I have come to beieve that bitcoin is art. No intrinsic value, and each unit is individually labeled, nearly as identifiable as a numbered print.
Coins are not labelled. Only addresses and transactions.
Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
101–110 of 157 posts
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#102And if they fix the energy problem? what's gonna happen?
bitcoin issue is not energy consumption, it's just useless, it's used to scam people, lot of pump/dump and market manipulation
same for other altcoins, this is shady buisiness
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your aside is an extraordinarily large aside and yet you casually toss it in there. Humans have a nearly unlimited desire for luxury goods and always will, quite predictably. They lust after jewelry accordingly and have for many thousands of years. Nothing about that will change. The aesthetic demand for gold will remain so long as people continue to desire luxury goods. If you drop the price of gold low enough, peop…
Most gold isn't used in jewelry either, so it didn't derive much value from a fringe use. Ironically we go to huge effort to dig gold out of the ground, purify it, and form it into blocks and coins. Then we dig a new home in the ground, bury the gold in there and put guards outside the door. Someone here pointed out how aliens would be scratching their heads over our behavior if they could see it.
This is a paraphrase of the famous Buffet quote.
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Nazis can confiscate the hard drives where your keys are stored. And - it’s not going to help you against the Nazis if you can’t transact it. As to gold - that misses the point. Of course it can be taken from you. However unless that happens, you can still transact it. People escaped the Nazis using gold to pay their way.
It's better in some ways and worse in others. It could be a lot easier to hide a key than a gold bar. You could still use bitcoin to buy your way to freedom, and there would be a black market for it if there's any way to get online, which there will be. The value is supported outside the country. It's not clear to me that gold is superior in that use case.
Yes, a key might be easier to hide than a gold bar.
But some gold coins might be a lot easier to hide than computers.
> You could still use bitcoin to buy your way to freedom
Only if you can access the network.
That’s the point.
I don’t see why you say there will be a way to get online. We see coups where the internet is taken down quite regularly.
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes but only for irreversible computation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
Even for reversible computation the Margolus-Levitin theorem has been hypothesized
Isn’t the Margolus Levitin theorem slightly different?
As in while it puts the maximum bound of amount of computation per J it doesn’t enforces a requirement that the entropy increase needs to be through a non-information degree of freedom as in heat.
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody actually knows. We could make an educated guess, however. Gold has intrinsic value, which gives it a significant advantage over a tiny arrangement of bits in an ocean of them.
It does, but that only establishes a low floor on the price of gold. If it had no value as a store of wealth, it would plummet in value to a tiny fraction of what it is actually worth. Bitcoin has a floor of 0 in theory. I would also guess that makes gold better as a store of wealth. But given that the price rarely ever approaches that floor means it might not matter. And bitcoin is harder to steal (at least you don'…
I wonder about the value of gold. You might buy gold, but can you actually, physically hold it and own it?
As far as I know, the only way you can buy gold is if you either buy jewelry or are a jeweler to make said jewelry. Otherwise you’re just buying stocks which could theoretically be lost in the digital wind.
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#107Lack of market liquidity is what will burst Bitcoin bubble.
The market is more liquid than it ever has been. But yeah, not as liquid as I or many others would like. But if you really think it's gonna burst, there are plenty of eager sellers who would love to sell you some put options on LedgerX :) very above board, and the only CFTC-regulated physically settled BTC options exchange out there
Where you buy and sell BTC derivatives for 1 - 5 year time span with minimal counterparty risk?
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#108There are a lot of arguments against Bitcoin, and the energy consumption argument has always struck me as the most asinine. It's an anchoring fallacy rooted in the fact that bitcoin's energy consumption is easy to estimate with a fair amount of confidence. However, because Bitcoin is easy and other industries are hard, we do not scrutinize the utility of any other industry in this way, though data suggests global vid…
It makes very much sense to criticize Bitcoin for its energy usage, I really don't understand your angle, and how that would asinine. "Mining" Bitcoin is literally competing to waste energy. Even if you want to ignore the fossil fuel angle, as a civilization energy for us is still of pivotal importance - to like build stuff, live and do amazing stuff like explore another planets.
If the price of Bitcoin continues to climb, at which point does it become not sensible to spend more energy mining it? When every inch of our planet has been filled with a nuclear plant or a solar panel? Because rising price will perpetually mean mining more will break a profit. If you can make a profit from wasting energy, markets will reward you for that indefinitely and the entire society will reconfigure around Bitcoin mining.
No, that makes no sense. I don't think anybody wants to regulate how private homes or businesses use their electricity, but I just find the fundamental proposal of Bitcoin as untenable. Criticizing it does not have ulterior motive apart from trying to make people see how silly it appears to me personally.
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your aside is an extraordinarily large aside and yet you casually toss it in there. Humans have a nearly unlimited desire for luxury goods and always will, quite predictably. They lust after jewelry accordingly and have for many thousands of years. Nothing about that will change. The aesthetic demand for gold will remain so long as people continue to desire luxury goods. If you drop the price of gold low enough, peop…
Most gold isn't used in jewelry either, so it didn't derive much value from a fringe use. Ironically we go to huge effort to dig gold out of the ground, purify it, and form it into blocks and coins. Then we dig a new home in the ground, bury the gold in there and put guards outside the door. Someone here pointed out how aliens would be scratching their heads over our behavior if they could see it.
i posit if asians, especially the indians, get tired gold jewellery , the metal wouldnt be worth nearly as much.. haha
Re: Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
And rebutted in the equally well known "Bitcoin: A Comically Badly Designed and Completely Dysfunctional Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".
It was an impressive proof of concept. There are technically better cryptocurrencies (along pretty much any dimension), but they just didn't get as much attention. Maybe these articles about how bad bitcoin is should call out some alternatives.
What are the better alternatives?