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Do serious bitcoin supports really believe this nonsense?

• keymone 5y ago
  yeah, nothing but ad hominems, people with your level of ignorance don't have much else.
  • danaw 5y ago
    I can't tell if you're just trolling or you're trying to make a point that Bitcoin actually uses no energy which, unless you do some crazy mental gymnastics, is quite a bizarre perspective to hold. And please explain how my question is ignorant but the stance you're taking isn't?
    • keymone 5y ago
      Well, your question assumes that bitcoin is using energy and anybody thinking differently must be ridiculed. Bitcoin isn’t using any energy, bitcoin is a marketplace where security of financial asset is represented in terms of energy expenditure.
      • afiori 5y ago
        airplanes use no energy, they offer a marketplace where token of fuel consumption are exchanged for weak guarantees of transportation
        • keymone 5y ago
          if you want to see it that way, sure, but i'd say it's stretching. airplanes convert energy into miles travelled. bitcoin converts energy into security of an asset. if nobody needs to travel or nobody needs the security - no energy is spent.
          • afiori 5y ago
            Personally I have a problem with how much energy is needed in the conversion in both cases, but my point is that both formulations are sophistically working around the fact that bitcoin and air travel both consume a lot of energy.
            • keymone 5y ago
              But that’s where the analogy breaks, because with airplanes it’s indeed a backward way of describing it, but with bitcoin it’s what actually happens. Airplanes are means of travel, they can be more or less energy efficient. Bitcoin is a mean of achieving security via energy expenditure and energy efficiency doesn’t apply here. If you made a Bitcoin miner that is two times more efficient - it wouldn’t lead to reduction in energy use, it would lead to increase in difficulty requirement in bitcoin because the attacker can use that energy efficient miner too. You may not like how much energy is spent on maintaining security, but it’s not bitcoin that necessitates it, it’s the market. Bitcoin opened a Pandora’s box by showing the world how it can be done and now if people say they want an attacker to take 1gigawatt to overtake the network then that’s what will be spent to protect against such attack. With or without bitcoin.
              • afiori 5y ago
                Personally I do not see how it is meaningful to draw a distinction between bitcoin and its market. If you prefer I can reformulate my poin to "the bitcoin current _ecosystem_ consume is overly inefficient" but beyond that I find problematic that > If you made a Bitcoin miner that is two times more efficient - it wouldn’t lead to reduction in energy use, it would lead to increase in difficulty requirement this is not considered problematic for something meant to replace current army-based currency. It points toward a direction where the economy becomes a zero-sum game.
                • keymone 5y ago
                  Maybe I can reformulate my position then, so that it’s clearer: people have demand for certain kind of security of their financial assets - security that guarantees any attacker would have to spend some amount of energy to perform a successful attack. Whether bitcoin exists or not - that demand will be fulfilled and that amount of energy will be spent.