[beaconstudios]

"You criticise bitcoin for using more electricity than Ireland while using disproportionately high levels of coal power usage, and yet you live in a house. Hypocrite!"

This isn't a cogent argument. Yes, overheating or overcooling houses is also bad. If AI training used as much electricity as Ireland I'd be critical of that too.

[notch656a]

Heating and cooling uses way more electricity than Ireland. This message is for the hypocrites who complain about bitcoin while keeping their house above 60 when it's cold, or those running A/C below 80 when its hot. Y'all are wasting way more energy than bitcoin, while many of you simultaneously complain about bitcoin.

>This isn't a cogent argument. Yes, overheating or overcooling houses is also bad. If AI training used as much electricity as Ireland I'd be critical of that too.

It's a cogent argument to point out the hypocrisy. If you want to argue we should create a watt-police or ensure externalities of power consumption are better accounted for, that's a different argument.

[beaconstudios]

I mainly just want to ensure the earth doesn't burn. Yes people should ideally not be overheating their home (could easily be done using smart meters if electric companies weren't incentivised to ignore it) and many other things like reducing fossil fuel usage. Bitcoin consumes massive amounts of energy for basically no benefit except pure money wonkery, which is no benefit at all. It's a net negative in every possible way.

[notch656a]

>Bitcoin consumes massive amounts of energy for basically no benefit except pure money wonkery, which is no benefit at all. It's a net negative in every possible way.

Well I disagree here. It provides benefit for many people. The example I continually use for me personally is buying precious metals with <30 min clearing without paying credit card fees (and I really hate funding credit card companies anyway). But people in Argentina also using it for reasons just to have efficient way of receiving dollar for free-lance work.

I think we're in agreement we would do well to be as efficient as we can with our resources. It would be great to find a way to eliminate externalities of energy production/consumption.

[kaba0]

But those rules/fees are there for a reason. You (and me also) may not agree with those reasons, but still you are just circumventing a law made through a democratic process.

[notch656a]

What law am I circumventing when I take my legally acquired, W-2 reported salary and buy litecoin and trade it for bullion from APMEX?

[beaconstudios]

Are you buying precious metals in the abstract, commodities market sense or are you manufacturing? Because if its the former, I still don't think that's a net positive.

I do think it has some small benefits like transferring money where there are no other options. But the vast majority of the network's use is in purely financial use and justified by HODLers and libertarian types. Its existence is largely a downside on its own even without the huge energy costs.

[notch656a]

>Are you buying precious metals in the abstract, commodities market sense or are you manufacturing? Because if its the former, I still don't think that's a net positive.

Y'all told me crypto was bad and now I'm bad for dumping crypto to buy precious metals? The litecoin transaction I do uses $0.02 of electricity. $0.02. Ever left a lightbulb on longer than you should have? Spent $0.02 in gas to go to the bank to get fiat? Just can't win. I don't really like holding dollars as the government constantly inflates them, and I see them as part of a system that bombs innocent children abroad and locks up foreign nationals without even a trial. I see it as irresponsible not to store emergency wealth _somewhere_. I'm committed to not become a public charge and I wouldn't resort to begging from family unless there were no other choice and even then I'd probably rather just starve

[tromp]

> The litecoin transaction I do uses $0.02 of electricity. $0.02.

Litecoin processes about 100k txs a day and miners make about 1M$ per day. So that comes to about 10$ in electricity per tx if we assume miners break even and ignore hardware depreciation. While this overestimates electricity costs, it's not off by orders of magnitude. This is the way that people attribute bitcoin's electricity costs to transactions.

Your $0.02 is presumably just your tx fee.

[beaconstudios]

Well, it's pretty simple really - I'm not a big fan of financialisation. I think it's done some pretty serious harm to the world - even many libertarians, simple minded though they may be, have the good sense to point out that wall street is bad. Now I don't really blame you personally for day trading or buying gold as a store of value or whatever, but it isn't helping your argument that bitcoin is doing anything good if it is literally just "wall street but with massive energy costs, less regulation, and full of even more scammers and financially illiterate".

[rsynnott]

A lot more than Ireland now; that was years ago. It now uses more electricity than Argentina (about 6 Irelands).

[beaconstudios]

Oh, wonderful.