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Earlier quoted context omitted.
But Bitcoin is not needed. It currently provides little to no positive value to society and a lot of negative value so it is hard to classify it as society progressing.
The positive value is that it protects from inflation.
We've just made a judgment as a society that a small amount of inflation is good, in part because it drives economic growth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For proof of work the cost of the hardware is substantially irrelevant, it's eclipsed by energy costs after a month or two of operation. POS proposals all have participatory floors. E.g. the ethereum proposal requires participants lock up about $60,000 worth of ethereum to participate.
True, but staking pools might help mitigate the latter issue.
100% sure this anonymous article writer is somehow vested in a proof-of-stake shitcoin.
As long as we are making large unilateral changes: We should have a re-distributive carbon tax.
An issue with a carbon tax as it relates to bitcoin is that it would simply force mining into more lax countries. The only way to discourage what miners are doing would be to lower the value of bitcoin. This prisoner's dilemma comes up so much in global politics, it should have it's own name.
The issue of who gets to produce carbon, how much and for how long is really huge and is not dominated by any singular issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, let perfect be the enemy of the good.
A carbon tax isn't some pie in the sky thing, most developed countries have implemented it.
This is like saying incandescent light bulbs should be banned. Sure, it’s a sensible thing to say once you have unilaterally-better bulbs already fully commercialized and in mass production. (And this happened with CFLs and then LED bulbs; and then we did ban incandescents, here in Canada and in many other places.) But we’re not at that “fully commercialized and in mass production” inflection point yet with Proof-of-…
so... we have Proof of Stake, in various forms. And we can say "it will be banned in 1-2 years, you have the time to change the underlying tech. With those premises the value will not change much, and the global advantages are big.
And which one of those Proof-of-Stake forms are you already heavily invested in?
I really don’t understand this attack on Bitcoin. It seems to be all the rage nowadays to lament the effects of Bitcoin’s electricity usage on the environment but a couple things seem true to me. 1) Any civilization sufficiently progressing will use more and more energy. Bitcoin could definitely be more energy efficient but even without it our society would still increase our energy usage over time. 2) The issue peop…
This doesn't compute for me. We can (and do) have a free society that still has regulation. In fact, it's probably necessary for keeping it free.
Regulating resources is also critical---e.g., overfishing, mining, logging, etc.
Finally, I would say it's not the particular usage of electricity that should be banned here, but rather a particular action which currently has a negative* effect on society with no known positives beyond enriching a small number.
* If you want to argue that bitcoin currently has a positive effect on society then that's a separate argument. I'll actually concede if you show proof that its usage is driving solar up to a point that would not have been achievable otherwise, considering that fossil fuels are still predominantly used.
100% sure this anonymous article writer is somehow vested in a proof-of-stake shitcoin.
Or, just maybe, it's someone who truly cares about the ramifications of a cryptocurrency that requires the cumulative power of a medium size nation to run?
Most of this electricity is idle peak going to waste already and up to 60% has been via renewables that cannot be distributed globally like in my country of Iceland. Where we mine 11% of the Bitcoin network.
But sure, align with whatever anonymous author you think best suits your narrative by all means.