231–240 of 405 posts
The 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.
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> One of those has been decimated by a fiat printing press, the other has been a great investment How has the US dollar been destroyed? It has enjoyed remarkable price stability, very close to the target rate, which is what everyone expects and can plan for. The other has seen astronomical, wild price swings, which no one could plan for, and while it's currently enjoying a high value (just as tulips once did), it was…
The dollar has absolutely been destroyed. Housing, health care... true inflation is rampant. > The other has seen astronomical, wild price swings, which no one could plan for, and which is currently enjoying a high price (just as tulips once did), but which was worth 95% less just 10 months ago - and probably will be again soon. People have been saying this at their own expense for a decade.
If housing were expensive because the dollar had lost value, then you would expect it to be cheap to buy a house in SF in some other form of currency. But it's not, no matter what medium of exchange you want to use, it's still expensive.
And there are of course lots of locations with significant supply where housing in the US is dirt cheap, like Detroit.
Health care is more complex, but the same general idea applies. Whether you pay in USD, or anything else, it's still expensive.
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The real solution here is not complaining about individual use cases of energy, but effective carbon pricing. Wit cap & trade on a global level, this wouldn't be an issue. Of course there seems no political will nor ability to make this happen any time soon.
The big miners in China and Iceland are using hydro and geothermal. Pricing the other miners out might have some interesting side effects.
The 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…
This is textbook conspiracy theory here. Don't forget that even if bitcoin was running 100% on renewable energy (which it definitely is not), the added load on the grid definitely causes coal/gas plants to fire up and make the grid CO2 emissions of the country where people mine bitcoin to get worse.
I don't buy the decentralised argument either, more than 51% of the hashrate is in China and the government can decide to shut all of this down the day they want to reduce their unproductive CO2 emissions.
The 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.
Proof-of-work =/= cryptocurrency. There are cryptocurrencies that work without proof-of-work, and those that quantitatively rely on it to a far lesser degree. Honestly, it continues to surprise me how clueless most of HN commenters are on this topic.
And they don't have a fair distribution mechanism. They exist primarily to make their creators rich.
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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…
I've been hearing for almost a decade how Bitcoin was going to change the world and help humanity and yet...nothing. Other than some speculators and early adopters getting rich. I've yet to hear of anything "world-changing" BTC could do that isn't already done better by traditional systems.
Meantime, it's useful to keep track of who is most vocally against a technology that could eliminate graft.
The 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.
Proof-of-stake blockchains are accomplishing more than was ever imagined possible with Bitcoin at a fraction of the cost.
It's unfortunate how uninformed people willing to jump into a conversation/invest in cryptocurrencies can be.
The 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
How would one measure that? The price of one bitcoin compared to the price of a kilogram of gold? That seems arbitrary. Total market value? Transaction volume?