Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 321 posts

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#261

Post by arcsincosin »

tudorw wrote: post #48
skohan wrote: post #24

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…

Can someone get busy wrapping endangered species as NFT's and direct the funds accordingly, timing seems about right...

Yes, this exists! [1]

[1]: https://wildcards.world/

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#262

Post by thebean11 »

salawat wrote: post #259
thebean11 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating a token does not consume any additional energy. Transaction volume does _not_ scale with mining so it's a really bad comparison. The energy is spent to secure the network regardless of how many transactions are processed (in practice, transaction volume is pretty much fixed in terms of "bytes of transactions")

The network is not secured if you just offload the externality to the international electrical grid. You just traded one tgreat model for another, and boy it is a doozy.

Not sure I understand your argument, because there are externalities the network is not secured? All consumption of power created by fossil fuels has negative externalities. Also, there's no requirement that miners are on the grid (lots of mining operations use off-grid excess power that cannot be stored).

> You just traded one tgreat model for another, and boy it is a doozy.

What? I'm not sure what models you're referring to

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#264

Post by distribot »

ethbr0 wrote: post #65
skohan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Officially this is an estimate, but having been where these animals live, I believe we can have an exact count. Keep in mind that when we say “globally” this means a tiny region straddling the border between Rwanda, Uganda and Congo. We are talking about a few families of gorillas, some of which are tracked daily. There is a massive conservation effort on these animals, at least in Rwanda and Uganda, they all have na…

I believe it also helps that they live in social groups, aside from some solitary males. So we're tracking (population / avg_group_size + misc_males) objects, as opposed to the entire population. Example on the other end would be snow leopards (130+ sq km) and grizzlies (380+ sq km), which are mostly solitary and have huge ranges.

If there are really 1063 I would think conservationists could know about almost every one individually. That's smaller than the high school I went to. I know they are spread out over a wide area in a dense jungle but I think it would be possible.

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#265

Post by colinmhayes »

thebean11 wrote: post #205
codebolt wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin alone currently pollutes about the same as half the global airline industry. If cryptos really are the future, I weep for the planet.

Luckily mining with renewables is much less difficult technically than flying with renewables.

Energy is fungible. Bitcoin using renewables just means that other electricity consumers are using fossil fuels.

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#266

Post by bradlys »

asdff wrote: post #246
mgerullis wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t have a certain number of karma points you cannot even post there, I guess the largest part there is only lurking.

It is striking how just about any subreddit is several orders of magnitude larger than their average engagement. It's seemingly no matter the size and affects huge and tiny subeditors. I guess there really are that many bot accounts on reddit.

Many people (including myself) will just not post. If you want to see what’s going on with a subreddit in your feed, you have to subscribe/join it. You can manually visit all your favorite subreddits but that can be very tedious and doesn’t fit the “news feed” type of behavior that people want to use.

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#267

Post by arrosenberg »

tudorw wrote: post #57
viraptor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that without the NFT right now with many charities. If you want it publicly visible you can tweet your receipt.

Yes, but I cannot buy, sell and speculate with that.

Not a judgement, but speculating on charitable giving is the worst idea I've ever heard.

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#268

Post by cryptica »

Philanthropy is one of the greatest evils of our time. Philanthropists steal money from workers via monetary inflation and financial schemes. Then they give away a tiny portion of it to the world's poorest. In the meantime their financial schemes squeeze everyone in the middle; those who actually produce all of the world's economic value.

In this case, they steal money from working humans and give it to a bunch of gorillas who should have been left alone in the jungle in the first place.

Not surprising that many of these displaced working humans turn to poaching and other illegal activities to make a living. Their salaries are constantly inflating away, they can't save anything on normal salaries. They can't start their own businesses, they can't compete against those who have access to the money printers.

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#269

Post by cycomanic »

mszcz wrote: post #69
edoloughlin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What sort of calculation is that? Let's for a moment disregard the fact that banks do much more than just transactions, let's also ignore that there is more then the transaction energy in bitcoin (there are also people working for the miners, producing the hardware etc). Just the comparison between the number of transactions of the banking system (including credit cards) to the number of bitcoin transactions should tell you how different the scales are. There were around daily 400k bitcoin transactions. There were 100 Million credit card transactions per day in the US alone. That would mean if we were to transition to use crypto currencies as our main financial system we'd use more than all the energy we produce worldwide just for bitcoin. So bitcoin looks even worse after doing a bit more of a comparison.

Re: WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

#270

Post by jfk13 »

thebean11 wrote: post #205
codebolt wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin alone currently pollutes about the same as half the global airline industry. If cryptos really are the future, I weep for the planet.

Luckily mining with renewables is much less difficult technically than flying with renewables.

Also much less useful.
Post reply on HN