101–110 of 214 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Literally every joule that goes into snapchat datacenters is wasted. It's not necessary, it doesn't make anything happy and it's primarily a way for a large company to harvest a lot of data on young people. Nobody wins with the way this power is used.
You can make that argument for any piece of entertainment. why live? let's all kill ourselves, that way we won't use any energy anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well there's nothing wrong with considering a store of value to keep you from being under the thumb of fiat. So there's works of art, maybe some other metals, some really unusual one-off earth property. So what you have left is crypto or gold. So invest in gold and encourage more gold mining. Or just trust your government and hold cash. Either way, you're losing a shitload of value. Hedge a small piece of your opinio…
How's is bitcoin even a hedge against the dollar when it's correlated with the U.S. stock market? So many things just don't add up, like is btc a currency or an investment? Fiat currency is really the only spendable currency.
Source?
The premise is that there no more worthier causes than bitcoin beyond the grid needs. That premise is simply false. You can use excess grid capacity for lots of useful things including water desalination, charging cars at off peak hours, producing hydrogen. These are all applications that can flexibly use clean/cheap power when it is available instead of putting a constant load on the grid. This solution would compet…
A lot of people need bitcoin. It is really useful to hoard! Not to ge rich, but to avoid getting poorer in countries with rampant inflation. Also it facilitate money transfers a lot. Yes, a transaction in bitcoin is expensive, but a international wire transfer on my country for example is EVEN MORE expensive, so transferring money using Bitcoin, even after eating all the fees, is cheaper (and easier too). So people t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of this matters. The system is unblock able and your opinion doesn't matter. It will go on without me or you. That is how it is. You can complain all you want.
I see you stoped caring about real arguments because its to much effort for you to read through them and trying to argue against them. Sure, lucky enough, i'm arguing on hn also to make sure that comments and articles dont' scew the image of bitcoins being bad for the environment and happy enough, you stop arguing about it, does exactly this.
The premise is that there no more worthier causes than bitcoin beyond the grid needs. That premise is simply false. You can use excess grid capacity for lots of useful things including water desalination, charging cars at off peak hours, producing hydrogen. These are all applications that can flexibly use clean/cheap power when it is available instead of putting a constant load on the grid. This solution would compet…
A lot of people need bitcoin. It is really useful to hoard! Not to ge rich, but to avoid getting poorer in countries with rampant inflation. Also it facilitate money transfers a lot. Yes, a transaction in bitcoin is expensive, but a international wire transfer on my country for example is EVEN MORE expensive, so transferring money using Bitcoin, even after eating all the fees, is cheaper (and easier too). So people t…
You do realize that, because the total number of bitcoins is limited, it will get harder and harder to get bitcoins? So every generations will have to work/fight harder to get their currency, which is extremely unfair? Why would a newborn have more trouble to get his hands on money compared to the ones (like myself) who had it easy to buy cryptos while it was cheap? And what about increase/decrease in population: central bans may implement bad policies but at least they did not tied their hands in principles (e.g hardcoded limited number of coins) and can adjust things as they are needed.
I understand your argument as "humans do bad things today, let's hardcode things with technics" without consideration as to why the hardcoded things will remain beneficial to all/most in the long term. Humans are fallible and inconstant but they are human after all. We can't do without trust so why try to replace it with mathematics anyway? Only because we _currently_ lack trust? If so, shouldn't we focus on that instead?
This really is the right idea. Making it profitable for PoW to consume excess solar energy has the downstream effect of spinning up more demand for solar energy in general. You can hate Bitcoin and PoW all you want, but the genie is already out of the bottle. Even if you banned mining rigs (good luck with that), people would just mine it at home on their spare computers or use botnets. Either way, the only way we'll…
But we don't just need more solar. We need less non-renewable energy to be consumed.
Solar may replace it but adding tones of solar to retire polluting sources is not directly addressing the issue at stake but just want more solar.
The missing consideration here is the wasted capital of a miner sitting there idle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is purely subjective. Bitcoin's spent electricity goes to increase security of the network (whether one's care about the network, is the subjective part). But the electricity is not being turned into heat for no purpose and then ejected into the atmosphere.
That's still not the problem: Proof-of-work mining wastes energy purposefully, while any other type of data processing only does so coincidentally. Data centers would jump at the opportunity of using 50% less electricity due to more efficient processors. Bitcoin miners would just mine twice as fast.
So then it comes down to, we’ll is that extra processing these data centers doing useful or wasteful? And that’s all subjective. Some of its more clear cut probably: work that leads to new medicine probably useful. Work that hijacks dopamine processes to addict people. Arguably not useful. But how do we determine that fairly? And where would we draw a line on this kind of moral policing of energy use?
Increasing bitcoin mining capacity allows the energy provider to “overbuild” solar without wasting energy. Nope. “Free” PoW undermines the whole system. Mining has to be a sacrifice, otherwise it won’t work anymore. There is no “and I can use the resulting infrastructure for X”. Every joule of energy that goes into proof of work is a joule wasted by design . There is no free lunch. I’m starting to think that maybe cr…