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Show me a list of what you do in a day and I’ll find questionable, selfish uses of cheap energy that don’t benefit society. That’s not a game you want to play.
by hombre_fatal 6y ago
Show me a list of what you do in a day and I’ll find questionable, selfish uses of cheap energy that don’t benefit society. That’s not a game you want to play.
People making noise about Bitcoin energy consumption seem to have little idea how much energy anything else uses kinda like how Americans only compare everything to Hitler because WW2 is all we’re really taught in school.
People suddenly act like they care about how others choose to spend their energy when it comes to Bitcoin but not anything else, like the incredible amount of land and energy it took to bring that pound of meat to your table that you only eat because it pleases your tastebuds. Or the tech gadgets you own.
Seems convenient to only turn on the ol careface when it’s something you don’t happen to indulge in, yet it makes you blind to the inconsistency of your position. There are a lot of necks on the chopping block long before you get to Bitcoin mining when you start bringing up the metrics that you think damn Bitcoin mining, probably your entire way of life.
- ZitchDog 6y agoWhataboutism at its finest. Current energy waste doesn’t justify future energy waste. Especially waste as avoidable as PoW mining.
- lifty 6y agoFolks, please stop with the ‘whataboutism’ argument. We are debating the morality of energy usage so comparative arguments are perfectly fine. You don’t hear every day articles about the huge nr of gaming PCs or gaming consoles sucking energy, but you do hear about bitcoin. I have absolutely no problem with taxing dirty energy or disincentivizing high energy consumption but do it for everything. It’s hypocritical otherwise.
- Qwertious 6y agoGaming PCs actually improve peoples' lives in a non-zero-sum fashion. I have yet to hear an argument for how bitcoin does the same. >I have absolutely no problem with taxing dirty energy or disincentivizing high energy consumption but do it for everything. It’s hypocritical otherwise. Nobody sane is arguing for conditional carbon pricing (although obviously some will say that carbon pricing should be accompanied by e.g. an explicit transport subsidy for poor people), the "argument" is that while we absolutely should do it, nobody is able to get it passed into law - so while it's the best solution, we can't wait for it and we need to focus on other solutions in the mean time.
- zacharycohn 6y agoA gaming PC doesn't quadruple energy usage of an entire region
- fulafel 6y agoFixing bad things in somewhat inconsistent order is absolutely a thing we want to, and need to, do. Otherwise we'll be gridlocked by trying to be foolishly self consistent, and we won't be able to rein back developments that make things worse in new ways.