61–70 of 111 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is like saying incandescent light bulbs should be banned They are banned in the EU, and are slowly being banned in the US.
Did you read the parenthetical after that sentence? My point was that we waited until after we had practical alternatives to ban them. We didn’t ban them in order to magically force practical alternatives into existence .
I'd love for my mind to be changed, but if governments and other parties with grievances can't freeze or compel control over assets that leaves violence. Just the world we live in.
I really don’t understand this attack on Bitcoin. It seems to be all the rage nowadays to lament the effects of Bitcoin’s electricity usage on the environment but a couple things seem true to me. 1) Any civilization sufficiently progressing will use more and more energy. Bitcoin could definitely be more energy efficient but even without it our society would still increase our energy usage over time. 2) The issue peop…
But Bitcoin is not needed. It currently provides little to no positive value to society and a lot of negative value so it is hard to classify it as society progressing.
Actual question as I’m not too familiar with proof of stake. As described in the article, all that matters is how much is in your wallet... Doesn’t that seem ripe for hyper capitalist abuse? I realize the article is just offering a simplified explanation, but the idea that whoever has the most money directly controls the money supply itself seems... well, not ideal? So could anyone elaborate on what else about proof…
Proof of Stake doesn't just have a problem with rich get richer effects, it's fundamentally logically unsound and is inherently insecure as a decenteralized consensus mechanism. Schemes which claim to have 'proven' the security of POS do so by assuming that you externally have a secure consensus mechanism (or one in disguise, e.g. a network which delivers all messages in the same order to all users), resulting in a c…
I really don’t understand this attack on Bitcoin. It seems to be all the rage nowadays to lament the effects of Bitcoin’s electricity usage on the environment but a couple things seem true to me. 1) Any civilization sufficiently progressing will use more and more energy. Bitcoin could definitely be more energy efficient but even without it our society would still increase our energy usage over time. 2) The issue peop…
I really don’t understand this attack on Bitcoin. It seems to be all the rage nowadays to lament the effects of Bitcoin’s electricity usage on the environment but a couple things seem true to me. 1) Any civilization sufficiently progressing will use more and more energy. Bitcoin could definitely be more energy efficient but even without it our society would still increase our energy usage over time. 2) The issue peop…
1) the problem is that usage != waste. PoW is mostly waste
2) No, it's also about available electricity. Mining is causing blackouts. also health issues due to high coal usage and so on
3) You are not going to run your mining rig on solar power, much less the night. if I cover my house in solar panels I get 6Kw... at the peak. Lots of people can't do even that, it's not their house to begin with
Solar/wind/Hydro is wonderful, but at the end of the game it's not what runs the mining rigs
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is like saying incandescent light bulbs should be banned They are banned in the EU, and are slowly being banned in the US.
Did you read the parenthetical after that sentence? My point was that we waited until after we had practical alternatives to ban them. We didn’t ban them in order to magically force practical alternatives into existence .
Like ACH, Venmo, wire transfers, etc?
Bitcoin is like CFL bulbs. An unfortunate ecological misstep while trying to improve what was available. I'll agree the parallel is clunky since CFLs still saved energy, bit bitcoin burns through it.
Why did this get flagged?
I really don’t understand this attack on Bitcoin. It seems to be all the rage nowadays to lament the effects of Bitcoin’s electricity usage on the environment but a couple things seem true to me. 1) Any civilization sufficiently progressing will use more and more energy. Bitcoin could definitely be more energy efficient but even without it our society would still increase our energy usage over time. 2) The issue peop…
But Bitcoin is not needed. It currently provides little to no positive value to society and a lot of negative value so it is hard to classify it as society progressing.
This is like saying incandescent light bulbs should be banned. Sure, it’s a sensible thing to say once you have unilaterally-better bulbs already fully commercialized and in mass production. (And this happened with CFLs and then LED bulbs; and then we did ban incandescents, here in Canada and in many other places.) But we’re not at that “fully commercialized and in mass production” inflection point yet with Proof-of-…
Lighting serves a basic human need. Bitcoin does not.
They also enable trade to continue between nations that trade-sanction/blockade one-another, which is usually seen as a global-economic net good (in the sense that a trade-sanction/blockade is essentially an infinity% tariff, and economists have analyzed to death how tariffs hurt both the target and source economies.)
(Some countries accomplish this by just using some other country’s physical currency — e.g. Venezuela using USD. But in really authoritarian [and technologically-modern] countries, any type of movement of physical currency exchange is heavily tracked, so this isn’t usually an option.)