I just don’t see how this is true. Are similar assertions going to be made when we switch to electric cars as a significant percentage of the population? It’s at about 2-3% IIRC and increasing this by several orders of magnitude will have a similar impact on electricity usage.
Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
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Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#92The article is paywalled. So people upvoting this, are you just upvoting for the abstract and headline alone?
sci-hub
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#93If $1 in BTC is responsible for ~$0.50 (I don't buy this claim)...imagine how much damage central banks cause by debasing currencies to fight endless wars, funding corruption through a class of useless cantillonaires, exacerbating inequality, etc....
Central bank corruption probably even indirectly funded the stupidity that allows articles like these to be branded as "science"...to the casual observer this might seem like a stretch but it really is not. "Debase the money, debase society..."
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#94Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#95From seeing this, I fear the HN I once knew and liked is gone. The article isn't accessible, doesn't make sense and is promoting poor discussion.
fwiw, I realize this comment doesn't help much either.
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#96Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#97What is the energy cost of the entire USD-based financial system? At a minimum we need to total up what the US Mint, the Federal Reserve, Visa, Mastercard, Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and thousands of other companies and government entities do. It is obvious that amount of energy used to keep the USD going absolutely dwarfs Bitcoin.
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this bait? Of course it's just about profit... the point is that he should be aware of its environmental impact and the hypocrisy of his investment therein.
That may be your point, but it was not GP's point.
If he did it on purpose, he's a supervillain, if he did it due to negligence, he's a hypocrite. No need to split hairs.
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most of this electricity comes from the cheapest source of power, which is hydro. This has become almost a religious belief amongst cryptocurrency acolytes, but it's simply not true. -- Edit: please see my comment¹ and piplikoc's comment² below for more detail on this. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342411 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342366
If you're going to question the validity of an assertion please provide more than just a counterassertion.
That's not how it works. If I claim the moon is made of cheese and someone says he doesn't believe me, the onus is on me to prove it is, not on them that it isn't.
Re: Every $1 of BTC value responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in US
#100> responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages
red flag this article is steeped in pseudoscience.
you could spend a lifetime trying to model and predict global weather patterns _with no outside intervention_. the idea that you could even make an attempt at attaching a number to this phenomena is laughable. what are the error bars here, 10,000%?
lets pretend, for example, you tried to estimate the impact of tsunamis assuming that we think this weather event is standard deviations more likely due to BTC (this is non-obvious and probably not true, but for the sake of argument). dozens of tsunamis around the globe will kill people and decimate cities, but your estimate will be multiple orders of magnitude off in some places like fukushima - a cursory glance at wikipedia indicates a lower bound of 300 billion dollars.
this is not to say that we shouldnt be concerned about rapid global climate system changes; on the contrary! junk science like this actively harms the cause. we dont have to sensationalize, reality and truth are scary enough.