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Never thought a site called "Hacker News" would be so anti-technology as I'm seeing in these comments. Use the energy. We'll start making more of it and cheaper. Everyone benefits.
I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment. (edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven th…
The more billions it costs to run bitcoin, the more it costs to 51% attack it. If you can outwaste energy, you can hijack the system.
It would be useful it some state, eg., russia or china, would just cut off networks and forge bitcoin network traffic -- and hence bring the whole thing down. Or, do a 51% attack by controlling 51% of the hashing power.
The whole thing is a joke, one only tolerated by states because it's supports joke levels of economic transactions. Were any % of an economy to run on this, states would just seal the network in their borders and end the whole charade.
In the same context: How many top ranking games on steam waste the same amount of electricity? Shouldn't they be responsible for building fusion reactors, too, by that logic? If not, why?
Games are a product and bitcoin is a digital "currency" mainly used for financial speculation, fraud, gray and black market goods/services, and money laundering.
Power usage by itself is meaningless. The real question is the power providing utility or not. Like, no one thinks data centers for AWS are bad. They provide real benefit and utility. But, perhaps power wasted on cloth dryers and Christmas lights are a western frivolity. So, the real argument is Bitcoin useful or not. Which, like most things, is something that probably be left to the free market.
Bitcoin however provides what? A tiny fraction of the transactions per second that visa does, without all the consumer protection that credit cards encompass, with orders of magnitude more power consumed. All the while providing 'freedom' to a handful of activists, but most of all money launderers, drug sellers and all sorts of shady businesses.
Never thought a site called "Hacker News" would be so anti-technology as I'm seeing in these comments. Use the energy. We'll start making more of it and cheaper. Everyone benefits.
I don't follow crypto news but I am curious how the "proof of work" alternative is working out? or not?
Ethereum, the second biggest coin by market cap and the network that allows for NFTs, completed their transition to proof of stake in 2022. Ethereum’s energy usage is now almost completely negligible. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms... Since Bitcoin is completely decentralized, there’s no way to change the protocol without everyone just stopping using it, which miners don’t want to do.
That's completely wrong though. The protocol gets changed by a majority of miners accepting new protocols, as has happened many times before.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This 2.3% mostly came from fossil fuels not new green generation capacity. You need to consider where these miners are located based on electricity costs and what infrastructure is built there not simply a hypothetical grid where arbitrary power can be moved anywhere at zero losses.
Source?
Why is crypto still a thing ? I may be dumb but just don't get it.
I coincidentally just came to HN looking for this exact answer following the headlines about BTC soaring. [1] The use cases for it I see are: 1. Cheaply send large payments without having to pay a bank fee (instead you pay btc fees plus conversion to and from fiat fees). 2. Anonymously transfer money if using a washing service (illegal to offer one in the US) or if you spend rawly mined coins. IMO, crypto is a US gov…
And how much energy does maintaining the military that backs US currency use? Much more and it's violent. The use of energy to protect bitcoin from attack from nation states is non-violent. It really is an efficient and ethical use of the energy.
Bitcoin doesn't gurantee that if you give someone money and exchange it for bitcoin that you will get the bitcoin. It will not guarantee that if you want to buy something, that you receive the item in the expected quality, time and condition.
The only use case for bitcoin are ON chain transactions and the only solution to this are smart contracts which also don't solve the problem because its still only for digital things and it requires the same amount of capital which doesn't make sense because rich people could block you from ever accessing your money if they want to destroy you.
Please please please please start reading up on blockchain!1 :(
2.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane. This is the type of tragedy of the commons issue where regulation is needed. For any one actor they can justify spending infinity energy as long as their ROI is positive. There are enough justifications out there that it's easy to convince oneself that you're doing the world a favor ("I'm just librating finance and fighting the good fight against the central…