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> We supposedly draw the line on how others spend their energy when it comes to bitcoin and nowhere else. Nowhere else has an incentive to use as much power as
by cesarb 6y ago
> We supposedly draw the line on how others spend their energy when it comes to bitcoin and nowhere else.
Nowhere else has an incentive to use as much power as possible. With your example of animal agriculture, the incentives align towards a lower energy expenditure (if a farmer spends more on energy, either the profit is lower, or the extra cost is passed to the customer, who then has an incentive to consume less). With Bitcoin, the incentive aligns towards a higher energy expenditure (for a given Bitcoin price and amount of transaction fees, a miner which uses more energy gets a higher portion of the block rewards and transaction fees, so the collective energy usage of all miners converges towards using all of the block rewards and transaction fees to pay for energy).
- thecrash 6y agoPower is the input for a machine that performs calculations which can be used to get money. On a factory farm, power is the input for a machine that raises animals, which can be exchanged to money. If your animal-raising machine is profitable, you absolutely want to put as much power into it as possible - raising more animals means more profit. Both machines can be optimized, but that just allows more production for the same energy use. There's no incentive to reduce energy consumption unless some other factor bounds the machine's capacity (for example lack of materials, hardware, labor) Capitalism in general is a machine for consuming natural resources and converting them to profit as quickly as possible.