> I'm rather mistrustful of people that are this forthy about being against a new technology.
I don't really give a crap about what people do or don't do with new technology, ultimately what people want to spend their time and money on is up to them.
However, "Crypto" is different. If all it was was just the unbelievably irritating crypto bros rug pulling, ponzi scheming, wash trading, ugly NFT shilling and hacking all the while claiming to be at the spearhead of a solution to pretty much every human problem in existence then so be it. I would be capable of ignoring it. I would read a different article, do some work or go for a walk, ignored, done.
But "Crypto" (specifically the energy intensive kind) has a different problem, and that's that it has /massive/ externalities that it simply ignores, forcing us, the people who want nothing to do with it, to now deal with it, and with the people in the ecosystem that we find so objectionable. We are dealing with the significant fallout from their hobbies. We are in the middle of 1) a very serious climate crisis 2) a cost of living crisis where people can't afford energy to cook and heat (in the UK at least) and 3) a war that would likely be brought to a stop sooner if we could phase out Russian gas sooner.
All things that could be alleviated if "Crypto" and it's so-far intangible benefits were to dissapear.
That is why I hate "Crypto", that's why I call people out about it, why I'm "frothy".
> Not efficient? Well neither was the Ford model T. Newer generations are getting better.
The Model T allowed people to do something that previously hadn't been done before. So far no-one has been able to point me at a single thing that public public blockchains do that either is worth doing and is only possible using blockchain tech, or is better (more power efficient, faster) than using pre-existing technology.
If people can point me at some of these things then we can at least start having a discussion about wether it's worth spending an entire country's worth of electricity on it.
Once somebody spends $400,000 on an ugly ape and then found they spent their money for nothing, they will become a permanent enemy of crypto. It’s just a matter of time before you join us (crypto haters) the difference is that some of us knew it was a scam right away and others will have to learn it the hard way.
I dunno; from what I’ve seen, that depends on the personality of the person involved.
Some people will react the way you say, yes, but others, after spending $400k or whatever for a worthless NFT, or for some combination of “coins”, will double down, unwilling or unable to let themselves see the truth because that would mean they were wrong in a spectacular fashion.
So they push for crypto harder than ever, to get other people to come in, prop the system up, keep the value of their purchase up, and validate their worldview.
That is one outcome. A person like that however will get another chance to change their mind.
Another possible outcome is that people will pretend the whole thing didn’t happen.
(From the viewpoint that it is possible to learn from other people’s mistakes, people are already pretending the tulip bubble, law’s scheme, 1829, 1969, 1999, 2008, etc. didn’t happen. That Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë and the other authors of those awful Victorian novels lost their money in railroad bonds. The difference is railroads go somewhere, Aries don’t.)
You mean in unregulated centralized exchanges like binance and FTX, whose entire existence depends on the existence of these Ponzis? When they can just press a button, cause a flash spike, and liquidate all of your winning whenever they feel like it?
Yeah, I'm sure that works perfectly. After all, why would they be dishonest?
The volatility of cryptocurrencies makes shorting them risky. Even if the eventual value is zero, they might go up to any arbitrary number between then and now.
> So far no-one has been able to point me at a single thing that public public blockchains do that either is worth doing and is only possible using blockchain tech, or is better (more power efficient, faster) than using pre-existing technology.
Using privacy coins I can donate money to causes I believe in (eg WikiLeaks) without fear of reprisal and with the knowledge that the funds will reach their recipient. If you have a better way, please let me know.
Private or not, which country are you in that would penalise you if you donated to Wikileaks?
Ultimately though, there's a decent argument for /not/ allowing completely anonymous money transfers as the list of organisations that you'd be penalised for donating to probably has a pretty strong overlap with the list of organisations that society as a whole, through it's government, has decided we don't want to receive money.
Crypto /might/ allow you to make an end-run around this system, but do we want it to, and even if we do, is it worth an entire country's electricity usage?
> Private or not, which country are you in that would penalise you if you donated to Wikileaks?
Didnt US companies stop payments to Wikileaks because they exposed the US govt, atleast with crypto Wikileaks and others can bypass US payments systems.
Wasn't this because the US government blacklisted it? Being a tool for evading laws that we don't find convenient doesn't seem like a great reason for existing.
This is a good use case for crypto, but it’s ruined by all the speculation and boom/bust.
I don’t need $30,000k Bitcoin to support Wikileaks and my blogger. $10 Bitcoin works perfectly for this.
But people hype and fraud coins to heights they shouldn’t be and make it useless for actual use.
I think Eth is a good idea. I like smart contracts. But Etherium doesn’t need to be $3k and transactions shouldn’t be $10. $1 Eth and $.01 transactions is still perfectly fine for a sustainable system. But that doesn’t make people millions and billions by milking idiots.
I think if we had regulators preventing wash and pump and dump then we can just pick dogecoin or whatever and move on to digital cash. Until then, it’s not going to be possible with dogecoin going up 10x and down .1x along with everything else.
The reason they're priced so high is because most of the supply has gone to early adopters (and its creators in case of the 70% premined Ethereum) leaving late adopters in fear of missing out and fighting over crumbs.
> we can just pick dogecoin
Dogecoin admittedly has higher inflation, but still had early miners getting 50x more reward than current ones. If you want to deter speculation, it makes more sense to just have a fixed reward, i.e. a pure linear emission, that maintains a high inflation for the first few decades.
I understand and agree with you, but it's pretty difficult to avoid early adopters holding large swaths of value when something goes from not popular to extremely popular.
1) Crypto is easily traceable. Far more than any other means of funds transfer if you exercise even modest efforts to hide the source of funds. And to the extent crypto provides a modicum of privacy it’s because it’s too small for governments to have put any restrictions on it.
2) There is absolutely no guarantee the money will reach Wikileaks. At best, the money will reach the holder of Wikileaks’s private key holder. As we found out with Coinbase, for the vast majority of crypto wallets, that’s not gonna be your intended recipient.
3) Even “The money” it’s a term
Is debatable. If you sent them that crypto 1 month ago and they tried to withdraw it today, at best they would have got half the value you sent them.
There is nothing unique about crypto in terms of privacy other than the fact that most governments haven’t bothered with it. In fact, crypto is so easily traceable I’ve always harbored half a theory that it was created by the CIA specifically to chart out and bust drug and terrorist rings.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the only reason the government isn’t taking down/regulating crypto is because the intelligence agencies are just so thrilled with the awesome network information they’re getting about criminals through their crypto transfers.
You are answering like it’s 2015 and all you know about is how Bitcoin works. All 3 problems that you mention are solved with 1. zero knowledge proofs 2. multisigs 3. stablecoins.
Ah yes, stablecoins that are very well known to keep their values stable over a long period. It's not like one of the top five stablecoins is just going to evaporate into thin air over a week, right?
You are saying dollars are so stable, how come the Zimbabwe dollar crashed!
That’s just wordplay, algorithmic stablecoins have been problematic and crashing since the beginning and a big one just crashed. Call me when USDC or DAI crashes - specifically not Tether because it’s arguably also undercollateralized.
Dai is an algorithmic stablecoin, same as Terra/UST, their supply is determined by an algorithm.
USDT is a centralized stablecoin, same as USDC.
So in your argument that comes quite close to "No true Scottsman" fallacy, what is the exact criteria that you are using to separate out the "stable" stablecoins from the "unstable" stablecoins?
> But "Crypto" (specifically the energy intensive kind) has a different problem, and that's that it has /massive/ externalities that it simply ignores, forcing us, the people who want nothing to do with it, to now deal with it
Grossly inefficient personal transportation and industrial farming have massive externalities forcing people who want nothing to do with it to deal with it. That doesn't seem to be a concern that matters to most people. And they're exacerbating the same climate and energy issues.
Public blockchain can be powered by renewable energy, using its own value to pay for it, and can harness power in areas where it is not feasible to harness that power for other purposes.
Here's a podcast[1] episode with Saifedean Ammous, if you're interested in the value proposition. He claims Bitcoin actually saved his life, so obviously incredibly valuable to him. Lex does a pretty good job at pushing back on his evangelism.
> Grossly inefficient personal transportation and industrial farming have massive externalities forcing people who want nothing to do with it to deal with it. That doesn't seem to be a concern that matters to most people.
But it is a concern, and it is being tackled in many places: gasoline is taxed very heavily. Farm subsidies are being reduced.
Just because not all externalities have been fully internalised yet, doesn't mean PoW with its massive externalities is fine.
The model T is also a bizarre example because the negative externalities of the private automobile are so extreme that you are materially worse off now owning a car in a city designed around cars than not owning one in a city designed to minimize their use.
Yeah. I left this out for the simplicity of the argument, but something we really didn't have a good idea of at the time (especially because it largely hadn't happened yet, and we might not have been able to measure if it had) was that climate change exists, and cars are a huge part of it.
We know that now, but are stuck in a world with cars, we're trying to dig ourselves out of that hole.
We know that crypto[1] uses massive abouts of power when we're struggling to move off fossil fuels. We know that now, at the genesis of the crypto.
[1] the crypto I care/talk about, the power hungry kind.
Notable is that PoW is a way of polluting outrageously whilst transferring wealth to the wealthy, PoS just transfers it more directly without the indirection via physical capital. Neither of them solve any of the issues they propose to solve.
>> 1) a very serious climate crisis 2) a cost of living crisis where people can't afford energy to cook and heat (in the UK at least) and 3) a war that would likely be brought to a stop sooner if we could phase out Russian gas sooner.
All of these things are the result of bad governing, not crypto. Maybe banning crypto would help them (I don’t believe that) but banning lots of other things would also help. What we really need is better energy policy, better foreign policy, and better regulation of companies destroying the environment and contributing unnecessarily to climate change.
Edit: The vitriol in some of the replies to this is fascinating. Did you all just lose a fortune in the crypto crash or something?
I'm "frothy" about my government (who are seemingly incompetent) too, that doesn't mean that crypto in it's realised form isn't also at fault. I mean sure, crypto as a concept isn't doing anyone any harm, but the realised actually running systems that are Eth and BTC sure as hell are.
> Maybe banning crypto would help them
It seemingly serves no purpose, and yet takes up a huge amount of power, which in it's absence would allow us to phase out a lot of our fossil fuel usage, which could include Russian gas.
What like a policy that bans extremely energy intensive things that offer no value other than to construct Ponzi schemes at rapid clip? Yeah we need that policy.
(Happy to hear what value crypto offers that can’t be done with more energy efficient mechanisms.)
Sorry to break this too you but bitcoin would need to be banned by a serious amount of governments to have any real effect on energy consumption. This is by design. The wiser policy choice is to incentivize the large mining farms in your country to mine on renewables and let a digital gold exist.
The point of (good) cryptocurrencies is that they require real energy to coerce. Because of this I’ve felt safe keeping savings & transacting in bitcoin for years, I’m sorry that you don’t see that as valuable. Good luck with your ban, it isn’t smart.
> bitcoin would need to be banned by a serious amount of governments to have any real effect on energy consumption
What's your reason behind believing that? From what I know , Bitcoin mining fell 50% when China banned it [1]. How would that not be similar if the US + EU just bans it tomorrow?
Temporarily dropped 50%, then the miners moved to new countries and it's almost completely back to its hash rate from before the China ban now (probably has by now, the article below is from Dec 2021).
So the question was “what value crypto offers that can’t be done with more energy efficient mechanisms,” and your answer is.. you can transact in crypto. This is trivially circular reasoning.
It’s not cryptos fault that it’s a terrible currency. Just invest in it. It’s not crypto’s fault that it’s a terrible investment. Why don’t you want a great currency that government doesn’t control? It’s not crypto’s fault that half the money in the ecosystem is stolen. Why isn’t the government helping this anti governmental technology? It’s not crypto’s fault that the vast majority of the coins are scams. It only failed because Citadel and Blackstone attacked it.
No, crypto is pure and faultless. And anything that it does wrong is the fault of the government and/or Blackstone and Citadel and/or the Paper Hands.
People might think this is too bitter or dismissive but it's true.
I have seen many many people pointing out the shady dealings and the death spiral nature of Terra on social media like reddit. But they were shouted out with cries of "FUD!".
It's a ponzi scheme and if your caught holding the bag, it is always in your interest to continue the scam rather than call out the scammers. That is why crypto "communities" will never acknowledge negative facts.
> The vitriol in some of the replies to this is fascinating. Did you all just lose a fortune in the crypto crash or something
Ah, the "have fun staying poor" argument of "y'all are salty you missed out". Is it really inconceivable for you that some people may have (a) concern for a massive, energy guzzling Ponzi scheme (b) that just this week was revealed to cause "billions" in losses in others in their society (c) that they have been calling out for months and have only gotten vitriol for?
No, their pockets must have been directly hurt to be this salty. It's not like people are capable of having intelligence, empathy, or a desire to build a better world if it doesn't line their pockets, right?
It was a joke. For the record I've got no money in crypto.
>> Is it really inconceivable for you that some people may have (a) concern for a massive, energy guzzling Ponzi scheme (b) that just this week was revealed to cause "billions" in losses in others in their society (c) that they have been calling out for months and have only gotten vitriol for?
I think getting incredibly angry about those things, to the point that the usual type of rational HN discussion cannot happen, is idiotic. Discussing crypto here has become like discussing US politics. It's just not possible because everything is described in black and white/good and evil terms. Claiming that getting rid of crypto will lead to the resolution of national and international crises is stupid.
You don't think that the 1MWh or so of electricity used (estimates vary from 2MWh down to 700kWh, depending on what you read, so I pick a value in the low end of the middle) is pushing up the price of energy?
Let's reframe those values slightly - every bitcoin transaction uses about as much electricity as it costs to run my house for nearly six months.
Are you sure that's not having an adverse effect on energy prices?
> every bitcoin transaction uses about as much electricity as it costs to run my house for nearly six months.
Why does that even matter, a rich guy travelling in a private jet uses more energy compared to you travelling in commercial jet, does that mean we should ban private jets?
If we find that private jet use negatively impacts the price of or access to commercial airfare for the 99.9% (e.g. if we discover that commercial airports are congested by private corporate traffic, or that private airplanes are getting unfairly preferential access to scarce parts such that commercial airlines can't repair their planes), then yes: we should consider regulating and in some cases preventing private jet use.
By that logic business class should be banned because business class customers get preferential access compared to economy customers and they use more energy.
PoW (ie mining) is not something inherent to cryptocurrencies. We should try to get rid of PoW and move all coins to non energy wasting systems (such as PoS).
Model T is not efficient by modern standard. But it was the much more efficient compared to horse carriage at the time. Bitcoin is much less efficient than USD now. Very difficult to see why bitcoin would replace USD.
> So far no-one has been able to point me at a single thing that public public blockchains do that either is worth doing and is only possible using blockchain tech, or is better (more power efficient, faster) than using pre-existing technology.
Facilitating certain types of illegal transactions. Ex, Sanctions evasions for the average Moe, online illicit substance transactions between complete strangers. So I would guess the crux of your statement is actually the “worth doing” part.
I respect your position but I respectfully disagree.
I don't see any cryptocoins that I regard as a success, but I am watching three that might be a success:
1. Filecoin: It was well-motivated from the start, to provide a cheap way to get counterparties (by default, a multiple of six) to pin content in IPFS. I don't regard it as a proven technology yet, but it's usable as it stands;
2. Brave's BATs: Brave annoys me with its cryptocoin boosterism, but in principle this provides an way for content providers to profit from gaining a readership that doesn't involve nasty ad-tech. I don't think the system provides good enough incentives for users to mint BATS as it stands, but I think that in principle the Brave team have a viable solution to this problem.
3. The Stellar payments infrastructure has a cryptocoin used to grease its wheels. I don't see Stellar's choice to mint their own cryptocoin as principled here (they could have allowed nodes to choose), but using some cryptocoin here is driven by use.
None of these coins use Bitcoin / present-day Ethereum style proof of work, so they do not appear to have the negative externalities you deplore.
Is there any reason this needs to be on a public blockchain? What are the benefits? Why is this a better solution than Brave keeping points/payments data in their own database?
What if the Taliban downloads and starts using your browser? Do you want to keep their ledgers and start processing payments for them using your centralized DB?
The use of crypto here has the same reason as use of crypto almost anywhere else, to sidestep regulations and liabilities. Doesn't matter whether those regulations are there for very good reason.
If the Taliban trades on a public blockchain, aren't their ledgers being kept and their payments being processed by every miner? I don't see how that sidesteps liability at all; it just externalizes it.
It's just regulatory arbitrage. I am not a lawyer, but until there are clear laws about it, why can't you just claim that this is just funny money with no real world value, and it has no more seriousness than an in game gold/xp?
> why can't you just claim that this is just funny money with no real world value, and it has no more seriousness than an in game gold/xp?
That might work in a jurisdiction where the trade in cryptocurrency is illegal but its possession is allowed, but I can't imagine a US or European court would take that argument seriously when crypto has a demonstrable market value. The court would almost certainly treat crypto like a commodity in that case. Wheat doesn't have KYC requirements, but if you knowingly and demonstrably facilitate wheat trades on behalf of a sanctioned entity, you can expect some legal trouble.
It could be done via a centralised database. However, Brendan Eich is a cryptocoin enthusiast. He thinks that BAT is more valuable because it can leverage DeFi infrastructure. It also drastically reduces worries about that database's availability, making the job the Brave team has to do easier.
I'm not sure what your point is here. Interesting as these things might be I honestly don't care about in the context of the argument over wether power wasting networks such as btc and eth are a good idea.
They're not good and I want the waste to end and the cryptohucksters to get burned. But the story is called "why all cryptocurrency should die in a fire" and the badness of btc & eth doesn't lead to that broader conclusion.
Yeah, I was specifically commenting on the "specifically the energy intensive kind", which is the kind that I suspect draws the ire of the majority of people.
Blockchains are interesting, they're useful sometimes.
People into crypto don't post here because they get shouted down every time they have an opinion that isn't "all crypto is a scam". Articles like the linked are not curious, not thoughtful or substantive: it's all there in the headline. But it gets boosted because the majority of HN has big hate for crypto.
I think there is lots of utility in the space, even if BTC isn't it. My Urbit ship that gives me control of my own data is only partly related (but very useful) in that Urbit IDs are put on Ethereum because it works as a good ledger of ownership and stops floods of spam taking over communities.
A frequent companion of anti-crypto arguments is inflation is good. As a tool for goading humans into behavior like destroying the planet with overconsumption (oddly enough the same flavor of argument anti-crypto people use against crypto), I don't believe inflation is a good. I'd love to have open, curious discussions around this but it never happens. People just say inflation is good because otherwise people would stuff their mattresses and not eat.
We should eat only when we need to and spend conscientiously. Inflation is not a positive force for these two maxims. Somehow that idea has turned into heresy.
They're the ones buying abandoned oil wells and coal power plants and starting them back up for more shitcoin.
Of course, the externality is shoved on ALL of us with worsening environment, climate crisis, higher cost of electronics to do *real* work (no, your 10^15 hashes where -1+10^15 are thrown out IS NOT REAL WORK).
I see! How does that differ from, for example, owning stocks? Or real estate? I literally don't see a functional difference. Sorry I realise this seems antagonistic but I really want to understand the vitriol.
Apple, along with a bunch of upstream suppliers, brings together some glass, some plastic, some metal, and create an iPhone out of it. The value of an iPhone is greater than the value of the raw materials. Thus, it's a positive sum game. Same goes for owning a stake in Apple the company.
One person buys a Bitcoin that another person sold, which is zero sum. But miners burned real energy paid with not-Bitcoin to process it, thus value exits the system. Thus it is negative sum.
Ok, Im not sure why youve chosen Apple but I'll bite. Those resources aren't actually renewable. And mining that stuff certainly costs the environment more than the value of this conversation we are having on those devices warrants. And at the end they're tossed in landfills. You might disagree, but so would a crypto enthusiast.
I do understand your point though I think. Waste in general is bad.
Aluminum is renewable. So is glass, of course. And no, Apple is actually doing all they can to keep old iPhones from being tossed in landfills, including designing custom robots to disassemble them so that the components can then at least theoretically be recycled.
You don't need to mine more aluminum if you're able to use recycled aluminum in your products. And Apple does.
So Apple is perhaps not the best choice of a company to pick on in this particular part of the argument.
Perhaps, fartcannon, you have just been lucky. They pop up in my twitter feed pretty regularly.
However, the main point was that I don't want to deal with them, and under normal circumstances I could just ignore the relatively minimal interactions I have with them.
But because I am effectively fighting back against /their/ externalities affecting me I have to seek them out. To learn about their hobbies, to find out about what it is they are doing.
I don't have a horse in the race (there are other worse things that use more power that we should be focusing our concentrated effort on in my opinion) as I don't own any crypto but I do think there's some powerful PR being used and I'd like to see from where it originates.
There's things that use much more power than crypto. The regular banking system apparently uses twice as much as bitcoin, but it actually does something. It's actually useful. We can try to trim power from other things for sure, and we should, but you tell me what other system we could focus on that uses so much power for such little value.
Hence the call to point out things that are either better on the blockchain, or of value and that can be only made on the blockchain.
Then it's a case of discussing wether the power consumption is worth it.
So far in this thread all that anyone's come up with is "because I might want to send money to someone that my government has banned money transfers to".
I have previously asked elsewhere and got a load of answers which fall into the "technically can be made on the blockchain, but can be done far more efficiently and effectively using exisint tech", eg. carbon credit trading, and (rather surprisingly) "publishing a website".
At the funeral of my in-law Aunt who died of COVID-19. The crypto bro was her boyfriend, who had been her boyfriend when she was married. Her husband had hung herself 2 years prior and mental anguish over the adultery contributed to his mental health problems.
The jackass was boasting that he’d bought a graphics card from a scalper and was so happy he could mine Etherium. I told him I didn’t want to hear about it.
Speaking of externalities - climate change is a very real consequence many people choose to go Lalala about. Ridiculously pricey GPU? Now we have something people might notice :D
> We are dealing with the significant fallout from their hobbies. We are in the middle of 1) a very serious climate crisis 2) a cost of living crisis where people can't afford energy to cook and heat (in the UK at least) and 3) a war that would likely be brought to a stop sooner if we could phase out Russian gas sooner.
Are you honestly blaming cryptocurrencies for climate change, inflation and Russia‘s war against Ukraine? That’s crazy.
Climate change is a long running issue that started waaay before Bitcoin even was invented. Still projects other than Bitcoin are working hard to implement staking to use much less energy.
Inflation is an issue brought on us by Western governments drowning in debt for decades: For wars in Afghanistan and the middle east, unsustainable social security systems, stimulus packages.
And Russia … Putin and his supporters have finally come to terms with the fact it lost its super power Status and in a peaceful manner make the most of their vast and empty territory.
> Are you honestly blaming cryptocurrencies for climate change, inflation and Russia‘s war against Ukraine? That’s crazy.
No, I don't think you understood what I wrote.
> Climate change is a long running issue that started waaay before Bitcoin even was invented.
What's your point here? Climate change has been around for ages so it's OK to blow a load of electricity on something that's not particularly useful?
> Still projects other than Bitcoin are working hard to implement staking to use much less energy.
Bitcoin isn't though, and Ethereum has been 6 months away for what, more than two years? They may never change. In the mean time it's blasting through a shit-ton of power for little to no actual value. Happy for people to stop burning through that power and pick up their hobby again when the power usage has been sorted out.
> Inflation is an issue brought on us by Western governments drowning in debt for decades: For wars in Afghanistan and the middle east, unsustainable social security systems, stimulus packages.
Power companies are literally putting their prices up because of a shortage of sources of power. "It's OK if we use all this power because governments are also bad" is kinda ridiculous.
> And Russia … Putin and his supporters have finally come to terms with the fact it lost its super power Status and in a peaceful manner make the most of their vast and empty territory.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here, that Putin invading Ukraine is making the most if it's vast and empty territory?
> What's your point here? Climate change has been around for ages so it's OK to blow a load of electricity on something that's not particularly useful?
So shall we stop inventing technology that draws power because it’s bad for the environment? I mean Bitcoin isn’t consuming electricity just for fun. People use Bitcoin and that’s why it consumes power. Like people using air conditioning, fridges, washing machines and cars. Furthermore, the raw KWh figure the Bitcoin network is consuming (which AFAIK currently is unknown because miners moved all around the globe in the last couple of years) is not a useful measure of its green house gas emissions as we don’t know how it’s energy is created. It could well be on renewables by large percentage as they are cheaper in some countries (e.g. hydroelectricity in Norway) and mining is expensive.
> Power companies are literally putting their prices up because of a shortage of sources of power.
Price surges among some goods are not inflation but simply an indication of scarcity. Power scarcity affects Bitcoin as much as other sectors of the economy. Price surges across all economic sectors are inflation. BTW: It’s the inflationary policies of the FED and its equivalents creating cheap money and driving the investment bubbles … including the crypto bubble. If you‘re angry about the crypto craze put the blame also on the current monetary regime.
> I don't understand what you're trying to say here, that Putin invading Ukraine is making the most if it's vast and empty territory?
I was referring to parent‘s blame of the Ukrainian war on cryptos. It’s not the fault of crypto heads that Putin invaded its neighboring country and caused gasoline and electricity prices to rise. BTW: It’s probably not even Putin‘s fault alone. Government regulations to support the transition to renewable energy sources have been pushing prices up for electricity and gasoline already for years, at least in Europe.
> I mean Bitcoin isn’t consuming electricity just for fun.
Not exactly for fun, but sort of: frivolously, needlessly, and with an arms race dynamic: Put in 1000x more energy, and you get - exactly the same result, because the algorithm adjusted the Proof of Waste to make it 1000x more wasteful.
> So shall we stop inventing technology that draws power because it’s bad for the environment?
That wasn't my argument. My argument was that Bitcoin etc. are bad because of the power they consume when as far as I can tell almost all of what happens on these blockchains can be done far more efficiently and faster on existing technology, or in the case of transactions, existing banking infrastructure.
> People use Bitcoin and that’s why it consumes power.
I don't doubt it, it would be nice if they owned their externalities so I could stop being angry with them for it.
> Like people using air conditioning, fridges, washing machines and cars.
Things that we (realistically in modern society) need. The alternative to, for instance, washing machines would be to hand-wash clothes.
We don't need Bitcoin. It hasn't enabled anything that couldn't be done already using the banking system, or with existing non-power abusive technology.
> Furthermore, the raw KWh figure the Bitcoin network is consuming (which AFAIK currently is unknown because miners moved all around the globe in the last couple of years) is not a useful measure of its green house gas emissions as we don’t know how it’s energy is created. It could well be on renewables by large percentage as they are cheaper in some countries (e.g. hydroelectricity in Norway) and mining is expensive.
Worldwide power generation is a zero-sum game. There is limited power generation available each day. Right now even though we're trying to move to renewable or green energy, there is not enough of that to power what we need through renewables alone so we use fossil fuel.
If you removed the blockchain load from that system you could reduce the fossil fuel burn by approximately one whole country per day of load.
It doesn't matter where the generation comes from, using any of it to power what is effectively a pointless distrubuted heater is removing our ability to shift away from fossil fuels.
> I was referring to parent‘s blame of the Ukrainian war on cryptos.
Once again, that's not what I wrote. Ukraine is at war with Russia. Much of the rest of the world is at war with Russia by proxy, because most of the rest of the world is sick of Putin's bullshit.
Putin is making shit loads of money from selling Gas to Europe, especially Germany.
If we instead of running PoW blockchains, and used the far more efficient existing banking infrastructure, we could almost completely shut off all of Germany's gas from Russia (at least that portion used to generate electricity), significantly weakening his position.
It's a zero sum game. We're using renewable electricity to power bitcoin so we have to use fossil fuel for other stuff.
> Government regulations to support the transition to renewable energy sources have been pushing prices up for electricity and gasoline already for years, at least in Europe.
I'm pretty sure renewables are actually cheaper to produce than fossil fuels.
> We don't need Bitcoin. It hasn't enabled anything that couldn't be done already using the banking system, or with existing non-power abusive technology.
The advantage of Bitcoin may seem questionable if you believe dependency on central banking is fine and hedging against financial risks of traditional banks is silly. But mind you there are many people in the world without access to stable banking services.
> If we instead of running PoW blockchains, and used the far more efficient existing banking infrastructure, we could almost completely shut off all of Germany's gas from Russia (at least that portion used to generate
Come on, the number of Bitcoin miners in Germany might approach zero. Energy is way too expensive there. Miners operate in countries with access to cheap energy (which could be coal like in China but also renewables like in Norway). There may be validation modes in Germany but those draw much less power than a mining facility that append to the ledger. So Putin wouldn’t even notice if Central Europe would be shutting down the Bitcoin network.
And do you know what services had similar energy consumption in the past and nobody cared? Peer to peer file sharing like Bitorrent. Running seeding nodes 24/7 or your desktop computer for days just to download illegal copies of movies and software was not exactly environmentally friendly either. Can’t remember any outrage about that. While it’s valid to criticize Bitcoin‘s energy consumption it is not completely out of place and not without precedent.
> I'm pretty sure renewables are actually cheaper to produce than fossil fuels.
Yes, they‘re cheap to produce but very expensive to distribute. Germany e.g. heavily subsidized renewables in the past making electricity very expensive here (AFAIR even one of the most expensive in the world). The most economic renewable currently is hydroelectric power where you also can regulate power generation in response to demands.
But that wasn’t my point. I was just arguing Bitcoin is not a significant contributing factor to rising electricity costs.
> Worldwide power generation is a zero-sum game. There is limited power generation available each day. … It's a zero sum game.
No, that’s not how markets work and energy markets neither. If demand rises energy producers react by increasing production, if demand falls they lower production. If demand rises long-term, they invest in more production facilities. That, of course, takes time so prices will rise temporarily but still creating an incentive to invest. If Bitcoin miners manage to leverage renewables they might actually encourage a net production rise of renewable energy.
BTW: The Bitcoin network‘s power consumption is not fixed either, it depends on the network load and the number of miners competing with each other. At the peak of the bubble it may be much higher than on average. The next crypto winter is likely to come soon and then power consumption goes back to normal. Until the next crypto craze competing networks will hopefully have switched over to Proof-Of-Stake successfully.
> All things that could be alleviated if "Crypto" and it's so-far intangible benefits were to dissapear.
This is pretty shallow thinking. I’m sure the traditional banking system uses orders of magnitude more energy than crypto, but you don’t hear about that cause the “studies” about crypto energy use are funded by people who benefit from maintaining the status quo. In fact, you will notice most of the studies critical of Bitcoin focus on how much ENERGY it uses as opposed to its fossil fuel usage and greenhouse gas emissions. This is likely intentional.
Big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter probably use more energy than Bitcoin too, and it is debatable how much of what they do actually creates value in the world.
The U.S. military is one of the largest polluters in the world, and Congress nearly unanimously gives them hundreds of billions of dollars every year with very little debate or scrutiny or oversight.
The waste of natural resources and energy will not disappear just because crypto goes away. If anything, crypto will actually help SOLVE the problem sooner by creating real economic incentives to use cheaper and cleaner energy. Some estimates say that over 60% of Bitcoin mining now uses renewable energy, and it is trending in the right direction [1].
> So far no-one has been able to point me at a single thing that public public blockchains do that either is worth doing and is only possible using blockchain tech
“Worth doing” is subjective so that’s a non sequitur, but I will give you something blockchains do that is only possible using blockchain tech: they allow control over the supply of money without a central authority. Separation of money and state, if you will. Some may scoff at this idea, but currency debasement has contributed to the collapse of many empires and governments in history [2] so the importance of this invention should not be understated.
> If anything, crypto will actually help SOLVE the problem sooner by creating real economic incentives to use cheaper and cleaner energy.
Do you understand how markets work? What's disincentivizing the current energy users from seeking out cheaper and cleaner energy? Why would we have to invent a new coal-chugging[1] ponzi scheme to kick off that search?
> > All things that could be alleviated if "Crypto" and it's so-far intangible benefits were to dissapear.
> This is pretty shallow thinking. I’m sure the traditional banking system uses orders of magnitude more energy than crypto, but you don’t hear about that cause the “studies” about crypto energy use are funded by people who benefit from maintaining the status quo.
The people who benefit from the status quo (ie. regular banks) are pretty much everyone in the world who has a bank account and does transactions. That's a lot of people.
Bitcoin (ignoring eth and others for the moment here) might use half (not orders of magnitude) as much energy as the regular banking system (eg. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/research%3A-bitcoin-consumes...), but it services far far more people than bitcoin does.
Bitcoin handles (I'm googling these) 4.6 transactions per second, Visa somewhere between 1700 and 65k per second (https://www.visa.co.uk/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/vis...), depending on where you look, and that's just Visa, that's ignoring all the other banking systems out there.
You could roll those BTC transactions into the current banking system and the power usage of the regular banking system would hardly budge. You could save one half of the banking systems entire power usage by transacting using the banking system instead of bitcoin.
> In fact, you will notice most of the studies critical of Bitcoin focus on how much ENERGY it uses as opposed to its fossil fuel usage and greenhouse gas emissions. This is likely intentional.
Yes, because right now we are struggling to migrate off fossil fuel. This is a zero sum game, there is a limited amount of electricity we can generate right now, if you use some of the green energy to bitcoin it means you use fossil fuel for other things. If you use fossil fuel for bitcoin you can use the green energy for other things.
Removing the power usage of bitcoin means you can scale down the energy required by the system, and you can choose where that scaled down energy comes from. I suggest it should be taken from the slice of fossil fuel energy that is being generated.
> Big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter probably use more energy than Bitcoin too, and it is debatable how much of what they do actually creates value in the world.
It depends what you mean by value, but lots of things use energy create "value". Some things (facebook for example) can't be done without the web, servers etc. Some things (for example financial transactinos) can be done using existing technologies OR vastly wasteful tech such as bitcoin. There's a choice there.
> The U.S. military is one of the largest polluters in the world, and Congress nearly unanimously gives them hundreds of billions of dollars every year with very little debate or scrutiny or oversight.
Look at that bad thing, because that bad thing is allowed to exist so should the bad thing I care about!
> The waste of natural resources and energy will not disappear just because crypto goes away. If anything, crypto will actually help SOLVE the problem sooner by creating real economic incentives to use cheaper and cleaner energy. Some estimates say that over 60% of Bitcoin mining now uses renewable energy, and it is trending in the right direction [1].
See the previous reply about energy generation being zero sum.
The fact remains, that wherever the electricity for Bitcoin et. al. comes from, it's using about one countries worth of electricity, and if it wasn't, if the things that were being done using bitcoin were being done in a more efficient way using existing tech, that renewably electricity could be used to offset the fossil fuel generated energy.
> > So far no-one has been able to point me at a single thing that public public blockchains do that either is worth doing and is only possible using blockchain tech
> “Worth doing” is subjective so that’s a non sequitur, but I will give you something blockchains do that is only possible using blockchain tech: they allow control over the supply of money without a central authority.
Why is that bad though? There's good reasons why it makes sense to control what a countries money is worth, for instance controlling inflation.
> Separation of money and state, if you will. Some may scoff at this idea, but currency debasement has contributed to the collapse of many empires and governments in history [2] so the importance of this invention should not be understated.
Why is Separation of money and state something we want to aim for? It's certainly not going to stop currency debasement given that you still have to transfer bitcoin into something else to spend it (for most normal people/regular transactions), and at 4.6 transactions per second (at a cost of one half of a ragular banking systems power) you certainly can't use it to buy a loaf of bread directly (ignoring gas fees entirely).
Crypto proof of work mining is actually one of the most renewable friendly sectors. Its mostly waste hydro, waste gas, etc being sought after. Its not perfect, but that is the trend.
You also have to compare it against what its competing against, all those fancy bank buildings with 24.7 lights and ac, the staff to mantain the paper trail (their commutes, etc), the vast security forces and militaries there to secure it (military being the largest polluter), etc.
From what I understand, the growth of the network, especially when it piggy backs on layer two networks like the lightning network for btc means 99% of the transactions can operate in a non proof of work method costing little more than the servers used to run a popular website.
Its still sooooo early. The tech will evolve and competition is fierce for the best solutions. So long we dont try to regulate it to death and protect the status quo, its going to evolve in ways we are yet to imagine.
> the vast security forces and militaries there to secure it (military being the largest polluter)
I've seen several comments in this thread comparing BTC's energy consumption to that of the world's militaries; is this a new crypto meme?
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but we would still need police and the military even if the world only used cryptocurrency. The irreversibility of crypto transactions increases the ROI of crime, so I think we would need more police and larger militaries in that world. Also, non-financial crime and interstate conflict exists.
Wouldn't that incentivize people to create crimes that they could then stop to collect their PoliceCoin? Or to stoke short-lived interstate conflict to mine some more WarCoin?
But that'll just mean more and more opportunity for PoliceCoin and WarCoin, so maybe it's actually sound monetary policy.
I don't really give a crap about what people do or don't do with new technology, ultimately what people want to spend their time and money on is up to them.
However, "Crypto" is different. If all it was was just the unbelievably irritating crypto bros rug pulling, ponzi scheming, wash trading, ugly NFT shilling and hacking all the while claiming to be at the spearhead of a solution to pretty much every human problem in existence then so be it. I would be capable of ignoring it. I would read a different article, do some work or go for a walk, ignored, done.
But "Crypto" (specifically the energy intensive kind) has a different problem, and that's that it has /massive/ externalities that it simply ignores, forcing us, the people who want nothing to do with it, to now deal with it, and with the people in the ecosystem that we find so objectionable. We are dealing with the significant fallout from their hobbies. We are in the middle of 1) a very serious climate crisis 2) a cost of living crisis where people can't afford energy to cook and heat (in the UK at least) and 3) a war that would likely be brought to a stop sooner if we could phase out Russian gas sooner.
All things that could be alleviated if "Crypto" and it's so-far intangible benefits were to dissapear.
That is why I hate "Crypto", that's why I call people out about it, why I'm "frothy".
> Not efficient? Well neither was the Ford model T. Newer generations are getting better.
The Model T allowed people to do something that previously hadn't been done before. So far no-one has been able to point me at a single thing that public public blockchains do that either is worth doing and is only possible using blockchain tech, or is better (more power efficient, faster) than using pre-existing technology.
If people can point me at some of these things then we can at least start having a discussion about wether it's worth spending an entire country's worth of electricity on it.