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Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

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Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#341

Post by ckosidows »

xkjkls wrote: post #280
airza wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to other externally-caused problems like natural disasters, beating eaten by lions, etc. I would guess that a large chunk of human history was dominated by these problems.

Or just hunger in general. Before the agriculture revolution starvation was the primary cause of human death.

Was it?

I know a couple books[1] that suggest life prior to the agricultural revolution wasn't nearly as famine-stricken as we tend to think it was. These books claim hunter gatherers were quite proficient at finding enough sustenance.

Obviously starvation was still possible and likely, but was it the primary cause of death? Is there some more evidence that humans were suffering from starvation before agriculture? Wouldn't populations thin out and stabilize accordingly if starvation was such a problem?

[1] - _Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind_ and _Sex at Dawn_

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#342

Post by newsbinator »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #330
adolph wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the cause of many of humanity's biggest problems is humans As opposed to elephants or sea urchins? How can humans not be the cause humanity's biggest problems? The Buddha taught there are three kinds of dukkha [usually translated as “suffering”]. The first kind is physical and mental pain from the inevitable stresses of life like old age, sickness, and death. The second is the distress we feel as a result of imperm…

One year into a worldwide pandemic affecting every aspect of life and you have a hard time finding examples of really bad things not caused by human? That's some committed misanthropy, I got to give you that.

The jury’s out on whether this one was our own fault too.

Maybe we made it in a lab, or even if we didn’t, maybe we should have been much smarter about preventing or containing it.

It’s not like an alien virus we never predicted and can’t understand. Experts had been warning about this exact thing for years.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#343

Post by mathlover2 »

Shorel wrote: post #232
minikites wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polluting and overheating the planet to make numbers in a computer go up.

We have been polluting and overheating the planet to make virtual characters eat pills and rescue princesses for over 30 years. What's the utility of that?

The amount of energy required to rescue a single princess does not increase exponentially over time. In fact it pretty much stays constant. Furthermore, gaming energy expenditures are probably minor compared to the amount spent on Bitcoin these days (last I heard it had an energy footprint equivalent to the Netherlands.) There are also other cryptocurrencies that don't have the same problem as Bitcoin with being increasingly energy intensive to produce over time.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#344

Post by runarberg »

xkjkls wrote: post #280
airza wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to other externally-caused problems like natural disasters, beating eaten by lions, etc. I would guess that a large chunk of human history was dominated by these problems.

Or just hunger in general. Before the agriculture revolution starvation was the primary cause of human death.

Was it? I wasn’t aware of that? Is this also the case of non-human omnivores? If not, at which point in our evolution did this start to be the case, e.g. during Australopithecus or Homo Erectus? And is it also the case for humans that don’t live in agricultural or industrial societies today (such as tribes deep in the jungles of Papua New Guinea)?

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#345

Post by SwimSwimHungry »

Shorel wrote: post #203
jetpackjoe wrote: post #9

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.

This is actually something that Bjarne Stroustrup addressed when talking about C++: There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses. In the case of cryptocurrencies, as soon as a cryptocurrency has any important percentage of use, these transactions are not confirmed in seconds anymore, and transaction fees starts to grow up. No one is really using PoS right now, so let'…

You're spot on. The ETH fans love to wax poetic about PoS and how it's always around the corner and coming soon. It's been that way for ages.

Lightning Network is similar. It's been perpetually 6 months away for years.

Frankly, I'll be impressed if the current power structure within PoW cryptos doesn't find any way to hamstring PoS, mostly because they have a vested interest in keeping everything the way it is now.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#346

Post by j-james »

runarberg wrote: post #38
jetpackjoe wrote: post #9

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.

Could anyone explain to me how proof of stake works (as opposed to proof of work), and how it is better? Has proof of stake been proven to be as robust as proof of work? EDIT: The wikipedia article is easy to find[1]. However it is really short, looks incomplete, and has a lot of “citation needed” after each point. So I would rather ask on HN. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake

I'll give it a try, but I'm by no means an expert in cryptography.

Proof-of-work works (very broadly) by computers solving harder and harder math problems to create value. Eventually, these get so hard that solving one requires either joining a pool or a huge investment in electricity and mining rigs - which is where we're at now. This isn't good for the environment.

Proof-of-stake works by individuals "staking" some of their own coins to be more likely to be randomly chosen to "validate" a transaction (which earns them a reward, similar to hashing). Validating a transaction is trivial and uses very little electricity, but the rest of the network also checking the transaction keeps the validator honest.

While proof-of-work and proof-of-stake are both a kind of "the rich get richer" game, to get more coins in proof-of-stake all that's required is a greater investment into the network, as opposed to the mining rigs and large amounts of electricity that are required by proof-of-work.

I found this video to be helpful in visualizing the networking parts of proof-of-stake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3EFi_POhps

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#347

Post by melomal »

meowkit wrote: post #253
saalweachter wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what actually bothers me the most about all crypto-currencies? None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers. The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone . Possession of the money is possession of the money and third parties don't need to get involved in every transaction. I can hand someone dollars and take a sandwich and walk away, transaction done. T…

> The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone. Honestly don’t know if you’re trolling or just old. I used paper money once last year. To buy weed. Because the federal government has determined I am not responsible enough to use or own weed. No one I know uses physical cash anymore. We’re moving away from physical items where possible, not toward it. I would rather have my currency on a public DLT than cont…

I've never been robbed for cash. I have had my bank account emptied multiple times though, recently too.

When I hand cash over to someone, I know how much is leaving and coming back right then and there. When I fill out a payment form with my card details I'm handing over my entire balance into the ether. I could be sleeping and quietly money is leaving my bank account, which happened. So cash is king still.

Plus it's generational. If I said walkman's are the best I would guess you have a different response, more digital based I imagine.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#348

Post by nahimn »

rawtxapp wrote: post #94
HideousKojima wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have done the math, and the carbon cost for a credit card transaction is several orders of magnitude lower than that of a single bitcoin transaction

Except credit card transaction isn't settlement, it's a temporary transfer until it settles, more akin to lightning network. Lightning network barely uses any energy fwiw.

Agree -- settlement still occurs every day. And credit cards charge %, versus network fees in crypto are amount agnostic (ie: 1 million transfer vs 1 dollar transfer cost the same)

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#349

Post by nelsontodd »

SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #334
nelsontodd wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe true depending on the energy source. I've heard it argued also that bitcoin will become the 'purchaser of last resort' for energy. For example, fracking companies often just burn off natural gas they find while looking for oil... instead, this gas could be used to mine btc. Also well documented that a lot of bitcoin operations in china are fueled by hydroelectric sources. The promise of violence is free until r…

Hydroelectric sources that could be best used on homes, businesses, etc. Anything but Bitcoin, really. Did everyone forget that the best goal we can achieve with power usage is by reducing consumption outright? Just because some of the mining is done on greener solutions doesn't mean it's a net positive. Global warming isn't exactly going away if we keep this experiment up.

Yeah but good luck convincing people to move next to sources of energy so cheap it would be wasted otherwise (rural west texas, rural china). If bitcoin becomes the dominant global financial system, securing it will be a worthy use of energy.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#350

Post by junippor »

nelsontodd wrote: post #313
junippor wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, just because he's a billionaire doesn't mean any of those things. It's just that Bill Gates is legendary for the amounts he reads and his recall ability, and his contributions to many topics outside of just managing MS (state of the art algorithms, erradictinc malaria, nuclear energy etc). I thought everyone knew this, but apparently not. So you can see how funny it is when a random guy on HN says "just because h…

Fair enough. But for every bill gates we can find a mark cuban, michael saylor etc who are extremely excited about bitcoin. So I still think it is uninteresting.

Moving the goal posts.

First you said "Just because Bill Gates is a billionaire, doesn't mean he knows what he's talking about"

Now that you've learned that most likely he DOES know what he's talking about, you changed your argument to "Other people think other things, so it's uninteresting" (What? WE're not talking about random people here.)

Lets just say it: you already arrived at the conclusion you want, now you're grasping for arguments to support it.

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