211–220 of 321 posts
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Can someone get busy wrapping endangered species as NFT's and direct the funds accordingly' Can't help but wonder how much habitat is destroyed by the generation of a token.
I don't think that cryptocurrency energy consumption is as big a problem as it's been recently painted in the media. Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. are, potentially, self-contained, almost complete, final, financial systems. Using a VISA card (for instance to make the same contribution to wild-life preservation) would use a fraction of the energy that's used to sustain cryptocurrencies, sure, but that's not a fair comparison…
...for a small village of maybe 1000 people? At the current transaction rate, they could barely handle that. And of course they don't handle disputes, loans, insurance, tech support, legal compliance, KYC and AML, or any other part of a financial system (you're even forgetting that someone needs to design and print the physical cards).
Bitcoin in particular does nothing more than verifying a handful of transactions per second (5? 7?) while consuming more electrical energy than all of the world's regular transaction processing hardware combined, perhaps with the exception of ATMs - which amounts to hundreds of millions of transactions per second, all over the world, in a truly decentralized system.
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And mining Bitcoin requires chip makers (including rare earth materials), the tech industry and the whole internet. If you include side channels in visa, you'll need to do the same for Bitcoin. Yes, Bitcoin has advantages, but low energy consumption is not one of them.
I never said it's energy usage is low. I said (more or less) that for what it is it's energy usage is low.
For what it is, it consumes ENORMOUS amounts of energy.
Just to put this in perspective, the global population of mountain gorillas is 1,063, so this represents the symbolic adoption of over 3 times the mountain gorillas alive in the wild! I hope this unexpected boon in capital will allow for some meaningful work in preserving and protecting these rare animals. It would be an interesting footnote in history if we can look back in 50 years and draw a line between an intern…
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That wouldn't be a valid comparison. There's a lot more to the other financial system than just currency and payments. Even if hypothetically the whole world adopted Bitcoin we would still need most parts of the other financial system.
What about the costs of military and lives and environment of the efforts spent in maintaining the USD hegemony?
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That wouldn't be a valid comparison. There's a lot more to the other financial system than just currency and payments. Even if hypothetically the whole world adopted Bitcoin we would still need most parts of the other financial system.
What about the costs of military and lives and environment of the efforts spent in maintaining the USD hegemony?
US military has been estimated between the world's largest polluter and as much as 140 countries.
That Dollar, that "Freedom" isn't free, and it's the world paying the bill.
[Note: American here. Ashamed about our imperialist impact ]
https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter...
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That's a specialized version of the question, is it really evil to kill evil people? But it's also a bit off-topic; the more important one is, are only evil people getting killed by drone strikes executed by people who (claim to) try to kill only evil people? The answer to that is a resounding no. We can debate the specifics of this, but it wasn't my point. My point was, the concept of layers of indirection making pe…
>My point was, the concept of layers of indirection making perpetrating evil/immoral acts easier is a well-recognized one It seems that you are again assuming that drone strikes are evil immoral acts. Most people view civilian casualties in war as a trolley car problem, (e.g. a necessary evil in an overall moral action)
Also, it is a created trolley car problem not the trolley car problem. And creating such a situation instead of coming across it is definitely morally evil.
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I think is a fair comment. The people involved probably wouldn't give the steam off their coffee to the someone struggling right in front of them.
What you are missing is that this allows people who are otherwise unable to help to do so. Helping animals has always been somewhat more popular than helping people because people have more agency and also tend to suck. What do you suggest we do for the people struggling in front of us? Also that is a broad brush you are painting a lot of people with. It's likely that many /r/wallstreetbets users donate to other char…