Usually asset classes that don't have any negative externalities priced into their value are the best performing assets.
Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare
131–140 of 242 posts
Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare
#132I am so conflicted about the environmental impact of Proof-Of-Work. In many ways it feels like an arbitrary energy spend - but I think criticizing cryptocurrency for it seems a little disingenuous when we don't apply the same logic to other areas. What's the environmental impact of better refresh rates on monitors? What's the environmental impact of large scale cctv systems? What's the environmental impact of western…
Perhaps it's more reasonable to compare the energy footprint of cryptocurrency with that of our traditional fiat currencies. Including all computing power used by banks to settle their transactions.
We could, and it ends up being much less. Probably less overall for the entire banking system, and most definitely less per transaction than the horror of bitcoin.
I've been unable to find any rigorous research on this, but even the pieces defending bitcoin claim that the banking system consumes maybe 5 or 10 times as much energy as the bitcoin network, while neglecting to mention that the traditional banking system handle hundreds of thousands of times more transactions per second than bitcoin (especially funny since the estimates include stuff like the AC costs of bank branches - obvious sophistry).
Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dyson sphere you mean? We are centuries away from achieving anything like that...
He means a Dyson swarm and we are not centuries away from achieving this. The economical sense is on a different paper. Having ASIC miners in space connecting to something like Starlink is entirely possible even though not cost effective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_swarm
Go ahead and do the math on how long it would take to launch enough bots to match current energy spend on earth.
Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably, forcing illegal actions to happen through bitcoin adds friction to the process. But more importantly, as far as I know bitcoin is not designed to guarantee anonymity in money transfers, and the fact that every transaction is set in stone publicly in the blockchain makes it relatively easily traceable. Am I wrong in that area?
> Presumably, forcing illegal actions to happen through bitcoin adds friction to it. Adding friction to non-illegal actions is harm, not benefit. Adding friction to illegal actions is the opposite of what happens, because it's enabling something that wasn't previously possible. Also, criminals can survive higher friction than dissidents and vulnerable populations because the illegality creates a moat that raises marg…
> You go to some cryptocurrency hangout, pay some stranger a hundred bucks in cash and they transfer a hundred bucks in Bitcoin to your wallet. You go pay for a VPN with it. Then everybody can see that A transferred money to B and B transferred money to C, but nobody knows that you're B and those are the only transactions for that wallet.
Essentially you have to create a brand-new, single-use wallet for every transaction, am I wrong?
Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare
#135drink wall st. ESG kool-aid if you want, i have seen diamond merchants in ESG ETF componens. go figure.
your electric cars as well combustin engine cars use lot of energy worse than Bitcoin. oh cars get you from point a to point b. guess what, Bitcoin gets your value from point a to point b more efficiently than anything else out there yet and it maintains so keeping it as the hardest money known to humans
gold mining, banking services use lot of energy
you playing xbox or publishing dumb articles on an ad-tech trojan horse also takes energy
learn and adapt , else get extinct
Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
When cryptocurrency provides 1% of the services that the traditional banking system does, let me know and we can do this comparison.
You can already do many things with crypto that you cannot do with the traditional banking system. Can you open 10,000 bank accounts right now? I can make 10k wallets. There are so many new things we can do with crypto that it's going to take decades for people to discover them.
> You can already do many things with crypto that you cannot do with the traditional banking system
OP meant legal things.
Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that takes off, aren't we liable to see a rocketing demand for storage, doing to the storage market what PoW does for the graphics card market? And while it may be low energy to run, creating hard drives just to prove you have space seems a less than environmentally friendly activity. It looks just like another proof of waste
Persistent storage doesn't have to be powered on all the time, though, which makes the environmental impact a known thing. Factor in the cost of building + populating the drives along with having to replace them periodically and you know the cost of that storage. In comparison, PoW's future cost can skyrocket as the network expands and the difficulty goes up. Storing the whole chain takes a bunch of space anyway, so…
It's a known quantity, sure, but IIRC hard drive manufacture was not necessarily a very "clean" process.
Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
The number of times such an activity would be useful to me is zero. However calling my bank and having cash recalled from fraudulent (or even just bankrupt) merchants, that's happened. Who do I call at Bitcoin?
Bitcoin isn't a bank, it's a currency. You can't do that with the USD either, and you could build a banking platform on top of bitcoin to allow for chargebacks and credit lines. The benefit of BTC is that when your bank mismanages their assets a la 2008, resulting in a bank run, you know your assets are safe instead of having to rely on the Fed to bail out your bank. Your money is in your control, not in the control…
> The benefit of BTC is that when your bank mismanages their assets a la 2008, resulting in a bank run, you know your assets are safe instead of having to rely on the Fed to bail out your bank. Your money is in your control, not in the control of someone else.
I don't think that's true. Most companies providing services on top of bitcoin control the private keys, so they could do the same thing. You give up absolute control of your money to get access to a service, except now creating the money is terrible for the environment and consumes as much power as a small European nation.
Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare
#139Cryptocurrency is still something that legacy financial systems could easily out-compete given an appropriate regulatory environment. There are things Bitcoin is better at than e.g. credit cards. If you're a trusted merchant with shady customers, once the transaction posts you don't have to worry about scammers fraudulently disputing the charge or your bank cutting you off because that happened too often. You can get…
> If you're a trusted merchant with shady customers, once the transaction posts you don't have to worry about scammers fraudulently disputing the charge or your bank cutting you off because that happened too often. If you're a scammer merchant, ripping off good-faith customers you also don't have to worry about chargebacks. Bitcoin moves power from the consumer to the merchant. I don't see that as a net positive.
Then don't pay scammer merchants with payment methods that don't have chargebacks. That's no reason not to do it when you're confident that you can trust the merchant and the merchant has legitimate reasons to expect that some of their customers are unreliable.
It's a common problem for adult products that the buyer's spouse sees the charge on the credit card statement, the buyer claims not to know anything about it and the spouse disputes the charge even though the merchant did nothing wrong.
Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can you open 10,000 bank accounts right now? If you need to do this, you can do it through the group at your bank called treasury services (or something like that). They have APIs for financial services customers and CFOs who need to do this sort of thing.
I imagine I'd have to give the bank much more money or information than I already have to get this business service. At the very least, it would take time. Anyone can do this now with HD wallets.
> I imagine...
That’s moving the goalpost.
There isn’t any barrier to programmatic banking. The use case is too narrow for it to be a widely-advertised service.