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I cringe every time I see such comments. Ban bitcoin or ban beef because it uses too much energy. Humanity will continue to require energy as it advances and b
by Aqua 5y ago
I cringe every time I see such comments. Ban bitcoin or ban beef because it uses too much energy.
Humanity will continue to require energy as it advances and banning anything "because it uses too much energy" is a ridiculous advice. How about we ban gold mining, or set quotas on the number of children people may have, that will surely contribute to our CO2 reduction goals. It's also Orwellian and reminiscent of how the world looked like for citizens of the USSR back in 1960-1990
- dd36 5y agoCommunities tend to ban harmful things.
- rantwasp 5y ago“communities”. it’s all fun and games until I ban something you rely on for your livelihood
- dd36 5y agoI’m sure businesses that rely on dumping arsenic into the local lake don’t like having their livelihood threatened either. Property rights matter. Right now the market is broken.
- rantwasp 5y agoconsuming energy (and paying for it) is not even the same species with dumping toxic chemicals
- dd36 5y agoBurning coal literally dumps arsenic into the environment. And to do so for speculative fun is ridiculous.
- rantwasp 5y agoi have some bad news for you when it comes to how lot of electricity is generated. Also, how do you decide which computing is good and which computing is bad?
- dd36 5y agoYou do, do you? I suppose it is of the variety where miners magically only use clean energy? Kill the value of POW as a store of money and see how much of that computing still happens. Then you’ll know how useful it is.
- rantwasp 5y agonah. the bad news is that a lot of energy is generated with coal. so you get the arsenic and other crap with our without bitcoin. now, the question is: who decides what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable for energy use?
- dd36 5y agoThe government defines efficiency standards. I’d bet money some are coming for crypto soon.
- 0xB31B1B 5y agoWe have banned a ton of things because they are bad for the environment. It has worked and will continue to work. Things like building design and construction standards are set to a minimum environmental standard, why shouldn't cryptocurrencies.
- chrischattin 5y agoYoutube alone uses 2x’s the amount of energy of the Bitcoin network. Ban Youtube?
- leesalminen 5y agoI mean, all YouTube does is generate money for the ad-tech industry. I think it should be banned before PoW cryptos.
- scrollaway 5y agoNo that isn't all YouTube does thank you very much. It's one of the greatest treasure troves of educational video content. It has helped my life, career, and those of my friends. It has probably contributed far more to humanity's advance, in efficiency alone, than most other websites of its kind. That you only use it to watch videos that bring zero gain to your life is a You problem.
- simonw 5y agoNo it doesn't.
- chrischattin 5y agoYeah, it does. I posted sources in a reply to another comment. Or, you can look it up yourself.
- simonw 5y agoYou quoted https://thefactsource.com/how-much-electricity-does-youtube-use/ https://thefactsource.com/how-much-electricity-does-youtube-... which says: "the internet uses 10% of the total electricity consumption worldwide. How much of that is consumed by Youtube? After Netflix and embedded videos, Youtube is the third biggest global internet bandwidth eater. About 11.4% of global internet traffic is consumed by Youtube" That figure assumes that the electricity usage of the internet is exactly related to the amount of bandwidth - so if YouTube uses 11.4% of the internet's total bandwidth, that means that YouTube uses 11.4% of the internet's total electricity consumption. That is a highly dubious assumption.
- noja 5y agoWow. Where to start on this one! Where do you see the problem in using less energy for a crypto currency? Why not make a cryptocurrency that uses even more energy?
- pamplemoose 5y agothose currencies already exist. people can choose to use them, while understanding the trade-offs.
- artifact_44 5y agoBecause electricity costs money. When the cost of electricity exceeds the value of coin you mine, you will stop mining. If you make a coin that takes half as much energy to mine, miners will just mine twice as much of it. Its like y'all are just discovering capitalism for the first time.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago>How about we ban gold mining Why not? >or set quotas on the number of children people may have Some people consume 10x less energy than others, so blindly capping the number of children does not seem a good idea. What about capping the carbon footprint per person instead? We track and tax revenues (not perfectly but as well as we can). We could definitely track and cap carbon emissions. Sounds good to me!
- rantwasp 5y agoyes. also let’s start capping the amount of oxygen people are allowed to breathe. I mean, without oxygen you cannot produce co2, amiright? /s
- Nursie 5y ago> Humanity will continue to require energy as it advances and banning anything "because it uses too much energy" is a ridiculous advice. Not right now it's not. Not when we have constraints on how much CO2 we can pump into our atmosphere. Right now, and I mean right now, when we're having huge problems de-carbonising the planet's energy supplies and are risking making life very uncomfortable for ourselves for decades or centuries to come, limiting energy use is actually one of the few levers we have to try to make a difference. In this current situation, bringing online a whole new mid-sized country's worth of energy consumption for a financial instrument is ridiculous, and a huge own-goal for humanity.