221–230 of 268 posts
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"You criticise bitcoin for using more electricity than Ireland while using disproportionately high levels of coal power usage, and yet you live in a house. Hypocrite!" This isn't a cogent argument. Yes, overheating or overcooling houses is also bad. If AI training used as much electricity as Ireland I'd be critical of that too.
A lot more than Ireland now; that was years ago. It now uses more electricity than Argentina (about 6 Irelands).
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Because no private enterprise could provide power or internet. Sure, some of the internet technology was invented with government grants, but lets not pretend these inventions were only inevitable due to US government. If US government were gone today the internet, electricity, and bitcoin will still be here but the usefulness of the dollar will massively decrease.
I'd argue the opposite, if the US government ceased to exist, the electrical grids in North America would collapse shortly thereafter, followed by the Internet and Bitcoin. Without the rule of law and threat of prosecution, a massive surge in usage due to theft would overwhelm systems. Without the nuclear status quo and the threat of retaliation, NA would either be glassed or invaded.
No, there will just be temporary outages and prices these things (electrical grids, internet) will rise to extortionist levels as local authorities / militias take over. Just like they do in any other conflict zone in the world.
So bitcoin failed its guarantees two times at least, but it's fine and dandy by the ‘crypto’ people. Such cryptography, wow.
Whats your suggestion, how should crypto people react? They currently dont hide the fact the network split twice (8 years ago), so what else should they do?
“It's so decentralized, very nice! Oh, wait, let us centralize it real quick. Here, now it's decentralized just like the other day! No, wait, we need to centralize it again for a minute. Done, now it's surely decentralized and immutable, tell all your friends!”
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It's functional but not ready for prime time yet, IMHO. Buying things on Bitrefill using Lightning works well. It is better than a credit card, I think. Really fast and low fees. Imagine a gift card that works for any merchant that opts into the open protocol. Also, if you want to refund the money on the card, you can do that without the cooperation of any merchant. There are a number of improvements in the pipeline.…
What do you mean exactly about refunds, do you mean a merchant can refund without involving a card network?
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Those achievements are through cooperative contracts and agreements. That can happen without US government. They can even happen without any government at all. Government after all is just a body with a monopoly on violence.
I don't think contracts can replace law. Imagine having to read and understand a unique 3000 page contract in order to buy a share of stock, or a house, or to get married. Imagine trying to do something like loan money if you have no way of knowing what someone's existing financial obligations are. I think the volume of economic activity would plummet. "Monopoly on violence" is something I've heard about before. Is t…
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I mainly just want to ensure the earth doesn't burn. Yes people should ideally not be overheating their home (could easily be done using smart meters if electric companies weren't incentivised to ignore it) and many other things like reducing fossil fuel usage. Bitcoin consumes massive amounts of energy for basically no benefit except pure money wonkery, which is no benefit at all. It's a net negative in every possib…
>Bitcoin consumes massive amounts of energy for basically no benefit except pure money wonkery, which is no benefit at all. It's a net negative in every possible way. Well I disagree here. It provides benefit for many people. The example I continually use for me personally is buying precious metals with I think we're in agreement we would do well to be as efficient as we can with our resources. It would be great to f…
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It was never meant to be private or anonymous. You’re creating huge strawmen here. Bitcoin is definitely fungible and decentralised. You’re using a lot of words that you don’t know what they mean.
On the contrary, I don’t think you know what those words mean. Bitcoin is neither fungible or decentralized. Mining is completely dominated/centralized by ASIC farms run by huge mining cartels. Also, buying Bitcoin from someone else inherits that coin’s entire history. If those coins were stolen at some point you could become liable. Bitcoins are non-fungible.
You’re creating an impossible standard, a logical fallacy. Dollars can also be tainted with serial numbers, get damaged, be marked with colors.
Again, your argument only consists of logical fallacies.
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What do you mean exactly about refunds, do you mean a merchant can refund without involving a card network?
No, I mean unlike a gift card, you can get your balance back from the card without the merchant's cooperation. Once you pay a merchant, it's not reversible.
The big thing it's missing from a consumer standpoint is the purchase protection that comes with credit cards (which does let consumers claim refunds for faulty products etc).
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Are you buying precious metals in the abstract, commodities market sense or are you manufacturing? Because if its the former, I still don't think that's a net positive. I do think it has some small benefits like transferring money where there are no other options. But the vast majority of the network's use is in purely financial use and justified by HODLers and libertarian types. Its existence is largely a downside o…
>Are you buying precious metals in the abstract, commodities market sense or are you manufacturing? Because if its the former, I still don't think that's a net positive. Y'all told me crypto was bad and now I'm bad for dumping crypto to buy precious metals? The litecoin transaction I do uses $0.02 of electricity. $0.02. Ever left a lightbulb on longer than you should have? Spent $0.02 in gas to go to the bank to get…
Litecoin processes about 100k txs a day and miners make about 1M$ per day. So that comes to about 10$ in electricity per tx if we assume miners break even and ignore hardware depreciation. While this overestimates electricity costs, it's not off by orders of magnitude. This is the way that people attribute bitcoin's electricity costs to transactions.
Your $0.02 is presumably just your tx fee.
For all the hate Bitcoin gets because it’s obviously in a bubble market, can we at least agree that it is an astounding engineering achievement that an anonymous individual and a small group of researchers were able to build a network capable of transacting billions of dollars of value with only 2 service incidents in 14 years? All without any meaningful service costs and no hacking of the network, despite huge incen…
There is a meaningful service cost, it's just paid for by mining. Environmentally there's also a massive cost, one that is not offset by the benefits bitcoin brings - which is primarily financial speculation and scams. Cryptocurrency is probably one of the worst inventions in recent memory.