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Coinbase Fact Check: Decentralizing truth in the age of misinformation

8 points by elsewhen 5y ago

arkitaip 5y ago
This is standard PR work as every company tries to reshape reality to fit their business needs. The only difference is that good PR people know better than to use weird terms like 'decentralizing truth' and 'misinformation'. You can tell that Brian Armstrong wrote this.
wyiske 5y ago
This feels like an assault on truth. I skipped to the blog on “Is Bitcoin mining environmentally unfriendly” and found numerous cases of cognitive biases. Calling it fact checking is disingenuous. More like “alternative” facts. E.g, consider “Energy consumption comes primarily from mining blocks on the blockchain, not from transactions”. Bitcoin mining incentivises miners to create transaction blocks. The main purpose is to cement the transactions not mint coins. This is plain to see if you consider that the mining process is still necessary once all coins are minted. Therefore transaction energy cost is substantial. If someone had an unlimited cheap source of green energy, it would actually make Bitcoin less secure as it goes against proof of work - proof of work literally requires an “expensive” operation, exchanging work (energy) for security. This actually makes Bitcoin incompatible with green energy. I’ll let someone else more eloquently refute all the points in the article.
- jkepler 5y ago
  > If someone had an unlimited cheap source of green energy, it would actually make Bitcoin less secure as it goes against proof of work - proof of work literally requires an “expensive” operation, exchanging work (energy) for security. This actually makes Bitcoin incompatible with green energy.. Huh? The bitcoin protocol Proof-of-Work (PoW) doesn't take energy cost into account at all. PoW simply looks to see which chain is the longest, and it takes that to be true. Miners get to add their block by doing enough computations to find the correct nonce, depending on the network's current difficulty target. But Bitcoin, strictly speaking, could care less what a miner pays for energy. Having said that, miners have huge incentives to minimize their energy costs, as paying too much puts them our of business. And that incentivises them to find the cheapest energy sources, which are more often than not renewables. Green energy doesn't affect bitcoin's security, but it can help miners' bottom line.
  - wyiske 5y ago
    PoW guarantees the energy has been spent to find the nonce. If one person had access to a perpetual motor, they could control the market. We assume everyone else would then have to find cheaper sources of energy to compete. If we take this to the extreme and energy were free for everyone then it would essentially become a lottery and the cost of additional mining equipment then becomes the limiting factor. This energy-cost dilemma is required to required to balance the market. It’s also a highly speculative arms race incentivising mass misinformation campaigns to increase the value for existing Bitcoin owners.
mgh2 5y ago
I read some of their illicit activity counterpoints, most sources come from crypto industry supporters. This is fine, but bias and conflicts of interest usually tends to skew to the other side - profit is a perverse motivator when it comes to finding truth (as seen with academic research) We need a more balanced view. More discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27313895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27313895 Nonpaywall: https://archive.is/4U02A https://archive.is/4U02A
andrewfromx 5y ago
"Distribution of our content will happen through podcasts, YouTube, our blog, Twitter, and every other channel we own. But in the future, it will also likely move to more crypto native platforms, like Bitclout, or crypto oracles." He mentions Bitclout by name! huge!

8 points by elsewhen 5y ago

This is standard PR work as every company tries to reshape reality to fit their business needs. The only difference is that good PR people know better than to use weird terms like 'decentralizing truth' and 'misinformation'. You can tell that Brian Armstrong wrote this.

wyiske 5y ago

This feels like an assault on truth. I skipped to the blog on “Is Bitcoin mining environmentally unfriendly” and found numerous cases of cognitive biases. Calling it fact checking is disingenuous. More like “alternative” facts. E.g, consider “Energy consumption comes primarily from mining blocks on the blockchain, not from transactions”. Bitcoin mining incentivises miners to create transaction blocks. The main purpose is to cement the transactions not mint coins. This is plain to see if you consider that the mining process is still necessary once all coins are minted. Therefore transaction energy cost is substantial. If someone had an unlimited cheap source of green energy, it would actually make Bitcoin less secure as it goes against proof of work - proof of work literally requires an “expensive” operation, exchanging work (energy) for security. This actually makes Bitcoin incompatible with green energy. I’ll let someone else more eloquently refute all the points in the article.

jkepler 5y ago
> If someone had an unlimited cheap source of green energy, it would actually make Bitcoin less secure as it goes against proof of work - proof of work literally requires an “expensive” operation, exchanging work (energy) for security. This actually makes Bitcoin incompatible with green energy.. Huh? The bitcoin protocol Proof-of-Work (PoW) doesn't take energy cost into account at all. PoW simply looks to see which chain is the longest, and it takes that to be true. Miners get to add their block by doing enough computations to find the correct nonce, depending on the network's current difficulty target. But Bitcoin, strictly speaking, could care less what a miner pays for energy. Having said that, miners have huge incentives to minimize their energy costs, as paying too much puts them our of business. And that incentivises them to find the cheapest energy sources, which are more often than not renewables. Green energy doesn't affect bitcoin's security, but it can help miners' bottom line.
- wyiske 5y ago
  PoW guarantees the energy has been spent to find the nonce. If one person had access to a perpetual motor, they could control the market. We assume everyone else would then have to find cheaper sources of energy to compete. If we take this to the extreme and energy were free for everyone then it would essentially become a lottery and the cost of additional mining equipment then becomes the limiting factor. This energy-cost dilemma is required to required to balance the market. It’s also a highly speculative arms race incentivising mass misinformation campaigns to increase the value for existing Bitcoin owners.

mgh2 5y ago

I read some of their illicit activity counterpoints, most sources come from crypto industry supporters. This is fine, but bias and conflicts of interest usually tends to skew to the other side - profit is a perverse motivator when it comes to finding truth (as seen with academic research) We need a more balanced view. More discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27313895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27313895 Nonpaywall: https://archive.is/4U02A https://archive.is/4U02A

andrewfromx 5y ago

"Distribution of our content will happen through podcasts, YouTube, our blog, Twitter, and every other channel we own. But in the future, it will also likely move to more crypto native platforms, like Bitclout, or crypto oracles." He mentions Bitclout by name! huge!