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El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

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Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#231

Post by thehappypm »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #114
acjohnson55 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually a complete waste. All it produces is more security for the blockchain, which is of low marginal value. They could use that energy to produce something of actual value, like hydroponic food, or desalinated water, or run a data center, or literally anything else.

I’m sorry you don’t see that it has value. It has value to me. In fact, I need a secure, permissionless, censorship resistant, non-state backed value storage system more than I need hydroponic food or desalinated water. The problem is the disconnect between your wants/needs and the needs of others in the world. Waste is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

Honestly, why do you need BTC? You can't actually buy a whole lot with it, and you gotta convert to real currencies do anything meaningful anyway, which defeats the whole argument.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#232

Post by thehappypm »

Tenoke wrote: post #87
dougk16 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good analogy with http. But keep going. After http people realized the importance of https. Sending credit card numbers and passwords in cleartext over the Internet was clearly a bad idea. So what is https in this analogy? Monero, PirateChain, Aeon, Wownero are the major contenders.

Monero yes, the other 3 do not seem like all that serious contenders. LTC with mimblewimble would be a way better example. Of smaller ones, SCRT which is a whole privacy-focused smartchain would be my other pick.

I've never heard smartchain before, that's terrific marketing, I bet it's gonna fool a ton of people.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#233

Post by technotony »

maneesh wrote: post #218
reader_mode wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's all fine and dandy until you need to take out a loan and on top of high interest you also need to account for deflation - good luck getting a house mortgage and falling wages. Deflation puta pressure on price of work as well - but people don't like pay cuts.

When you're one of the 70% of people who are unbanked in el salvador, there are no needs for loans or interest -- the concept barely exists.

It's very counterintuitive, but actually the more unbanked you are the more you needs loans/savings and the more complicated your personal financial balance sheet is. I'd recommend the book 'the poor and their money'[1] for the details on this, but essentially if you haven't got savings you are constantly borrowing and lending informally with your community to meet life needs like a new roof or school fees.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Their-Money-Oxford-India-Paperbacks/d...

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#234

Post by pkulak »

rawtxapp wrote: post #216
pkulak wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning is a horrible kludge to deal with the fact that Bitcoin is terrible at being a currency. It essentially boils down to this process: 1. Pay huge fees to take your money off the blockchain. 2. Whiz it around a new, totally independent, centralized network where you need an always-on connection to anyone you're paying or receiving from and need to trust any intermediaries you're using, with brand new fees for…

Channel factories will open/close many channels at once, so you'll only pay a fraction of the blockchain transaction cost. It has the advantages of Bitcoin's security and p2p network speed. Security and trust are a lot more important for currency, nano doesn't have that. It has easily been spammed [1]. It barely has a market cap of ~1B$ and has never recovered to it's 2017 prices, so it's not even remotely close to b…

Eh, it got spammed and transactions slowed to BTC level (but still with no fees) for a couple months. Spam is a solvable problem. A hard limit of 4 transactions per second isn't.

Ya know what doesn't have security and trust? Putting your entire country on two custodial wallets and having all your citizen's wealth in the hands of two foreign companies (channel factoried or no). No one in El Salvador actually owns any Bitcoin. It baffles me how anyone could get on board with the original ideals of BTC, then defend what's happening now.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#235

Post by hungryhobo »

hulitu wrote: post #11

Is this paper a subsidiary of the Onion ? "100% clean, 100% renewable, 0 emissions energy from our volcano" . So when a volcano is depleted you plant another one ?

depleted might be the wrong word, becomes inactive perhaps? I agree with your general assessments though, volcanic activity doesn't seem like a reliable source of energy.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#236

Post by rawtxapp »

thehappypm wrote: post #229
rawtxapp wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean even gold (which is a centuries old asset) is pretty volatile on a yearly basis (high of ~2100$, low of ~1650$ this year). I think when Bitcoin approaches Gold's price, you can expect similar volatility because by then large institutions/countries would be holding it. Also on a long term basis, it appreciates an average of ~300% year over year which is much better than the dollar which is depreciating on purpo…

Gold is not a used directly as a currency anymore, in part for the reason that it's hard to control the value of an asset. It turns out that having some control over a currency's inflation/deflation is very powerful and good for economies to function.

Fiat currencies fluctuate too, even a big pair like USD/EUR has a high of ~0.9 and low of ~0.8 this year and if we are talking about smaller currencies like say the Turkish Lira, you're looking at much larger changes.

Gold isn't used directly because it's not convenient, are you gonna transport a heavy metal that you can't divide into small portions to pay for stuff? No! Lightning network wallets makes even tiny payments of couple satoshis very easy/instant/almost free.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#237

Post by acjohnson55 »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #114
acjohnson55 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually a complete waste. All it produces is more security for the blockchain, which is of low marginal value. They could use that energy to produce something of actual value, like hydroponic food, or desalinated water, or run a data center, or literally anything else.

I’m sorry you don’t see that it has value. It has value to me. In fact, I need a secure, permissionless, censorship resistant, non-state backed value storage system more than I need hydroponic food or desalinated water. The problem is the disconnect between your wants/needs and the needs of others in the world. Waste is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

There are now other cryptocurrencies that provide that without wasteful proof of work.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#238

Post by randomhodler84 »

thehappypm wrote: post #231
randomhodler84 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry you don’t see that it has value. It has value to me. In fact, I need a secure, permissionless, censorship resistant, non-state backed value storage system more than I need hydroponic food or desalinated water. The problem is the disconnect between your wants/needs and the needs of others in the world. Waste is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

Honestly, why do you need BTC? You can't actually buy a whole lot with it, and you gotta convert to real currencies do anything meaningful anyway, which defeats the whole argument.

A) Ensuring the time-value of my labor is not eroded by the state through inflation. Yes, there are day to day risks of fluctuations in value, but one just needs to compare the trend line of where BTC is going vs fiat currencies in the longer term. I’m not worried about 50% draw downs on an asset that appreciates > 100% pa.

B) ensuring that third parties like banks are unable to steal my funds. Through fees, charges, unauthorized transfers or just plain theft…

C) portability of funds around the globe, independent of foreign or domestic currency. Ever tried to wire funds globally on a weekend? Trade?

You are still looking at bitcoin like it’s a dollar bill. It’s not — it’s digital gold with more computational security than any system ever built by humanity.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#239

Post by iabacu »

cartosso wrote: post #139

I can't believe people still don't see the obvious issue that PoW has no sense and it's impact gets progressively worse as the market cap of BTC increases. The more adoption BTC will have, the more incentive will powerful entities have to take part in mining (obvious analogy: US dollar, the people who control it have the most power in the global financial system). Also, the more valuable BTC becomes, the more new min…

The argument about POW energy is overblown.

There's an exponential decay of rewards of mining BTC (50% every 4 years).

Do you think the price of BTC will increase exponentially, faster than the decay over the long term? I don't think so.

This implies that the energy consumption of bitcoin mining will eventually decay exponentially too.

Re: El Salvador Plans to Use Electricity Generated from Volcanoes to Mine Bitcoin

#240

Post by randomhodler84 »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #237
randomhodler84 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry you don’t see that it has value. It has value to me. In fact, I need a secure, permissionless, censorship resistant, non-state backed value storage system more than I need hydroponic food or desalinated water. The problem is the disconnect between your wants/needs and the needs of others in the world. Waste is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

There are now other cryptocurrencies that provide that without wasteful proof of work.

Ok, hold up. Energy usage is a good thing and provides security, actually. You can’t ditch the energy and retain security. I’m sorry, but PoS is a bad and the wrong model for censorship resistant, non-state stores of value.
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