7 ms·
They're all arbitrary stores of value whos intrinsic value is not justified by the market price?
by d0lph 8y ago
They're all arbitrary stores of value whos intrinsic value is not justified by the market price?
- rtkwe 8y agoOnly Bitcoin requires the continuous consumption of energy to continue being a useful asset though.
- d0lph 8y agoRight, diamonds just cost human lives.
- rtkwe 8y agoBut that isn't an inherent fact of a diamond. Mining them doesn't require that people lose their lives it's a fact of shitty people. And most diamonds consumers will encounter aren't from that stream.
- bduerst 8y agoYep. Human nature is a different problem set altogether from being intentionally designed to waste electricity.
- gnode 8y ago> intentionally designed to waste electricity. I strongly doubt the intention was to waste electricity, more likely it was incidentally designed that way, as it's difficult to conceive how you could create such a decentralized cryptocurrency without proof-of-work (at least at the time).
- criley2 8y ago"Right, diamonds just cost human lives." If we're going to play that game, where did the electricity come from for your watt-hour-sucking GPU? A coal plant? How many died mining it? How many got life long illness or injury/disability mining it? How much poverty did the abusive mining industry inflict on poor dependent communities? How many hundreds of thousands of people were affected by it's emissions? How many thousands of cases of asthma? How many deaths? If we go nuclear : Where was it mined? Who mined it? Who processed it? Where is the waste going? Are you supporting rather despotic countries depending on ore source? Etc Or the cards themselves. Where did the rare earth materials that go into graphics cards come from? Where were the graphics card parts manufactured, and where was the board assembled? Are you benefiting from near-slave labor for your cards? I mean, if we want to play that game, there's so much to examine!
- gnode 8y ago> If we're going to play that game, where did the electricity come from for your watt-hour-sucking GPU? Pointing out that diamond mining is also not without externalities doesn't mean d0lph is an exponent of Bitcoin mining.
- d0lph 8y agoI like nuclear, it's the obvious choice, and incredibly safe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_the_United_S... "Uranium mining in the United States produced 3,303,977 pounds (1,498,659 kg) of U3O8 (1271 tonnes of uranium) in 2015" The US. I wasn't aware there were a significant number of uranium mining deaths? I also assume the US can process it and safely dispose of the waste. No despotic countries of course. China is a tough one though, I don't know how we justify it.
- criley2 8y agoAFAIK the US imports 80% of its uranium used in power generation?
- d0lph 8y agoYou didn't really post much about why exactly that's a bad thing.
- criley2 8y agohttps://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=nuclear_where https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=nuclear_w... "Canada–25% Kazakhstan–24% Australia–20% Russia–14% Uzbekistan–4% Malawi, Namibia, Niger, and South Africa–10% Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Czech Republic, Germany, and Ukraine–2%" So we can toss in the blood diamond / African blood uranium comparison, 10% of American uranium comes from Africa. But we also have the despotic nation of Russia, so by using uranium you're in some part enriching that anti-liberty mobocracy.
- gnode 8y agoBitcoin doesn't intrinsically require that much power. The computation to verify transactions is a tiny fraction of that required to compete for the next block by hashing. The high hash rate is because of the high difficulty, which is itself dependent on the hash rate of the entire network. If the price of bitcoin drops, the incentive to mine decreases, and thus so does the difficulty. This is comparable to gold, as an increase in the gold price also incentivises increased mining.
- rtkwe 8y agoBut once extracted their energy costs are negligible (especially with gold being stored and the rights traded instead of the physical asset a lot of the time). In the case of BTC you can't really separate out the cost of mining a block from validating the transaction because until it's in a block a transaction doesn't really exist (this will get much better with lightning though). But without the constant burn of mining BTC (even post lightning) will be come useless.
- michaelscott 8y agoUntil it IS in a block. Then, like the storage cost of gold or any "real" material, the energy expenditure for maintenance is negligible. In fact, considering the storage requirements of something like bullion I'd argue the maintenance costs are considerably lower.
- rtkwe 8y agoYes any given transaction is valid once it is in a block but without continuous mining it's still worthless because it cannot be spent without a new block being mined. And since mining has to be pretty continuous or the whole thing becomes unusable because of loooong processing times the maintenance of the whole network kind of becomes maintenance of the transactions. Even lightning would only last for a while without new blocks being mined because adding funds to your 'lightning channel' requires a transaction to be placed on the blockchain to open a channel.
- deegles 8y agoPhysical gold still needs to be mined, smelted, transported, and guarded. When you buy it and move it around energy is spent too. So if you really want an apples-to-apples comparison you'd have to count the energy needed to mine each oz. of gold.
- rtkwe 8y agoThe large majority of gold traded for bullion or investment isn't actually moved. It's just the rights to claim X tr. oz. of gold in the vault of XYZ company. Also value of my gold doesn't depend on the transport of all the gold out there so rolling those costs in at the individual level doesn't make much sense. BTC on the otherhand is useless without mining because the existence and transfer of BTC depends on the miners. Even post lightning mining is still critical to opening new channels.
- deegles 8y agoThe large majority of Bitcoin isn't actually moved every block either. And those systems you describe to reassign rights to gold also use energy. As block rewards fall, profit will come from transaction fees only, and only the most efficient miners (best equipment or energy access) will remain. Sure, Bitcoin uses more energy now than a database sitting on a server, but it's solving a different problem.
- rtkwe 8y agoIt is solving a different problem but that doesn't change the fact that the whole network's mining work is required to make it work. There are some energy costs to tracking the rights of stored gold but they're vanishingly small compared to BTC. We're getting sucked down into the weeds here and losing sight of the original point which is BTC as designed requires the use of massive amount of energy to validate and secure the transaction ledger and that ledger and the things it enables is the whole value of BTC.
- perl4ever 8y ago
- thatcat 8y agoThe only reason anyone cares is because it's relatively easy to compute this inefficiency compared to the vast sea of inefficient products that would require signifigant effort to even approximate.
- d0lph 8y agoPrecisely, I'm sure there's an enormous amount of infrastructure, extraction equipment, storage, processing and reprocessing. Without the full data such a statement is vacuous.
- abritinthebay 8y agoNone of them have intrinsic value. At least gold & diamonds are useful
- ams6110 8y agouseful + scarce == intrinsic value, no?
- abritinthebay 8y agoUseful is a subjective value judgement, so... no. But I get what you're saying - I'd say it's more correct to say it's valued, but not that it has intrinsic value. For example - over history gold has been mostly considered pretty, but not exactly high value. It was only through trade it became representative of value (of the goods).