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WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

bbc.co.uk

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

#271

Post by hello_friendos »

cryptica wrote: post #268

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 go…

Your last paragraph is something that IS being addressed by this charity. I'm not sure if you think they literally had dollar bills to apes, but they have a number of different programs addressing different aspects of 'saving' apes.

Like, what is this?

"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."

Receiving donations is not stealing, and the entire point of protecting gorillas is that they aren't being left alone.

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

#272

Post by thebean11 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #265
thebean11 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Energy is extremely difficult and expensive to store, it's not fungible over a time period. This is why energy rates fluctuate during the day. It's also not fungible between consumers not connected to the same grid.

When generating energy (either with fossil fuels or renewables) energy is often wasted because there is no immediate consumer or way to store it.

What you say _can_ be true, for example additional consumers of energy on the national grid, during times of high demand, will likely result in more energy production. It is not true as a rule though.

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

#273

Post by emteycz »

lostlogin wrote: post #260
thebean11 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lucky for Bitcoin, there's a clear path to reducing environmental impact.

Or we could use that power for something a little more practical which we can’t do without.

What we? These are individuals, each with their own goals. Give them some other business opportunity and I'm sure they'll jump on it - it just needs to be as good as Bitcoin.

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

#274

Post by smabie »

lostlogin wrote: post #260
thebean11 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lucky for Bitcoin, there's a clear path to reducing environmental impact.

Or we could use that power for something a little more practical which we can’t do without.

My (and others) livelihood depends on the existence of crypto currency. Seems pretty practical to me.

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

#275

Post by Paradigma11 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #136
groby_b wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh... Selling a single token? 8.7MWh[1] That's slightly less than the average US household consumes in a year. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/nfts-hot-effect-earth-climate/

Has there been any movement in the crypto world (that isn’t just creating new coins) towards switching algorithms such that BTC et al don’t use proof of work anymore?

Tezos using PoS has been up and running for more than a year i think. You can mint NFTs here: http://nftz.fun/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/

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

#276

Post by smabie »

blablabla123 wrote: post #226
beaconstudios wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole reason we care about the environment is so we can keep living in it. What should we do instead, leave the turtles to inherit the earth and yeet ourselves into the sun?

Exactly that. We destroy our tourist destinations, beaches, food sources, areas where to live, landscapes for desktop backgrounds, the air and the water. Lost in useless economic abstractions.

Useless? Sounds like you're using it.

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

#277

Post by c1ccccc1 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #169
TeMPOraL wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I don't really care what most people think. If I chose my beliefs based solely on what most people thought, I would be guilty of committing the bandwagon fallacy. So don't hide behind "most people". What do you think about this issue?

My own personal view is this: The Geneva convention forbids the killing and torture of non-combatants. The Geneva convention exists for a reason: without it, war would be more brutal and kill many more innocent people. Sure, it's easier to destroy the enemy if you don't worry too much about civilian casualties. But if both sides reason that way, the advantage to each cancels out, and the net outcome is just more civilian deaths.

It's cheap to say "oh it's a trolley problem" when we're talking about killing some innocent people thousands of miles away in order to take out an enemy general. Imagine if the civilians killed by each drone strike were all Americans. Want to kill that enemy commander? It'll cost you 5 American lives. Same logic from a trolley problem standpoint, but I expect you'd get some very different results on your poll.

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

#278

Post by thebean11 »

lostlogin wrote: post #260
thebean11 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lucky for Bitcoin, there's a clear path to reducing environmental impact.

Or we could use that power for something a little more practical which we can’t do without.

Are you advocating for some sort of central authority who regulates what individuals use power for?

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

#279

Post by s1artibartfast »

olyjohn wrote: post #249
s1artibartfast wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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)

Do most people really think that? I kind of doubt it.

here is some survey data from 2015 showing that the majory approves of drone strikes with a 58 to 35 approval.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/05/28/public-conti...

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

#280

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

codebolt wrote: post #202
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")

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

The thing is, it doesn't have to.

Bitcoin (and all other Proof-of-Work cryptos, which is basically all the major ones) only consume tons of power because the incentive to mine creates an arms race where whoever has the most hashing power makes the most money.

Bitcoin could be run on a single computer mining on a 10 year old CPU, but then it would be highly centralized, and decentralization is touted as one of the greatest features of Bitcoin. But with the incentive to run your own miner(s), and make it/them as powerful as you can to get the largest piece of the block reward pie, it ends up being a massive energy sink.

That's why people are pushing for the change to Proof-of-Stake in Ethereum. By taking away the incentive to waste tons of power on mining, it drastically reduces the carbon footprint of it.

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