5 ms·
I can’t help, but think about the megawatts of electricity turned to heat over something for which the floor is literally $0.00 USD. I truly hope that Btc ends
by IntronExon 9y ago
I can’t help, but think about the megawatts of electricity turned to heat over something for which the floor is literally $0.00 USD. I truly hope that Btc ends up being the catalyst for something worth what currently appears to be an incredible waste of a dwindling resource.
“So how did you make your fortune Alice?”
“Well Bob, I polluted the world a bit at the cost of enough power to light up a city for a week.”
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- TomK32 9y agoI think you just mined a completely new crypto-joke.
- qbrass 9y agoThey rehashed an old one.
- infinitone 9y agoThere are many things produced that bring no value but pollute the world... take cigarettes for example.
- nmyk 9y agoCigarettes produce value! They take the edge off.
- avip 9y agoThere must be a more cost-effective way to dilute the population. Space seems ripe for disruption.
- stcredzero 9y ago$500k for a one way ticket to Mars?
- drb91 9y agoAt least you can cash out a cigarette by smoking it. That’s value right there, even if you don’t appreciate it yourself.
- eip 9y agoOr 10K parking lots running 500+ 1kw HPS bulbs.
- IntronExon 9y agoWasteful and useless are not the same thing. A $0.00 is truly useless, while the lights in parking lots are simply wasteful.
- linuxps2 9y agoAlso, how are we defining value? Bitcoin certainly brings secure transactions to the table which has its own value (just ask the likes of Western Union, Paypal, etc...)
- bequanna 9y agoIt sounds like you have a narrow definition of the word 'value'. Care to elaborate?
- IntronExon 9y agoCigarettes are valuable, they’re just harmful as well. There are also legitimate medical uses of cigarettes for schizophrenics and perhaps others. It’s a dubious product at best, and a really poor choice for most, but some people enjoy smoking. Nuclear bombs are harmful and destructive, but hey do have a use regardless of any consensus regarding their imagined value. What can you do with a Bitcoin when no one wants to buy it from you? Try smoking it? A better analogy to Btc using cigarettes would be collecting the heat from burning cigarettes and trying to sell that.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago> I truly hope that Btc ends up being the catalyst for something worth what currently appears to be an incredible waste of a dwindling resource. This is exactly what I had hoped, too, but it hasn't materialized yet, and I'm losing hope it will. Instead of inventing some ultra-smart general purpose supermachine people stucked to producing very specialized hardware able to do just one thing. There is some glimpse of hope: now that it's less and less profitable to use electricity, the miners might have more incentive to use different forms of renewable energy rather than anything else. This can have various unpredictable consequences though...
- sincerely 9y agoAren't miners mainly using hydro power right now?
- kibwen 9y agoHydropower is renewable, but it's not very scalable (once you've dammed up your biggest rivers, that's it, you're done; hydro has been capped in the US for decades because of this). Hydropower is also quite ecologically damaging, though in the local sense rather than the global greenhouse gas sense.
- therein 9y agoNo they are not.
- Retric 9y agoElectricity is reasonably fungible. Hydro power is cheaper locally because you lose energy in transmission, but if they where not using it that energy would be shipped out and replace peaking power.
- outworlder 9y agoNo, they are using whatever is cheapest.
- Cyberdog 9y agoDo you also get sore thinking about the pollution and waste of energy caused by people playing video games? Also, if the cost of Bitcoin falls to $0, I will want to collect all of the coins for free. But then someone else will probably offer $0.01 for them, so then I'd need to offer $0.02. But then maybe someone else will offer $0.03. And so on and so on. The price would only drop to zero if everyone decides there's no useful utility behind Bitcoin that makes them desirable to hodl or use. I just don't see that happening.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vinchuco 9y agoPassive-aggressive paraphrasing, for free: > then video games are bad! Checkmate! > assuming people assign BTC value then BTC will not reach zero value > I don't think that will happen so it won't happen.
- Cyberdog 9y agoI'll accept your criticism, except for: > > assuming people assign BTC value then BTC will not reach zero value Please explain to me what's wrong with this. If there's still at least two people who value BTC enough to pay to own it, how can it reach zero value?
- vinchuco 9y agoI can't dispute the statement if it happens to be vacuously true https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuous_truth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuous_truth It's true people can assign value. It's not necessarily true that they will.
- dalore 9y agoOne could argue Bob provided a valuable service by calculating some hard to calculate sums which could then be used by others securely.
- IntronExon 9y agoIsn’t that sort of a circular argument? The calculations are trivial, but difficult, and only have value as proof of expended energy. That proof only has value while Btc has value, but it has no other use.
- 0wing 9y agoProof of Work algorithms are not hard to calculate, it's simply designed to increase capital costs to access writing to the database (adding the next 'block' set of transactions to the blockchain). The actual math amounts to a best effort guess in a lottery for write access to a database. The network would function just as fast with 3-10 computers as it does with 3 billion times the amount of "computing" power. In summary, Proof of Work is designed to waste as much energy and capital input as possible.