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The type of person hackernews respects the most - a billionaire - told them that their favourite toy is bad.
Bitcoin is anything but HN's favorite toy.
Or so I thought, the amount of people taking offense at Bill Gates saying the uncontroversial is impressive.
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Doesn't Ethereum have the same environmental issues?
Ethereum is supposedly changing over to proof of stake, but it's been a years long process
Billionaire says XYZ bad for environment. I cannot help thinking: what a hypocrite. Poor people are much better for the environment than rich. Not even considering private-jet flying super rich. I think BG has no business telling others what's good/bad for the planet.
I'm pretty sure Bill Gates has a way way bigger net positive impact on the environment than you, or almost any of us here. Just because he is rich doesn't mean he has a net negative impact. Rich people like him have the money and power to make a significant change and do more good than a 1000 of us combined possibly could.
* https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/how-bad-are-billionair...
Bitcoin is a beautiful concept that has been bastardized by economies of scale. The mining concentration is decreasing its security over time. The centralized block structure and exorbitant fees will afflict it more and more as it grows. Even arguments about renewable energy being used to mine BTC are moot, because they don't consider the opportunity cost of what could be done with all that energy instead. I truly be…
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Proof of stake crypto currencies are just as secure.
Proof of stake is a different security model. It may work but it has not been proven in a $1 trillion high stakes environment yet.
PoS also offers something PoW does not: absolute finality, https://medium.com/mechanism-labs/finality-in-blockchain-con...
Additionally, PoS attackers can have their stake slashed, so they may never attack again. However, you can't slash PoW attackers, once attacked, they will just keep on coming back (no matter how many times you change the hashing algorithm)
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Military force and law enforcement provide solutions for consensus across great many domains, so they're marginally near-free to use for consensus in any single area of interest. You could say, they are consensus factored out and made incarnate. Conversely, if all money suddenly become Bitcoin, military force and police would still be needed, in mostly the same amount they are today.
It's odd to me that people think Bitcoin can be free of "force" long term. Bad guys can point a gun at your head and demand you login into Coinbase to transfer coins to them. What happens if the government makes Microsoft give them admin accounts to the Bitcoin repo? What happens if there is a fork and China doesn't like it and prohibits miners from adopting it? BTC is way more susceptible to traditional military and…
My post was referring to how the US has killed lots of people to keep strong dollar. I think its feasible that a true global currency (possibly bitcoin) could prevent violence like this.
There are so many better crypto-currencies. Better for the environment because they use proof-of-stake, and not proof-of-work. Better for users because transactions are confirmed in seconds, not hours, and without the ridiculous fees that Bitcoin has. I think this shows how truly powerful the network effect, and being first to market is. Because without those things, Bitcoin would be nothing.
Without this and usage for criminal purposes bitcoin would be worth a fraction of it's current worth and as such likely not worth mining for.
This also means IMHO that Bitcoin as currency not just already failed, but did so pretty hard.
As a non currency speculative investment/mony parking product it didn't fail. But it wasn't meant to be such a think.
Furthermore the massive environmental problems it introduce by having a high such a absurd high need of energy and other economical problems (drain of currently limited chips without producing "general" economic benefits, usage for criminal activities if combined with mixers etc.) makes it a highly flawed product.
It should be noted that this is Bitcoin specific. Other cryptocurrencies have this problem much less by neither having absurd high energy costs, nor having absurd high purely speculation/money parking based prices.
Sure there will always be some drain of energy and some drain of chips and some usage for criminal activity. It's just that for Bitcoin thinks have gotten out of balance and besides availability through the network effect there is no reason to use Bitcoins for normal (legal) payments. It's just too costly, slow and price unstable (due to speculative investments always forming a bubble) to be used for normal payments IMHO.
Exceptions can be countries with a "broken" economy, but even then other crypto currencies would be normally preferable as far as I know.
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Because this rich tech billionaire brought about humanity-changing innovations so maybe what he says deserves some attention? Why does _your_ opinion matter?
His status as rich tech billionaire doesn't make a difference unless he is making arguments that are new or interesting. And he isn't. We've all been hearing the environment argument for years now. Plus, there is obviously an argument to be made that he has had a negative overall influence on the world & therefore shouldn't be trusted.