed. And thanks to Bitcoin powerplants can be paid for electricity that will be generated anyways but would go to waste, thus making green energy cheaper.
> Arguably for nothing.
For trustless, quick and reliable transfers of money, which are for example improving the life of many Nigerians.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#307Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways. The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so. Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking r…
Determining fully decentralized consensus between arbitrary participants (or at least one of the best approximations of that). In Bitcoin that consensus is limited to transactions, in Ethereum with smart contracts it can be used for much more (though that might require additional layers of incentivation to work properly, depending on the use case).
> Determining fully decentralized consensus
But this only solves a problem specific to bitcoin that no one else has, because no one else keeps a centralised database with every transaction, so I'm not sure it counts as an advantage.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#308Why do they have to mine bitcoins at this point? There are enough in the market just transact and trade with them.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#309Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways. The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so. Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking r…
Follow the big money. Michael Saylor from Microstrategies: $1B. Elon Musk from Tesla: $1.5B. GrayScale: not sure how many dollars, but they own >550,000 bitcoins. Big money is of the opinion that bitcoin is an excellent store of value. Only a matter of time before it becomes a medium of exchange. And later on, a unit of account. By that time, you won't be asking yourself what 1 bitcoin is worth anymore. Things will b…
Big money can write it off as a business expense on their taxes if it goes down. The average individual doesn't have that upside.
Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
#310Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways. The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so. Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking r…
Bitcoin is a potentially revolutionary technology in a very early stage. The important new part, the consensus algorithm, is ground breaking.
Now, the very first implementation (Bitcoin) kinda sucks, like most technologies in their first versions. But there are newer generations, each more interesting, and each unlocking more possibilities. We are for example getting:
* No-autority enforcement of contracts (Ethereum).
* A distributed computation (operating) system (EOS).
* Decentralised finance, for example lending platforms (AAVE).
* Cash-like payment system suitable for real-world payments (Monero).
We're only eleven years in so it's a bit too early to say if it's all rubbish or if it will change the world.