741–750 of 1001 posts
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> Bitcoin is now considered by some important for our future finance system Yeah, but those people are wrong. It's perfectly reasonable to judge them for doing harmful actions in service of a wrong belief.
Beliefs that used to be "wrong" and now are considered right: abolitionism, homosexuality, marijuana. How do you know this is a wrong belief that will stay wrong?
Nic Carter's rebuttal to a Bloomberg comparison between Bitcoin/Visa, including assessments of total and per/transaction energy usage: "First of all, Bitcoin and Visa are fundamentally different systems. Bitcoin is a complete, self-contained monetary settlement system; Visa transactions are non-final credit transactions that rely on external underlying settlement rails. Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global…
Nic Carter's rebuttal to a Bloomberg comparison between Bitcoin/Visa, including assessments of total and per/transaction energy usage: "First of all, Bitcoin and Visa are fundamentally different systems. Bitcoin is a complete, self-contained monetary settlement system; Visa transactions are non-final credit transactions that rely on external underlying settlement rails. Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global…
> including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar This isn't true. Internationally the thing that backs the dollar is the U.S. economy. People know they can spend dollars to get anything they need. Domestically what drives the dollar is that it's the only way you can pay taxes. I suppose you could say that oil is used to defend the U.S. economy but that's a stretch.
>This isn't true.
Basic economics and the law of supply and demand says that it is true.
>when demand increases and supply remains the same, the higher demand leads to a higher equilibrium price and vice versa.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/033115/how-does-law...
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Cryptocurrency are inefficient by the design only at creation. But once mined, in principle with the right setup transactions can be arbitrary cheap. It is similarly as with gold. It is expensive to dig it once, but once a coin is minted, it can be used for millions of transaction making transaction cost rather low.
This is completely incorrect. Transactions are processed as part of mining. You cannot simply stop mining and continue doing transactions for free; the whole point of the mining process in a PoW cryptocurrency is that mined coins are given out as a reward for helping to secure transactions.
At that rate and assuming 4tx per second a single Bitcoin transaction consumes 165kWh. A Tesla battery is bit over 50kWh. So let's round that to 3 full charges of Tesla battery. That's 350km/220 miles of range per charge. In total 1050km or 660 miles of driving. So basically if you want to transfer money and the recipient is closer than 660 miles from you it's more efficient to just get a bunch of bills, drive there…
At that rate and assuming 4tx per second a single Bitcoin transaction consumes 165kWh. A Tesla battery is bit over 50kWh. So let's round that to 3 full charges of Tesla battery. That's 350km/220 miles of range per charge. In total 1050km or 660 miles of driving. So basically if you want to transfer money and the recipient is closer than 660 miles from you it's more efficient to just get a bunch of bills, drive there…
And this is not surprising. Cryptocurrency is designed to be anti-efficient. "Proof of work" is just a synonym for "having wasted tons of energy." This is my main beef with these systems. Gaining fundamental value from the act of wasting energy and being the one to accelerate the (local) heat death by the most is not a sensible basis for a 21st century technology.
In the grand scheme, the "tons" (or rather, gigajoules) of energy wasted by the Proof-of-Work are nothing. The Sun radiation that hits Earth every second dwarfs this consumption. Also, one of the definitions of life is "a local decrease in entropy, at the cost of a global, larger, increase in entropy". By this criteria, every living being is a bad thing for the universe, because it accelerates the global heat death e…
The discussion about energy use of Bitcoin is within the context of the effectively closed system of Earth.
Until such a time that solar generated electricity is too plentiful to meter and ubiquitous, Bitcoin mining will cause huge demand for fossil fuel based energy, with the associated consequences for climate change.
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.…
How many of those directly convert electricity into profit? How many of those businesses have been rent seeking countries/states/locations that subsidize electricity for their populations? Electricity is one of those things most of society has deemed an essential good, and as such has subsidized it for the poorest among us. Bitcoin farmers are abusing that system to turn the government subsidies into personal profit…
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.…
That’s a neat slight of hand trick you’ve pulled off there, connecting Bitcoin to entertainment in order to shame those of us concerned about Bitcoin energy usage. Everything else you’ve listed provides subjective value to the user, which makes them hard to attack. Who can say what the value of skiing is to a society in terms of kWh? There is no way to objectively compare the value of energy spent on a ski lift vs. d…
even if it never proves to be a viable currency, a secure digital store of value is objectively useful. especially if you're in a country experiencing institutional failure, risk of hyperinflation and so on.
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I think that this is a great big stretch to try and justify BitCoin mining. I don't know if you personally own BitCoin, but I would say that this is a prime example of motivated reasoning. > or even negative I can see no way that consuming more energy can result in an improvement to the environment (unless that energy usage was directly related to improving the environment). There is absolutely no time where you can…
I think that this critique severely mischaracterizes the argument: we're not just talking about the merits of blindly consuming electricity ("leaving the lights on forever"), we're talking about what happens when you attach a financial incentive to consuming electricity structured in such a way that your net profit increases if you spend less on that energy. For Bitcoin miners, the input is energy, and the output is…
You're describing it as if BitCoin miners have the ability to construct their own gigawatt power plant.
But even if they did, the argument is still "If I use more electricity, and I/they create more green power plants to match my demand, the environment is better off."
If I burn 100 TWh/yr of electricity, and they build a power plant for me that supplies 100 TWh/yr of green power, how, exactly, have I reduced the demand for fossil fuels? I'm burning all the new green energy that's being created!