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Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

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Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#301

Post by clippablematt »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #110
clippablematt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like lots of people forgot about 2007/08 and the impact on so many people around the world. It was truly painful and destructive. And very clearly people responsible got off free, with bonuses and some even ended up with jobs in the treasury. A lot of people I know working in crypto saw their families hurt badly by that crises and will happily spend their lives trying to build something else (even if the odds…

Serious question: how would cryptocurrencies and defi have helped avoid/mitigate the subprime lending crisis specifically?

I’m not an economist or banker. Other people will have better answers. I’m sure there’s a lot of excellent stuff we can use in existing systems. But I just don’t hold it as a precious untouchable thing. People tell me they are scared crypto is dangerous, but we’ve already been badly hurt by the current system I’m not gonna apologise for trying something else.

I think a key idea to pursue is how we could provide privacy for individuals and transparency for institutions/corporations.

And I think it’s important to try ideas. Try something, anything. Accept that most things will fail, that 90% will be shit. Break things, take things apart and rebuild them, remake old ideas anew. Take the same energy i have to getting mods to run in a game, or monitoring the rain in my garden and doing it to money and banking and lending, community currencies, universal basic income, trust networks, etc.

That’s not to say don’t be critical, there is a lot to question and weird speculation(imo a result of the abusive financial system we live in, it didn’t just appear with crypto) but hackernews could do with more hacker mentality on crypto imo. It’s a massive design space for people to try out their ideas for money and debt and gift giving and public services and taxes and where digital worlds and communities meet real world politics and institutions and economies.

I’d like it if my bank was hentai death metal themed not hsbc blandness. And that I can build my own savings account logic on top of it that automatically sends half the profit to animal charities. I’d like to be able to spin up an instant bank account for my new guild of strangers around the world at the click of a button so we can share materials and grow together. I’d like my money to be pictures of dogs not pictures of a president or queen. I don’t think these ideas are silly, dangerous, or impractical. And it doesn’t require the permissions of tradfi. Just public and private keys. Wild.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#302

Post by captainmuon »

I like to think of bitcoin as solving the sybil problem via proof of work. Because if you just gave every "account" coins, then somebody could just make multiple "accounts" and get more than they are entitled to. (I know bitcoin doesn't have "accounts" but bear with me.) By it's very nature it is wasteful.

Question: Has anybody tried to replace proof of work with social proof? Let every participant create their own fiat or scrip out of thin air. The different kind of scrips are not fungible with each other. Often scrip would be used like a voucher. You acquire it on the market and then return it to its emitter for goods and services. I can imagine digital companies or successful streamers to have their own scrip, but also local and national governments, or banks. If Joe normal emits their own scrip, well then it is at first worthless. Same as if you make your own shitcoin.

BUT the twist here would be that you can endow other scrip with your scrip's value. If you are a celebrity with a lot of value, you can put a little bit of your coins in the coins of, say, an environmentalist project you want to support. Suddenly their printed money can buy things they need.

In a way, it is the anti-bitcoin. Bitcoins are hard to generate, and the algorithm is strict with no room for negotiation. If somebody has a lot of coin but the majority doesn't like what they are doing with it, tough luck. Social scrip would be trivial to generate, and it's value is due to the services I provide to others, or the value transferred by others to my scrip, so a part of it is permanently up to negotiation.

Probably it is a crazy idea. I'm still thinking about how to make the "imbueing" work exactly while keeping the value stable (the current idea is some kind of page-rank algorithm). I'm also not sure how to incentivize people to keep the ledger running if there is no mining. But maybe somebody is already further along with this idea.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#303

Post by landemva »

it_citizen wrote: post #237
zionic wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn’t we be giving up an essential lever to adjust to changing economical conditions? Who’s we? You, I, and most people have zero ability to move those levers. The question is should they have access to those levers and I firmly believe the answer is no. I’d rather have a world with sound money and no one in control than the people who have dominated the west for the last 100+ years.

We as “citizen of a nation”? If nations no longer control their money, does it mean they can go bankrupt? They can no longer adjust their money to influence their commercial balance? Would have the EU and the US been able to create stimulus packages? What about adjusting the inflation to the economic growth rate of a country? (Genuinely asking)

We could replace the contract company 'Federal Reserve' (not gov't agency and no gov't employees) with a growth rate formula. Let me know how readily they take that idea.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#304

Post by landemva »

bidirectional wrote: post #127
thathndude wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never understood the BTC purists. I’m generally anti-crypto in any variety, but As far as cryptocurrency‘s go, bitcoin is really bad compared to so many alternatives. I’d just as soon see it all go up in smoke. But why does BTC reign?

This is what I find strangest. At least coins like Ethereum and Solana have entire ecosystems of complex projects being built up around them (no matter how skeptical one may be of those projects), Bitcoin seems like an incredibly spartan ecosystem with basically one use, and the sole advantage of being first.

Solana is a VC-backed centralized money grab.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#305

Post by [deleted] »

arcticbull wrote: post #275
colecut wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming it killed 15000 people, that is still over 8000 transactions per person killed... Nothing is perfect.

If one person died for every 8000 transactions on the Visa network it would be nothing short of global genocide. Credit networks ran 468 billion transactions in 2020, so that would be 60 million dead. "Pobody's nerfect" hardly seems like the right response.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#306

Post by colecut »

arcticbull wrote: post #275
colecut wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming it killed 15000 people, that is still over 8000 transactions per person killed... Nothing is perfect.

If one person died for every 8000 transactions on the Visa network it would be nothing short of global genocide. Credit networks ran 468 billion transactions in 2020, so that would be 60 million dead. "Pobody's nerfect" hardly seems like the right response.

It is if you're being darkly cynical

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#308

Post by Chyzwar »

Nextgrid wrote: post #56

The only way to beat Bitcoin or other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies is to remove the need for them. Bitcoin and other cryptos have a use-case; it may not be apparent to someone living in a developed country with access to a good banking system or it may be one you don't like and involves criminal activity, but there absolutely is a use-case. The only way to stop this is if the traditional banking system catches up a…

Then, We should make money laundering, drug trafficking, ransomware, blackmail etc legal?. Banking system is regulated precisely to make illegal activities more difficult. Sooner or later, crypto exchanges will get regulated in the same way as banks. It just takes time for regulators to catch up.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#309

Post by iggldiggl »

esarbe wrote: post #179
oneoff786 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you give food to poor areas for free then their farmers go out of business, the area becomes more poor, and they become dependent on aid. Breaking systems always has consequences. It’s not easy.

How about industrialized nations get rid of their agricultural subsidies?

I absolutely can't say whether current subsidies are too high or too low or just at the right level for that purpose, but at least to a certain extent the subsidies and the resultant overproduction are intentional as a safeguard against harvest failures, because you really really don't want to end up with a famine as soon as you get an only even just marginally worse harvest.

It's the same issue we're now running into with renewable electricity production: You either need lots of storage, and for what you cannot store you need to significantly overbuild your production capacity.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#310

Post by sgjohnson »

la_fayette wrote: post #255
arcticbull wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part is that according to Cambridge some 40% of that is coal power [1]. Frequently the dirtiest coal power in the world, between Xinjiang (no longer, probably...) and Kazakhstan. Coal power causes excess mortality of anywhere between 25 and 278 deaths per TWh generated depending on how you're counting it and (most importantly) where it's generated. [2,3,4] Bitcoin's addiction to dirty coal killed between 15…

There are no new dirty power plants like coal or nuclear built specifically for bitcoin mining. There are definitely new renewable energy sources built for bitcoin mining. So dirty energy would be used anyway! The rate of new renewable energy sources created because of bitcoin is higher overall than without bitcoin.

>like coal or nuclear

Nuclear is dirty? How?

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