5 ms·
If you accept PoW cryptocurrency you are complicit in the environmental impact of it. End of story.
by mdoms 5y ago
If you accept PoW cryptocurrency you are complicit in the environmental impact of it. End of story.
- rasengan 5y ago
- mdoms 5y agoI don't follow?
- rasengan 5y agoYou’re complicit in global warming. Shame on you.
- dang 5y agoPosting like this will get you banned here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
- tapoxi 5y agoI don’t understand the comparison you’re trying to make. There’s no viable alternative to a computer that uses substantially less power. The alternative is there for crypto, and it’s called fiat currency.
- randomhodler84 5y ago
- rasengan 5y agoHow is fiat an alternative to cryptocurrency? Fiat is printed without transparency [1] whereas cryptocurrency is not for example. How are these the same? [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1 has been discontinued.
- Jasper_ 5y agoIt was replaced with https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL . The only change is that the M1SL metric now includes savings deposits, whereas the old M1 metric did not. This was a change that was in the works for months.
- charcircuit 5y agoThe amount of power that is used in PoW is not correlated to the transaction volume. Sending more transactions does not use more energy. The amount of power used is linked to the ratio of power needed to mine a block vs the mining reward.
- tapoxi 5y agoBut you are supporting and endorsing a network that causes a massive waste of energy in the midst of a climate crisis.
- sokoloff 5y agoIf I take gold bars, emeralds, or diamonds, I’m supporting mining. If I take USD, I’m supporting the US military complex. If someone wants to give me money and happens to have it in BTC, either they’re going to convert it or I am. I might as well make it easy for them. (I’m generally anti-BTC, but if I were taking donations, I’ll find a way to take what you want to give me.)
- tick_tock_tick 5y agoOne of those you're legally obligated to use. All the others are 100% optional and frankly a lot of people do intentional avoid them for ideological reasons such a the whole "blood diamond" issue. Ethically sourcing mined resources has been a very big deal for Apple and Intel recently too.
- Zababa 5y agoWho is forcing you to be in the USA?
- sascha_sl 5y agoThis is so funny to me. People always forget that immigration elsewhere also isn't trivial. Otherwise we wouldn't have the problem of statelessness. Every time someone says "if you don't like it here, go somewhere else / home" with an anti-immigration stance (even if they're talking to people born / naturalized in that country) they're asking them to be an immigrant elsewhere.
- renewiltord 5y ago
- randomhodler84 5y agoVast simplification that isn’t even correct. It’s far more complex than that. Your ignoring many examples of clean energy incentivizing from proof of work mining. But you could just ignore reality cos this story sounds easier to understand.
- saagarjha 5y agoUsing energy for the sake of using energy is pretty dumb. You can try to sugarcoat it all you want, but that’s just how it is.
- knicholes 5y agoPoW isn't using energy just to use energy. It's using energy to validate a block of transactions in a distributed, untrusted network.
- duskwuff 5y agoNo, it isn't. "Validating" a transaction takes very little energy -- in most cases, it's a simple ECDSA signature check. What's being "validated" by PoW mining is that someone has done a bunch of expensive, energy-intensive work on a block of transactions to satisfy an arbitrary condition (that a hash of the block be less than a target value). Explaining how this actually "secures the transactions" involves a great deal more hand-waving.
- randomhodler84 5y agoNo hand waving. One needs to outspend the energy (hash rate of the network) to undo transactions, censor or reorder transactions. The (probabilistic) finality of the transactions is contingent on the energy spent. It’s not a complex idea.
- lottin 5y agoBitcoin's hashrate has dropped by 50% a number of times and no transactions have been undone, censored or reordered. This is pretty solid evidence that at least a large percentage (if not all) of the energy spent by bitcoin is wasted.