441–450 of 499 posts
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…
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> want to know where OP lives, having an all electric heating setup anywhere in the world where it gets cold enough is incredibly inefficient I'm in Wyoming. My heat is direct electric. The house doesn't have ducting and Wyoming power is cheap.
A bit of a tangent, but do you mind saying what you pay per kWh? I'm currently on £0.36 GBP per kWh (about $0.45). Just wondering what counts as cheap!
5.604¢ for my last bill. (About 6¢ after taxes.)
> The EIA found that the global share of Bitcoin mining that takes place in the U.S. grew from 3.4% in 2020 to a whopping 37.8% in 2022. What drove that? Since this is the kind of thing that you could do pretty much anywhere, why should a such a disproportionate amount of it happen in the US?
If this is economically unproductive work, why are the miners being rewarded for it? Is it just that the market hasn't figured out what the detractors here seem to know? Or is it that they don't understand as much about economics as they think they do?
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(All money is make-believe)
I agree, fwiw. Let's move on to a post-money communist society.
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Yeah those companies generally use that energy to produce things of value to people
The cryptocurrency has value! Maybe we agree that it's shitty, but its value is abundantly clear. It has a price and a nonzero trading volume. An economy that prioritized at human wellbeing or moral value (and had the might to impose it) might be nice, but it's a far cry from the current reality of market forces determining what gets produced.
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.