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Bitcoin as a Battery

nickgrossman.xyz

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Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#11

Post by quotha »

ketamine__ wrote: post #3
henearkr wrote: post #2

Well, call any anthropogenic CO2 amount in the atmosphere "battery" then...

The fact that said thing produces a lot of CO2 is not going to stop anyone from doing said thing if they enjoy it. Source: population growth.

That cannot continue, pop will drop significantly if we don’t stop producing so much CO2.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#12

Post by user-the-name »

notum wrote: post #6

A bit nonsensical imho. A battery by definition has to be able to produce the same type of energy that was put into it. While correlating crypto with something random every week (Easter bunnies next Sunday?) can be marginally interesting, this instance makes no sense. We can't extract electricity from aluminum or Satoshis, we can buy it though, but that's outside of the battery scope.

[flagged]

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#13

Post by user-the-name »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #9

An infuriating article. A better title would have been bitcoin as a way to use all the cheap electricity. I hope I'm being trolled.

This is actually what bitcoiners believe. Well, I say "believe", but it's more that bitcoiners do not care about truth or making sense, all that matters is bitcoin and the price going up.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#14

Post by user-the-name »

ketamine__ wrote: post #3
henearkr wrote: post #2

Well, call any anthropogenic CO2 amount in the atmosphere "battery" then...

The fact that said thing produces a lot of CO2 is not going to stop anyone from doing said thing if they enjoy it. Source: population growth.

People don't ruin the environment with bitcoin mining because they "enjoy" it. They do it because they can get money out of it.

Stop the supply of money, it goes away.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#16

Post by eloff »

notum wrote: post #6

A bit nonsensical imho. A battery by definition has to be able to produce the same type of energy that was put into it. While correlating crypto with something random every week (Easter bunnies next Sunday?) can be marginally interesting, this instance makes no sense. We can't extract electricity from aluminum or Satoshis, we can buy it though, but that's outside of the battery scope.

Refined aluminum is in quite a high-energy state. Chemically you could extract energy or make electricity from aluminum. It's used in some types of military explosives. Because the refining takes so much electricity, some well-meaning people suggest running it at times of low demand to balance the grid. But refining is capital intensive so you don't want to turn it off or you miss out on the returns from the investment, and the process runs at high temperatures and can't just be turned on and off (in fact if that happens unintentionally it makes a big mess!)

I agree with what you're saying though.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#17

Post by PeterBarrett »

This seems like a pretty flawed idea and an attempt to justify the incredible amount of electricity required by bitcoin. If bitcoin was changed to require a fraction the amount of electricity all of these ideas would suddenly fall apart.

Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to power a bitcoin farm is just completely nonsensical and does noting to help with the shift to renewables.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#18

Post by fsh »

I don't buy the argument in the article. The purpose of a battery is to store energy to be used later and potentially elsewhere. There is no way to regain the energy that was turned into heat while mining bitcoins, so bitcoin is not a battery.

The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak, since aluminum has an intrinsic economic value, whereas cryptocurrencies don't. Most of the arguments given in the article boil down to a variant of the broken window fallacy, where economic value is falsely attributed to a useless waste of resources.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#19

Post by tonetheman »

GD... why did anyone bother reading this crap. Excessive energy usage from my made up currency is driving innovation.

Gah. Crypto and the people hyping it need to be quiet or at least be honest about what is going on.

We are draining energy really quickly so we can make sure someone isn't double spending the imaginary money...

What a horrible article.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#20

Post by gus_massa »

I like the analogy with Aluminum, but I don't like the title. As far as I know nobody oxidize Aluminum to get electricity back. And nobody undo Bitcoins mining (whatever that means). So Aluminum and Bitcoins are really similar, but not a battery.
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