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Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

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Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#791

Post by LdSGSgvupDV »

pwthornton wrote: post #12
mcfly1985 wrote: post #4

Rich old man wants you to continue using fiat money to keep you enslaved.

From Bill: "Bitcoin uses more electricity per transaction than any other method known to mankind." And he's right. Bitcoin is terrible for the planet and our future.

But, how to estimate the waste of traditional currency? US dollar is based on Capitalism and the weapons. Should we count the price to maintain these two factors? Capitalism is almost built on the balance of wasting resource and incoming. Should we count the waste in market? Developed countries keep QE to spread the debt into global market. Should we count the side effect of QE? As citizen of developed countries, we take the benefits of traditional money and we control it. It is good for us as government or corporation, but may not be good for individual.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#792

Post by dmingod666 »

hannasanarion wrote: post #611
dmingod666 wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person holding a certain amount of currency, the last thing you want is the govt to print more. That is essentially the govt putting a hand in your pocket and taking away cash by diluting what you already have. Is land a bad thing to buy because they are not making more of it? I'm sure you know you can exchange those numbers for other numbers that show up in your bank if you're inclined..

The purpose of land is not exchange for goods and services. The purpose of money is not so that you can "hodl". I swear, this speculation bubble has melted y'alls brains.

I don't 'hodl' either stock or bitcoin btw.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#793

Post by dmingod666 »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #632
dmingod666 wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person holding a certain amount of currency, the last thing you want is the govt to print more. That is essentially the govt putting a hand in your pocket and taking away cash by diluting what you already have. Is land a bad thing to buy because they are not making more of it? I'm sure you know you can exchange those numbers for other numbers that show up in your bank if you're inclined..

As a person who makes goods/provides services, what you want is for the government to ensure there is enough money for others to buy/hire your good/service. As a person who wants to buy a house but doesn't have the full purchase price in liquid dollars, the thing you want is for the government to give lenders access to low-cost money so they can then lend it to you at low rates so you can afford the principal+interes…

Sure, you have a valid point. However, a tangential argument can be made that, exactly due to banks lending money to buy houses, houses have essentially been priced out for regular people..

If you see educational costs, at one point in the 70s I think, the govt decided to offer loans so that students wouldn't need to do a job on the side to fund their education. Now it's ballooned to become such a mess..

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#794

Post by silentsea90 »

zzzzzzzza wrote: post #789
silentsea90 wrote: post #420

What's bad for the planet is how decades of individual work output in money can be confiscated (by printing and inflation, not taxation) by the Government under the pretense of doing good. What's bizarre is that the Government is not affected by market forces while the rest of us plebs are forced to be efficient lest we lose to competition. Note: when I say confiscation, I mean money printing and not taxes (which wil…

the poor have debt, inflation is good for them. (in fact the federal reserve target rate of inflation is good for everyone in a utilitarian sense (whereas deflation is horrible))

Inflation is good for the poor is a lie. The poor can no longer afford a house, can't pay for college, can't pay for healthcare because inflation has taken this away from them.

Inflation is good for the rich. I would much rather be rich and hold assets that go up with inflation, and invest on leverage because inflation makes it easy to pay back my loan. The rich hold most of their wealth in assets, the poor hardly have any assets that go up with inflation and are left behind with whatever cash they have which loses value continuously.

Taxation is a method that can theoretically target the rich more than the poor. Inflation steals from everybody equally in theory, but from the poor more than the rich in practice.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#795

Post by nelsontodd »

rspeele wrote: post #651
nelsontodd wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forget about the violent invasions that allowed the USD to maintain its value while you were paying for groceries lol

Can you name some that wouldn't have happened if the world ran on Bitcoin?

roman invasion of britain

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#796

Post by runarberg »

redwall_hp wrote: post #440
jedberg wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old and in the same boat as you, for many years now. I haven't been to a cash machine in years, because maybe once a year I get someone who wants to pay me in cash for something, so that just becomes my "bank" for the year. I use so little cash that just one person paying me for their part of a nice meal is enough for the entire year. Even the vendors on the side of the road prefer Venmo/PayPal now.

Hell, aside from recurring bills, I put everything on credit and then pay it off within the week. That way I get cashback rewards, build credit and can ensure I have the peace of mind of being able to pay for anything at the time of transaction without worrying about shifting money between accounts or where I am in the pay cycle. It also ensures that, due to building my credit score, I have ample credit at my disposa…

As someone who comes from a working class background, I hate this system. Credit is something that ought to be abolished in its current form. Credit card companies and banks abuse this system to offer overpriced loans to desperate people, and they oversell the convenience to working class folks, encouraging them to buy things on credit they otherwise couldn’t afford... Now they most likely will pay their credit card bill at the end of the month, but at the cost of not having any money for the rest of the month.

Moving to America I was horrified to learn that in order to get applicable for loans (including home loans) I had to “work up my credit”, which includes maxing out on credit cards and then paying it back. As a teenager I made it my philosophy (experiencing second hand stress from the people around me) never to get a credit card. Now if I want to have a realistic opportunity to buy a house here I’m forced to abandon this philosophy and to the thing that kept my mom in constant state of stress. This credit system ought to be abolished.

From my personal perspective, credit cards are a systematic way to bamboozle the working class into over-consuming and keep them in constant state of dept. And to reward the wealthy for the same behavior, which only serves to shove it in the face of poor folks that the rich get away with everything. This system ought to be abolished.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#797

Post by adolph »

inglor_cz wrote: post #656
adolph wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have lived a good life, is dying a problem?

Starving to death together with the rest of your tribe - your parents, your siblings, your friends, your kids - must be mentally excruciating. Famine has been considered one of the worst curses of humanity since the dawn of written records at least. How happy are we who have never experienced that! How would our ancestors envy us!

Truly if one was to know the excruciating pain of those who have gone before these things of today thought of as worthy of attention would fade to nothingness.

Would our ancestors envy us or be happy for the fruit of their effort? There are setbacks and frustrations about the slow state of progress sometimes for certain. Maybe they would also be sad for the material orientation of many people and the loss of spirituality that gave them much hope and fortitude.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#798

Post by dcchambers »

It really saddens me that a "Science Coin" didn't catch on that actually did something useful with all of those compute cycles.

My student job in college was helping to maintain a large-ish high-throughput computing cluster (https://chtc.cs.wisc.edu/), and that 1000+ node server cluster...and even all of the servers around the world connected to the Open Science Grid (https://opensciencegrid.org/), pale in comparison to the compute power that is wasting time and energy computing bitcoin hashes.

What a shame.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#799

Post by albertgoeswoof »

cmdli wrote: post #644
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Renewables aren't infinite; they are constrained, just as you said, by our manufacturing and natural resources to build vehicles to collect them. 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 necessa…

The idea is that economies of scale and increased incentives drive forward new innovation in technology that increase the amount of renewable energy that can be captured.

Eg if we need to manufacture 100x more solar panels than last year, the cost per solar panel will drop dramatically, and the efficiency will rise due to the volume of investment in solar panels.

We are not limited in how much we accomplish as technology provides efficiencies that allow us to grow, it’s not a zero sum game.

Re: Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet

#800

Post by tekknik »

meowkit wrote: post #253
saalweachter wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone. Honestly don’t know if you’re trolling or just old. I used paper money once last year. To buy weed. Because the federal government has determined I am not responsible enough to use or own weed. No one I know uses physical cash anymore. We’re moving away from physical items where possible, not toward it. I would rather have my currency on a public DLT than cont…

Maybe you’re just too young but it’s still recommended to store your fancy digital cash in offline paper wallets. Maybe research what happened with Mt Gox :)
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