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Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
151–160 of 405 posts
Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
#152The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.
To give you the other side: It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US. Either Argentina doesnt use as much as you’d think or the US wastes a whole lot of power doing nothing. I’d argue thats way worse than mining bitcoin! Anyway its a sensationalist statistic designed to arouse your response. I’d expect theres heaps of things more wasteful.. office building services running 24/7 comes to mind
Ah yes the good old "but something worse already exists therefore it is ok" argument. Always very effective.
Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin's energy usage isn't determined by the transaction count but by its valuation. Raising the limit of transactions on the Bitcoin network wouldn't affect the energy consumption (but it would have other trade-offs).
Aren't there significant technological obstacles to raising the transaction limit, not to mention the fact that large miners have actively obstructed attempts to raise it in the past? My understanding is that we only finally got a block size increase with segwit in 2017 and that only happened after people worked around miner sabotage.
There are no technological obstacles per se, but it will increase the rate which the size of the blockchain grows.
It's true miners have obstructed attempts to make these kind of changes but they don't control the price of Bitcoin. If market demand for a higher transaction rate becomes great enough and they don't adapt, then another coin with bigger blocks will simply outcompete Bitcoin.
Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know this is just a matter of opinion, but I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies that are manipulated to cyclically transition massive amounts of wealth from the poor to the wealthy. Of course there's no guarantee that bitcoin or any of the other cryptos will resolve this issue for us, but they are our best chance at the moment.
> I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies That's not what this is about, Bitcoin has utterly failed at that mission, and nothing about cryptocurrencies necessitates computationally wasteful proof of work. The only reason Bitcoin is still popular is because of people using it for speculating, it's not a viable currency.
Bitcoin continues to grow at an enormous rate. It hasn't failed at anything. Soon BTC will surpass the value of gold. We are actually on our way to getting off fiat.
Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
#155The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.
Why is the idea of people using electricity to make money so sickening?
Because if there's a direct connection between the amount of electricity used and the amount of money generated, the only logical conclusion is for human society to burn up every possible available ounce of energy as quickly as possible.
Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
#156The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.
It's hard to see it as anything but that because cryptocurrency people don't collectively realize the gravity of the PR disaster they have on their hands. Central banks are looking for reasons to shut down the whole cryptocurrency space and in an ignorant public's eye, bitcoin's absurd energy waste is a perfect reason to do just that. Where is the coinmarketcap-like tool that indexes cryptocurrency projects' energy (…
Bitcoin uses 7% of the energy the global banking system uses and its energy use doesn't scale with adoption
Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ripple, Nxt, etc have been around since 2012-ish or earlier. Ancient technology, basically.
Wasn't aware of those ones, thanks. It's a shame they're not even in the top 100 by volume.
Ripple has still the fifth biggest market cap.
If you look at the five biggest coins by market cap (excluding USDT which is just digital Dollar) then three of them use proof of stake, Cardano, Polkadato and Ripple. Ethereum is actively transitioning to proof of stake.
Bitcoin is the ONLY outlier. Though also the biggest market.
Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
#158The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.
This comment is incredibly ignorant and I'm going to have an aneurysm if it gets brought up again - bitcoin uses a 1/3rd of the energy used in gold mining - bitcoin uses 7% of the energy used in the global banking system - bitcoin energy usage does not scale with adoption, actual payments are meant to be made on the lightning network (faster and cheaper than Visa), and settled eventually on the blockchain https://www…
> bitcoin uses a 1/3rd of the energy used in gold mining - bitcoin uses 7% of the energy used in the global banking system
Those are both gigantic energy expenditures, and to say that BitCoin uses only a third of the energy that another despicable planet-destroying industry does doesn't speak much in the favor of BitCoin.
Nor does saying that something ~50 million people own (0.5% of the Earth's population) is "only" 15% of the entire global financial system used by 7.3 billion people.
Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
#159The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.
Sickening? Really? Don't you find it interesting that currency free of nation-state regulators would be attacked as anti-environmental?
These same regulators would love to steer policy and public opinion by calling something that reduces their influence bad for the climate, even if such a thing is run on clean energy, solar, etc. That seems suspicious.
Beware of what -isms you are repeating and supporting - they are very likely aligned with other -isms you would not support, or are a root cause of the issue you care about in the first place. Environmentalism is no exception.
Overall, blockchain currency has the ability to help humanity. If that requires more power, well, so does everything. I'd focus on how to generate that power renewably, not to argue against a technology that millions in the unbanked world could use to better their situation. I'd suggest you learn more about the problems that present cryptocurrency as a potential solution before just listing new problems.
Re: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014)
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rate of information transmission was much higher in 2010 than in 2000. If Bitcoin had been invented in 2000, it wouldn't have been more than a technical curiosity in the hands of a few crypto-nerds in very niche internet forums. Since it was invented in 2010 it easily spread through Facebook, Reddit and other universal social media before making the jump via mainstream news to non-technical people.
> If Bitcoin had been invented in 2000, it wouldn't have been more than a technical curiosity in the hands of a few crypto-nerds in very niche internet forums. It most certainly was this for at least 2 years. 2-4 years more if you count the time Satoshi was working on it before the public release
I remember hearing about Bitcoin in HN in 2011. I'm sure that same post convinced a lot of people with better hindsight than me to start mining.