The mechanism is to prevent, and disincentivize, inflation. It's supposed to be harder to make more than it is to give it to someone else. If it wasn't, it would have already hyper-inflated and become worthless. Afterall, why would I send money, if it's easier for my friend to just make the money from scratch.
Your criticism is around the "waste" is entirely based off of that false assumption, and you are complaining the energy being used to mine. Typically what happens is the opposite, as most of that energy on demand would be wasted as literal smoke from powerplants, since the wattage that isn't being demanded has to be removed because it can't be stored. Instead, miners tend to work with powerplants to actually syphon that.
But even if waste were your concern, none of this would still make sense because it would be a criticism of all currencies that have ever existed, and all monies that have ever existed. The "waste" of mining gold literally turns mountains into craters and kills people every year. The "waste" of printing fiat currencies destroys forests every year. You do not want to even imagine the "waste" that the financial companies generate in electrical usage transmitting money back and forth.
Your not really arguing against Bitcoin, you're arguing against currency itself.
The mechanism is to prevent, and disincentivize, inflation.
something we could do with any currency in the world if any government had half a braincell to share between all its constituents.
most of that energy on demand would be wasted as literal smoke from powerplants
"if i hadn't wasted all this energy it woulda been wasted anyway, honest"
"waste" of mining gold... "waste" of printing fiat currencies
you're right to put "waste" in quotes, those are just production side-effects. crypto physically wastes energy on nothing at all by having computers do entirely unnecessary calculations as part of its functionality. it is waste by design and cannot be done away with or made more efficient, ever, unlike normal currencies.
"waste" that the financial companies generate in electrical usage
still orders of magnitude less than crypto protocols that have computers doing random calculations on purpose - and i bet if they used modern tech instead of mainframes and code from the 1970s they'd be even more orders of magnitude more efficient.
mining gold ... kills people every year
but crypto mining ASICs just materialize out of the aether and involve no industry accidents in their creation, right?
you're arguing against currency itself.
no, i'm arguing against needing a computer to pay thousands of people a cent each to waste a few kilowatts processing me purchasing a two dollar soda at the store.
There is an easy way to tell how much energy is wasted by bitcoin each year: The price of bitcoin. Last I checked BTC was 64k per coin and the amount received per block was 6.5, thus the amount of electricity per block is around $416,000. Blocks are by design supposed to be generated at around 1 per 10 minutes so that is around 52,560 blocks per year. This means around $2.1 * 10 ^ 10 energy is turned into waste heat each year for bitcoin. Where I live the price for electricity is cheap, around $0.12/kWh. Thus amount of electricity per year used by BTC alone not counting the other cryptos is about 1.8 * 10 ^11 kWh, 180 TWh, 6.142×10^14 BTU, or 640 petajoules.
BTC uses around the same amount of energy as the US Steel Industry, equivalent to 1/20th the entire energy consumption of the US. That energy is super useful electricity being turned into nothing. Especially since as soon as a practical quantum computer is made, every bitcoin becomes worthless overnight. Several different groups have 1k qbit laboratory computers in the last year. Any one of those could break SHA 256 in a way to allow unlimited mining of BTC.
Name a government that hasn't inflated it's currency. Even fiscally responsible governments pull that stunt, particularly in times of war.
And your complaining about "waste" in computers doing math, when the "waste" of a fiat currency is also doing math, money-changing, and printing money such that the costs of everything in the economy goes up. The "waste" in a fiat currency literally bankrupts you, directly.
The powergrid of wallstreet is absolutely nothing compared to all of the bitcoin miners on earth combined and multiplied by 10. High Frequency Traders literally build entire buildings to buy and short stocks in milliseconds. They specific geographic location of these buildings is incredibly important to them because speed-of-light-transactions are too slow.
Complaining about code from the 1970's doesn't make any sense either. Earlier versions of code make better use of computing costs and space. It's like complaining that someone coded something in assembler. If they did, it's probably for a very good reason.
Yes, you are arguing against currency itself. You are refusing to understand that there is enormous cost in energy in moving money around as cash, let alone transmitting it across multiple cloud networks across the earth in the form of your bank account. Your criticisms are ridiculous.
HFTs are not scams, it is simply the mechanism of what exists. You're complaining about waste, and pretending that only crypto is capable of what you are declaring to be "waste".
It sounds much more like your complaint is about "Capitalism", which is why I think you are actually being a dishonest 3rd Positionist.
Your criticism is around the "waste" is entirely based off of that false assumption, and you are complaining the energy being used to mine. Typically what happens is the opposite, as most of that energy on demand would be wasted as literal smoke from powerplants, since the wattage that isn't being demanded has to be removed because it can't be stored. Instead, miners tend to work with powerplants to actually syphon that.
This is utterly false. There is very little waste in bulk energy production from coal, ng, hydro, and nuclear, because aggregate demand is very predictable. The waste comes from the unreliability of solar and wind, when a cloud comes by or a group of turbines are becalmed drops your production.
Yes, I'm sure that there is little waste, and yet, the waste is still being used and captured. That's my point, bitcoin miners are exploiting even excess energy.
Sometimes I wonder if proof-of-work isn't actually a better incentivizer for new technological development than proof-of-stake, because it uses more energy. We need to ask if new forms of energy production like nuclear fusion are pie-in-the-sky fantasy or actually technologically possible and practical.
If they'll never become reality, then Malthus is right and we need to cut back and conserve.
If they will, then we are on the verge of becoming a Type I civilization. We need to increase energy production, not slow down. In some countries they started building new power plants explicitly because of the crypto boom. Maybe crypto is the incentive the market needs to finally force affordable fusion power into reality?
Nuclear fusion is certainly possible and we've successfully begun getting more energy out of the experiments than we put in. From this point on, it's a matter of scale and practicality.
Malthus is retarded, and was wrong about literally everything, similar to how Marx was wrong about value.
Fusion will be attacked similar to how nuclear power has been attacked: by communist governments, using socialist useful idiots, to completely undermine technological development and energy independence with extreme regulations and slander until the Communist states can catch up.
Expect the first accident in Fusion power to be met with a 100 day 24/7 media firestorm about how Fusion power is more dangerous than nuclear power and any sane planet would ban it immediately, paid for by the CCP.
This criticism makes absolutely no sense.
The mechanism is to prevent, and disincentivize, inflation. It's supposed to be harder to make more than it is to give it to someone else. If it wasn't, it would have already hyper-inflated and become worthless. Afterall, why would I send money, if it's easier for my friend to just make the money from scratch.
Your criticism is around the "waste" is entirely based off of that false assumption, and you are complaining the energy being used to mine. Typically what happens is the opposite, as most of that energy on demand would be wasted as literal smoke from powerplants, since the wattage that isn't being demanded has to be removed because it can't be stored. Instead, miners tend to work with powerplants to actually syphon that.
But even if waste were your concern, none of this would still make sense because it would be a criticism of all currencies that have ever existed, and all monies that have ever existed. The "waste" of mining gold literally turns mountains into craters and kills people every year. The "waste" of printing fiat currencies destroys forests every year. You do not want to even imagine the "waste" that the financial companies generate in electrical usage transmitting money back and forth.
Your not really arguing against Bitcoin, you're arguing against currency itself.
something we could do with any currency in the world if any government had half a braincell to share between all its constituents.
"if i hadn't wasted all this energy it woulda been wasted anyway, honest"
you're right to put "waste" in quotes, those are just production side-effects. crypto physically wastes energy on nothing at all by having computers do entirely unnecessary calculations as part of its functionality. it is waste by design and cannot be done away with or made more efficient, ever, unlike normal currencies.
still orders of magnitude less than crypto protocols that have computers doing random calculations on purpose - and i bet if they used modern tech instead of mainframes and code from the 1970s they'd be even more orders of magnitude more efficient.
but crypto mining ASICs just materialize out of the aether and involve no industry accidents in their creation, right?
no, i'm arguing against needing a computer to pay thousands of people a cent each to waste a few kilowatts processing me purchasing a two dollar soda at the store.
There is an easy way to tell how much energy is wasted by bitcoin each year: The price of bitcoin. Last I checked BTC was 64k per coin and the amount received per block was 6.5, thus the amount of electricity per block is around $416,000. Blocks are by design supposed to be generated at around 1 per 10 minutes so that is around 52,560 blocks per year. This means around $2.1 * 10 ^ 10 energy is turned into waste heat each year for bitcoin. Where I live the price for electricity is cheap, around $0.12/kWh. Thus amount of electricity per year used by BTC alone not counting the other cryptos is about 1.8 * 10 ^11 kWh, 180 TWh, 6.142×10^14 BTU, or 640 petajoules.
BTC uses around the same amount of energy as the US Steel Industry, equivalent to 1/20th the entire energy consumption of the US. That energy is super useful electricity being turned into nothing. Especially since as soon as a practical quantum computer is made, every bitcoin becomes worthless overnight. Several different groups have 1k qbit laboratory computers in the last year. Any one of those could break SHA 256 in a way to allow unlimited mining of BTC.
Name a government that hasn't inflated it's currency. Even fiscally responsible governments pull that stunt, particularly in times of war.
And your complaining about "waste" in computers doing math, when the "waste" of a fiat currency is also doing math, money-changing, and printing money such that the costs of everything in the economy goes up. The "waste" in a fiat currency literally bankrupts you, directly.
The powergrid of wallstreet is absolutely nothing compared to all of the bitcoin miners on earth combined and multiplied by 10. High Frequency Traders literally build entire buildings to buy and short stocks in milliseconds. They specific geographic location of these buildings is incredibly important to them because speed-of-light-transactions are too slow.
Complaining about code from the 1970's doesn't make any sense either. Earlier versions of code make better use of computing costs and space. It's like complaining that someone coded something in assembler. If they did, it's probably for a very good reason.
Yes, you are arguing against currency itself. You are refusing to understand that there is enormous cost in energy in moving money around as cash, let alone transmitting it across multiple cloud networks across the earth in the form of your bank account. Your criticisms are ridiculous.
why are you bringing up scams involving currencies when we're talking about just currencies?
do you realize how much of a failure that discussion would be for you considering the infamy of crypto and its rugpull culture?
wonder what you can do with crypto and its extremely unstable prices...
HFTs are not scams, it is simply the mechanism of what exists. You're complaining about waste, and pretending that only crypto is capable of what you are declaring to be "waste".
It sounds much more like your complaint is about "Capitalism", which is why I think you are actually being a dishonest 3rd Positionist.
This is utterly false. There is very little waste in bulk energy production from coal, ng, hydro, and nuclear, because aggregate demand is very predictable. The waste comes from the unreliability of solar and wind, when a cloud comes by or a group of turbines are becalmed drops your production.
Yes, I'm sure that there is little waste, and yet, the waste is still being used and captured. That's my point, bitcoin miners are exploiting even excess energy.
Comment Reported for: Rule 12 - Intentional Falsehoods / Disinformation
Comment Approved: This mostly sounds like opinions.
Comment Reported for: Rule 12 - Intentional Falsehoods / Disinformation
Comment Approved: I don't see why I'm being dragged into this.
Sometimes I wonder if proof-of-work isn't actually a better incentivizer for new technological development than proof-of-stake, because it uses more energy. We need to ask if new forms of energy production like nuclear fusion are pie-in-the-sky fantasy or actually technologically possible and practical.
If they'll never become reality, then Malthus is right and we need to cut back and conserve.
If they will, then we are on the verge of becoming a Type I civilization. We need to increase energy production, not slow down. In some countries they started building new power plants explicitly because of the crypto boom. Maybe crypto is the incentive the market needs to finally force affordable fusion power into reality?
Nuclear fusion is certainly possible and we've successfully begun getting more energy out of the experiments than we put in. From this point on, it's a matter of scale and practicality.
Malthus is retarded, and was wrong about literally everything, similar to how Marx was wrong about value.
Fusion will be attacked similar to how nuclear power has been attacked: by communist governments, using socialist useful idiots, to completely undermine technological development and energy independence with extreme regulations and slander until the Communist states can catch up.
Expect the first accident in Fusion power to be met with a 100 day 24/7 media firestorm about how Fusion power is more dangerous than nuclear power and any sane planet would ban it immediately, paid for by the CCP.