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>>Gaming rigs use upwards of a thousand watts, no practical value in gaming. Humans have been playing games literally for thousands of years - there is a value

>>Gaming rigs use upwards of a thousand watts, no practical value in gaming. Humans have been playing games literally for thousands of years - there is a value in entertainment, especially with our busy lives of 21st century. You can of course overdo it, turn it into an addiction and it can destroy your life - like many other things. Crypto trading is as valuable as trading scraps of paper with a dollar sign scribbled on it - if it were done for fun or entertainment, then sure, whatever, but it's having major impact on our energy consumption and has to be curbed. PS - also, a small side note - literally no gaming rig uses an "upwards of a thousands watts". Even fitted with the highest rated components currently available on the market(say a 12th gen i9 + RTX3090) you won't be using 1000W of power. Consoles use about 200-300W under full load, and that's a bigger gaming market than PC. And then the biggest gaming market is mobile - larger than PC and consoles combined, and the energy consumption there is tiny. So you're massively off base here. >>Honestly I think providing an alternative financial system is more practical than most of the other energy intensive things we do these days. And I honestly think that anyone who thinks crypto will become "an alternative financial system" and not just a pyramid scheme is lying to themselves.

snarfy 5y ago
It's true - crypto is bullshit. I've had a hard time shaking the realization that money is bullshit too.
- gambiting 5y ago
  I think there's a fundamental issue here that prevents us from reaching an understanding. ANYTHING can be used as money. The systems that we currently have in place have lots of big problems, but "we" decided to use them and that's why they are popular. We could also decide to use a cryptocurrency as money, and it would be equally valid, and it would become our "money" - that bit is fine and I'm not arguing with it. What I am commenting on, and what I am calling bullshit, is the cold hard reality of crypto - there hasn't been a coin invented yet that is anything but a ponzi scheme. Everything from bitcoin to ETH to dogecoin is just a scam to make some people rich, even if it started with good intentions(and I believe Bitcoin really was started with the intention to become a currency). The second this changes, and we have a cryptocurrency that is actually used as money and not a plaything, I'll happily stop complaining about it.
  - loup-vaillant 5y ago
    > The second this changes, and we have a cryptocurrency that is actually used as money and not a plaything, I'll happily stop complaining about it. I won't: we still have proof-of-work to get rid of (and generally, the unreasonable energy consumption and chip usage).
    - lui8906 5y ago
      Is there any other unreasonable use of energy consumption than proof of work? Solana (using proof of stake) uses similar energy as hosting a website. If this tiny energy usage is also problematic then we would need to start also shaming people for uploading Youtube videos or scrolling through Instagram.
      - loup-vaillant 5y ago
        If this low energy consumption confirms itself at scale, that will be a huge progress. Possibly not quite there (there’s still the Ponzi problem to contend with), but at least that’d get rid of most of the externalities. Now we need to nuke the Bitcoin farms. (Half serious: I wonder whether launching tactical nukes on those farms would generate less pollution in the long term than letting those farms be.)
  - lui8906 5y ago
    I hold a decent chunk of change in stable coins most of which I lend out to earn interest. Sometimes I top up a VISA card with those stables and then buy groceries. You might reply "you're just using a proxy of USD the original currency, its not new". That's true my reply to that would be: Having the USD be on chain allows very efficient lending. For eg. I can use a lending aggregator that is constantly polling many lending sources and moves my money to the best source of yield regularly. How would you do this with traditional banking? I expect over time for the volatility to smooth out as more of the expectations are realised and we figure out a widely agreed fair price for most cryptos (for many this will be zero).
    - 5y ago
michaelscott 5y ago
Humans have also been gambling for thousands of years (which is just playing games with the added component of money on the line), so by this logic there's value in it too. I would also be interested to see the worldwide energy consumption of all gaming devices in comparison to the worldwide energy consumption of all crypto mining, especially now that many have moved to proof of stake. Considering the explosion in the gaming industry in recent years you may find that it outpaces crypto already, or is catching up very fast.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  > especially now that many have moved to proof of stake. For tiny values of many. There is no major cryptocurrency using anything other than PoW. Ethereum has plans to start moving to PoS in 2022, but isn't there yet. And related to gaming: Bitcoin alone consumes more power than entire European countries - including all the gaming, smelting, heating, industry, finance, data centers etc in those countries. There is no chance in hell gaming alone, for the entire world, is consuming more power than even Bitcoin - not to mention comparing it to all crypto combined.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    > Bitcoin alone consumes more power than entire European countries - including all the gaming, smelting, heating, industry, finance, data centers etc in those countries. EU nations may be a poor comparison, as it has many tiny nations as members as well as a few big ones. The first Google hit I got said Bitcoin uses 80 TWh/year which puts it around Belgium (9th in EU) for pure electricity, the second said Bitcoin was using about 177 TWh/year (bit more than Poland, 5th in EU, again just for electricity). I don’t have exact figures for game consoles or power usage per console or gaming PCs, so I will do a Fermi estimate: 1 billion active gaming devices (PCs and all consoles combined), 200 W per device, each used for 3 hours per day. This is 219 TWh/year. As a Fermi estimate, take with a grain of salt. (I don’t accept the general claim that BTC actually has real value; conversely I think most gaming does, including gambling although for gambling the value is much less than the cost, but that’s not the focus of this comment).
wrinkl3 5y ago
> Humans have been playing games literally for thousands of years - there is a value in entertainment, especially with our busy lives of 21st century. Who gets to decide that? You see value in entertainment derived from a gaming rig, a person in Argentina sees value in mining a unit of make-believe currency which they can then sell on a speculative market. Should we form a global committee to decide on which types of computation have value, and should therefore be allowed to execute?
- ben_w 5y ago
  Having a committee decide what’s allowed is generally how law is made, and the need for such committees is that what’s good for any individual is often different for what’s good for groups of people even though the latter contains the former (tragedy of the commons, prisoner’s dilemma) so: yes.

snarfy 5y ago

It's true - crypto is bullshit. I've had a hard time shaking the realization that money is bullshit too.

gambiting 5y ago
I think there's a fundamental issue here that prevents us from reaching an understanding. ANYTHING can be used as money. The systems that we currently have in place have lots of big problems, but "we" decided to use them and that's why they are popular. We could also decide to use a cryptocurrency as money, and it would be equally valid, and it would become our "money" - that bit is fine and I'm not arguing with it. What I am commenting on, and what I am calling bullshit, is the cold hard reality of crypto - there hasn't been a coin invented yet that is anything but a ponzi scheme. Everything from bitcoin to ETH to dogecoin is just a scam to make some people rich, even if it started with good intentions(and I believe Bitcoin really was started with the intention to become a currency). The second this changes, and we have a cryptocurrency that is actually used as money and not a plaything, I'll happily stop complaining about it.
- loup-vaillant 5y ago
  > The second this changes, and we have a cryptocurrency that is actually used as money and not a plaything, I'll happily stop complaining about it. I won't: we still have proof-of-work to get rid of (and generally, the unreasonable energy consumption and chip usage).
  - lui8906 5y ago
    Is there any other unreasonable use of energy consumption than proof of work? Solana (using proof of stake) uses similar energy as hosting a website. If this tiny energy usage is also problematic then we would need to start also shaming people for uploading Youtube videos or scrolling through Instagram.
    - loup-vaillant 5y ago
      If this low energy consumption confirms itself at scale, that will be a huge progress. Possibly not quite there (there’s still the Ponzi problem to contend with), but at least that’d get rid of most of the externalities. Now we need to nuke the Bitcoin farms. (Half serious: I wonder whether launching tactical nukes on those farms would generate less pollution in the long term than letting those farms be.)
- lui8906 5y ago
  I hold a decent chunk of change in stable coins most of which I lend out to earn interest. Sometimes I top up a VISA card with those stables and then buy groceries. You might reply "you're just using a proxy of USD the original currency, its not new". That's true my reply to that would be: Having the USD be on chain allows very efficient lending. For eg. I can use a lending aggregator that is constantly polling many lending sources and moves my money to the best source of yield regularly. How would you do this with traditional banking? I expect over time for the volatility to smooth out as more of the expectations are realised and we figure out a widely agreed fair price for most cryptos (for many this will be zero).
  - 5y ago

michaelscott 5y ago

Humans have also been gambling for thousands of years (which is just playing games with the added component of money on the line), so by this logic there's value in it too. I would also be interested to see the worldwide energy consumption of all gaming devices in comparison to the worldwide energy consumption of all crypto mining, especially now that many have moved to proof of stake. Considering the explosion in the gaming industry in recent years you may find that it outpaces crypto already, or is catching up very fast.

tsimionescu 5y ago
> especially now that many have moved to proof of stake. For tiny values of many. There is no major cryptocurrency using anything other than PoW. Ethereum has plans to start moving to PoS in 2022, but isn't there yet. And related to gaming: Bitcoin alone consumes more power than entire European countries - including all the gaming, smelting, heating, industry, finance, data centers etc in those countries. There is no chance in hell gaming alone, for the entire world, is consuming more power than even Bitcoin - not to mention comparing it to all crypto combined.
- ben_w 5y ago
  > Bitcoin alone consumes more power than entire European countries - including all the gaming, smelting, heating, industry, finance, data centers etc in those countries. EU nations may be a poor comparison, as it has many tiny nations as members as well as a few big ones. The first Google hit I got said Bitcoin uses 80 TWh/year which puts it around Belgium (9th in EU) for pure electricity, the second said Bitcoin was using about 177 TWh/year (bit more than Poland, 5th in EU, again just for electricity). I don’t have exact figures for game consoles or power usage per console or gaming PCs, so I will do a Fermi estimate: 1 billion active gaming devices (PCs and all consoles combined), 200 W per device, each used for 3 hours per day. This is 219 TWh/year. As a Fermi estimate, take with a grain of salt. (I don’t accept the general claim that BTC actually has real value; conversely I think most gaming does, including gambling although for gambling the value is much less than the cost, but that’s not the focus of this comment).

wrinkl3 5y ago

> Humans have been playing games literally for thousands of years - there is a value in entertainment, especially with our busy lives of 21st century. Who gets to decide that? You see value in entertainment derived from a gaming rig, a person in Argentina sees value in mining a unit of make-believe currency which they can then sell on a speculative market. Should we form a global committee to decide on which types of computation have value, and should therefore be allowed to execute?

ben_w 5y ago
Having a committee decide what’s allowed is generally how law is made, and the need for such committees is that what’s good for any individual is often different for what’s good for groups of people even though the latter contains the former (tragedy of the commons, prisoner’s dilemma) so: yes.