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.
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.