Everyone needs a thneed.
Careful... referring to banned authors is dangerous. /s
Bitcoin may consume as much energy as all data centers globally
11–20 of 131 posts
Re: Bitcoin may consume as much energy as all data centers globally
#12Proof of work blockchains should be banned by various governments for this reason alone. At this point BTC is a speculative bubble that benefits a very small group to the detriment of the rest of us. I also have a lot of personal frustration with how mining (more of ETH and others) is impacting the global GPU supply. A whole cottage industry has cropped up of sites, discords, etc that provide notifications when GPUs…
I say we should ban data centers instead. They're clearly a scam and no one should be allowed to use them because they waste so much power!
A lot of datacenters provide substantial utility to others. Like the customers of the services that are hosted in those datacenters.
BTC mining makes the miners more wealthy. In service of the BTC network, which has what utility?
There are quite a number of criminal or at least grey market uses for BTC.
But what are the legitimate uses that are not as well or better served by the traditional payment networks?
Re: Bitcoin may consume as much energy as all data centers globally
#13How much energy do the following consume in total: - mining metal for coins of fiat currency - mining gold because people don't trust fiat (digging otherwise useless-in-that-quantity rocks out of the earth, a Proof of... hmm... WORK?) - running stock exchanges because people don't trust gold either (tungsten has almost the same density) - smelting the plain metal and gold - the US military which backs the dollar, and…
Does it matter? Bitcoin will never be a currency based on the implementation (a satoshi is not small enough) and just because something else is bad or worse doesn't make what you do acceptable.
Re: Bitcoin may consume as much energy as all data centers globally
#14Proof of work blockchains should be banned by various governments for this reason alone. At this point BTC is a speculative bubble that benefits a very small group to the detriment of the rest of us. I also have a lot of personal frustration with how mining (more of ETH and others) is impacting the global GPU supply. A whole cottage industry has cropped up of sites, discords, etc that provide notifications when GPUs…
>BTC is an anti-social Ponzi scheme speculative bubble =/= ponzi scheme https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26203396
To be fair, if Satoshi Nakamoto is still around and has access to 1 million bitcoins, then it's more of a Ponzi scheme.
Re: Bitcoin may consume as much energy as all data centers globally
#15Proof of work blockchains should be banned by various governments for this reason alone. At this point BTC is a speculative bubble that benefits a very small group to the detriment of the rest of us. I also have a lot of personal frustration with how mining (more of ETH and others) is impacting the global GPU supply. A whole cottage industry has cropped up of sites, discords, etc that provide notifications when GPUs…
I can list so many dumb uses of energy out of my head that could be beneficial if banned...
VISA alone processes over 60,000 transactions per second [0] and only uses a tiny subset of the world's data centers. Bitcoin processes a whooping 7 transactions per second and consumes as much energy as *all data centers globally*.
I'm curious to hear what dumb use of energy you have in your head that rivals this level of stupidity.
edit: I'll address the "apple to oranges" replies here: you can combine the energy consumed by VISA and whatever other financial service exists that would together match the feature-set of bitcoin (eg. VISA + Bank of America + ...) and you'd still have energy consumption many orders of magnitude lower than the Bitcoin network.
[0] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...
Re: Bitcoin may consume as much energy as all data centers globally
#16Proof of work blockchains should be banned by various governments for this reason alone. At this point BTC is a speculative bubble that benefits a very small group to the detriment of the rest of us. I also have a lot of personal frustration with how mining (more of ETH and others) is impacting the global GPU supply. A whole cottage industry has cropped up of sites, discords, etc that provide notifications when GPUs…
>BTC is an anti-social Ponzi scheme speculative bubble =/= ponzi scheme https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26203396
Yeah, you're right on the definition.
Re: Bitcoin may consume as much energy as all data centers globally
#17Proof of work blockchains should be banned by various governments for this reason alone. At this point BTC is a speculative bubble that benefits a very small group to the detriment of the rest of us. I also have a lot of personal frustration with how mining (more of ETH and others) is impacting the global GPU supply. A whole cottage industry has cropped up of sites, discords, etc that provide notifications when GPUs…
Yeah, pretty much expected these comments would appear soon. How come everytime Bitcoin thread is started, 99% of comments are people absolutely clueless about how difficulty is regulated within Bitcoin protocol?
Re: Bitcoin may consume as much energy as all data centers globally
#18How much energy do the following consume in total: - mining metal for coins of fiat currency - mining gold because people don't trust fiat (digging otherwise useless-in-that-quantity rocks out of the earth, a Proof of... hmm... WORK?) - running stock exchanges because people don't trust gold either (tungsten has almost the same density) - smelting the plain metal and gold - the US military which backs the dollar, and…
Just to provide some balance, you can add to the bitcoin side:
- Mining metals for GPUs and other devices that run proof of work
- Manufacturing those devices
- Transporting those devices
- Building shiny glass bitcoin cafes.
I'm aware that several of your list items dwarf my items, but it's useful to still remember that producing (and as the article states, using) electronics _also_ has a cost.
Re: Bitcoin may consume as much energy as all data centers globally
#19Proof of work blockchains should be banned by various governments for this reason alone. At this point BTC is a speculative bubble that benefits a very small group to the detriment of the rest of us. I also have a lot of personal frustration with how mining (more of ETH and others) is impacting the global GPU supply. A whole cottage industry has cropped up of sites, discords, etc that provide notifications when GPUs…
I can list so many dumb uses of energy out of my head that could be beneficial if banned...
cough ad-tech cough
Re: Bitcoin may consume as much energy as all data centers globally
#20Another anti-Bitcoin article focusing on energy consumption, how original.
HN has discussed this to death.