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All this crypto currency mining and speculation is a perverse form of wasting resources. While most people talk about energy conservation others keep buying har

All this crypto currency mining and speculation is a perverse form of wasting resources. While most people talk about energy conservation others keep buying hardware they don't need to burn electricity 24/7 so they can "create" made up resources to sell to other speculators online.

mlevental 9y ago
what's the difference between it and absolutely any other commodity that has zero use value? nothing
redcalx 9y ago
Question: Are the resource demands of the entire world banking system a perverse use of resources? If bitcoin supplants a large chunk of that system but in doing so uses less resources overall...?
- mikeash 9y ago
  The second question is based on faulty assumptions. Bitcoin uses orders of magnitude more energy per transaction.
  - ayemiller 9y ago
    Does it? How many employees does bitcoin have?...
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Yes, it does. The figures are out there. Bitcoin is absolutely tiny on the scale of global finance, so the denominator is extremely small. Not having employees doesn't save it.
  - honestlyreally 9y ago
    But virtually all mining is done near cheap renewable power. People talk a lot about how much energy it uses, yet to see attempt at quantifying co2 emissions, they are likely quite low.
    - ctz 9y ago
      In a country with an electricity grid and 60% coal-based electricity generation.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Couldn't that cheap renewable electricity be transmitted and used elsewhere if the miners weren't using it? The disparity in energy use is so large that even if Bitcoin mining emitted only 1% of the CO2 per kWh that normal energy users do, it would still be far ahead.
  - redcalx 9y ago
    > energy per transaction The lightning network may address this specific concern. I.e. bitcoin may become primarily a settlement mechanism for a much less resource hungry payment handling protocol/layer.
  - yebyen 9y ago
    Humans are involved in banking transactions too, don't discount the carbon footprint of the collective of bankers and bank tellers. Those people won't go away if we eliminated the whole banking system, but their carbon footprint will not have been wasted on the tracking and transfer of assets!
    - mikeash 9y ago
      A single bitcoin transaction uses about as much energy as the average American uses in 10 hours. As long as those bankers are doing at least a couple of transactions per day, they still come out ahead.
      - yebyen 9y ago
        "They get more done" =/= "They do more things" =/= "They are more efficient" There is downward pressure on the transaction volume of bitcoin for bitcoin users, because each individual transaction costs so much. This is not exactly an advantage of Bitcoin, I'll admit, but there are some people who will consider Bitcoin a success if ultimately it is only used for larger settlements between payment companies (they would prefer to see Bitcoin is not involved in micro-transactions, they would raise the tx fees to make this use case impracticable.) All I'm saying is, don't look at Bitcoin handling an average of 7 transactions per second and say "that's less efficient" because your average Bitcoin transaction is currently trending toward being significantly more complicated than your average credit card transaction. (And even after the recent improvements and pricing hype, I'm not actually betting on Bitcoin myself.) The BTC system, by design, is unsuitable for trustless person-to-person transactions in the form of Point-of-Sale. Every merchant who operates Bitcoin is trained to know that the transaction is not over until it's mined and in a block, and it's really much safer to wait at least a few blocks. So if you're selling coffee, maybe you don't worry about it because absolutely nobody is waiting 30 minutes for their cup of coffee, and if someone defrauds you more than twice you'll surely remember their face. By then you're still only out ~$10, and the cost of each attack is high, and likelihood of success is non-zero but fairly low. So you can eat the loss for the cup of coffee, sure, but this is definitely not a great sales pitch for Point-of-Sale system at BestBuy or basically anywhere else. Ethereum, on the other hand, mines a block on average every 14 seconds. You could realistically be safe and use that in a Point-of-Sale system. (And I'm not the expert, there may be even better systems than Ethereum. But don't say Visa... :-)
- consto 9y ago
  Bitcoin can never and will never be a fraction of the efficiency of the modern world banking system, and it can never and will never be able to handle the number of transactions. While you could argue that updates and changes over the years might be able to mould Bitcoin into an efficient transaction network, at that point it would not be Bitcoin anymore. VISA is capable of handling 56,000 transactions per second [1] while Bitcoin is capable of handing a measly 2.5 [2]. Bitcoin would need to scale by 224,000% to match VISA, and VISA is one of my different global networks. I don't know how much energy VISA uses but as of today, the bitcoin network is estimated to be using 16TWh [3], that's the same as all of Jordan or Lebanon or 5.2% of the energy consumption of the United Kingdom [4]. Assuming no energy consumption improvements, to scale to VISA levels Bitcoin would need to consume 224,000% more energy. That's 35,840TWh, which is nearly twice as much energy as the entire planet uses (21,776TWh)!!! So, if Bitcoin is able to become 90% more efficient, it would only require as much energy as nearly two European Unions. If Bitcoin is able to become 99% more efficient, it would only require as much energy more energy than the entire United Kingdom. If Bitcoin is able to become 99.9% more efficient, it would only require as much energy as Qatar. I can keep going but I won't. I might have made a mistake and been a factor out, but even then it doesn't even matter, that's how ridiculous the numbers are. I don't know about you but I find it rather unlikely that Bitcoin will every be a viable replacement for the world banking system. Maybe in a universe where Nuclear fusion is easy and ASICs never wear out, and the cost of cooling them is free but unfortunately for Bitcoin we don't live in that universe. Bitcoin and crypocurrancys are horrible inventions if you care about the planet, if you think a massive decentralised network where value is created from ever increasing difficulty proof of work could be more efficient than VISA you are frankly deluded. Granted, this is someone who does not own any Bitcoins, so maybe I just haven't drunk the kool aid. --- 1. https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visa-fact-sheet-Jun2015.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visa-... 2. https://blockchain.info/charts/transactions-per-second https://blockchain.info/charts/transactions-per-second 3. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
  - gruez 9y ago
RationPhantoms 9y ago
And let's quantify the waste of resources by storing vast buckets of useless data people put on the internet. Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Google Plus. What about the PoP's the house the IP transit traffic? How about the thousands of advertisement/Spam companies that just add to the noise? Telemarketers and their like (legal and not). Surely there is a better argument to be made here. Speculative "mining" on consumer purchased hardware is hardly near the top of global wasted resources.
- sjm 9y ago
  So your argument is because it's not the "top of globally wasted resources", we should ignore the waste? It's a large enough industry that GPU stock and prices are hugely affected by it, and its much more conventionally wasteful than the services you're trying to compare it to. Plus if the goal of cryptocurrency is to become more mainstream, this is a super important argument to make against it in its current form.
  - dozzie 9y ago
    > So your argument is because it's not the "top of globally wasted resources", we should ignore the waste? Sometimes this argumentation is totally valid. For example, it's utterly stupid reasoning when one uses less water at home "to save fresh water and environment", because households use half of the fresh water used by industry, and agriculture uses twice as much as the two combined. Whatever inconvenience the person trying to save the environment this way puts themselves into, the effect is capped at about 10% of total fresh water consumption. It's an effort applied in the wrong place.
    - chenglou 9y ago
      Saving water or such is a mentality and you might not be able to measure it through a simple people * saving/person. If everyone's wasteful there'd be way less incentive to nudge industries into changing. Where would the change be coming from? More philosophically speaking, if there's an equation of life with all the variables and we apply it here by taking all the "saved effort thanks to not promoting water consciousness in regular households" and dumping it into whichever area we'd think is ideally efficient, it wouldn't be _too_ surprising if holistically, the result comes out less favorable of this approach vs just telling regular folks to save water. For example, consider that it might take tenfold the effort to convince an agricultural company CEO to change approach; if ninefold the effort doesn't reach the activation energy to convince such person then you're better off telling nine people to stop the waste. In general, I have the feeling that many decisions can wrongly be made to look stupid if we recalculate it using the select few variables we care about.
prostoalex 9y ago
I have a conspiracy theory that cryptocurrencies have been created by security agencies to conduct massively parallel calculations (mainly to break crypto) with costs offloaded onto the private sector.
- martinko 9y ago
  repeating double sha256 would be a rather inefficient way of going about this
- honestlyreally 9y ago
  Putting on the tinfoil: cryptocurrecies are a defacto bounty for hash algorithms, bitcoin is excellent proof that sha2 and ripemd160 arent broken
  - hartator 9y ago
    BitCoin is md5.
jray 9y ago
We need a 100% pre-mined coin.
- jameskegel 9y ago
  Those exist
- shepardrtc 9y ago
  There are a few of those. I think the first and most established is Ripple.
- bkolobara 9y ago
  https://www.stellar.org/ https://www.stellar.org/
sjm 9y ago
I wish more people would talk about this. It seems like a completely ignored aspect of cryptocurrency. It's not even just the electricity but the raw materials that go into all these GPUs that are being bought up (to the point of real scarcity and crazy price hikes), and tossed away when a more performant chip comes out. Like you say, it is seriously perverse.
- beepboopbeep 9y ago
  Plenty of people talk about, issue is people are so locked into their profit motives that they reject dissenting statements like a hot poker to the skin.
- sodafountan 9y ago
  Except those are all good things, more demand in this space will drive more competition and force manufacturers to push the energy saving capabilities of chips further in order to stay competitive. Raw materials can be recycled, we're not dealing with finite resources here. Then again it could all just be a bubble, in which case yes there will be a lot of waste but the market will correct itself. The problem is cryptocurrency has real value, it takes real computing power to process and once it's processed it's very secure (therein lies the value) so I don't think cryptocurrency is going away
- dspillett 9y ago
  Last time I looked at the like profit "mining" ETH (a couple of people at work go on about it endlessly so I thought I'd check the maths) with my current hardware (a pretty decent single GPU and a couple of reasonable CPUs) and the price I pay for electricity I could net about $100 in a few months. That just isn't worth the potential hassle (setup, monitoring, keeping mining clients up-to-date, leaving the main desktop machine on full blast 24/7 heating up the room in summer for a start, and the profit calculation didn't include anything regarding extra wear-and-tear) to me.
- wyldfire 9y ago
  > It seems like a completely ignored aspect of cryptocurrency. I don't think it's ignored at all. It's covered in Bitcoin's FAQ because it comes up pretty often. Also some folks have tried to create coins that use something other than a PoW. Some have created coins whose PoW has independent utility (XPM: cunningham chains of primes). > raw materials that go into all these GPUs Well, thank goodness the GPUs have independent utility. If you want to be concerned about waste, the ASICs are generally much less useful after difficulty increases than GPUs. > seriously perverse. shrug people every day "waste" global resources on things that I think are totally worthless. You might see bitcoin and friends as similarly worthless but if absolutely nothing else it does seem like it has real utility for making remittances more affordable.
emiliobumachar 9y ago
Do you consider gold and silver to be similarly perverse?
paulpauper 9y ago
the solution is self-regulating: if bitcoin ceases being profitable to mine, people will stop mining as much it and electricity usage will also fall
- bbctol 9y ago
  That's not self-regulating; environmental harms of increased electricity usage and elements usage in hardware is an externality that isn't always captured by the market.
- horusthecat 9y ago
  Or conversely big players will pony up for larger operations to exploit marginal inefficiencies and other economies of scale, which is what seems to be happening. Additionally you're assuming the only motive behind mining bitcoin is the value of bitcoin, effectively ignoring realities like, e.g., that entities use it to avoid capital flight regulations.
detritus 9y ago
I was under the impression that making use of the otherwise 'wasted' compute cycles was the purpose of Ethereum - to allow people to throw 'useful' problems into the fray as people mine? Or am I completely off here?
- sudoscript 9y ago
  You're partially right. But "wasted" compute cycles refers to time that your CPU sits idle. I think the argument here is about energy usage. So sitting idle is not the same as running other people's computations.
mrb 9y ago
"All this crypto currency mining and speculation is a perverse form of wasting resources" It is not a waste because we extract economic & social worth from cryptocurrencies. Same thing with cars: they waste 97% of their fuel energy but we tolerate them because they provide obvious economic advantages. Also see: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-mining-is-not-wasteful/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-mining-is-not-wasteful/
seabird 9y ago
You need to slow down, big fella. By this same argument, all data processing by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the like are all wasted resources. Burning CPU time on AI research is wasted resources. Using Excel is wasted resources. Bitcoin is a transaction processing platform, the success of which is unfortunately limited by severe volatility issues. Many of these altcoins are designed to process arbitrary data, control ownership/identity, etc. Yes, there are plenty of pump and dump schemes, but you're talking out of your ass if you're trying to generally equate the usage of CPU time with "wasting energy."
googletazer 9y ago
I'd rather let the market figure it out than have people like you tell me what is a waste of resources and what isn't.

mlevental 9y ago

what's the difference between it and absolutely any other commodity that has zero use value? nothing

redcalx 9y ago

Question: Are the resource demands of the entire world banking system a perverse use of resources? If bitcoin supplants a large chunk of that system but in doing so uses less resources overall...?

mikeash 9y ago
The second question is based on faulty assumptions. Bitcoin uses orders of magnitude more energy per transaction.
- ayemiller 9y ago
  Does it? How many employees does bitcoin have?...
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Yes, it does. The figures are out there. Bitcoin is absolutely tiny on the scale of global finance, so the denominator is extremely small. Not having employees doesn't save it.
- honestlyreally 9y ago
  But virtually all mining is done near cheap renewable power. People talk a lot about how much energy it uses, yet to see attempt at quantifying co2 emissions, they are likely quite low.
  - ctz 9y ago
    In a country with an electricity grid and 60% coal-based electricity generation.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Couldn't that cheap renewable electricity be transmitted and used elsewhere if the miners weren't using it? The disparity in energy use is so large that even if Bitcoin mining emitted only 1% of the CO2 per kWh that normal energy users do, it would still be far ahead.
- redcalx 9y ago
  > energy per transaction The lightning network may address this specific concern. I.e. bitcoin may become primarily a settlement mechanism for a much less resource hungry payment handling protocol/layer.
- yebyen 9y ago
  Humans are involved in banking transactions too, don't discount the carbon footprint of the collective of bankers and bank tellers. Those people won't go away if we eliminated the whole banking system, but their carbon footprint will not have been wasted on the tracking and transfer of assets!
  - mikeash 9y ago
    A single bitcoin transaction uses about as much energy as the average American uses in 10 hours. As long as those bankers are doing at least a couple of transactions per day, they still come out ahead.
    - yebyen 9y ago
      "They get more done" =/= "They do more things" =/= "They are more efficient" There is downward pressure on the transaction volume of bitcoin for bitcoin users, because each individual transaction costs so much. This is not exactly an advantage of Bitcoin, I'll admit, but there are some people who will consider Bitcoin a success if ultimately it is only used for larger settlements between payment companies (they would prefer to see Bitcoin is not involved in micro-transactions, they would raise the tx fees to make this use case impracticable.) All I'm saying is, don't look at Bitcoin handling an average of 7 transactions per second and say "that's less efficient" because your average Bitcoin transaction is currently trending toward being significantly more complicated than your average credit card transaction. (And even after the recent improvements and pricing hype, I'm not actually betting on Bitcoin myself.) The BTC system, by design, is unsuitable for trustless person-to-person transactions in the form of Point-of-Sale. Every merchant who operates Bitcoin is trained to know that the transaction is not over until it's mined and in a block, and it's really much safer to wait at least a few blocks. So if you're selling coffee, maybe you don't worry about it because absolutely nobody is waiting 30 minutes for their cup of coffee, and if someone defrauds you more than twice you'll surely remember their face. By then you're still only out ~$10, and the cost of each attack is high, and likelihood of success is non-zero but fairly low. So you can eat the loss for the cup of coffee, sure, but this is definitely not a great sales pitch for Point-of-Sale system at BestBuy or basically anywhere else. Ethereum, on the other hand, mines a block on average every 14 seconds. You could realistically be safe and use that in a Point-of-Sale system. (And I'm not the expert, there may be even better systems than Ethereum. But don't say Visa... :-)
consto 9y ago
Bitcoin can never and will never be a fraction of the efficiency of the modern world banking system, and it can never and will never be able to handle the number of transactions. While you could argue that updates and changes over the years might be able to mould Bitcoin into an efficient transaction network, at that point it would not be Bitcoin anymore. VISA is capable of handling 56,000 transactions per second [1] while Bitcoin is capable of handing a measly 2.5 [2]. Bitcoin would need to scale by 224,000% to match VISA, and VISA is one of my different global networks. I don't know how much energy VISA uses but as of today, the bitcoin network is estimated to be using 16TWh [3], that's the same as all of Jordan or Lebanon or 5.2% of the energy consumption of the United Kingdom [4]. Assuming no energy consumption improvements, to scale to VISA levels Bitcoin would need to consume 224,000% more energy. That's 35,840TWh, which is nearly twice as much energy as the entire planet uses (21,776TWh)!!! So, if Bitcoin is able to become 90% more efficient, it would only require as much energy as nearly two European Unions. If Bitcoin is able to become 99% more efficient, it would only require as much energy more energy than the entire United Kingdom. If Bitcoin is able to become 99.9% more efficient, it would only require as much energy as Qatar. I can keep going but I won't. I might have made a mistake and been a factor out, but even then it doesn't even matter, that's how ridiculous the numbers are. I don't know about you but I find it rather unlikely that Bitcoin will every be a viable replacement for the world banking system. Maybe in a universe where Nuclear fusion is easy and ASICs never wear out, and the cost of cooling them is free but unfortunately for Bitcoin we don't live in that universe. Bitcoin and crypocurrancys are horrible inventions if you care about the planet, if you think a massive decentralised network where value is created from ever increasing difficulty proof of work could be more efficient than VISA you are frankly deluded. Granted, this is someone who does not own any Bitcoins, so maybe I just haven't drunk the kool aid. --- 1. https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visa-fact-sheet-Jun2015.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visa-... 2. https://blockchain.info/charts/transactions-per-second https://blockchain.info/charts/transactions-per-second 3. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
- gruez 9y ago

RationPhantoms 9y ago

And let's quantify the waste of resources by storing vast buckets of useless data people put on the internet. Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Google Plus. What about the PoP's the house the IP transit traffic? How about the thousands of advertisement/Spam companies that just add to the noise? Telemarketers and their like (legal and not). Surely there is a better argument to be made here. Speculative "mining" on consumer purchased hardware is hardly near the top of global wasted resources.

sjm 9y ago
So your argument is because it's not the "top of globally wasted resources", we should ignore the waste? It's a large enough industry that GPU stock and prices are hugely affected by it, and its much more conventionally wasteful than the services you're trying to compare it to. Plus if the goal of cryptocurrency is to become more mainstream, this is a super important argument to make against it in its current form.
- dozzie 9y ago
  > So your argument is because it's not the "top of globally wasted resources", we should ignore the waste? Sometimes this argumentation is totally valid. For example, it's utterly stupid reasoning when one uses less water at home "to save fresh water and environment", because households use half of the fresh water used by industry, and agriculture uses twice as much as the two combined. Whatever inconvenience the person trying to save the environment this way puts themselves into, the effect is capped at about 10% of total fresh water consumption. It's an effort applied in the wrong place.
  - chenglou 9y ago
    Saving water or such is a mentality and you might not be able to measure it through a simple people * saving/person. If everyone's wasteful there'd be way less incentive to nudge industries into changing. Where would the change be coming from? More philosophically speaking, if there's an equation of life with all the variables and we apply it here by taking all the "saved effort thanks to not promoting water consciousness in regular households" and dumping it into whichever area we'd think is ideally efficient, it wouldn't be _too_ surprising if holistically, the result comes out less favorable of this approach vs just telling regular folks to save water. For example, consider that it might take tenfold the effort to convince an agricultural company CEO to change approach; if ninefold the effort doesn't reach the activation energy to convince such person then you're better off telling nine people to stop the waste. In general, I have the feeling that many decisions can wrongly be made to look stupid if we recalculate it using the select few variables we care about.

prostoalex 9y ago

I have a conspiracy theory that cryptocurrencies have been created by security agencies to conduct massively parallel calculations (mainly to break crypto) with costs offloaded onto the private sector.

martinko 9y ago
repeating double sha256 would be a rather inefficient way of going about this
honestlyreally 9y ago
Putting on the tinfoil: cryptocurrecies are a defacto bounty for hash algorithms, bitcoin is excellent proof that sha2 and ripemd160 arent broken
- hartator 9y ago
  BitCoin is md5.

jray 9y ago

We need a 100% pre-mined coin.

jameskegel 9y ago
Those exist
shepardrtc 9y ago
There are a few of those. I think the first and most established is Ripple.
bkolobara 9y ago
https://www.stellar.org/ https://www.stellar.org/

sjm 9y ago

I wish more people would talk about this. It seems like a completely ignored aspect of cryptocurrency. It's not even just the electricity but the raw materials that go into all these GPUs that are being bought up (to the point of real scarcity and crazy price hikes), and tossed away when a more performant chip comes out. Like you say, it is seriously perverse.

beepboopbeep 9y ago
Plenty of people talk about, issue is people are so locked into their profit motives that they reject dissenting statements like a hot poker to the skin.
sodafountan 9y ago
Except those are all good things, more demand in this space will drive more competition and force manufacturers to push the energy saving capabilities of chips further in order to stay competitive. Raw materials can be recycled, we're not dealing with finite resources here. Then again it could all just be a bubble, in which case yes there will be a lot of waste but the market will correct itself. The problem is cryptocurrency has real value, it takes real computing power to process and once it's processed it's very secure (therein lies the value) so I don't think cryptocurrency is going away
dspillett 9y ago
Last time I looked at the like profit "mining" ETH (a couple of people at work go on about it endlessly so I thought I'd check the maths) with my current hardware (a pretty decent single GPU and a couple of reasonable CPUs) and the price I pay for electricity I could net about $100 in a few months. That just isn't worth the potential hassle (setup, monitoring, keeping mining clients up-to-date, leaving the main desktop machine on full blast 24/7 heating up the room in summer for a start, and the profit calculation didn't include anything regarding extra wear-and-tear) to me.
wyldfire 9y ago
> It seems like a completely ignored aspect of cryptocurrency. I don't think it's ignored at all. It's covered in Bitcoin's FAQ because it comes up pretty often. Also some folks have tried to create coins that use something other than a PoW. Some have created coins whose PoW has independent utility (XPM: cunningham chains of primes). > raw materials that go into all these GPUs Well, thank goodness the GPUs have independent utility. If you want to be concerned about waste, the ASICs are generally much less useful after difficulty increases than GPUs. > seriously perverse. shrug people every day "waste" global resources on things that I think are totally worthless. You might see bitcoin and friends as similarly worthless but if absolutely nothing else it does seem like it has real utility for making remittances more affordable.

emiliobumachar 9y ago

Do you consider gold and silver to be similarly perverse?

paulpauper 9y ago

the solution is self-regulating: if bitcoin ceases being profitable to mine, people will stop mining as much it and electricity usage will also fall

bbctol 9y ago
That's not self-regulating; environmental harms of increased electricity usage and elements usage in hardware is an externality that isn't always captured by the market.
horusthecat 9y ago
Or conversely big players will pony up for larger operations to exploit marginal inefficiencies and other economies of scale, which is what seems to be happening. Additionally you're assuming the only motive behind mining bitcoin is the value of bitcoin, effectively ignoring realities like, e.g., that entities use it to avoid capital flight regulations.

detritus 9y ago

I was under the impression that making use of the otherwise 'wasted' compute cycles was the purpose of Ethereum - to allow people to throw 'useful' problems into the fray as people mine? Or am I completely off here?

sudoscript 9y ago
You're partially right. But "wasted" compute cycles refers to time that your CPU sits idle. I think the argument here is about energy usage. So sitting idle is not the same as running other people's computations.

mrb 9y ago

"All this crypto currency mining and speculation is a perverse form of wasting resources" It is not a waste because we extract economic & social worth from cryptocurrencies. Same thing with cars: they waste 97% of their fuel energy but we tolerate them because they provide obvious economic advantages. Also see: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-mining-is-not-wasteful/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-mining-is-not-wasteful/

seabird 9y ago

You need to slow down, big fella. By this same argument, all data processing by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the like are all wasted resources. Burning CPU time on AI research is wasted resources. Using Excel is wasted resources. Bitcoin is a transaction processing platform, the success of which is unfortunately limited by severe volatility issues. Many of these altcoins are designed to process arbitrary data, control ownership/identity, etc. Yes, there are plenty of pump and dump schemes, but you're talking out of your ass if you're trying to generally equate the usage of CPU time with "wasting energy."

googletazer 9y ago

I'd rather let the market figure it out than have people like you tell me what is a waste of resources and what isn't.