Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Telemoto 1356 days ago
Bitcoin can't do that.

Bitcoin will consume as much cheap energy as it can get. This leads to more consumption of energy through Bitcoin and not less.

There is a slo nothing worse for Bitcoin to not keeping it running. So the incentive is also to be were you can run it reliable.

And as usual the pure capitalistical economy is shit in regulating itself therefore laws are required (we already have tons of laws to protect people because stuff like asbestos is great as long as you don't pay for the hospital bill).

Bitcoin takes energy and increases demand for solar etc while consuming it and making it unavailable. It even eats solar panels as Bitcoin is a global market while energy is more often than not local.

It's quite depressing to see such kind of nonsense when we clearly in a position were climate change costs us more and more every year and we still talk about bullshit arguments from Bitcoin instead of talking how to cleanup our current mess.

IF Bitcoin/crypto can be an interesting side hustle AFTER we solved climate change, I don't know. But Bitcoin will not stop the droughts etc.

1 comments

Whats nonsense, is this idea that Bitcoin will consume as much energy as it can get. That's complete bullshit. Bitcoin mining is not static.

The difficulty adjustment is specifically designed so that blocks are found in an eta of 10min . This means that there are diminishing returns. There is a limit to how much energy can be used before it's no longer economically feasible to mine.

Whats worst is you discuss energy locality. But you failed to consider energy capture in locations where is is not feasible to transport the energy or there is no way to use the energy. eg Bitcoin mining at remote natural gas sites using methane which normally just be burnt off to CO2 reaping no financial benefits. This alone could make Bitcoin carbon negative. Not to mention landfill methane etc etc.

The idea that using less energy to foster more efficient energy is ridiculous. The only way to drive greener energy is to foster competition and intensives to innovate greener technologies. Which is exactly what Bitcoin does.

There no way a free society can dictate what people use energy for, simply because some people disagree on whats useful to them but not others. It's completely anti competitive. And anti-competitive practices will always stifle innovation.

I'm not here to change your mind. I'm simply setting the record straight. Due to the distributed nature of Bitcoin your laws are pointless. Bitcoin mining will move to more innovative locations. But beware those place will gain all of the benefits that healthy competition provides and they will end up with far superior electrical grids then locations that stifle innovation.

You are repeating the same flawed arguments.

Bitcoin miner are not best buddies. It's a market.

Miner a has a high incentive to mine as much as possible with the cheapest energy. This is of course capped somewhere but you will creat a lot of waste in the process.

And about those other things like Natural gas: just to be very very clear: a society which wastes non renewable energy by just burning it of (with or without Bitcoin actually doesn't matter) instead of incentivising to capture and use it, is broken and needs the right incentive to do so as those things DO NOT regenerate.

Yes we would need to forbid companies to get 99% of the gas with great profits and burn the rest just because it would reduce their profits a little bit.

This is just green washing.

And anti competitive is also wrong. We already do that in our markets. We already are in regulated markets and it did not stifle innovation. It redirected it.

They cant mine as much as possible. 6.25 bitcoins will be mined every 10min from now till 2024 ish. Due to the variable difficultly there is a cap as to how many miners can mine and remain profitable. If there high energy usage at all it simply means bitcoin has that much value otherwise it would not be worth mining at all. * which refutes the whole bitcoin has no value argument *

There is no incentive to move methane from remote locations. The volume would probably not make it physically possible to do, never mind economical. Not to mention waste more fossil fuels ie diesel. And besides you completely overlook remote locations that cant afford infrastructure do to costs and low dense population. Bitcoin would make infrastructure profitable in those cases.

Bitcoin is easy to setup one container box plus sat up-ink. Seeing as how this ensures the methane is burnt of and also provides incentive to do so. I fail to see your complaint here.

Whats even more insulting is people are using the fact bitcoins is transparent and deterministic to quantify how much energy is uses (which is less then clothes dryers by a factor of 5 BTW) . Meanwhile they are enjoying all their guilty pleasures hiding behind the fact we cant even quantify their energy use.

It's just ridicules to think xbox and video cards etc etc have value. But providing banking to the estimated 1.8 billion people without a bank account has no value.

We've seen this kinda of thing before. In short it always boils done "we don't see the value". How can a computer widget have value after all. And the precise answer is because it's tethered in the real world . You cant make something from nothing.

Ultimately it doesn't matter because you cant stop/attack it. More energy will be wasted then bitcoin uses trying to stop it and still won't succeed. I suggest you conserve your efforts (energy)

It really doesn't matter how many bitcoi s are minded every ten minutes.

Bitcoin still changes it's value up and down.

My argument was not based in the amount of bitcoins itself. It's still valid. It's a rat race and this doesn't mean Bitcoin is 100% energy efficient.

It's as efficient as the market makes it.

The methan discussion: either it produces enough energy that you can do things with it or it doesn't matter at all

We could force them to have edge mini Datacenters there to render things or do research workload. We could also charge batteries or enforce an energy line. Tons of options and no motivation to do it because profit and easy but useless solution of Bitcoin.

And yes it's less efficient to run Bitcoin instead of just burning it. Bitcoin then still steals critical ASIC/chip production capacity.

The guilty pleasure thing is just a strawman argument. It doesn't make Bitcoin better or worse just because of others. And yes I do totally disagree on GPUs etc not having a value.

I don't mind clarifying how much better gaming is, but it is. The discussion general is valid but at least the energy consumed gives a direct value.

Bitcoin hash finding still doesn't do anything and it also still doesn't solve the trust issue: Bitcoin is not decentralized, tons of miners are under control of few people. El Salvador shows how far away normal people are of even understanding it.

The excuse of 'people without bank account ' you really believe Bitcoin solves such issues? It doesn't. People still need infra to get crypto. We see how it works in Africa with simple phones. Bitcoin is not solving a problem here.

The same dump argument of people in north Korea or Iran: you still need someone exchange your currency and dollar and euro actually do the job. Go to Iran and pay with euro. You will be able to pay with it with zero energy consumption... (I have been to Iran)

We can stop it and it will not be allowed. Why? Because no country has any incentive to allow a parallel existing financial market circumventing anonymous payment system.

You will see how it will fail when a normal user can't loose there money by just buying it on normal platforms. No one cares about Bitcoin. Go out and ask any random people it's already wasting tons of resources while having zero impact.

I wish I could respond to your concerns here. However almost every concern you have boils down to "I don't think bitcoin has value or use". As much as you are entitled to this opinion. The market says other wise. 19k USD per bitcoin to be precise.

What I do find ironic is how we are discussing the death of Bitcoin yet again (RIP bitcoin). On a startup accelerator with at best a success rate of 10%. But please tell me how Bitcoin is dead and useless after 13 years. Also consider that bitcoin was essentially created with no startup investment and now has a valuation of 400b dollars. If Bitcoin was y combinator incubated for all intensive purposes it would be considered a success. Maybe Bitcoin can teach us a lesson here.

Now its important to understand. I'm not here to change your mind or suggest you use Bitcoin. At this point I'd actually suggest the opposite. If you want to stop bitcoin though I suggest you'd be wasting your time (energy) but by all means you can try.

Best of luck to you.

The current market cap only shows how irrational an unregulated market can be.

It doesn't say it's successful just because.

gwyneth paltrow is successful enough with her garbage. Plenty of MLM still exist.

I bought drugs with BTC. How much market cap are illegal drugs alone?

Unfortunately tech like stable coins, nft, BTC scratch something in man but I'm not sure if it's just too complicated for some to really understand it.

El Salvador shows us how useless it actually is if you try to use it in the real world.