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I find this kind of argument bizarre - if something is valuable to humans they will use energy for it whether it's for transportation, watching the Kardashians
by formalsystem 6y ago
I find this kind of argument bizarre - if something is valuable to humans they will use energy for it whether it's for transportation, watching the Kardashians or mining Bitcoin. Saying one application of energy is moral and another is amoral neglects that people essentially vote with their time and energy what to consume it on.
If an application that uses a lot of energy is very valuable to people than it's a competitive advantage to also service that need with cheap energy.
Having sound money is not at odds with the environment.
- noja 6y agoSo your argument is that if people want to do something, they should be allowed to?
- formalsystem 6y agoThe alternative of stack-ranking what constitutes a good or bad use of energy doesn't seem particularly feasible to me. If energy is cheap, abundant and clean you don't need to create such good/bad energy list.
- viraptor 6y agoThat's not the situation we're in though. It may be fairly abundant, but neither cheap nor clean on average. And we're still decades away from closing the most polluting sources.
- arghwhat 6y agoIf it was all abundant wind-power, sure. Denmark, famous for its wind farms and for having too much renewable energy at times, only has 6.1GW of wind capacity, which is is a few gigawatt short for the Bitcoin network. So no, there isn't an abundance of energy when you decide to throw it all away as fast as you can.
- Closi 6y agoBut energy isn’t cheap, abundant or clean? Also because of how the Bitcoin algorithm and economics work, if energy is cheap then the market will scale up mining thus the Bitcoin algorithm will scale up difficulty. Cheap energy results in more energy waste from Bitcoin.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- afavour 6y agoI’d argue that “valuable for humans” is brushing over something: is Bitcoin valuable for humans as a collective or is it valuable for a small minority who stand to gain from it? From my view, and despite the initial promises of Bitcoin, it’s being used by people of means to get even more money than they already have.
- formalsystem 6y agoSure value is subjective - I find it valuable because it's gold I can transmit through space quickly
- ben_w 6y agoWhich county are you in? I’ve never had a lack of convenience from normal banking.
- formalsystem 6y agoI'm a dual citizen - my family lost their savings in Lebanon because of banking capital controls. That story is not unique to our generation or history more generally.
- ben_w 6y ago> That story is not unique to our generation or history more generally. Indeed, though I don’t see how BTC could help — it’ll just be one more currency you’re not able to convert local money into, surely?
- formalsystem 6y agoFor transactions yes you need local money for long term savings would rather hold Bitcoin or Lebanese Lira?
- ben_w 6y ago
- _vertigo 6y agoHow much energy is moral to use in pursuit of “sound” money? Maybe Bitcoin hasn’t crossed the threshold yet. But I disagree that we should completely sidestep that conversation.
- Closi 6y agoPeople don’t vote with their time and energy, they often vote with their wallet regardless of the impact on energy and the environment which is the issue. See: Negative Externalities. The problem with Bitcoin is that energy waste is inherent in its design. As Bitcoin value goes up, the value of a Bitcoin relative to energy changes, which encourages more mining, which results in higher energy spend and emissions as the algorithm difficulty adjusts to the new hash rate. Generating 10,000,000 bitcoins could be done at low energy with a few miners - but the more valuable they become the more energy they use. My issue with Bitcoin is that while other industries try to save power, Bitcoin tries to waste it and waste is built into the algorithm. And the more popular Bitcoin gets, the more our planet gets polluted trying to make magic numbers on a ledger.
- formalsystem 6y agoWhat you call energy waste others would call effort. Money should be hard to produce otherwise you end up with central banks putting magic numbers on balance sheets You can use energy that would otherwise be wasted https://cointelegraph.com/news/oil-companies-will-dominate-btc-mining-in-five-years-marty-bent https://cointelegraph.com/news/oil-companies-will-dominate-b... or clean energy like Nuclear
- Closi 6y agoYou can’t choose the kind of energy Bitcoin gets made with. It’s produced worldwide and mining moves to wherever energy is cheapest, which ends in a race to the bottom. > What you call energy waste others would call effort This is my whole issue with it - effort doesn’t have to be tied to wasting energy, but it is in Bitcoin. Why would people call wasting energy ‘effort’ in a system where wasting energy wasn’t intrinsic to the system itself.
- sdjkglb 6y agoIt's not wasting energy, it's consuming previously wasted energy. In fact it puts a floor under energy prices so that it rather than wasting energy that you can't get to consumers you can instead use it to mine bitcoin. Nic Carter has a good piece on this: https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-consumption https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co...
- tomComb 6y agoYes, but this information is useful in evaluating alternatives and trade-offs.