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This article seems silly to me, because it tries to conflate the wasted energy that went into "mining" bitcoins with their value. It's like an update of hoary
by ForHackernews 9y ago
This article seems silly to me, because it tries to conflate the wasted energy that went into "mining" bitcoins with their value.
It's like an update of hoary old Marxist notions, but for cryptocurrency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
- jerf 9y agoYes, that was my thought too. For this to be arbitrage, we need to see buying something one market where it is cheap and selling the same something into another market where it is expensive. BitCoin miners certainly buy the energy, but where are they selling it? I can't take that $0.04 KW/h energy in the BitCoins and use it instead of my expensive power. (If I could do that, we wouldn't still be arguing about whether BitCoin was valuable, there would be an inarguable value to it.) Manufacturing A that needs B where B is cheap isn't arbitrage, that's just manufacturing where costs are lower. It lacks all the fundamental characteristics of arbitrage and consequently all the effects. Unless I am grossly mistaken about what arbitrage is, the article is just wrong.