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Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

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Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#151

Post by chordalkeyboard »

SCLeo wrote: post #150
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Watt-hour of hydro or solar that goes to mining Bitcoin could have been used to reduce demand for power generated from fossil fuels. No, that power would have gone to reducing the price of power and people would have found new uses for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

But those new uses (presumably improvements to quality of lives) are now gone because the electricity is used in mining bitcoins.

Yes, people used it for the best available purpose. If that purpose was not available to them they would have chosen something inferior.

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#152

Post by xiphias2 »

SCLeo wrote: post #149
xiphias2 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin has to withstand an attack from central banks of the world in the future. Just look at some comments from Christine Legarde to see what is coming. It's the war of media companies vs internet coming back, just with something much more important. I hope Bitcoin wins, but I think that nobody knows the future for certain.

Other cryptocurrencies? Maybe, I am not an expert on them. But definitely not bitcoin. Its transaction speed is simply way too slow. And it is not even close.

Most cryptocurrencies are a joke, trivial to attack by any state, or even somebody renting machines on AWS

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#153

Post by 3np »

mrits wrote: post #115
3np wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of a myth. The actual mining is very fragmented and so are the Chinese mining pools.

There is an appearance of fragmentation. If you look at the order from the supply chain it would lead you to believe this is not the case. It's not going to be even be easy for anyone in retail to get an ASIC miner for the foreseeable future.

Hardware manufacturing for ASICs is indeed mainly from Bitmain and a few others - how does that matter here?

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#154

Post by 3np »

3np wrote: post #153
mrits wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an appearance of fragmentation. If you look at the order from the supply chain it would lead you to believe this is not the case. It's not going to be even be easy for anyone in retail to get an ASIC miner for the foreseeable future.

Hardware manufacturing for ASICs is indeed mainly from Bitmain and a few others - how does that matter here?

(Too late to edit, but to get the point home): Would you argue that non-blockchain computing is centralized just from the fact that Intel and TSMC arguable control the CPU manufacturing?

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#155

Post by logifail »

xiphias2 wrote: post #143
paulgb wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe the Bitcoin network would be insufficiently secure if miners were incentivized only by the transaction fees and not the block rewards?

Bitcoin has to withstand an attack from central banks of the world in the future. Just look at some comments from Christine Legarde to see what is coming. It's the war of media companies vs internet coming back, just with something much more important. I hope Bitcoin wins, but I think that nobody knows the future for certain.

> Bitcoin has to withstand an attack from central banks of the world in the future

Q: How do we imagine central banks would 'attack' a cryptocurrency, and how is a cryptocurrency (or its users/owners/proponents) going to defend against whatever form such attacks might take?

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#156

Post by rorykoehler »

FIAT is backed by the military. The countless wars to maintain hegemony are surely very environmentally destructive. Has anyone done a comparison study between the US dollar and Bitcoin from this environmental perspective?

Edit: I looked it up on Wikipedia and found this:

>In FY 2006, the DoD used almost 30,000 gigawatt hours (GWH) of electricity, at a cost of almost $2.2 billion. The DoD's electricity use would supply enough electricity to power more than 2.3 million average American homes. In electricity consumption, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 58th in the world, using slightly less than Denmark and slightly more than Syria (CIA World Factbook, 2006).[1] The Department of Defense uses 4,600,000,000 US gallons (1.7×1010 L) of fuel annually, an average of 12,600,000 US gallons (48,000,000 L) of fuel per day. A large Army division may use about 6,000 US gallons (23,000 L) per day. According to the 2005 CIA World Factbook, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just behind Iraq and just ahead of Sweden.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_S...

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#157

Post by logifail »

notahacker wrote: post #129
gruez wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Gold has an intrinsic additional cost to acquiring that is unrelated to humans. There exist deposits that are harder to get to in the world and it isn't currently economically viable to extract them. This isn't mankind's doing it is just a truth of the world. I disagree. Gold was specifically chosen to be rare and hard to counterfeit. That's why we don't use sea shells as a store of value. In that respect I don't se…

The most obvious difference is that the "mining" of BTC is necessary for its security/transaction layer. The security of the worldwide gold supply is not contingent on constantly directing more resources towards mining, and it is possible to continue to transact with gold if mining were banned altogether. Most holders of gold don't have any interest at all in mining; indeed curtailing gold mining would actually work…

> gold hoarding is pretty wasteful in multiple ways too

Isn't most hoarding wasteful?

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#158

Post by rorykoehler »

hannob wrote: post #61
frongpik wrote: post #43

Someone's really serious about pushing the "bitcoin is bad" narrative. Too many articles like that recently. Nevertheless, upvoting because HN should see this.

Maybe it's, you know, people caring about a livable planet. The "Big survival of humanity" lobby.

Interestingly it's the same people who drop millions of tonnes of munitions to protect the dollar without any environmental impact stories hitting the media.

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#159

Post by rorykoehler »

stouset wrote: post #28
bufferoverflow wrote: post #22

Most bitcoin mining is done with hydro or solar electricity, because it's either very cheap or free. Both are renewable. And even if it wasn't, who are we too tell people how to spend their energy? What we really need is a proper carbon tax.

Even if we accept this argument at face value, every Watt-hour of hydro or solar that goes to mining Bitcoin could have been used to reduce demand for power generated from fossil fuels. Power generation isn't perfectly fungible, but it's enough so that this argument falls completely on its face. I wish people would stop making it. Bitcoin is an environmental disaster.

The Chinese miners sticking rudimentary hydro-turbines in rivers to mine bitcoin in the middle of nowhere are not using energy that could otherwise be distributed. It just wouldn't be generated at all.

Re: Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact

#160

Post by xiphias2 »

logifail wrote: post #155
xiphias2 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin has to withstand an attack from central banks of the world in the future. Just look at some comments from Christine Legarde to see what is coming. It's the war of media companies vs internet coming back, just with something much more important. I hope Bitcoin wins, but I think that nobody knows the future for certain.

> Bitcoin has to withstand an attack from central banks of the world in the future Q: How do we imagine central banks would 'attack' a cryptocurrency, and how is a cryptocurrency (or its users/owners/proponents) going to defend against whatever form such attacks might take?

Buy / bribe miners to have a constant 50% attack even if they lose billions / tens of billions of dollars.

Bitcoin mining should soon be seen as national security threat for countries that have the most bitcoins, that's why having so much hashing power in China is dangerous.

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