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It’s the largest preventer of death lol. Citation needed there. People will always die. Government minimizes this to the best of our abilities. How many do not

It’s the largest preventer of death lol. Citation needed there. People will always die. Government minimizes this to the best of our abilities. How many do not die each year because of government? As in software testing we don’t often measure the impact of our work in terms of things that don’t happen because our system exists. It is far easier to count instead the failures. But this misses the whole point. Count the deaths that don’t happen. Meanwhile bitcoins thirst for coal kills thousands per year and achieves literally nothing. Blockchains can only represent true state of things wholly representable on chain, which is why only currencies actually work. As soon as you try and ledger things off chain reality gets in the way and reality supersedes the chain.

etherael 5y ago
Citation originally provided. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide > How many do not die each year because of government? I'd honestly like to see any kind of attempt to quantify that, I've seen a few for example that gave credit for removing lead from fuel to the government and then tried to by extension say that the positive externalities from that should be attributed to government. Which of course runs afoul of the point that the government was responsible for promoting leaded fuel to begin with, right up to the point of suppressing alternatives. Which in turn begs the question, what will the government actually do generally speaking? And as far as I can tell the answer is work in its own interests and accrue benefits to those on the inside at the expense of those on the outside, and that's all. If hundreds of millions die in the process, that's totally fine. That almost everybody accepts that entity should have a monopoly on violence and basically unlimited power strikes me as increasingly crazy as every year goes by and it does progressively more insane stuff and we slide closer and closer to the possibility of an extinction level event war. > Meanwhile bitcoins thirst for coal kills thousands per year and achieves literally nothing. I'm not interested in defending BTC generally speaking, as I despise it. I should however point out that proof of work has no intrinsic "thirst for coal". Merely the lowest possible cost of energy, right up to the point of subsidising alternative renewable low cost energy projects, which many POW miners have done and why hydroelectric power is such an oft-constituted part of their energy supplies.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  My point in the first half is that you can’t look solely at the costs without looking at the benefits - unless you evaluate both you can’t make a meaningful judgement on the efficacy of a system. Yes for sure the government is the largest source of death — but only because the government stamped out all other sources of death. Removing the government would shift that death to elsewhere and not remove it. And if history is anything to go by, dramatically amplify it. That’s why government needs to be iterated on not removed. Re: renewables in bitcoin, it’s all greenwashing. Every kWh wasted guessing nonces on renewables isn’t spent decarbonizing the grid where we do actual productive things. While generating inordinate quantities of e-waste. I mentioned in another reply 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out, burned, crushed or buried all without ever mining a block successfully in its entire useful life. I know there are other consensus mechanisms but they just rely on feudalistic control of the supply and just create systemic inequality without accountability. There’s no good that comes of this. In basically every case decentralization and permissionlessness is not what anyone actually wants or needs.
  - etherael 5y ago
    > My point in the first half is that you can’t look solely at the costs without looking at the benefits There is no benefit from a political authority wielding entity which has not been provided by an entity that does not wield political authority. Therefore the political authority is not necessary for those benefits. > Removing the government would shift that death to elsewhere and not remove it. Removing the hundreds of millions of people who were killed in the name of national security and the maintenance of political authority would not magically make them die for some other reason instead. > That’s why government needs to be iterated on not removed. Whether you call providing the benefits of typical governments without their horrendous costs an iteration or a removal is semantics. My concern is that it gets done. > Every kWh wasted guessing nonces on renewables isn’t spent decarbonizing the grid where we do actual productive things. This would assume that those energy forms restricted to specific geographic locations are not so restricted. This is not true. > I mentioned in another reply 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out, burned, crushed or buried all without ever mining a block successfully in its entire useful life. Most e-waste won't mine a block successfully in its entire life. If it could contribute to the peaceful destruction of the state, hard to imagine a better use it could've been put to, given the statistics. > I know there are other consensus mechanisms but they just rely on feudalistic control of the supply and just create systemic inequality without accountability. You mean like being born economically so deep underwater it's impossible to ever even break even because of the economic mismanagement of your political authority wielding organisational unit? At least ledgers using those consensus mechanisms only levy debt on people who choose to participate. > There’s no good that comes of this. In basically every case decentralization and permissionlessness is not what anyone actually wants or needs. It's clearly what a whole lot of people want, as to whether they need it or not, time will tell. For all the aforementioned reasons, I think the case couldn't be clearer that they do, however.

etherael 5y ago

Citation originally provided. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide > How many do not die each year because of government? I'd honestly like to see any kind of attempt to quantify that, I've seen a few for example that gave credit for removing lead from fuel to the government and then tried to by extension say that the positive externalities from that should be attributed to government. Which of course runs afoul of the point that the government was responsible for promoting leaded fuel to begin with, right up to the point of suppressing alternatives. Which in turn begs the question, what will the government actually do generally speaking? And as far as I can tell the answer is work in its own interests and accrue benefits to those on the inside at the expense of those on the outside, and that's all. If hundreds of millions die in the process, that's totally fine. That almost everybody accepts that entity should have a monopoly on violence and basically unlimited power strikes me as increasingly crazy as every year goes by and it does progressively more insane stuff and we slide closer and closer to the possibility of an extinction level event war. > Meanwhile bitcoins thirst for coal kills thousands per year and achieves literally nothing. I'm not interested in defending BTC generally speaking, as I despise it. I should however point out that proof of work has no intrinsic "thirst for coal". Merely the lowest possible cost of energy, right up to the point of subsidising alternative renewable low cost energy projects, which many POW miners have done and why hydroelectric power is such an oft-constituted part of their energy supplies.

arcticbull 5y ago
My point in the first half is that you can’t look solely at the costs without looking at the benefits - unless you evaluate both you can’t make a meaningful judgement on the efficacy of a system. Yes for sure the government is the largest source of death — but only because the government stamped out all other sources of death. Removing the government would shift that death to elsewhere and not remove it. And if history is anything to go by, dramatically amplify it. That’s why government needs to be iterated on not removed. Re: renewables in bitcoin, it’s all greenwashing. Every kWh wasted guessing nonces on renewables isn’t spent decarbonizing the grid where we do actual productive things. While generating inordinate quantities of e-waste. I mentioned in another reply 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out, burned, crushed or buried all without ever mining a block successfully in its entire useful life. I know there are other consensus mechanisms but they just rely on feudalistic control of the supply and just create systemic inequality without accountability. There’s no good that comes of this. In basically every case decentralization and permissionlessness is not what anyone actually wants or needs.
- etherael 5y ago
  > My point in the first half is that you can’t look solely at the costs without looking at the benefits There is no benefit from a political authority wielding entity which has not been provided by an entity that does not wield political authority. Therefore the political authority is not necessary for those benefits. > Removing the government would shift that death to elsewhere and not remove it. Removing the hundreds of millions of people who were killed in the name of national security and the maintenance of political authority would not magically make them die for some other reason instead. > That’s why government needs to be iterated on not removed. Whether you call providing the benefits of typical governments without their horrendous costs an iteration or a removal is semantics. My concern is that it gets done. > Every kWh wasted guessing nonces on renewables isn’t spent decarbonizing the grid where we do actual productive things. This would assume that those energy forms restricted to specific geographic locations are not so restricted. This is not true. > I mentioned in another reply 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out, burned, crushed or buried all without ever mining a block successfully in its entire useful life. Most e-waste won't mine a block successfully in its entire life. If it could contribute to the peaceful destruction of the state, hard to imagine a better use it could've been put to, given the statistics. > I know there are other consensus mechanisms but they just rely on feudalistic control of the supply and just create systemic inequality without accountability. You mean like being born economically so deep underwater it's impossible to ever even break even because of the economic mismanagement of your political authority wielding organisational unit? At least ledgers using those consensus mechanisms only levy debt on people who choose to participate. > There’s no good that comes of this. In basically every case decentralization and permissionlessness is not what anyone actually wants or needs. It's clearly what a whole lot of people want, as to whether they need it or not, time will tell. For all the aforementioned reasons, I think the case couldn't be clearer that they do, however.