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There are a great many people who chose to see crypto as an existential threat to the earth because proof of work requires energy and energy is derived from fos

There are a great many people who chose to see crypto as an existential threat to the earth because proof of work requires energy and energy is derived from fossil fuels and therefore any expansion of its use exacerbates climate change. Proponents of crypto are frequently corralled into a “climate change denier” corner by this faction. The other large contingent, myself included, sees the never ending scams, shady dealings, and blatant money laundering. Some of these projects, like Bitcoin Lightning Network, are like honey pots for smart people that have no idea how serious the government is about sanctions.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> There are a great many people who chose to see crypto as an existential threat to the earth because proof of work requires energy and energy is derived from fossil fuels and therefore any expansion of its use exacerbates climate change. (...) Don't miss: and energy costs grow much faster than linear with that expansion, and the incentives are all wrong - with traditional financial systems, energy expenditure is waste, upkeep, something you need to pay but want to minimize; with PoW, it's value generation and something everyone wants to maximize. Long-term, fossil fuels don't even matter here. Even with 100% clean energy derived from a Dyson sphere or something, it's still pure waste of energy, done for the sake of not having to ever trust each other. What crypto people missed is that trust is a feature, not a bug.
- tom_ 3y ago
  You can't waste energy. It can't be destroyed!
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Of course you can. Waste != destroy. The First Law tells you can't create or destroy energy, but you can transform it. The Second Law tells you that this transformation always reduces the amount of useful work you can extract from it. This is how energy is "used up" - it's transformed from a high-grade form (e.g. electricity) to a lower-grade form (e.g. waste heat). Per the Second Law, you can't then go back the opposite direction. (For a hands-on example, compare the utility of an egg vs. that of a smashed egg, and the amount of effort required to convert one into the other.) So no, Proof of Work isn't destroying energy, but it's wasting it. It's literally the whole point: you're meant to burn high-grade energy down to waste heat in order to prove you can afford it - there is math to show that trying to make it not wasteful (by e.g. doing some useful math like protein folding, instead of brute-forcing a random hash) creates incentives that defeat the whole system that PoW is supposed to establish.
    - politician 3y ago
      The trouble with describing PoW as "wasting energy" is that it's relative. There's only a sliver of the Sun's light that reaches the orbital plane, and the rest is wasted blasting off in other directions. Then there's all those trillions of stars in galaxies far far away wasting their hydrogen. Waste as a rationale depends on the assumption that the Earth's atmosphere heats up as a result of any excess power generation beyond equilibrium solar radiation, and so there is a limited power budget available to humanity for "useful" work. Asking the question of whether someone finds it acceptable for PoW to be performed in space or on the Moon is a useful way to discuss crypto when someone just wants to make the climate change argument because it separates the concerns.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        It's simpler than that. For a PoW blockchain based digital economy, the energy waste would scale much faster than the growth of said economy. There's lots of energy in space, but only so much of it is accessible at any given level - I would not like 99%+ of that to be dedicated to keeping the blockchain going. Today, this may be increasing fraction of energy generation on the planet. In 50 years, this may be dedicated space satellites beaming energy from the sun. 500 years later, a Dyson swarm constructed for the sole purpose of keeping the blockchain going. Nah.
        politician 3y ago
        Ok, “Nah” noted. But for the past billions of years, the same resources have been “wasted” throughout the entire uncountable universe. Dismantling a few planets around a few stars to build Bitcoin mining infrastructure is not remotely problematic for a K3 civilization, for instance. The argument that because humanity is wasting it it’s bad seems faulty.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        The argument is that Bitcoin mining will asymptotically approach to taking all resources your civilization can access. Always stuck at 99.999...%, and only adding more 9-s. So with K3 civilization, we're not talking about dismantling a few planets - but rather dismantling the neighbourhood galaxies.
redsky880 3y ago
What do you think the Lightning Network provides over the main net as far as getting around sanctions?

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> There are a great many people who chose to see crypto as an existential threat to the earth because proof of work requires energy and energy is derived from fossil fuels and therefore any expansion of its use exacerbates climate change. (...) Don't miss: and energy costs grow much faster than linear with that expansion, and the incentives are all wrong - with traditional financial systems, energy expenditure is waste, upkeep, something you need to pay but want to minimize; with PoW, it's value generation and something everyone wants to maximize. Long-term, fossil fuels don't even matter here. Even with 100% clean energy derived from a Dyson sphere or something, it's still pure waste of energy, done for the sake of not having to ever trust each other. What crypto people missed is that trust is a feature, not a bug.

tom_ 3y ago
You can't waste energy. It can't be destroyed!
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Of course you can. Waste != destroy. The First Law tells you can't create or destroy energy, but you can transform it. The Second Law tells you that this transformation always reduces the amount of useful work you can extract from it. This is how energy is "used up" - it's transformed from a high-grade form (e.g. electricity) to a lower-grade form (e.g. waste heat). Per the Second Law, you can't then go back the opposite direction. (For a hands-on example, compare the utility of an egg vs. that of a smashed egg, and the amount of effort required to convert one into the other.) So no, Proof of Work isn't destroying energy, but it's wasting it. It's literally the whole point: you're meant to burn high-grade energy down to waste heat in order to prove you can afford it - there is math to show that trying to make it not wasteful (by e.g. doing some useful math like protein folding, instead of brute-forcing a random hash) creates incentives that defeat the whole system that PoW is supposed to establish.
  - politician 3y ago
    The trouble with describing PoW as "wasting energy" is that it's relative. There's only a sliver of the Sun's light that reaches the orbital plane, and the rest is wasted blasting off in other directions. Then there's all those trillions of stars in galaxies far far away wasting their hydrogen. Waste as a rationale depends on the assumption that the Earth's atmosphere heats up as a result of any excess power generation beyond equilibrium solar radiation, and so there is a limited power budget available to humanity for "useful" work. Asking the question of whether someone finds it acceptable for PoW to be performed in space or on the Moon is a useful way to discuss crypto when someone just wants to make the climate change argument because it separates the concerns.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      It's simpler than that. For a PoW blockchain based digital economy, the energy waste would scale much faster than the growth of said economy. There's lots of energy in space, but only so much of it is accessible at any given level - I would not like 99%+ of that to be dedicated to keeping the blockchain going. Today, this may be increasing fraction of energy generation on the planet. In 50 years, this may be dedicated space satellites beaming energy from the sun. 500 years later, a Dyson swarm constructed for the sole purpose of keeping the blockchain going. Nah.
      - politician 3y ago
        Ok, “Nah” noted. But for the past billions of years, the same resources have been “wasted” throughout the entire uncountable universe. Dismantling a few planets around a few stars to build Bitcoin mining infrastructure is not remotely problematic for a K3 civilization, for instance. The argument that because humanity is wasting it it’s bad seems faulty.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        The argument is that Bitcoin mining will asymptotically approach to taking all resources your civilization can access. Always stuck at 99.999...%, and only adding more 9-s. So with K3 civilization, we're not talking about dismantling a few planets - but rather dismantling the neighbourhood galaxies.

redsky880 3y ago

What do you think the Lightning Network provides over the main net as far as getting around sanctions?