4 ms·
I'm interested in what you find lame about the climate change arguments? They seem fairly appealing to me, cryptocurrency is a fraction of the size of current
by Jochim 6y ago
I'm interested in what you find lame about the climate change arguments?
They seem fairly appealing to me, cryptocurrency is a fraction of the size of current payment processors and is already consuming a small country's worth of power. How much more power will it consume if scaled further? How will power efficiency strategies affect the utility of the network?
I think there are some reasonable arguments for mining farms that draw from excess power during periods of low utilisation, but even that power seems like it could be put to more productive use.
- tippytippytango 6y agoThe energy is used to provide security for the value the network stores. The energy consumed by the actual transaction processing is incidental. If bitcoin used a traditional database to store value it would need physical security (people with guns and/or lawyers) to ensure its integrity. To decide if bitcoin is actually wasteful you'd have to compare it to the energy consumption of the physical security that would be required to protect an equivalent amount of value (getting close to $1T).
- dodobirdlord 6y agoThe Fed building isn't all that well protected, and "stores" essentially an arbitrarily large amount of USD. It helps that it's impossible to steal, since if you somehow "robbed" the Fed all it would take is a court order to retroactively clarify that your robbery never happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccles_Building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccles_Building I'm happy to call Bitcoin wasteful because we already know what's going to replace it. Proof of work is a dead end and with it all coins that are anchored on PoW and aren't working on migrating to proof of stake. The writing is on the wall that proof of stake is the future.