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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

#801

Post by albertgoeswoof »

anoncake wrote: post #714
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…

> 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. No. If demand rises, so do prices. Not the other way round.

Not if your goods are infinite. There’s an infinite amount of sunlight and wind, if demand goes up, more tools/breakthroughs in tech will be made and the costs will drop dramatically.

See battery tech and solar panels lately.

Only if we hit a hard resource and tech barrier will we not be able to move forward.

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

#802

Post by tekknik »

DennisP wrote: post #633
groos wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re. buying/selling with BTC, one other problem is stability of value. Without stability, usability as a currency becomes hard. How does one even list items' cost in BTC when the value of BTC is constantly fluctuating?

There are stablecoins on Ethereum that fix that problem. Some of them are derivatives backed by nothing but ETH.

So, right back to fiat!

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

#803

Post by tekknik »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #666
willis936 wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cash’s no. 1 use case in the 21st century is tax evasion. Most people just refuse to acknowledge that because they like evading taxes. I’m sure there are ways to use cryptocurrency to do the same.

There are certainly a lot of people who use it for tax evasion, to be sure. One interesting tangible example that this problem exists is the recent removal of large bank notes by the Indian Central Bank, which was done expressly to combat tax evasion and money laundering. The fact that lots of people in India have had serious issues because they were unbanked does seem to indicate that there's a sizable population of…

> My personal belief is that the number one use is for money laundering...

Have you ever experienced a natural disaster? One thing you realize quite quickly is that your debit card is useless. That doesn’t mean transactions stop, people are still buying and selling, those with cash at least. If there’s runs on banks, infrastructure outages, etc, those relying entirely on debit and other payment cards won’t be buying food!

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

#804

Post by mryalamanchi »

TameAntelope wrote: post #409
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…

You're getting a lot of responses, because this is a pretty common complaint about crypto, and it taps into a great "WELL ACTUALLY" moment, because your concern is close enough to the "at least real money is backed by something" misconception (which, tbh, I'm sure you're aware of at this point if you weren't already). Fundamentally, what folks are trying to get to with crypto is a trust-less system, one that can oper…

I think the mindset of those people who make such arguments are those who want to delegate individual responsibilities that involve such risks to other parties. They might not understand the risk involved when such parties get big enough to dominate and decide what to do and how to do it.

Usually, we commonly agree by coming to consensus on what to do and not to. But here the consensus, sometimes, can get hijacked by the third parties which lot of people don't understand how it happens (read historical events). 2008 banks bailouts is a good example to begin with.

As Satoshi mentioned, in the OG Bitcoin paper, that cryptocurrencies will be attractive to Libertarians. That's a fair assumption as one would start to notice a lot of activities involved in being part of cryptocurrency, atleast currently, requires lot of individual responsibilities, especially maintaining the wallet's credentials. Not to say that they can't be automated away.

Coming to terms with taking individual responsibilities in general is very hard. Most people want others (Government) to do it.

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

#805

Post by bouncycastle »

yunvme wrote: post #598
bouncycastle wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They work under the same assumption as PoW - that the majority of those participating in consensus will be honest. PoS also offers something PoW does not: absolute finality, https://medium.com/mechanism-labs/finality-in-blockchain-con... Additionally, PoS attackers can have their stake slashed, so they may never attack again. However, you can't slash PoW attackers, once attacked, they will just keep on coming back (n…

And you need to bootstrap your PoS system by enriching a bunch of insiders so that they can validate your transactions. PoS systems are unfit for being the decentralized digital store of value. Bitcoin has the most fair launch any cryptocurrency can ever have. There is no alternative for Bitcoin's use case.

PoS systems can be bootstraped by PoW, so no problem there.

Bitcoin did not have a fair launch either, there was a lot of information asymmetry between the project insiders and the public. Satoshi's stealth-mine of ~1 million BTC for example.

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

#806

Post by melomal »

jjnoakes wrote: post #677
melomal wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been robbed for cash. I have had my bank account emptied multiple times though, recently too. When I hand cash over to someone, I know how much is leaving and coming back right then and there. When I fill out a payment form with my card details I'm handing over my entire balance into the ether. I could be sleeping and quietly money is leaving my bank account, which happened. So cash is king still. Plus it'…

I'm curious how your bank account is being emptied so often?

I work in digital marketing so generally I make purchases for random ebooks, courses etc. Chrome tells me that basically every major website has been hacked or exposed.

But here is my PIN **

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

#807

Post by melomal »

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #738
melomal wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been robbed for cash. I have had my bank account emptied multiple times though, recently too. When I hand cash over to someone, I know how much is leaving and coming back right then and there. When I fill out a payment form with my card details I'm handing over my entire balance into the ether. I could be sleeping and quietly money is leaving my bank account, which happened. So cash is king still. Plus it'…

This sounds really stupid. No bank allows it here. You get redirected to the bank's site and are asked to confirm the transaction with all the details including the amount of money, plus there's an OTP pin required. Maybe it's the damn socialism protecting it's citizens with regulations again.

Card not present is the bane of the ecommerce world. Which is how most fraud is done but it makes it very easy for banks to recover it.

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

#808

Post by quartus »

jasonlaramburu wrote: post #427
TameAntelope wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting a lot of responses, because this is a pretty common complaint about crypto, and it taps into a great "WELL ACTUALLY" moment, because your concern is close enough to the "at least real money is backed by something" misconception (which, tbh, I'm sure you're aware of at this point if you weren't already). Fundamentally, what folks are trying to get to with crypto is a trust-less system, one that can oper…

Crypto is 'backed' by the sunk cost of the energy used to mine it.

This is an interesting thought that crypto (or at least proof of work crypto) is backed by a sunk cost of an otherwise useless task. But let me extend that paradigm: why is (or isn't) gold also not baked by a sunk cost? What was the point of all that expensive mining and digging if not for the sole purpose to extract that shiny metal from the earth's crust?

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

#809

Post by dlubarov »

knuthsat wrote: post #453
DennisP wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having trouble seeing how you could have offline transactions that prevent doublespending. Could you expand on "nice physical gauge theory (allowing offline transactions)?" If you have a good idea here, it might be possible to implement as a second layer on a chain with smart contracts.

I'm aware of approaches similar to this: https://gist.github.com/DavidBurkett/32e33835b03f9101666690b... describing offline transactions.

That title might be misleading; the doc is just about generating transactions without the sender and recipient needing to engage in an interactive protocol. It doesn't address double spending.

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

#810

Post by acd10j »

asenna wrote: post #616
acd10j wrote: post #495

Bitcoin seems like a huge Ponzi scheme, just with any other Ponzi scheme, its adopters fiercely fighting and trying to silence anyone who dares to utter anything opposing it. Bitcoin as it stands today has potential to destroy all the gains we have made in clean energy and bringing zero carbon offsets. Bill gates is right that it is massively inefficient in what is supposed to be doing. That is doing transactions. Ju…

> Bitcoin seems like a huge Ponzi scheme Can you please point out which previous ponzi scheme / bubble / tulip mania has gone through so many cyclic wave pattern and held up it's value despite all the crashes? "Bitcoin is going to crash" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg

You yourself has stated elsewhere in this thread that Bitcoin is literally just 12 Years old. You might also have stake in bitcoins/cryptocurrency survival. It is necessary for any success of any Ponzi scheme that people become it's fierce backer. But until unless it does deliver any tangible benefit to overall financial system (less overall transaction cost etc.) It is a ponzi scheme. There are long list of soft ponzi scheme (e.g. Amway) that have been running for decades. That does not mean they do not have Ponzi style pump and dump behavior. Bitcoin as it stands (huge waste of energy, Very high transaction cost) is failing in all of it's intended use cases.
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