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I remember how Hacker News laughed at Facebook during its IPO. Hacker News are also against Google, TikTok, Snap, Instagram all the time. Investing against the

I remember how Hacker News laughed at Facebook during its IPO. Hacker News are also against Google, TikTok, Snap, Instagram all the time. Investing against the popular opinions of Hacker News is an easy way to get rich.

paulgb 5y ago
I found the FB thread because I’m always curious how predictions on here pan out. I haven’t read every comment but I’d disagree with the perception that they were laughed at; the consensus seemed to be mildly positive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3540158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3540158
- netheril96 5y ago
  Facebook stock dropped a lot after IPO. That is when Hacker News laughed at it. People rejoiced that the evil company was abandoned by the market. Sorry I cannot find out the exact post.
Ygg2 5y ago
I hope Facebook does not guzzle same amount of energy as Bitcoin. We don't need another nation level energy guzzler for a spy/disinformation network.
- shagie 5y ago
  An article from a bit ago to put approximate scale of the services - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ethicallivingblog/2009/jan/12/carbon-emissions-google https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ethicallivingblog/20... > Climate researchers say two Google searches emit 7g of CO2 – the same as boiling an electric kettle. > ... > If Wissner-Gross is correct then 3,500 tonnes of CO2 (500m x 0.000007 tonnes) are emitted every day through all of us performing Google searches. Or put another way, 1.28m tonnes a year. That's about the same as Laos emits each year, the 151st biggest emitting country in the world. Compare: https://fortune.com/2021/11/06/offsetting-bitcoins-carbon-footprint-would-require-planting-300-million-new-trees/ https://fortune.com/2021/11/06/offsetting-bitcoins-carbon-fo... > All told, Bitcoin emits—by Forex Suggest’s estimate—some 57 million tons of CO2 annually, more than double Ethereum’s footprint. It’s noteworthy that for Bitcoin, all that energy generates a relatively low number of transactions. Because its distributed network is so slow, its users post only around 12,000 purchases, sales, and transfers on the blockchain each hour. That’s approximately 115 million transactions a year. By contrast, Ethereum handles over four times those volumes—devouring, once again, far less than half the juice. The result: Bitcoin deploys an incredible 707 kWh of electricity per transaction, 11 times as much as Ethereum, and emits 1,061 pounds, or half a ton, of CO2 every time you tap the app to buy a latte or zap a fraction to a buddy who beat you on a golf bet. Ethereum sends less than one-tenth of that carbon skyward for each purchase or transfer it processes. ---- So, roughly, bitcoin has a footprint that is ~45x larger than Google search. Facebook is probably lighter than that, though that's only a "its probably lighter than that" guess.
  - biztos 5y ago
    Whoa, so Ethereum is burning 64 kWh per transaction? I wonder if there is any mapping of “gas” to electricity. I guess it would have to be approximate but still, it’d be interesting to estimate how much electricity a particular smart contract consumed per execution.
    - zaphar 5y ago
      This is the entire point of most PoW mechanisms. It's a way of "proving" that an miner expended a certain amount of effort or energy to validate a transaction. It also requires that expenditure to be significant enough that gaming the system is expensive. As a result most of of them scale as the effort inevitably get's easier thus ensuring that the energy required to validate a transaction will only ever be capable of growing not shrinking. If it is allowed to shrink the consensus properties start to fail. Whether you think this is a worthy use of that energy will depend on how much benefit you think the consensus properties of your particular PoW implementation are providing.
      - biztos 5y ago
        I’m not questioning PoW per se, I was just surprised it worked out to that much per transaction.
  - G3rn0ti 5y ago
    While I am sympathetic with your argument, don’t forget you’re just comparing energy consumptions. We don’t know much about how its energy is being created. If 90% of Bitcoin’s energy use would be from renewables its CO2 footprint wouldn’t be 45x as large as that of Google. There was a study a couple of years ago suggesting Bitcoin’s global footprint is comparable to that of a medium sized city. But its assumptions are probably outdated. Edit: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435119302557 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
    - DangitBobby 5y ago
      That green energy would have been used by someone else if BTC didn't use it. Put another way, if there had been one energy customer, X, instead of BTC + X, and availability of green energy was X + BTC/2, then fuelling BTC required generation of non-renewable energy.

paulgb 5y ago

I found the FB thread because I’m always curious how predictions on here pan out. I haven’t read every comment but I’d disagree with the perception that they were laughed at; the consensus seemed to be mildly positive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3540158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3540158

netheril96 5y ago
Facebook stock dropped a lot after IPO. That is when Hacker News laughed at it. People rejoiced that the evil company was abandoned by the market. Sorry I cannot find out the exact post.

Ygg2 5y ago

I hope Facebook does not guzzle same amount of energy as Bitcoin. We don't need another nation level energy guzzler for a spy/disinformation network.

shagie 5y ago
An article from a bit ago to put approximate scale of the services - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ethicallivingblog/2009/jan/12/carbon-emissions-google https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ethicallivingblog/20... > Climate researchers say two Google searches emit 7g of CO2 – the same as boiling an electric kettle. > ... > If Wissner-Gross is correct then 3,500 tonnes of CO2 (500m x 0.000007 tonnes) are emitted every day through all of us performing Google searches. Or put another way, 1.28m tonnes a year. That's about the same as Laos emits each year, the 151st biggest emitting country in the world. Compare: https://fortune.com/2021/11/06/offsetting-bitcoins-carbon-footprint-would-require-planting-300-million-new-trees/ https://fortune.com/2021/11/06/offsetting-bitcoins-carbon-fo... > All told, Bitcoin emits—by Forex Suggest’s estimate—some 57 million tons of CO2 annually, more than double Ethereum’s footprint. It’s noteworthy that for Bitcoin, all that energy generates a relatively low number of transactions. Because its distributed network is so slow, its users post only around 12,000 purchases, sales, and transfers on the blockchain each hour. That’s approximately 115 million transactions a year. By contrast, Ethereum handles over four times those volumes—devouring, once again, far less than half the juice. The result: Bitcoin deploys an incredible 707 kWh of electricity per transaction, 11 times as much as Ethereum, and emits 1,061 pounds, or half a ton, of CO2 every time you tap the app to buy a latte or zap a fraction to a buddy who beat you on a golf bet. Ethereum sends less than one-tenth of that carbon skyward for each purchase or transfer it processes. ---- So, roughly, bitcoin has a footprint that is ~45x larger than Google search. Facebook is probably lighter than that, though that's only a "its probably lighter than that" guess.
- biztos 5y ago
  Whoa, so Ethereum is burning 64 kWh per transaction? I wonder if there is any mapping of “gas” to electricity. I guess it would have to be approximate but still, it’d be interesting to estimate how much electricity a particular smart contract consumed per execution.
  - zaphar 5y ago
    This is the entire point of most PoW mechanisms. It's a way of "proving" that an miner expended a certain amount of effort or energy to validate a transaction. It also requires that expenditure to be significant enough that gaming the system is expensive. As a result most of of them scale as the effort inevitably get's easier thus ensuring that the energy required to validate a transaction will only ever be capable of growing not shrinking. If it is allowed to shrink the consensus properties start to fail. Whether you think this is a worthy use of that energy will depend on how much benefit you think the consensus properties of your particular PoW implementation are providing.
    - biztos 5y ago
      I’m not questioning PoW per se, I was just surprised it worked out to that much per transaction.
- G3rn0ti 5y ago
  While I am sympathetic with your argument, don’t forget you’re just comparing energy consumptions. We don’t know much about how its energy is being created. If 90% of Bitcoin’s energy use would be from renewables its CO2 footprint wouldn’t be 45x as large as that of Google. There was a study a couple of years ago suggesting Bitcoin’s global footprint is comparable to that of a medium sized city. But its assumptions are probably outdated. Edit: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435119302557 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
  - DangitBobby 5y ago
    That green energy would have been used by someone else if BTC didn't use it. Put another way, if there had been one energy customer, X, instead of BTC + X, and availability of green energy was X + BTC/2, then fuelling BTC required generation of non-renewable energy.