4 ms·

Wow! Can someone help me describe the rhetorical device being used here? “Pyrrhic victory” comes to mind, which describes a win where the cost was so severe it

Wow! Can someone help me describe the rhetorical device being used here? “Pyrrhic victory” comes to mind, which describes a win where the cost was so severe it outweighs the benefits, like considering “heating old castles” to be an environmental win while the cost of such is running roughshod over the rest of the world’s environment, but that’s the name for a concept that describes this argument, not the rhetorical device.

dTal 5y ago
I think there's a few false dichotomies? Either warm castles with electricity Bitcoin OR warm them with gas; Bitcoin is better than gas (is it actually though? where's the electricity come from?), therefore Bitcoin is "good". No mention of not heating the leaky old castles at all.
- emteycz 5y ago
  How is that a false dichotomy when that's exactly the choice this particular place has faced? No alternatives were available due to cost and non-existent gas infrastructure. Not like we want to expand our gas usage anyways as here we buy it all from Russia, right?
  - dTal 5y ago
    Maybe they shouldn't be heating them at all! We don't owe it to old leaky castles to make it economically viable to heat them. Cheap gas is an ecological nightmare. That doesn't mean that other methods are not also ecological nightmares. How do you even know that the electricity they're burning to mine bitcoin didn't also come from Russian gas? There's no economic principle that says it can't. All Bitcoin does is make it profitable to waste energy - that doesn't mean wasting energy is good! How can paying people to use up electricity possibly be a net win?
    - emteycz 5y ago
      Sorry but here we like to preserve our 2000+ years old culture. This particular castle is 1200 years old. I can understand you're not excited about preserving some random few hundred years old buildings, but this is highly valuable cultural legacy and one of the few remains from that age. Czech electricity companies allow you to choose your energy mix (green/standard).
      - dTal 5y ago
        1) You don't need to heat a castle to preserve it. 2) If you really cared, as a society, you'd pay for the (more efficient!) heat pumps through taxes. Funding inefficient heating with Bitcoin just offloads the financial burden to new Bitcoin investors and is unsustainable in the long run anyway. TANSTAAFL.
        emteycz 5y ago
        1) You do. Castles are not just walls, there's stuff inside. 2) "if you really cared as a society" is not useful when there's simply not enough money in this society. We're not funding anything, this is a private project. The castle is buying some heat from them for a damn good price, that's it.
SantalBlush 5y ago
The argument is a broken window fallacy. It asserts that bitcoin energy use (the broken window) is good because it leads to increased spending on energy production and/or increased heat generation.
- emteycz 5y ago
  That's a wrong take of my opinion. It's better to use energy at times of overabundance for something economically useful (money to make the renewable project cheaper = affordable), than to just throw the energy away. If Bitcoin can make renewables more economical, we can stop burning fossil fuels faster. And if Bitcoin causes coal to be replaced with anything, that's a win for the environment too - even if it's a net increase of energy usage and heat, it's still a net decrease of greenhouse gas production which is much more important that reducing energy usage.

dTal 5y ago

I think there's a few false dichotomies? Either warm castles with electricity Bitcoin OR warm them with gas; Bitcoin is better than gas (is it actually though? where's the electricity come from?), therefore Bitcoin is "good". No mention of not heating the leaky old castles at all.

emteycz 5y ago
How is that a false dichotomy when that's exactly the choice this particular place has faced? No alternatives were available due to cost and non-existent gas infrastructure. Not like we want to expand our gas usage anyways as here we buy it all from Russia, right?
- dTal 5y ago
  Maybe they shouldn't be heating them at all! We don't owe it to old leaky castles to make it economically viable to heat them. Cheap gas is an ecological nightmare. That doesn't mean that other methods are not also ecological nightmares. How do you even know that the electricity they're burning to mine bitcoin didn't also come from Russian gas? There's no economic principle that says it can't. All Bitcoin does is make it profitable to waste energy - that doesn't mean wasting energy is good! How can paying people to use up electricity possibly be a net win?
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Sorry but here we like to preserve our 2000+ years old culture. This particular castle is 1200 years old. I can understand you're not excited about preserving some random few hundred years old buildings, but this is highly valuable cultural legacy and one of the few remains from that age. Czech electricity companies allow you to choose your energy mix (green/standard).
    - dTal 5y ago
      1) You don't need to heat a castle to preserve it. 2) If you really cared, as a society, you'd pay for the (more efficient!) heat pumps through taxes. Funding inefficient heating with Bitcoin just offloads the financial burden to new Bitcoin investors and is unsustainable in the long run anyway. TANSTAAFL.
      - emteycz 5y ago
        1) You do. Castles are not just walls, there's stuff inside. 2) "if you really cared as a society" is not useful when there's simply not enough money in this society. We're not funding anything, this is a private project. The castle is buying some heat from them for a damn good price, that's it.

SantalBlush 5y ago

The argument is a broken window fallacy. It asserts that bitcoin energy use (the broken window) is good because it leads to increased spending on energy production and/or increased heat generation.

emteycz 5y ago
That's a wrong take of my opinion. It's better to use energy at times of overabundance for something economically useful (money to make the renewable project cheaper = affordable), than to just throw the energy away. If Bitcoin can make renewables more economical, we can stop burning fossil fuels faster. And if Bitcoin causes coal to be replaced with anything, that's a win for the environment too - even if it's a net increase of energy usage and heat, it's still a net decrease of greenhouse gas production which is much more important that reducing energy usage.