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"There is no "environmental mitigation" for Bitcoin's energy use, this behavior ... is an essential property of cryptocurrency, without which it would cease to

by jariel 6y ago

"There is no "environmental mitigation" for Bitcoin's energy use, this behavior ... is an essential property of cryptocurrency, without which it would cease to exist." This is based on the false premise that energy, or anything else needs to be given up in exchange for crypto, or any other form of currency. We could create a zillion cryptos out of thin air and just hand them out. That's one way to do it. Central banks do it another way. The 'energy' thing is just nonsense, it's just something that happens to be baked into this specific form of BTC generation.

keymone 6y ago
Go create me a zillion of bitcoin and let’s see how much energy it’ll take.
- jariel 6y ago
  You are missing my point, which is, there's no material reason to 'use energy' to 'create currency' of any kind. It's just a peculiarity of bitcoin and the way some cryptos are generated. There is no theoretical generalization to the notion of energy->currency so the OPs premise of energy->value doesn't make any practical sense ... other than for BTC.
  - keymone 6y ago
    No, I think you are missing the point. It’s not the need to use energy, it’s a security feature that you can’t create it without using energy. It’s defense mechanism against debasement. Gold has that mechanism by being a rare metal - there’s only so much of it in our vicinity. Bitcoin gets that mechanism from universal law of physics - you can’t create energy from nothing.
    - jariel 6y ago
      No, again, you're confusing the issue. The 'security feature' of BTC, which happens to be related to energy has nothing to do with currency, or necessarily even crypto-currenices in the general sense. The OP was trying to imply some kind of theoretical implication between 'energy used + value creation' (and you're also tying that to energy 'secure' usage). Yes - we know BTC is 'tied to energy' - but that's irrelevant in the bigger picture, it's a specific feature of BTC - it's not a 'fundamental' problem. There are myriad ways if distributing currency, even 'security' that don't involve arbitrary amounts of energy usage. BTC/Crypto is kind of infuriating space of very smart technical people who have almost no financial knowledge 'discover' what they think of as new, but in reality, most of this has been known since the dawn of classical economics. BTC is a novel thing, that's about it.
      - keymone 6y ago
        > 'security feature' of BTC, which happens to be related to energy has nothing to do with currency it's literally the mechanism that solves double spend problem, which i'm pretty sure is quite important for a currency and to my knowledge wasn't solvable in trustless manner prior to bitcoin.

by jariel 6y ago

keymone 6y ago

Go create me a zillion of bitcoin and let’s see how much energy it’ll take.

jariel 6y ago
You are missing my point, which is, there's no material reason to 'use energy' to 'create currency' of any kind. It's just a peculiarity of bitcoin and the way some cryptos are generated. There is no theoretical generalization to the notion of energy->currency so the OPs premise of energy->value doesn't make any practical sense ... other than for BTC.
- keymone 6y ago
  No, I think you are missing the point. It’s not the need to use energy, it’s a security feature that you can’t create it without using energy. It’s defense mechanism against debasement. Gold has that mechanism by being a rare metal - there’s only so much of it in our vicinity. Bitcoin gets that mechanism from universal law of physics - you can’t create energy from nothing.
  - jariel 6y ago
    No, again, you're confusing the issue. The 'security feature' of BTC, which happens to be related to energy has nothing to do with currency, or necessarily even crypto-currenices in the general sense. The OP was trying to imply some kind of theoretical implication between 'energy used + value creation' (and you're also tying that to energy 'secure' usage). Yes - we know BTC is 'tied to energy' - but that's irrelevant in the bigger picture, it's a specific feature of BTC - it's not a 'fundamental' problem. There are myriad ways if distributing currency, even 'security' that don't involve arbitrary amounts of energy usage. BTC/Crypto is kind of infuriating space of very smart technical people who have almost no financial knowledge 'discover' what they think of as new, but in reality, most of this has been known since the dawn of classical economics. BTC is a novel thing, that's about it.
    - keymone 6y ago
      > 'security feature' of BTC, which happens to be related to energy has nothing to do with currency it's literally the mechanism that solves double spend problem, which i'm pretty sure is quite important for a currency and to my knowledge wasn't solvable in trustless manner prior to bitcoin.