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Gold is practically useless day-to-day for a lay-person except as decoration, but represents the literal blood, sweat, tears, and toil of someone taking it out

Gold is practically useless day-to-day for a lay-person except as decoration, but represents the literal blood, sweat, tears, and toil of someone taking it out of rocks, refining it and putting it into your hands. Also it has some commercial use. Cryptocurrencies likely follow a similar model. Useless to the lay-person except as decoration. Representing a "colossal waste of resources", but having access to the refining tools / techniques also has some commercial value. Is gold useless except for swindling? Was trading land for gold (or vice versa- gold for land?) was that swindling? I'd love to hear your rebuttal.

laretluval 9y ago
The blood, sweat and tears that go into gold production are irrelevant to its economic value, except inasmuch as they reflect its scarcity.
mikro2nd 9y ago
Just to put that "colossal waste of resources" in perspective... allegedly we're wasting 60 TWh/year 'mining' Bitcoin, and this is considered (maybe rightly) an environmental catastrophe. We also use around (again allegedly) 220 TWh/year mining Gold.
- hudon 9y ago
  I don't want to start a "Bitcoin is useless" flameware but to your question: the reason why the energy consumption of proof-of-work is important is because society hasn't found a purpose for Bitcoin to exist yet. Therefore, the energy consumed is considered "wasted" whereas it could have been used for something society already deems useful, like keeping the lights on.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    Isn't the energy use of Bitcoin also continuously growing? The cost of extracting gold is pretty steady.
- EGreg 9y ago
  Excuse me, prove that we use more TWh/year mining Gold than bitcoin!!
notavalleyman 9y ago
>to hear your rebuttal When gold is mined from the ground, planet Earth has less gold. When a coin is mined, there's a bit less solution space for the class of crypto problem. But when a Blockchain/protocol is forked, nothing of value is lost. In fact there's a gain in solution space. Eg BCash fork doubled the quantity of BCoin protocol solutions. > Gold is practically useless day-to-day for a lay-person except as decoration, And vehicles, phones, computer chips, the industrial applications that keep the planet functioning etc

laretluval 9y ago

The blood, sweat and tears that go into gold production are irrelevant to its economic value, except inasmuch as they reflect its scarcity.

mikro2nd 9y ago

Just to put that "colossal waste of resources" in perspective... allegedly we're wasting 60 TWh/year 'mining' Bitcoin, and this is considered (maybe rightly) an environmental catastrophe. We also use around (again allegedly) 220 TWh/year mining Gold.

hudon 9y ago
I don't want to start a "Bitcoin is useless" flameware but to your question: the reason why the energy consumption of proof-of-work is important is because society hasn't found a purpose for Bitcoin to exist yet. Therefore, the energy consumed is considered "wasted" whereas it could have been used for something society already deems useful, like keeping the lights on.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Isn't the energy use of Bitcoin also continuously growing? The cost of extracting gold is pretty steady.
EGreg 9y ago
Excuse me, prove that we use more TWh/year mining Gold than bitcoin!!

notavalleyman 9y ago

>to hear your rebuttal When gold is mined from the ground, planet Earth has less gold. When a coin is mined, there's a bit less solution space for the class of crypto problem. But when a Blockchain/protocol is forked, nothing of value is lost. In fact there's a gain in solution space. Eg BCash fork doubled the quantity of BCoin protocol solutions. > Gold is practically useless day-to-day for a lay-person except as decoration, And vehicles, phones, computer chips, the industrial applications that keep the planet functioning etc