641–650 of 862 posts
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Yes, and the selective bail outs and inflation which favor the rich are just the opposite!
Just because something else is bad already doesn't mean you should introduce more of the same. Also Bill Gate's opinion is based on Bitcoin offering almost no utilitarian value but consumes a ton of energy, nothing to do with monetary policies.
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The value is providing the ownership of a digital scarce fixed-supply item that can be transferred and traded. That's the product. And the market gives it a price. Also, it has everything to do with monetary policy.
There are 8000+ cryptocurrencies, some (or a lot?) of them are bitcoin clones. Most of them issue millions and billions of those digital items. It's not scarce at all.
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> the cause of many of humanity's biggest problems is humans As opposed to elephants or sea urchins? How can humans not be the cause humanity's biggest problems? The Buddha taught there are three kinds of dukkha [usually translated as “suffering”]. The first kind is physical and mental pain from the inevitable stresses of life like old age, sickness, and death. The second is the distress we feel as a result of imperm…
The cause of most problems for any biological creature on earth is external. All animals compete fiercely for survival among the elements, among other creatures, among each other. Survival is the biggest problem for all animals. Except humans. More humans die each year due to other humans, or due to things other humans have created (for example humans ignoring mask mandates). Point is, we are the only specie who has…
What other species creates scalable, global solutions to large scale problems? Example (not real, but realistic) - a group of scientists in India create a vaccine that a company in Germany manufactures, so that people in the US can avoid a deadly virus.
Only one I can potentially think of is Fungi, as they appear to have large scale symbiotic relationships, but nothing is comparable to humans.
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> If I launch a BTC miner into space and use a star to power it, will you worry about what else could have been done with that energy? Well first of all you used a ton of energy to get it to space. But yes, I would definitely worry about it. There are a ton of other CPU intense jobs you could do with a rig like that that would be more beneficial to humanity. Medical research for example. It doesn't matter where you d…
The point is that without btc the energy wouldn’t have been captured anyway. In theory if all btc miners used only renewables, the price of renewables would drop, and become more affordable for others, and the net impact on the environment would be positive. Renewables are infinite, we are constrained by our ability to capture them efficiently enough to beat fossil fuels. There are probably other factors at play that…
Unless BTC somehow manufactures more solar panels or provides more natural resources, then any resources consumed by BTC are resources that aren't used for other purposes.
Ultimately, we are always limited in how much we can accomplish, and devoting resources to BTC necessarily takes away resources from other uses. The only question, then, is if BTC is a better use for those resources than other things.
“Bitcoin uses more electricity per transaction than any other method known to mankind, and so it’s not a great climate thing” That's the sole actual quote attributed to Bill Gates in that article (which doesn't even link to any source). The rest is the author conflating their thoughts with Bill Gates's.
People attribute "greed" to the rise of bitcoin's usage, is that supposed to be a moral high road they're taking by avoiding "greed"? People love woke-shaming people into not doing something. Isn't this problem of "greed" going to be present in every system that needs to be bootstrapped from the scratch?
There are so many better crypto-currencies. Better for the environment because they use proof-of-stake, and not proof-of-work. Better for users because transactions are confirmed in seconds, not hours, and without the ridiculous fees that Bitcoin has. I think this shows how truly powerful the network effect, and being first to market is. Because without those things, Bitcoin would be nothing.
You know what actually bothers me the most about all crypto-currencies? None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers. The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone . Possession of the money is possession of the money and third parties don't need to get involved in every transaction. I can hand someone dollars and take a sandwich and walk away, transaction done. T…
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp
Kinda like you waking up to a brand-new bank account, with proof! The only thing stopping 51% on BitCoin is the cost of mounting one: were it a smaller crypto currency, it would be at risk. (I'm pretty sure I got that right, but I'll be corrected if I didn't!)
Since the complaint tends to be "A huge amount of energy is wasted for a single transaction", why don't we try to inflate the value of Bitcoin as much as possible, so one Bitcoin is worth $10 million or something like that, then we can fit more USD value in one transaction, and the energy impact is now lower of that transaction, I guess, when compared to the traditional financial system.
Might be a stupid idea, but eager to hear what you all think.
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Stepping on a sea urchin is no beuno. I remember one time snorkelling and I was being pulled by a rip tide and I was like no big deal, I can just slowly head a different direction until I started being pulled barely past sea urchins on corals and then I was freaked out. They are dastardly.
I heard they taste pretty good though.
What about 0 percent interest rates? How much environmentally damaging malinvestment across the globe has been caused by risk free money? Think of how carbon intensive the concrete, steel, manufacturing, power generation industry are. Not to mention the population boom beyond our earths carrying capacity needed to perpetuate our ever increasing monetary scheme requiring never ending growth where deflation can never e…
Sometimes "whataboutism" is subtle. Other times, people simply say "What about...".
Bitcoin is an almost perfect exploitation of humanities fatal flaws (greed, unwillingness to acknowledge externalities - i.e. selfishness). It's that old SF-trope that the cause of many of humanity's biggest problems is humans.