5 ms·

Ah yeah sure, people running warehouses full of GPUs and reviving local coal power plants for their energy supply are doing less harm than than someone eating t

Ah yeah sure, people running warehouses full of GPUs and reviving local coal power plants for their energy supply are doing less harm than than someone eating too much beef. Unlike meat consumption, mining doesn't map neatly onto the entire population. It's a rich few that can even buy this much compute power. Bitcoin is 137 TW/h/yr Etherium is 112 TW/h/yr (thanks for pointing out me messing up units) Those are both mid sized countries by now.

xvector 4y ago
How does crypto mining come even close? Sorry, which beings am I immersing in extreme pain and suffering by running hashes on my GPU? Environmentally, Bitcoin and Ethereum's combined production of greenhouse gasses - ~50M tons CO2 - does not come anywhere close to the over 6 billion tons of CO2 of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by meat production. Again, orders of magnitude more environmental damage, alongside the greatest cycle of sheer pain and suffering this planet has ever seen, and we don't even get something out of it. How can people point fingers at crypto miners while engaging in this far more harmful behavior?
- sascha_sl 4y ago
  It's a really terrible comparison and nothing but a cheap tu quoque. Crypto contributes nothing but a speculative asset to society. Meat production, while derailed into unsustainability, has a lot more utility and is also a lot harder to unwind from current culture. Try running a survey on which of the two people would rather forego, and your 100M to 6B ratio will look rather stupid. One shitty behavior doesn't excuse another.
  - xvector 4y ago
    > Meat production [...] has a lot more utility We will have to agree to disagree that stimulating the taste buds has more utility than providing a trustless financial system.
    - sascha_sl 4y ago
      I've used bitcoin as a currency in 2011, and now people keep telling me I shouldn't have because all I got for 2-million USD equivalent BTC then was a video game. What's the point of a currency that doesn't scale and that everyone is too afraid to spend because of volatility. Speculative asset, that's all you'll ever have there.
      - xvector 4y ago
        That comment belays a misunderstanding of the crypto sphere as a whole. If you don't want to partake in the speculative nature of the asset, you can simply transact with a stablecoin.
    - tehbeard 4y ago
      So, A cryptobro that eats soylent paste? Didn't have that one on my bingo card...
      - trainsarebetter 4y ago
        ha! Made me laugh, this was me 10 years ago
- nigma1337 4y ago
  I'd say we get more out of meat, having delicious stuff to eat is awesome.
- cedilla 4y ago
  The one system is providing sustenance for billions of people, the other is used by tens of thousands of people. As is always forgotten to mention when this argument is made. But this is an even worse argument than usual - the people speculating with crypto constructs are very often also part of the groups who consume a whole lot of meat...
  - mrb 4y ago
    "tens of thousands of people" You are off by 3 orders of magnitude. Bitcoin alone validates 7 million transactions monthly. If there were only 50k users, an average user would be sending 140 transactions per month.
    - htlion 4y ago
      What about trading and wash sales? Would not that make the average very high? I have no numbers so I can't say more, but 140 transactions per month per user doesn't sound that high considering the above.
      - nybble41 4y ago
        Much of that trading will happen off-chain using local accounts on some exchange and thus not contribute to the transaction count. Only the deposits and withdrawals require on-chain transactions.
    - salawat 4y ago
      The average centralized financial processor can process that many transactions in about 10 seconds, with the option of reversal, You are not making a great case here.
      - mrb 4y ago
        "in about 10 seconds" Patently false. For example an "average" processor like Western Union processes only 25 million transactions monthly. "with the option of reversal" Which is the whole problem. Bitcoin is irreversible, by design. That's crucial.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Oh for the love of Christ. Unless you go fully Jainist, and eat only what you grow, after painstakingly removing insect pests and placing them elsewhere gently, nothing you eat is pain/suffering free. Modern agricultural harvesting and processing always has a bykill of small mammals and ground nesting birds. Organic farming often uses companion planting to attract natural predators of insect pests, so that insecticides don't need to be used (as much anyway, there's plenty of rather toxic compounds that are perfectly natural and organic yet kill things well, like derris dust). How, though, do you distinguish between the suffering of cows, and the suffering of a dormouse, or the suffering of caterpillars that are being eaten from inside by the larvae of a parasitic wasp? Are you basing your morality on "there's an arbitrary level of suffering I'll accept" or "I'm only opposed to the suffering of life that has at least N neurons?" Or are you sweeping the path as you walk lest an ant be harmed?
  - WithinReason 4y ago
    I read somewhere that the death ratio of meat vs vegan diet is about 1 cow vs 30 mice, not sure if it was a reliable figure.
    - erk__ 4y ago
      That sounds incorrect since around 3/4 of the agriculture production is used to feed lifestock
      - EdwardDiego 4y ago
        In your country. In my country, we don't advertise beef as "grass fed" as a market segmentation tactic, because all our beef is grass fed, that's the only way we feed stock raised for beef. Once again, it's not just a simple case of "all animal husbandry is unsustainable", but we need to pick apart why the unsustainable practices have been developed into what they are now. My gut feeling is that Government subsidies of corn in the US create an oversupply of it, so sure, why not feed it to cattle? It's not like the American beef industry was predicated on grain feeding, it started with ranchers grazing them on prairies. So what changed?
wcoenen 4y ago
TW/h doesn't really make sense. I suspect you meant TWh/year.
michaelsbradley 4y ago
At least Ethereum’s energy usage will drop by 99.99% shortly.
- sascha_sl 4y ago
  It's been vaporware forever, I'll believe it when I see it. And I still wouldn't like it. Proof of Stake is even more directly aimed at making the rich richer, whereas Proof of Work only did it with a few extra steps. But at least they'd no longer be burning the planet.
  - michaelsbradley 4y ago
    Some of the most dedicated software engineers I’ve ever met have been working on it (transition to PoS) intensely for 2 years now and I heard from their own mouths (physically, in person) week before last just how excited they are it’s wrapping up. None of this work has happened in the dark. The regular cross-team meetings, constant stream of commits on GitHub, etc. are in the open for all to see. Next phase will be sharding and splitting out data availability from consensus strictly speaking, exciting times!
    - martin8412 4y ago
      At best it will be another hard fork. The miners need to vote on the change to PoS, and why would they? It would render their mining equipment worthless.
      - arlcode 4y ago
        It's the other way around. The miners can't do anything to prevent the switch since most major Ethereum users (aka Infrastructure providers) are clearly in favour and are already participating in the POS chain (which is currently running in parallel and without transactions). When they update they miners are simply cut off. Furthermore, Ethereum contains a self destruct mechanism that requires a hard fork. Unless miners can coordinate a competing POW fork (and convince rich people that the bad PR and profits for them are worth it) they won't be able to do anything.
mrb 4y ago
It's not TW/h/yr but TWh/yr. For reference, 120 TWh/yr is only twice the production of the Baihetan dam https://web.archive.org/web/20160302215312/http://english.cwe.cn/show.aspx?id=1828&cid=43 https://web.archive.org/web/20160302215312/http://english.cw... Most people don't picture that an entire "mid sized" country could run off only 2 hydro dams.
hanselot 4y ago

xvector 4y ago

How does crypto mining come even close? Sorry, which beings am I immersing in extreme pain and suffering by running hashes on my GPU? Environmentally, Bitcoin and Ethereum's combined production of greenhouse gasses - ~50M tons CO2 - does not come anywhere close to the over 6 billion tons of CO2 of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by meat production. Again, orders of magnitude more environmental damage, alongside the greatest cycle of sheer pain and suffering this planet has ever seen, and we don't even get something out of it. How can people point fingers at crypto miners while engaging in this far more harmful behavior?

sascha_sl 4y ago
It's a really terrible comparison and nothing but a cheap tu quoque. Crypto contributes nothing but a speculative asset to society. Meat production, while derailed into unsustainability, has a lot more utility and is also a lot harder to unwind from current culture. Try running a survey on which of the two people would rather forego, and your 100M to 6B ratio will look rather stupid. One shitty behavior doesn't excuse another.
- xvector 4y ago
  > Meat production [...] has a lot more utility We will have to agree to disagree that stimulating the taste buds has more utility than providing a trustless financial system.
  - sascha_sl 4y ago
    I've used bitcoin as a currency in 2011, and now people keep telling me I shouldn't have because all I got for 2-million USD equivalent BTC then was a video game. What's the point of a currency that doesn't scale and that everyone is too afraid to spend because of volatility. Speculative asset, that's all you'll ever have there.
    - xvector 4y ago
      That comment belays a misunderstanding of the crypto sphere as a whole. If you don't want to partake in the speculative nature of the asset, you can simply transact with a stablecoin.
  - tehbeard 4y ago
    So, A cryptobro that eats soylent paste? Didn't have that one on my bingo card...
    - trainsarebetter 4y ago
      ha! Made me laugh, this was me 10 years ago
nigma1337 4y ago
I'd say we get more out of meat, having delicious stuff to eat is awesome.
cedilla 4y ago
The one system is providing sustenance for billions of people, the other is used by tens of thousands of people. As is always forgotten to mention when this argument is made. But this is an even worse argument than usual - the people speculating with crypto constructs are very often also part of the groups who consume a whole lot of meat...
- mrb 4y ago
  "tens of thousands of people" You are off by 3 orders of magnitude. Bitcoin alone validates 7 million transactions monthly. If there were only 50k users, an average user would be sending 140 transactions per month.
  - htlion 4y ago
    What about trading and wash sales? Would not that make the average very high? I have no numbers so I can't say more, but 140 transactions per month per user doesn't sound that high considering the above.
    - nybble41 4y ago
      Much of that trading will happen off-chain using local accounts on some exchange and thus not contribute to the transaction count. Only the deposits and withdrawals require on-chain transactions.
  - salawat 4y ago
    The average centralized financial processor can process that many transactions in about 10 seconds, with the option of reversal, You are not making a great case here.
    - mrb 4y ago
      "in about 10 seconds" Patently false. For example an "average" processor like Western Union processes only 25 million transactions monthly. "with the option of reversal" Which is the whole problem. Bitcoin is irreversible, by design. That's crucial.
EdwardDiego 4y ago
Oh for the love of Christ. Unless you go fully Jainist, and eat only what you grow, after painstakingly removing insect pests and placing them elsewhere gently, nothing you eat is pain/suffering free. Modern agricultural harvesting and processing always has a bykill of small mammals and ground nesting birds. Organic farming often uses companion planting to attract natural predators of insect pests, so that insecticides don't need to be used (as much anyway, there's plenty of rather toxic compounds that are perfectly natural and organic yet kill things well, like derris dust). How, though, do you distinguish between the suffering of cows, and the suffering of a dormouse, or the suffering of caterpillars that are being eaten from inside by the larvae of a parasitic wasp? Are you basing your morality on "there's an arbitrary level of suffering I'll accept" or "I'm only opposed to the suffering of life that has at least N neurons?" Or are you sweeping the path as you walk lest an ant be harmed?
- WithinReason 4y ago
  I read somewhere that the death ratio of meat vs vegan diet is about 1 cow vs 30 mice, not sure if it was a reliable figure.
  - erk__ 4y ago
    That sounds incorrect since around 3/4 of the agriculture production is used to feed lifestock
    - EdwardDiego 4y ago
      In your country. In my country, we don't advertise beef as "grass fed" as a market segmentation tactic, because all our beef is grass fed, that's the only way we feed stock raised for beef. Once again, it's not just a simple case of "all animal husbandry is unsustainable", but we need to pick apart why the unsustainable practices have been developed into what they are now. My gut feeling is that Government subsidies of corn in the US create an oversupply of it, so sure, why not feed it to cattle? It's not like the American beef industry was predicated on grain feeding, it started with ranchers grazing them on prairies. So what changed?

wcoenen 4y ago

TW/h doesn't really make sense. I suspect you meant TWh/year.

michaelsbradley 4y ago

At least Ethereum’s energy usage will drop by 99.99% shortly.

sascha_sl 4y ago
It's been vaporware forever, I'll believe it when I see it. And I still wouldn't like it. Proof of Stake is even more directly aimed at making the rich richer, whereas Proof of Work only did it with a few extra steps. But at least they'd no longer be burning the planet.
- michaelsbradley 4y ago
  Some of the most dedicated software engineers I’ve ever met have been working on it (transition to PoS) intensely for 2 years now and I heard from their own mouths (physically, in person) week before last just how excited they are it’s wrapping up. None of this work has happened in the dark. The regular cross-team meetings, constant stream of commits on GitHub, etc. are in the open for all to see. Next phase will be sharding and splitting out data availability from consensus strictly speaking, exciting times!
  - martin8412 4y ago
    At best it will be another hard fork. The miners need to vote on the change to PoS, and why would they? It would render their mining equipment worthless.
    - arlcode 4y ago
      It's the other way around. The miners can't do anything to prevent the switch since most major Ethereum users (aka Infrastructure providers) are clearly in favour and are already participating in the POS chain (which is currently running in parallel and without transactions). When they update they miners are simply cut off. Furthermore, Ethereum contains a self destruct mechanism that requires a hard fork. Unless miners can coordinate a competing POW fork (and convince rich people that the bad PR and profits for them are worth it) they won't be able to do anything.

mrb 4y ago

It's not TW/h/yr but TWh/yr. For reference, 120 TWh/yr is only twice the production of the Baihetan dam https://web.archive.org/web/20160302215312/http://english.cwe.cn/show.aspx?id=1828&cid=43 https://web.archive.org/web/20160302215312/http://english.cw... Most people don't picture that an entire "mid sized" country could run off only 2 hydro dams.

hanselot 4y ago