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fuck crypto shit ffs
More like fuck crypto mining. There are cryptos that dont need mining.
If there’s no demand for a particular crypto then people mining it can’t sell it and go out of business. People mine this stuff because other people will pay them for it.
Good job, totally missed my point.
You can buy/sell ones that arent dependend on mining. Not every crypto is the same.
Ah, you’re referring to non-proof-of-work chains. There’s no need to be snarky, your comment could be interpreted in multiple ways.
You’re right, sorry, wrong destination
No problem.
Which ones? I’m curious since I don’t follow the scene and only know of mainstream stuff.
Beats me, I’m only interested in the technology :D Chia was plotted and not mined I think, but other then that …
This is as useless as saying “fuck currency shit ffs”.
Crypto isn’t a currency, it’s a commodity for trading. One that doesn’t physically exist. No inherent use and no inherent value.
The vast majority of “real” currencies are fiat currencies and don’t have inherent value or use either.
US dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since 1971, for example.
The only reason money has any perceived value at all, is because it’s collectively agreed to have some value. Just like crypto currencies.But this is actually why crypto isn’t a real currency: we haven’t collectively agreed to value it, or at least not in any way that makes it useful as a medium for exchange. Ironically it can’t possibly become a proper currency while speculators are making its price so volatile. The very act of investing in it is making it worthless.
Anything can be a currency, if you use it as a currency. A currency is not defined by its ability to be exchanged for gas or used to pay taxes.
If children in some school start to exchange pogs for junk food or video game cartridges, the pogs become a currency. By definition. The fact that the use is clearly limited and the value is a subject to rapid change or speculation is irrelevant.
There isn’t a single currency in the world the value of which is set in stone. There isn’t a single currency in the world which is universally accepted. Just because there exist currencies linked to some of the strongest economies in the world, which are relatively stable and incredibly hard to affect the value of via speculation, doesn’t mean they’re immune to speculation, nor does it mean that any smaller currencies, be it currencies or small countries, crypto or pogs, are “not real”.
I mean sure. Anything someone is using like currency can be called currency. But we’re talking practical terms here. Things we “collectively agree to value.” My WoW gold might be useful for buying potions, but it’s not generally accepted anywhere outside that narrow context. The fewer people who are willing to accept the currency, the less useful, and arguably less “real” it becomes, in so far as currency is defined by its value to others. I could print “me bucks” that I value at $1B USD, but that doesn’t mean much if nobody will give me a sandwich for it.
If you’re in the US, it’s not very practical to try to pay for things using Turkish liras either, for example. But it’s not any less “real” because of it. There is still a market for that currency, even if you might need to look around for a bit to actually use it or exchange it for a different one. Same for WoW gold or crypto.
But there’s so few uses of actually buying things with crypto. People don’t use it as a medium of exchange outside of illicit goods and money laundering. We’re more than a decade into this and using crypto to buy a pizza is still a novelty.
A major proof of this is that FTX collapsed and took a chunk of the crypto market out with it. The market at large shrugged this off. If it were actually linked in to the broader economy, then it would have had similar ripple effects to a major US bank failing.
I, personally, use crypto to do art commissions (I’m an artist) and to pay my VPS’s rent. Neither is an illicit good or related to money laundering.
And, honesty, it’s pretty great, compared to alternatives.
Last time I’ve used PayPal, it decided to withhold the funds for a month, for whatever reason. Plus, the transaction fee was about a dollar.
Transferring the same amount of money via Monero is guaranteed take only about a minute or two to process, since a transaction in that system would never get withhold, plus the processing fee would be about a hundred times smaller.In the EU they’re getting a digital euro which allows them to avoid bowing down to Paypal, Payoneer, and all the services interlinked with them (e.g. Patreon) - the ancillary services can even offer digital euro payouts instead, too. So as long as what you’re doing is legal, you can break the Paypal/Payoneer terms of service as much as you want and avoid their privately enforced authoritarianism that goes beyond the scope of the law for whatever reason. So those problems are being solved as we speak, depending on where you live.
The “Criticism and risks of the digital euro” section on Wikipedia outlines my concerns about such a system pretty well.
Unless they are going to implement a cryptocurrency with centralized minting (essentially giving themselves both as much and as little control over the digital currency as they have over physically printed money), it doesn’t seem that much different from what we have already. Just because it’s going to be a new system, doesn’t really mean it not going to have issues with false-positives suspending regular transactions or fees that are higher than they need to be.
One failed bank NOT causing an international disaster is a good thing imho.
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You literally just defined the attributes of a currency.
The only difference is that crypto isn’t backed by a government.Edited. See below. Apparently some crypto is government backed. There is no functional difference between traditional currency and (at least some) crypto.
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I stand corrected. There is literally no functional difference between “currency” and (at least some) crypto.
How much energy is required for use of each?
There is no reason for CBDC to use blockchain.
CBDC is blockchain based, i.e cryptocurrency.
A CBDC can be blockchain based, but almost none actually will be. China’s isn’t. Japan’s CBDC is not. In the US, the Federal Reserve is still in early stages but I’m confident it won’t use blockchain either.
The big difference is that crypto is “decentralized”. Traditional currency is, to some extent, controlled by a central bank. The CB seeks to ensure price stability.
Digital cash schemes are much older than bitcoin/crypto. It’s not “crypto” just because it’s digital money.
Tbf, most money nowadays doesn’t physically exist nowadays. Only a tiny fraction of the “money” that is out there has a physical instantiation. Most of it is just numbers in bank servers
Sure, it’s like if you printed ink on paper and pretended it was equivalent in cost to material goods.
Or if you pretended that material goods had an inherent value.
Pretense is not required for inherently valuable material goods.
Two sheets of cloth sewed together into pants provide protection, warmth, legal obedience.
Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.
Ink stamped onto a piece of paper(or usually plastic)? A bunch of people with shared values have to agree that it means something, even though it inherently does not.
Carrying your stamped paper or plastic doesn’t mean you won’t freeze to death, starve to death, or anything else.
It’s only value is by societal consensus, which while valuable, is not inherent, as with certain material goods.
Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.
Can be, but pants do not have inherent value in the context of a tropical climate where freezing is not an issue and nudity is allowed. They have contextual value.
Food does not have inherent value, it scales with availability and demand. An excess of apples that will spoil before they can be processed into something that can be consumed do not have inherent value.
This is important because while money’s value is far more volatile, the argument that material goods have inherent value as a comparison is flawed.
Pants have value in any climate.
Exposure is a problem in any climate.
Dehydration, sunburns, bug bites, there are plenty of reasons you want clothing.
Clothing has inherent value whatever climate you’re in.
Food does have inherent value.
Food is necessary to keep the human body, and the body of many other species, alive.
The excess of food for a given population may have less value, but you can trade that excess, or harvest or store it; the food itself still has inherent value to humans and other organisms that eat food.
You’re looking for particular circumstances that mitigate or otherwise affect the inherent value of certain goods, though your scenarios depend on those goods having inherent value in the first place.
The fact that certain material goods have inherent value is not flawed, but you can keep trying.
Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.
This is still dependent on societal consensus. Well, the going-to-jail part, anyway. The protection from cold issue is dependent on the climate and time of year of where you happen to be located. There are many parts of the world where you could comfortably go naked.
Clothes have inherent value by protecting you from exposure.
Spoons have inherent value in conveying food.
Containers have inherent value in holding and protecting resources.
Many material goods have inherent value, currency simply does not.
Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.
Sounds like without pants, I’ll be freezing to death — then going to jail for that!
Probably not. Not many countries prosecute the dead.
But let me know.
Indeed. All “value” is ultimately something that is collectively decided upon by society. A chunk of rock could be worthless or worth billions depending on how much people want it.
Not all crypto are the same.
Nano has been designed as digital money.
It has no mining, 0 fees (none for transactions, none for opening accounts), finalizes transactions sub-second (typically), has no built-in throughput limits and works across (political) borders.
I’d say these attributes offer some use and value.Does my grocery store or gas station accept it?
Just because it’s useless to you doesn’t mean it’s useless in general.
Does your grocery store or gas station accept Qatari riyals?
If that were my local currency, then I’m sure they would
At which point your local grocery store or gas station wouldn’t be accepting whatever currency is your current local currency. The point would remain the same - a currency doesn’t have to be universally accepted everywhere on the entire planet for it to still be a useful currency.
There is no such thing as inherent value.
Real currencies use significantly less power despite orders of magnitude higher transaction volumes. They also have physical exchange options that incur no transaction costs and require no digital infrastructure. Crypto is just bad as a currency.
Love to see some proof. Seems unlikely with the amount of necessary infrastructure, especially relative to ultra high efficiency cryptos.
What proof do you want? Real currency can be printed on paper or forged into coins, and then used until the physical medium wears out with zero electrical usage and zero transaction fees. No digital currency of any form can beat literally zero.
Literally zero.
Everybody keeps every dollar they own physically on them at all times.
These dollars do not have to be printed, the cotton does not have to be woven, the plastic does not have to be stamped, the dyes do not have to be mixed, nobody has to account them, nobody has to account for their storage, nobody is maintaining the number and circulating supply of them, nobody is regulating the distribution and influx through centralized institutions.
Sounds like a cakewalk.
Yes, all those dollars that get pulled out of the earth by the blood sweat and tears of miners?
What are you talking about. If there are coins that don’t need mining why are we wasting electricity (or anything really)on the ones that do.
?
I don’t get it, you sound combative but are reiterating my point.
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Centralised banking Stockholm syndrome is real.
Don’t most crypto users use one of a handful of highly centralized exchanges anyways? Like sure you can self host everything, but you can do that with real money too, and most people don’t have the care nor the skill to do it.
JFC how long do we have to wait for a carbon tax
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That’s. That’s the whole point. Things costing their true value.
Business exist to make money (even non profits need to make enough money from either sales or donations to cover operating costs). If something costs them more, it’s going to cost their customers more. This way negative externalities aren’t swept away to become an unmanageable problem in the future. The true cost of consumption is reflected in the price we pay.
What you’re describing as a bad thing is really the system working for good, as it was intended.
Unfortunately they are correct as the carbon tax in Canada is indeed a racket. It’s only on consumer consumption.
- oil exports, our largest source of emissions, are exempt
- agriculture and forestry, the next largest, also exempt
- shipping and rail, oh look, exempt
- heavy industry can buy phoney carbon credits for $5/ton instead of paying the $65/ton tax. Some of these are for forests that have already burned down
- oh yeah the greatest emission source last year, dwarfing all others, 80% of our total emissions came from the massive forest fires for which our policy is just to LET THEM BURN
So the only people who carry the burden of the Canadian carbon tax are the ordinary taxpayers. But hey, the optics are good! Looks very progressive. Despite the fact that Canadian consumer consumption is the definition of a drop in the bucket that is global emissions.
If Canada wanted to make a difference they would nationalize the grid, build nuclear and renewables. Or forget it all for now and just put out the damn fires!
Edit: I forgot one more, as imports are not taxed, the carbon tax actually encourages the import of goods made with coal power in China, over goods made with hydropower in Canada!
Do you have a source of your wildfires cause 80% of our carbon emissions?
Only thing I could find was about 25% which is much different then the number you showed.
I believe it was a CBC article last fall that mentioned it, talking about the massive rise in acres burned from previous years. But I can’t directly give you a link at this time unfortunately, am on mobile and can’t find it either.
I’d be really surprised if you could because it’s a made-up number.
Not made up, but estimated. Rather than find the exact article, here are the numbers after all was said and done:
In 2021, Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were 670 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (couldn’t find 2023 quickly on mobile but it will be close)
https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/copernicus-canada-produced-23-global-wildfire-carbon-emissions-2023
The wildfires that Canada experienced during 2023 have generated the highest carbon emissions in record for this country by a wide margin. According to GFASv1.2 data, the wildfires that started to take place in early May emitted almost 480 megatonnes of carbon
470 / 670 = 72%
To be fair this is not 72% of total emissions including wildfire smoke, but wildfires emitted 72% as much as the Canadian economy did.
So yes, it’s not 80% of total emissions - but it’s still a massive amount. Putting out these fires would have had nearly the same effect as shutting down our entire country and letting them burn.
Or you could say letting them burn nearly doubled our emissions, and in the hand-wavey world of emissions accounting you would be pretty close.
I’m Canadian and I support the carbon tax.
I would like to see our government stop subsidizing the fossil fuel companies and establish a national oil fund too.
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I support the carbon tax means that I support the carbon tax that we have.
What form would you like to see?
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I pay almost 30% in taxes to heat my home.
I don’t understand this part of your comment, can you explain it please?
It means for every $10 he gets charged, he’s paying $3 for stuff like gst, carbon tax, etc. $7 is for the actual gas or whatever he is consuming.
And you get CAIP now, which, for most Canadians, especially lower income Canadians, CAIP is greater than the additional cost you pay for goods and services due to the carbon tax.
The carbon tax is quite literally a tax on the rich that gets given to the poor, while at the same time making high carbon intensity products more expensive incentivizing choices that lower carbon emissions.
Only the very rich lose.
The people who speak out against it, are either rich, or they are useful idiots, people who are ignorantly shilling to scrap the tax to their own detriment because they were told by their rich tribe leader it’s bad.
Which one are you?
I love how downvoted you are and how many people can see through this BS.
That sucks. It’s not like climate change is everybody’s problem.
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There’s still market incentive for reducing emissions. Either lets you charge the same and for higher margins, or reduce prices and be more appealing to consumers.
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Hey, just because companies always choose (and get away with) “make more money by cutting costs” instead of “attract more customers with lower prices” doesn’t mean they have to …right?
When has there been a carbon tax in recent years?
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The tax will just be the cost of doing business. But surely “tHe MarKeT” will correct this by finding cheaper non carbon transport sell a cheaper product.
Personally I support tax of fossile and subsidization of alternatives. Worked like a charm to electrify Norways car park.
The cons are however that increased demand for electricity means building wind, hydro, solar power, with a huge cost to local environent both in most land and the diesel used by construction euipment
Any suggestions on how we can actually make corporations pay for the carbon they emit if a carbon tax isn’t it?
Doing nothing is what we have been doing and it isn’t working.deleted by creator
How would you implement that? Like, how do you propose to impose a tax on the company that they can’t just pass along to the customer?
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How would that law work? Unless you’re setting the price as a matter of law, how could you ever prove that a price rise was because of the tax and not “other economic factors”?
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What does the government do with all the extra revenue? Theoretically it should be able to reduce other taxes proportionally so that those with low carbon usage come out ahead instead of just being a negative for everyone.
Yup, the Climate Action Incentive is a Pigouvian tax, so the government estimates the revenues, divides that up to comes up with a number for each resident, and we receive it back in quarterly payments.
There is no good reason why this isn’t illegal.
Not a good reason, but money.
Not even real money, tech bro phantom bullshit.
The tech bros are convincing stupid people it is real money though. Just like they always have, whether it’s this or something else.
Crypto is the digital coal of our times.
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With the disadvantage of large stakeholders dominating the network and undermining the decentralization.
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It’s actually more true for proof-of-work mining than it is for proof-of-stake. PoW mining has strong economies of scale, a professional miner with a warehouse full of mining rigs and a special deal with an industrial electricity supplier can churn out hashes more cheaply than a home miner can. Whereas the hardware needed for PoS is negligible so there’s nowhere near that disparity between small and large miners.
Also, under Ethereum at least (the largest proof-of-stake chain and the one I’m most familiar with the workings of), stakers don’t “dominate” the network. They have no decision-making power over what the consensus rules are. If the users decide to upgrade to a new version and the stakers refuse to go along with that or try to push an upgrade that the users don’t want then those stakers lose their stake after the resulting fork.
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I went Googling for sources, and what I found says the opposite. Ethereum was becoming increasingly centralized under PoW but after the switch to PoS it became significantly more decentralized.
in order to stake to a pool, you need to lock your tokens away, making them impossible to spend for a specified time period.
This is exactly the point of proof-of-stake. You can’t prove you’ve staked some coins if you don’t actually stake them. If you’ve retained control over your tokens then they’re not staked. I’m not sure how you think it could work otherwise.
most of the criticisms I have of ETH are more damming of the way they went about the transition between two radically different consensus algorithms than about Proof of Stake itself.
The transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake has been on Ethereum’s roadmap since the beginning. It was rolled out in stages over the course of years. What was “damning” about the transition?
This is exactly the point of proof-of-stake. You can’t prove you’ve staked some coins if you don’t actually stake them. If you’ve retained control over your tokens then they’re not staked. I’m not sure how you think it could work otherwise.
WOW. Straight up wrong.
I’m guessing you have a YUGE bag of ETH staked. 🤣
Since you’re so wrong, it’s clear that you are absolutely guessing here while anon is spitting facts, being intellectually honest about which drawbacks actually exist in the world for proof of stake. Take the L, dude. haha
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I don’t defend anything - I simply do not consider the existing crypto assets as an alternative to currencies at all. They are still so far from being reliable or stable to be a good means of general exchange. They have their place in the area of investment and speculation and that works fine for me.
How about stabletokens, many of which are pegged directly to the value of the USD?
Primecoin wants to have a word having done useful PoW for over a decade.
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Prime numbers are searched for doing the PoW. The blockchain essentially contains a data base with prime numbers. As far as I can tell Primecoin never was popular,.but I like the novel approach of doing things, when most cryptocurrencies of that time were lame copies.
Btw. the Primecoin creator made Peercoin, which was afaik the first (and apparently still running) network being secured by Proof-of-Stake.deleted by creator
Hybrid pow/pos has been worked on since the beginning. Peercoin is still alive.
Whoever Satoshi was, I wonder how he’s responding to the thought that he’s personally contributed more to global warming than the average billionaire.
Probably not thinking about it on his yacht that he doesn’t pilot or maintain, having built the most successful grifter scheme of all time
I feel like calling bitcoin a grifter scheme is kind of like calling fiat currency (edit: in general) a grifter scheme. Which I guess isn’t entirely untrue…
Oh not this again.
Crypto is also fiat. It’s backed by nothing except the trust that it exists, therefore it’s fiat.
That’s my point. Sorry, I should have said “fiat in general”.
no, the US dollar is backed by the fact that you can use it to pay your taxes to the US government, and interact with the US government in general, quite literally backed by more than crypto.
and I hate to break it to you, but all currency, ever, is fiat.
all that gold standard stuff? you just abstracted the fiat nature from the money to the metal, there was never any actual basis for the value of gold outside its value, and there are plenty of more sparse metals that people don’t value as highly
👍
Satoshi is estimated to have wallets totaling as much as 1.1 million btc. That would make them the 26th richest person in the world.
If, Satoshi and the wallets actually still exist. Most of those wallets have been completely idle since they were mined
I imagine that “Satoshi’s Wallet” is the stuff of legends among cryptographic security researchers.
The ONE PIECE is real /s
It’s a bit more than just an estimate. If you want to know more, have a look here: https://bitslog.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/
The keys to the addresses exist. Whether someone is in control of them is unclear. It can’t be proven that they’ve been lost.Ok I was kind of dumbing it down when I said “if the wallet exists”, but yeah, obviously a wallet and key “exist”, but whether or not anyone actually has them is unknown.
Really sucks for Satoshi, too. If the keys are still in someone’s position, they can’t use it, because people are watching those wallets like hawks and if they move, that means there’s a new billionaire. For a brief moment. Until Bitcoin takes a massive nosedive from which it’ll never recover.
That must be some special kind of hell. To be an actual billionaire (and truly of their own making, which is even more rare) but not able to spend a cent of it. Spending it instantly reduces its value and likely kills the very thing that created it. Man, that’s like a Monkeys Paw billionaire.
Misleading title - the problem is not “crypto”, it’s pretty much all Bitcoin and the people against the change in the consensus mechanism. Out of the top
109 coins in market cap, Bitcoin is the only one using proof of work, which demands such high energy requirements.dogecoin is top10
ah yes the 10th place - still, Doge is estimated to use ~1% of the energy Bitcoin uses and it’s been in steady decline since the meme blew up.
the entire Bitcoin block chain could be run on the phone I’m using to write this. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.
and dogecoin merge mines with all the other script coins so how can you even calculate its independent usage?
there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.
Yes there is, massive power use is the entire point of proof-of-work. If Bitcoin blocks could be produced without massive power use then the blockchain’s system of validation would fail and 51% attacks would be trivial.
the hash rate for the first blocks was achievable with a pentium 3. the protocol functioned then. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates more hashpower is used. a 51% attack is the protocol functioning properly.
That’s because there were just a handful of people mining the first blocks and there was no demand, so the price was basically zero.
The protocol is meant to promote decentralization, so I have no idea how a 51% attack would be an example of the protocol functioning properly. A 51% attack is a demonstration that the protocol is controlled by a single entity.
a 51% attack means that 51% of the hashpower has agreed on a certain chain. this happens every 10 minutes.
idk their methodology - source
if they don’t explain their methodology, there is no reason to believe they got it right
then there’s no reason to believe they got it wrong.
also they’re vague estimates, even bitcoin has a huge margin for error.
there is every reason to not believe them. they clearly have a motivation to paint power consumption as worse than is true, and the complexity of extracting the use of dogecoin mining from the rest of the mergedmine is, personally, unfathomable. maybe i’m dumb and there is a simple calculation that can be done, but without evidence of their methodology, i’m not going to believe them, and no one should.
>it’s been in steady decline since the meme blew up.
it got a pretty big bump from elon a couple years back, but dogecoin is nearly perfect money. it isn’t deflationary, it’s cheap to transact, and the on-ramps are ubiquitous.
two of the top 10 by market cap ar stable coins.
what’s your point?
that market cap is a dumb metric to use to dictate protocol specifications
wtf are you even talking about? What protocol specs? Who’s dictating what?
the specifications of the bitcoin protocol require proof of work. using the market cap to dictate what the protocol specification should be is absurd.
and who’s proposing that? I picked the top in market cap to illustrate what most relevant coins are doing because most of them are irrelevant shitcoins.
seems like you undrestand that market cap is irrelevant to the protocol design.
Want to suggest a better one?
uh… adoption, stability, code commits, forks…
Modern day gold rush.
Digging up more and more dirt for diminishing returns while destroying the environment.
Bitcoin using more and more power for essentially the same.
You’d think with all of the money they’re pulling in, they’d invest in solar panels or something to lower their overhead.
Or am I making the mistake of approaching the situation with common sense?
It’s Bitcoin, of course common sense isn’t involved.
I mean, fair, but still. People should push them to go green.
With how volatile the value of Bitcoin is I don’t know whether or not they feel safe trying to take that money and reinvest it you’re walking by one of the coin ATMs that’s at one of my local stores I’ve watched the value of Bitcoin halve its value than double it overnight basically every single day for the last 3 weeks
they should be doing that, otherwise I don’t get how they are making any profit with those huge electricity bills. Last time I checked it, with electricity prices it wasn’t worth it to mine cryptocurrency.
no, that’s the magic of speculative market financing
Maybe pay off would be so far into the future that they don’t want to risk it? Who knows how long crypto will be a thing.
You can get solar panels for like $100-$200 on Amazon right now. Nice ones. The price of them dropped like a fucking rock since China got involved.
Vs. Banks. That have offices, branches, atms, data centers… banking does use more energy yearly. So why not both invest in renewables
Sure, but how much of the global financial market does crypto represent?
I susptect that the energy consomption per transaction is considerably higher for crypto than for a normal financial transaction.
no, it is exorbitantly higher for a single crypto transaction
I did find some information about this, and have posted about it in the thread, and you are absolutely right about this in regards to Bitcoin, I did not find a lot of information about other crypto apart from Etherium, which claimed that the energy use of one Etherium transaction would not consume any power at all, which I doubt.
Ethereum uses proof-of-stake, there is no “mining” in a traditional sense, so its power consumption is more akin to e-mail than mining crypto. But proof-of-stake leads to centralization over time, which is antithetical to what Bitcoin people want.
I agree with you. That still means Bitcoin is on the hook though.
Destroying the environment and not even for real money
What makes it less real than other fiat currencies, if I may ask? If a currency is agreed upon being valid by multiple parties, I’d argue it is “real money”.
It’s a speculative asset, based on the bigger fool theory. You need to sell it for real money to pay your taxes.
If a currency is agreed upon being valid by multiple parties, I’d argue it is “real money”.
That right there. The vast, vast majority of people don’t think it’s valid, therefore it’s not real money.
Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd’s 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).
Edit: Fixed URL. Edit2; Add transcript link.
Don’t forget the opportunity cost of achieving orbital velocity.
I’d say ban it but the cat is out of the bag. Tax it and provide alternatives and hopefully it will die.
dude you can totally ban it, it’s not even difficult, you just don’t let them suck up infinite power
Mineral resource mining as well
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Peter Todd’s 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The miners are taking power from the same grid as everyone else. Miners don’t emit carbon. Electricity generation from fossil fuels does.
The focus should be on moving to a renewable and abundant energy grid. Then let people use it for whatever the fuck they want.
Even if it was green energy (which doesn’t generate zero pollution over its lifetime by the way, we still need to produce the equipment to generate electricity and that’s a source of pollution), that’s extra power that needs to be generated that wouldn’t need to be otherwise and it’s used for something intentionally inefficient.
I’ve always found this argument against crypto to be a bad one. The headline will say something like “Crypto mining uses XYZ total energy” and we’re supposed to infer that this means crypto is polluting a lot. But it doesn’t say how much pollution there actually was. For economic reasons, these miners often use cheap excess energy that would have been produced anyway or green tech. Not all of it obviously, but that level of nuance is missing.
Also, we don’t make the same moral arguments against other energy uses. Air conditioners use more energy than Bitcoin mining does, but we don’t go around saying the government should ban people from using AC.
There are legitimate problems with crypto, but this one never convinced me
Air conditioning literally saves lives, especially medically vulnerable people, the hell are you on about?
As others have pointed out, ~2% of the entire US’s energy output is absolutely insane. According to the eia.gov, the US produced around 100 quadrillion BTUs worth of energy in 2022 (I don’t fully know why they chose BTUs to measure the total energy output, they explain on the website, but that’s besides the point). 2% of that is 2 quadrillion BTUs. According to psu.edu (I googled these sites on my laptop so don’t have exact urls on my phone at the moment), the entirety of US households in 2017 used 4.58 quadrillion BTUs.
Think about that. Bitcoin/PoW coin miners are using enough electricity to power around half of all homes in the US. According to statista.com, in 2022 there were 144 million homes. These miners consume 72 million homes worth of energy. And for what? To solve math problems that benefits no one but Bitcoin/PoW coin investors?
We’re literally seeing our weather patterns become more and more extreme every year due to climate change, which is also killing our oceans which is causing a severely negative chain reaction in the rest of our ecosystems… But, you know, fuck all that, I need to use an extremely inefficient method of generating currency that no one but enthusiasts/speculators/investors asked for. I’m not inherently against cryptocurrency; however, fuck Bitcoin and other extremely wasteful PoW coins.
And yes, printing dollar bills/other fiat currencies creates pollution, too. I agree that process should be modernized as well. And in some ways, it already has been undergoing modernization as more and more people use electronic payments vs cash, thus decreasing the need to print more bills.
Dude. It’s 2.3% of a massive industrialized nation where most citizens have access to some luxury goods. A nation with nearly 350 million people being the 3rd most populous country.
It does NOT fucking matter if it’s “”“”““waste””“”“” energy. And no, we don’t fucking make that arguement about things like ac because you know why? Someone is getting comfort out of it instead of burning seals to make a line go up.
It does NOT fucking matter if it’s “”“”““waste””“”“” energy
Sounds like you don’t actually care about the energy use, you just hate this for moral reasons. Using excess energy has zero externalities
Yeah, its not like we could store that energy in say a battery and then use it another time when demand is higher for actually useful things instead of jerking off techbros/cryptobros.
I would love if this were an option, but it’s not. The current battery technologies don’t have the scale for grid level storage capacity. The only grid scale storage solution that is really being done is to build very expensive infrastructure that moves water between two dams of different heights, and building more of those doesn’t seem politically likely at the moment
The reality is that there is much a whole bunch of excess energy supply that is produced because power plants can’t cycle up and down with demand. So they have to keep producing at peak demand 24/7 (there is some nuances based on the type of power plant, NatGas is faster to turn on/off, but this is broadly true)
I have my qualms with Bitcoin. As a currency it has significant transaction speed problems, and potential security ones after a couple more halvenings. But I don’t see a problem if Bitcoin miners want to pay energy producers to use energy that would be produced anyway and earn the producers nothing.
There are plenty of projects that use spare computational power for useful things. Like folding@home, which models protein structures to come up with potential drugs. Why not use the excess electricity for one of those?
That would be great! And I’m sure there are people doing it. And if 2.3% of the US Power grid were dedicated to that I’m sure some people would be upset about it too
My basic point is I don’t think there is anything morally wrong with Bitcoin miners using energy, even though this is a narrative that is very popular now. There are plenty of other valid criticisms of Bitcoin, but I don’t think this one stands up to scrutiny.
It’s a lot of energy for a global (!) maximum of around 7 transactions per second.
Unless you want to use the replica of traditional finance called Lightning Network. Then you have more transactions per second and a whole new set of drawbacks.Holy shit. 7 transactions a second is horrible and pretty much definitively proves (to me) that it’s not currently used as a currency
By chance, do you have a source for that or know where I would go looking?
Because the max blocksize of BTC is heavily crippled, max transactions per block is around 3,500ish. That puts us at about 500k transactions max per day (1 block every 10 min). So divide 500k by how many seconds are in a day (86,400) and you get slightly under 6 TPS. Whoever came up with 7 TPS probably did more accurate math than me.
Different transactions use different amounts of space so it’s always going to be a rough estimate.
Yep. That 3.5k I pulled out of my ass was just by looking at a graph of max transactions per block thus far. It highly depends on the efficiency of the transactions and size of each.
So what happens if a lot of people want to make transactions at the same time? Do they have to queue? Also, this sounds like anyone can cripple the system by scheduling a few thousand tiny transactions.
Yes, there’s a queue called mempool.
Clogging up the network is possible, but costs money (BTC), because transaction fees need to be added to the transactions and those fees need to be higher than those of the highest not yet processed transactions if “regular” users’ transactions shall be delayed.
Miners prefer transactions with higher fees (to be precise: higher fees per occupied block space), because they earn them when creating the block successfully - together with the BTC that get issued when a block gets created.There’s a transaction fee, the higher you pay the more priority you have (since miners get a cut).
You can look how much space a transaction requires, how much size is available per block and how many blocks per time are being created (at average).
The only way to exceed the figure is by creating transactions with 1 (or few) input(s) and a lot of outputs as they are more efficient in terms of space per tx. Individuals rarely have use for that, but exchanges tend to do that.
If you want to do your own research, start with the fundamentals and investigate the numbers (size per tx depending on type of tx, size per block, blocks per time).
Oh yeah there are many criticisms of Bitcoin one can make, I just don’t think the energy one is very convincing if you think about it a bit
Shall I add the mountain of electronic waste to the list?
I mean, Bitcoin mining devices can literally do nothing else but calculate SHA256.
Once they can no longer be operated economically, they’re garbage.
At least Ethereum’s PoW ran on GPUs, which can be used for, let’s say: gaming!
And Ethereum showed that a transition from PoW to PoS is possible.
I think that Bitcoin sparked a great idea, but way better implementations of that idea are available. Bitcoin has a massive network effect and first mover advantage. technology wise it’s no longer on top of the list.I agree with everything you’ve said
Pretty much the only things Bitcoin has on Ethereum today is a better brand and Lindy effect
Just a PSA that the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap (ETH) is no longer proof of work, and in the process, reduced their power consumption by ~98%.
“Research has found that bitcoin miners alone consume approximately between 60 to 125 TWh of energy annually, which is equivalent to around 0.6% of global electricity”
“Traditional banks’ total annual energy consumption of traditional banks is around 26 TWh on running servers, 26 TWh on ATMs, and 87 TWh from an estimate of 600k+ branches worldwide. Totaling 139 TWh.”
Not to mention banks impact on people’s lives. Limited purchasing power of the poor and soon to join them middle class… to purchase disposable products
https://www.iyops.org/post/energy-consumption-cryptocurrency-vs-traditional-banks
Compare Wh vs # transactions. PoW is unsustainable and irresponsible. We need a different way.
I’ve always been a fan of having the USPS provide banking services to everyone. Make it a public service and it is no longer exclusionary.
Ok fine lets look closer at those numbers, I don’t think they mean what you think they mean…
On their own these numbers are completely useless, we need to compare something that exists in both crypto and in traditional banking.
I found this page: https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-mining-statistics/
- One Bitcoin transaction can spend up to 1,200 kWh of energy, which is equivalent to almost 100,000 VISA transactions.
I suspect that is on the extreme end of the scale, so let’s be kind and slash 50% off of it, even then the energy consumption would be 600kWh per bitcoint transaction, and if we use the same data for VISA transactions, this is the equivalent of 50 000 VISA transactions, if these numbers are correct, crypto is insanely energy inefficient.
So I kept looking and found this page:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/
This page claims that one Bitcoin transaction used about 700kWh in 2023, and 100 000 VISA transactions used about 150kWh in total at the same time.
So we have two sources showing that Bitcoin is an absolute disaster for energy use and therefore the environment.
So I kept looking, and found some data about Etherium, which claims that one etherium transaction consumes 0 kWh, which I naturally doubt…
https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/
I will make no secret that I dislike crypto, but I did try and find objective data and summarize it objectively, I will also note that while I dislike crypto, I am not blind to the issues with traditional banking, they absolutely needs to clean up their act, environmentally and otherwise.
nah the power use numbers you gave are not on an extreme scale, the point of how the bitcoin and most cryptos work is designed to keep using more and more power
I suspcted as much, but I wanted to show that even cut in half the power use of a single Bitcoin transaction consume an absurd ammount of energy, this to try and stop people arguing that I was being unfair against crypto
That doesn’t make any sense unless it’s the only transaction in a block
If you have other data, please post it
Proof of work is not even scalable to the level of current bank transactions. Ethereum network didn’t have enough compute to clear the backlog created by some niche cat NFT “game” a few years ago when people still gave a shit about NFTs.
Limited purchasing power of the poor and middle class is a political problem, not a problem solved by tech, no matter what crypto gurus and tech messiahs will tell you. The most prolific crypto miners are the ones that already have more “traditional” capital to invest. So crypto is not solving the wealth divide, it is just making it worse.
I hate banks as much as anyone, but crypto is not the solution.
Elon Musk’s private jet uses energy equivalent to 980 average American households a year. What’s your point?
the point is we need to stop all this kind of ish or we die. our species is at a crossroads.
Ah, but we won’t all die. Just the poor. The majority will just live worse, much worse lifes.
The important people like Elon will be mostly fine though and isn’t that what counts?
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