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Bitcoin as a Battery

nickgrossman.xyz

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Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#181

Post by [deleted] »

hackernudes wrote: post #164
audunw wrote: post #143

What the hell is is with cryptocurrency proponents and trying to redefine words to suit their narrative? First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition), then it was also a store of value (despite it being a horrible store of value, a high-risk high-reward investment is more accurate). Now it's supposed to be a battery? When the energy being put into it is basically p…

You don't think bitcoin should be valuable. Your point is fine, but it really doesn't address the article at all! Assuming bitcoin stays valuable, does it make sense to use bitcoin mining to augment some power projects? Like using otherwise wasted energy to mine or to mine in places where it might not be easy to transmit the electricity?

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#182

Post by smashem »

tonetheman wrote: post #19

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.

> ...made up currency...

Welcome to reality. https://breedlove22.medium.com/masters-and-slaves-of-money-2...

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#183

Post by danShumway »

capableweb wrote: post #167
audunw wrote: post #143

What the hell is is with cryptocurrency proponents and trying to redefine words to suit their narrative? First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition), then it was also a store of value (despite it being a horrible store of value, a high-risk high-reward investment is more accurate). Now it's supposed to be a battery? When the energy being put into it is basically p…

> I really do think cryptocurrency and block-chain technology is cool. But the level of hype and double-think is getting insane. I agree with this, the amount of hype makes it hard to find the true innovations in the space, because most of it is honestly shit. > There are plenty of ways to do digital transactions Yes, but Bitcoin was not initially made to just "do digital transactions". It was made to be able to do d…

> It was made to be able to do digital transactions without any trusted 3rd party.

Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions.

They're devoted to Bitcoin itself above any of the reasons why the technology was built in the first place. But if people don't actually care about having distributed payments, and if they're perfectly willing to buy into payment processors that are only using Bitcoin as a store-of-value in the backend, then Proof of Work doesn't matter.

Proof of Work/Stake only matter if Bitcoin is actually being used as a trustless and anonymous payment system for regular transactions, which is ironically the task that (among most other cryptocurrencies on the market) it's perhaps least suited for technologically.

I'm not saying there's no innovation here. I am saying that I don't see any evidence that Bitcoin's largest proponents care about that innovation. I don't see any evidence that any of this matters beyond giving them an excuse to hype a speculative asset. If they did care, they would have abandoned Bitcoin and moved to basically any other coin -- anything at all that did Proof of Stake to reduce transaction fees and environmental costs, or that fixed its price to the dollar, or that had better privacy.

I firmly believe at this point that the technology of Bitcoin matters to the majority of its investors about as much as the technology of Beanie Babies mattered to its investors. That's not to say the technology isn't interesting or that it can't be used in useful ways, but most of the time that people talk about Bitcoin's success, they're not talking about technology.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#184

Post by selectodude »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #168
Retric wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money doesn’t buy electricity in a blackout. That’s the difference between an abstraction and the underlying reality.

It does actually, thousands in Texas had no electricity while I did. Cost me 1/5 of a Bitcoin.

Did your electricity provider accept Bitcoin?

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#185

Post by mentalpiracy »

smashem wrote: post #171
mustafa_pasi wrote: post #10

It is not a battery in the physical sense because it does not store energy. What it does is, it allows you to transfer the economic utility of cheap local energy to regions where energy is more in demand. Although, as the article itself highlights, this could also be done more efficiently with aluminum smelting, and other processes that are energy intensive but don't require much infrastructure. From a purely financi…

> ...it does not store energy. Yes it does. It stores what is called "monetary energy", and monetary energy belongs in the same class as kinetic, elastic, and chemical energies. One of the key differences between bitcoin and other monetary assets is that bitcoin is absolutely scarce (the first absolutely scare monetary asset in human history), so its energy cannot leak via inflation.

what?

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#186

Post by Kbelicius »

scotty79 wrote: post #49
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.

Human organisations don't run on energy and resources. They run on money. Crypto is a weird kind of battery, where you can put in energy, take out money, and when you need energy later, buy energy for that money. Analogy doesn't make sense at all if you skip the money part.

> Human organisations don't run on energy and resources. They run on money.

You are talking nonsense here. Money is just an abstraction of energy and resources used by a human organization. Remove the money and the organization can still function. Remove energy and resources and the organization can't function.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#188

Post by Proven »

eganist wrote: post #46
delaaxe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin mining is good for the environment https://pomp.substack.com/p/bitcoin-mining-is-good-for-the-e...

The post is making the free-market argument: > In reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Bitcoin is actually one of the greatest financial incentives to transition the world to clean energy. without bothering to explain why any one point they highlight would beget any one outcome claimed by the post. In fact, there are some backwards incentives that are missed. An example would be their claim with regards…

> rather than using mining as an incentive to pay for capturing lost methane

Because that's a useless activity and no one wants to pay for it. FartCoin wouldn't last a day.

> If all mining ceased tomorrow, we'd benefit substantially from dirty power usage coming down and more clean energy supply being directed back into productive work.

I doubt that. Why would dirty producers cut their output?

Those arguments in favor of Bitcoin are nonsensical but your counterarguments aren't that great.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#189

Post by capableweb »

klyrs wrote: post #179
capableweb wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there was any way to stream porn using less electricity, we would consume less electricity for that In a perfect world, yes. We would use less electricity if we realize we could. Unfortunately it doesn't work like that in the real world. In reality it has to make economic sense, as capitalism is "the way of life" in the western world (and many other places), otherwise it won't be thought of. We're slowly changin…

Data centers and cloud providers are optimizing flops per watt, not flops per second. Energy providers are finding that wind and solar have become incredibly cheap, and transitioning as fast as they can. It took us a while to overcome political hurdles erected by the carbon-burning industry, but it turns out this stuff just makes sense on an economic level.

Not sure it's happening as fast as you seem to indicate here. And if it is, what's the problem with Bitcoin and energy consumption, exactly the same thing will happen, but faster since Bitcoin is all about money?

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#190

Post by smashem »

audunw wrote: post #143

What the hell is is with cryptocurrency proponents and trying to redefine words to suit their narrative? First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition), then it was also a store of value (despite it being a horrible store of value, a high-risk high-reward investment is more accurate). Now it's supposed to be a battery? When the energy being put into it is basically p…

> ...Aluminum has value to everyone in some way, not just those invested in it...

A sound monetary system has more value than anything else on this planet. There's a lot of information out there, but here's one article to illustrate my point: https://breedlove22.medium.com/masters-and-slaves-of-money-2...

> The energy is burned forever.

Wrong. I can use it to pay someone to do work, for example. "Work" in both societal and physical senses. That means the energy is not lost in a bitcoin.

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