421–430 of 578 posts
The governments of the world could shut it down. A drop in the bucket of their vast collective wealth could buy the majority of the network, legislation to criminalize mining and trading, and just wait until it becomes unprofitable.
There are plenty of good reasons to do it, environmental concerns being only (very good) one.
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Digiconomist [1]. I should have linked it up top, my bad. Looks like they, in turn used this reference [2]. [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ [2] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30087-X
Ah, but they’re calculating e-waste in the form of specialized mining hardware (ASIC) that, at present, goes obsolete every few years. The e-waste generated this way is not an intrinsic cost of handling a transaction, since the hardware could hypothetically be reused or recycled. It seems unwise to think of it as an irreducible cost per txn, rather than a dynamic figure that would likely improve over time (especially…
I do not want to hate on Bitcoin but climate change is getting out of control and there is little time left to reverse course. Last year with a global pandemic CO2 still rose by near record amounts. Bitcoin mining does have something to do with this. There is a connection. Please be open to the idea that we need to regulate the energy that Proof of Work mining cryptocurrencies use. I don't want to stop crypto. I just want us to use types that require less energy to mine.
The planet is running out of time and this is FACT offsetting lots of progress on reducing emissions. https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html
Please don't downvote because you love crypto. I do too. I just want us to do better at preventing CO2 emissions from rising because of its mining.
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"a trusted party" does not exist at scale.
One such trusted party does exist. It’s a non-profit and it’s called the Stellar Development Foundation. It’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) is trusted well enough to be in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by marketcap. It has years of history to look back at. It doesn’t have a inflation rate (0% inflation rate now + occasional coin-burns). It uses orders of magnitude less electricity than bitcoin because it use…
market cap =/= trust, especially when you consider that in the past there were outright scams that were in the top 15 (eg. IOTA).
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Efficient or secure. Take your pick.
I"ll hire a few guys with guns, plus auditors. Their ability to maintain no sense of humor beats out your wonky crypto scheme in both regards. Your issue is you don't like the rules that come with the auditors. Those rules have a purpose, and that purpose is tied with sovereign diplomatic interrelation of civic bodies the world over. Many of whom are expressing great concern over the very thing PoW hastens. So no, it…
A few guys with guns can be beaten by several other guys with guns.
>plus auditors
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wirecard-scandal-puts-spotlight...
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To me it seems like Bitcoin (and other pow cryptocurrencies) are almost like the climate change scapegoat for a number of social and economic issues that have seemingly come to a head recently to facilitate their rise. People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?" and I think it is…
I don't think the criticism is exactly wrong, but it's more like Bitcoin mining is the reductio ad absurdum exposing the waste of resources that goes into gold mining (yes, there's some industrial uses, but that is a rounding error compared to the quantities that are dug up, purified, cast into bars, shipped around the world and buried back underground in vaults).
The ETs come back once all the minerals are refined and purified and neatly stacked.
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Well that's fine, no legitimate businesses hold them. Seriously. Your suppliers are paid in dollars, your tax burden is in dollars based on the conversion price on receipt. To hold them on receipt is wildly irresponsible speculation, as a business.
I don't know whether you consider Tesla a legitimate business but they're holding bitcoins. https://www.thestreet.com/crypto/bitcoin/tesla-up-1-billion-...
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They can move, but that undermines confidence of the blockchain because then it's under the influence of fewer governments. Which makes me think that quite a few wont.
Isn't majority of bitcoin mining done in China? If so then we can safely conclude that the people don't care under whose influence it is.
All this talk about Bitcoin causing global warming is starting to feel like a targetted misinformation campaign. Yes it's wasteful, and yes it's using a fair amount of energy at the moment. But all estimates show it's still a very small fraction of the problem. It feels like we spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about bitcoins carbon footprint for its size.
How can it be interpreted as misinformation if the information is pretty solidly based? Everyone is looking for low hanging fruit in the race to slow down the climate disaster and it’s an easy target. I’m glad online currencies exist as a technology but I’m not glad an energy intensive one is currently #1 when at the same time the entire tech is taken over by investors/speculators instead of users. And if calculation…
Compare for example with MGM's properties in Las Vegas which they claim consume 171 MW. That's not quite as much as Bitcoin, but it's still higher than 65 of the countries listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
So it's actually pretty easy to surpass the usage of "an entire country". And that to me seems like a much more useless waste than Bitcoin, which has significant uses besides entertainment
It’s a simple equation: So long as there is more money in mining BTC than there is cost in energy to mine it, mining will proceed. No entity in the world can control the price of crypto. But, we can and already do regulate energy production. I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere. Seriously, what are the…
> we can and already do regulate energy production. True. If BTCUSD goes to $1m AND you have strict global regulation banning carbon energy, it will be a powerful incentive to harness green energy, which will be good for mankind in the long run.