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Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

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Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#371

Post by lottin »

tmoravec wrote: post #310
baxtr wrote: post #265

Ok, 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)…

Do you have any idea about what 'finance' is? Shuffling money around is not finance.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#372

Post by dixego »

nickpp wrote: post #332

How much energy does watching porn consume? Playing video games? Watching a movie? Browsing Facebook? Using a ski chair? Visiting an amusement park? Going in vacation? Cooking your favorite type of food? Making ice cream? Driving to your friends? Listening to music? Concerts? Having a party? Banking? Casinos? As a species we use energy to meet our goals. Those goals may be situated anywhere in our hierarchy of needs.…

If maintaining the infrastructure for something a miniscule percentage of the world's population benefit from requires more energy than entire countries, surely it's worth interrogating whether the benefits outweigh the costs?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#373

Post by AnonsLadder »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #313
baxtr wrote: post #265

Ok, 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…

I'm in your boat, when it was first explained to me in a hacker space at college when it was first growing and priced at a few cents per 100++ Bitcoin. All I could see was a waste of energy and resources (time, energy, hardware). It will always be a drain on society, and it scares me that it hasn't failed because we see it draining our GPU industry to the point that market prices have gone insane and availability is…

You're looking at it from a totally wrong perspective. The U.S. government can print as much dollars as they want, whereas BTC cannot. The government does not care about green energy unless they can profit from it. To say that you did not buy BTC because of "wasting energy" is a very odd way to cope.

You guys are so hung up on energy consumption, a meme, that you're forgetting the real intrinsic value of Bitcoin.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#374

Post by Rallerbabs »

meowface wrote: post #358
Rallerbabs wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wouldn't be shocked if one bitcoin is worth $1 million in ten years, but I would honestly be shocked if it were being used as a medium of exchange. I see it as less probable than people mailing gold bars back and forth to each other. I unironically think Dogecoin has a much higher chance than Bitcoin of being a legitimate and popular medium of exchange in the future, in part because the supply isn't capped. I think…

Don't see how you can compare a virtual asset to a physical one and then somehow think the virtual asset is harder to manage then the physical one?

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#375

Post by jakupovic »

RobertKerans wrote: post #351
jakupovic wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem that you and others like you have is you don't have any BTC and now are struggling to understand why anyone else would have any. I think it's mostly from the fact you didn't get any when you should have and now there is no reason as it's expensive and again you don't have any. Simple really.

That doesn't really answer the question "what is the point of it" unless the only point is to create wealth for the people who do have it.

"what is the point of it" From bitcoin wiki: Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency, without a central bank or single administrator, that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries.

The trustless exchange part was worked on for a long time and Bitcoin came around and solved it. This is why questions like that are completely ignorant of anything technology and really makes me question the instigator's motives.

Edit: adding a link to an answer provided to the same question on this site https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25256738

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#376

Post by mikepurvis »

josalhor wrote: post #298
baxtr wrote: post #265

Ok, 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…

I see a huge potential in cryptocurrencies, just not in Bitcoin per se. I can totally see the European Central Bank controlling some kind of CryptoEuro that is tied to the real euro and allows individuals to make transactions without banks. Banks would become an optional frontend on this transaction system, with security features built-in, etc.

I don't think most normal people see "without banks" as a feature. Indeed, banks have already been peering with each other on transaction-clearing since forever, and I don't think it would take much for the EU to mandate a particular set of common APIs and maybe some entry criteria that allow increasingly smaller players access to the already-existing framework.

All of this seems a lot easier and cheaper than bitcoin's distributed ledger.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#377

Post by arminiusreturns »

baxtr wrote: post #265

Ok, 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…

I'll make it to the point since I was in on bitcoin back in the cpu crunch days too:

1. As a medium of exchange. This was what the global community, and more particularly the techie community behind it wanted to use it as. We wanted a quick way to exchange payment across the globe without dealing with shitty companies like Paypal etc.

but at some point, it became instead

2. A store of value. I'm not sure the order of effect on this, but then rich people who had the ability to influence the network effect started dumping real money into it, further inflating the price. I theorized at one point the central banks might have even participated on the dl, just because it's an easy bet to hedge on if you can poof money from thin air like they can.

I think #2 has completely overtaken it's use as #1, and due to that and other factors, I expect a major collapse at some inevitable but undetermined point in the future.

My personal evaluation and why I skipped bitcoin was because I saw that it did not have privacy protections built in, which is what the early coin community wanted (or so I thought). I kick myself for not keeping a few blocks sometimes (at one point I think I spent ~20 btc on a food order!), but oh well.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#378

Post by bhupy »

enraged_camel wrote: post #364
AnonsLadder wrote: post #333

It's hilarious to see the naysayers about Bitcoin say that BTC is not usable. Now it's worth almost 50 grand and all they can come up with is expensive transaction fees which in hindsight, are really not that expensive, and the energy consumption of maintaining the Bitcoin network. It sure is a lot better than using human lives, usually & most likely forced labor, to mine real Gold. Right? After all, energy is free w…

>>It sure is a lot better than using human lives, usually & most likely forced labor, to mine real Gold. Right? Bitcoin is purported to be an alternative to fiat money, not gold. And most governments can print fiat money at will, with virtually no energy.

> Bitcoin is purported to be an alternative to fiat money, not gold. And most governments can print fiat money at will, with virtually no energy.

That's not completely true. Bitcoin is purported to be an alternative to fiat money because it's purported to be an alternative to gold.

The argument for Bitcoin as a replacement for fiat money actually rolls up 2 big arguments into 1:

1. That fiat money should be replaced with money backed by some commodity like gold (the Goldbug argument)

2. That cryptocurrency is the ideal underlying commodity because it's more easily transferrable than gold.

To clarify, I don’t have a strong position on either of these arguments.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#379

Post by birracerveza »

This site is called Hacker News, and yet there is a surprising amount of resilience to accept the utility provided by Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, with the same old tirades that keep being repeated ever since Bitcoin was worth less than $1.

The ecosystem has grown and has been finding real world applications. If you are still of the opinion that cryptocurrency is exclusive to buying drugs, laundering money and scamming people, you have a lot of catching up to do.

Re: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

#380

Post by esotericn »

baxtr wrote: post #265

Ok, 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…

You can send me money across the globe without a middleman or anyone being able to block that transfer.

That's it.

If you don't want that, you don't want that. Some of us do.

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