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Taleb thoughts are irrelevant to Bitcoin’s failure or success. Bitcoin has a tremendous potential for many reasons (methane emissions reduction, renewable energ

Taleb thoughts are irrelevant to Bitcoin’s failure or success. Bitcoin has a tremendous potential for many reasons (methane emissions reduction, renewable energy load management, the lightning network for immediate value exchange) and it’s not riskless for sure (regulations, possible hack, UX difficulties).

thworp 3y ago
> renewable energy load managment I'll pick this as the most absurd use-case. Every party in an electricity grid already has to trust all the other parties in the network. What advantage does a trustless distributed ledger have that a more conventional distributed DB and messaging solution doesn't?
- cinntaile 3y ago
  What he means is that when renewable energy output is high, you can turn on the mining facilities to absorb the excess and turn it off when there is no excess. In this case it helps with load balancing. The ledger is irrelevant here.
  - futurecat 3y ago
    Absolutely. Thank you.
  - thworp 3y ago
    I am honestly dumbfounded. If this is an application of bitcoin, why wouldn't we use that same excess energy to run a giant tesla coil? At least that makes some pretty arcs while wasting the energy. Just a thought: You could also store the energy or use it to do actually useful calculations.
    - jakupovic 3y ago
      Because these applications are in middle of nowhere. You cannot store/transport the energy, the best you can do is burn it.
      - thworp 3y ago
        I call BS. Look at this map of Canadian hydro power stations: https://hydro.canadiangeographic.ca/ https://hydro.canadiangeographic.ca/ Some of the largest stations by output are in northern Quebec (one of the most "middle of nowhere" regions in the world) and their power gets sold as far away as NYC. Similarly for Chile and Argentina which have quite a few huge dams in Patagonia, which is also extremely remote.
        yanellena 3y ago
        You do have to build very expensive transmission lines to transport that energy. In some places in the world it's simply not economically viable.
        red-iron-pine 3y ago
        In some places there are volcanos. The "in some places" argument doesn't hold, when it's clearly very effective in many other ones. Plus most of humanity lives within the same 100 mile range of water, esp. oceans, and the bulk of humanity live in areas with lots of sun.
      - foo-bar-bat 3y ago
        Yeah this a corner case not a proof. Putting a hydro plant of any size in a location that is, apparently (from what I understand based on comments here only) not connected to a regional grid or even local demand for baseload doesn't make sense. In a country that has unmet demand for water, electricity, and government services the last thing they ought to be doing is converting precious finite resources (to include construction labor opportunity cost) into speculative Bitcoin. Electricity acts like a medicine. What they ought to be doing is wiring transmission lines to the hydro plant to organic demand for power. Now if the real purpose of the dam was flood control and water buffering, and the notional hydro gen facility is tertiary and irrelevant, OK fine. Mine your Bitcoin if they have all the electricity they need regionally already. But this is no proof of nothing for the crypto bros.
    - futurecat 3y ago
      Mining secures the ledger and miners are rewarded for this. Let’s take the example of the Virunga National Park in Congo. They run a small hydro power plant and needed a bench to manage the excess energy load. They instead went for bitcoin miner containers. It’s a net positive for them as: - They can manage the load of the hydro power plant - They can sell back the bitcoin and finance other activities in the park - They use heat generated by miners to dry fruits and experiment with creating a small economy with excess fruit resources in the park.
      - UncleMeat 3y ago
        Mining secures the ledger but it is also critical for continued processing of transactions. "Hey, we'll all wait until the next time we have an excess of renewable power to accept everybody's transactions" is... a mess.
        MichaelVangard 3y ago
        Bitcoin mining is globally distributed and doesn’t come to a halt when a particular facility or even a whole region has to shutdown because excess energy is not available.
      - pcdoodle 3y ago
        This is cool.
    - ephbit 3y ago
      > why wouldn't we use that same excess energy to run a giant tesla coil? At least that makes some pretty arcs while wasting the energy. Well, why aren't you doing it? Let me guess. You don't have enough money to waste to just build a "giant tesla coil .. to make some pretty arcs", just for the sake of it. Let me guess further. If you actually were to build such a coil, you'd want a return on your investment, you'd want to make money. As do many (which is a huge understatement here) people who invest in some material stuff. Some investments are simply not financially feasible, because not enough people are willing to pay enough money for the resulting product/service. That's the reasons you're not building your tesla coil. And it's also the reason why we don't see people stacking so many massive batteries at the GWh scale (and try to make profit), so that grid operators can put a check mark on that "balance the grid at all times" task. It's not happening because it doesn't pay for itself. "Store the energy" sounds easy but is everything but that. So when Bitcoin miners come along and set up their gear in some grid where the price of electricity regularly goes low/negative .. which happens because noone else is able to use the amount of electricity available at that moment to do something useful with it .. then they're actually doing something useful. They're preventing the price from going even lower, they're making the power generation more profitable. If you can come up with some process to make use of the fluctuating excess electricity and at the same time, make money from it, congrats, you have an excellent business case and only need some investors to throw money at it to get filthy rich. Until then, you could try to acknowledge that somehow through means of money/prices, (parts of) society has attributed some value to running sha256 perpetually, enough so that the process can use quite a bit of electricity and move money to electriticy producers.
  - ElfinTrousers 3y ago
    Or perhaps, just spitballing here, we could find something actually useful to do with the excess energy.
    - cinntaile 3y ago
      Being able to convert energy into money almost instantly is clearly pretty useful to some people.
  - UncleMeat 3y ago
    Today, it makes the news when some locality is able to draw 100% of its power needs from renewable sources. I'm not terribly worried about the problem of struggling to use up all of the renewable energy. Maybe someday, but certainly not now.
    - cinntaile 3y ago
      But why did you downvote me? I just explained what the parent meant?
      - UncleMeat 3y ago
        I did not downvote you.
    - MichaelVangard 3y ago
      It’s relevant now. We don’t have ways to store days or weeks worth of the excess energy many renewable sources produce. When you have somewhere for that energy to go when it can’t otherwise be used, and you’re getting paid for it, you can subsidize the cost of producing a more robust infrastructure that eliminates or greatly reduces the need for traditional power plants that cause environmental harm.
      - UncleMeat 3y ago
        This depends on the "I can sell BTC for dollars" part. This isn't stable if the use case of BTC is just to spend extra power.
  - Yizahi 3y ago
    Turn OFF mining facilities? Because what? It is morally good or something? This stupid argument always hinges on this fantasy and it never happens in reality. Any token mining adds a constant load to the system, while preserving all of the variability, it just makes peaks higher, and lows also higher. And then people are acting surprised about commenters here arguing against tokens for seemingly no reason or monetary gain. How about people are simply pissed off about reading lies for a decade now?
coldtea 3y ago
>methane emissions reduction, renewable energy load management This is like saying cyanide pills have a great feature in nutrition.
- futurecat 3y ago
  This is a terrible analogy.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Matching the terribly ill-fitting suggested use case!
- sunshinerag 3y ago
  Aren’t they?. Cures all illness /s :)

thworp 3y ago

> renewable energy load managment I'll pick this as the most absurd use-case. Every party in an electricity grid already has to trust all the other parties in the network. What advantage does a trustless distributed ledger have that a more conventional distributed DB and messaging solution doesn't?

cinntaile 3y ago
What he means is that when renewable energy output is high, you can turn on the mining facilities to absorb the excess and turn it off when there is no excess. In this case it helps with load balancing. The ledger is irrelevant here.
- futurecat 3y ago
  Absolutely. Thank you.
- thworp 3y ago
  I am honestly dumbfounded. If this is an application of bitcoin, why wouldn't we use that same excess energy to run a giant tesla coil? At least that makes some pretty arcs while wasting the energy. Just a thought: You could also store the energy or use it to do actually useful calculations.
  - jakupovic 3y ago
    Because these applications are in middle of nowhere. You cannot store/transport the energy, the best you can do is burn it.
    - thworp 3y ago
      I call BS. Look at this map of Canadian hydro power stations: https://hydro.canadiangeographic.ca/ https://hydro.canadiangeographic.ca/ Some of the largest stations by output are in northern Quebec (one of the most "middle of nowhere" regions in the world) and their power gets sold as far away as NYC. Similarly for Chile and Argentina which have quite a few huge dams in Patagonia, which is also extremely remote.
      - yanellena 3y ago
        You do have to build very expensive transmission lines to transport that energy. In some places in the world it's simply not economically viable.
        red-iron-pine 3y ago
        In some places there are volcanos. The "in some places" argument doesn't hold, when it's clearly very effective in many other ones. Plus most of humanity lives within the same 100 mile range of water, esp. oceans, and the bulk of humanity live in areas with lots of sun.
    - foo-bar-bat 3y ago
      Yeah this a corner case not a proof. Putting a hydro plant of any size in a location that is, apparently (from what I understand based on comments here only) not connected to a regional grid or even local demand for baseload doesn't make sense. In a country that has unmet demand for water, electricity, and government services the last thing they ought to be doing is converting precious finite resources (to include construction labor opportunity cost) into speculative Bitcoin. Electricity acts like a medicine. What they ought to be doing is wiring transmission lines to the hydro plant to organic demand for power. Now if the real purpose of the dam was flood control and water buffering, and the notional hydro gen facility is tertiary and irrelevant, OK fine. Mine your Bitcoin if they have all the electricity they need regionally already. But this is no proof of nothing for the crypto bros.
  - futurecat 3y ago
    Mining secures the ledger and miners are rewarded for this. Let’s take the example of the Virunga National Park in Congo. They run a small hydro power plant and needed a bench to manage the excess energy load. They instead went for bitcoin miner containers. It’s a net positive for them as: - They can manage the load of the hydro power plant - They can sell back the bitcoin and finance other activities in the park - They use heat generated by miners to dry fruits and experiment with creating a small economy with excess fruit resources in the park.
    - UncleMeat 3y ago
      Mining secures the ledger but it is also critical for continued processing of transactions. "Hey, we'll all wait until the next time we have an excess of renewable power to accept everybody's transactions" is... a mess.
      - MichaelVangard 3y ago
        Bitcoin mining is globally distributed and doesn’t come to a halt when a particular facility or even a whole region has to shutdown because excess energy is not available.
    - pcdoodle 3y ago
      This is cool.
  - ephbit 3y ago
    > why wouldn't we use that same excess energy to run a giant tesla coil? At least that makes some pretty arcs while wasting the energy. Well, why aren't you doing it? Let me guess. You don't have enough money to waste to just build a "giant tesla coil .. to make some pretty arcs", just for the sake of it. Let me guess further. If you actually were to build such a coil, you'd want a return on your investment, you'd want to make money. As do many (which is a huge understatement here) people who invest in some material stuff. Some investments are simply not financially feasible, because not enough people are willing to pay enough money for the resulting product/service. That's the reasons you're not building your tesla coil. And it's also the reason why we don't see people stacking so many massive batteries at the GWh scale (and try to make profit), so that grid operators can put a check mark on that "balance the grid at all times" task. It's not happening because it doesn't pay for itself. "Store the energy" sounds easy but is everything but that. So when Bitcoin miners come along and set up their gear in some grid where the price of electricity regularly goes low/negative .. which happens because noone else is able to use the amount of electricity available at that moment to do something useful with it .. then they're actually doing something useful. They're preventing the price from going even lower, they're making the power generation more profitable. If you can come up with some process to make use of the fluctuating excess electricity and at the same time, make money from it, congrats, you have an excellent business case and only need some investors to throw money at it to get filthy rich. Until then, you could try to acknowledge that somehow through means of money/prices, (parts of) society has attributed some value to running sha256 perpetually, enough so that the process can use quite a bit of electricity and move money to electriticy producers.
- ElfinTrousers 3y ago
  Or perhaps, just spitballing here, we could find something actually useful to do with the excess energy.
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    Being able to convert energy into money almost instantly is clearly pretty useful to some people.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  Today, it makes the news when some locality is able to draw 100% of its power needs from renewable sources. I'm not terribly worried about the problem of struggling to use up all of the renewable energy. Maybe someday, but certainly not now.
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    But why did you downvote me? I just explained what the parent meant?
    - UncleMeat 3y ago
      I did not downvote you.
  - MichaelVangard 3y ago
    It’s relevant now. We don’t have ways to store days or weeks worth of the excess energy many renewable sources produce. When you have somewhere for that energy to go when it can’t otherwise be used, and you’re getting paid for it, you can subsidize the cost of producing a more robust infrastructure that eliminates or greatly reduces the need for traditional power plants that cause environmental harm.
    - UncleMeat 3y ago
      This depends on the "I can sell BTC for dollars" part. This isn't stable if the use case of BTC is just to spend extra power.
- Yizahi 3y ago
  Turn OFF mining facilities? Because what? It is morally good or something? This stupid argument always hinges on this fantasy and it never happens in reality. Any token mining adds a constant load to the system, while preserving all of the variability, it just makes peaks higher, and lows also higher. And then people are acting surprised about commenters here arguing against tokens for seemingly no reason or monetary gain. How about people are simply pissed off about reading lies for a decade now?

coldtea 3y ago

>methane emissions reduction, renewable energy load management This is like saying cyanide pills have a great feature in nutrition.

futurecat 3y ago
This is a terrible analogy.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Matching the terribly ill-fitting suggested use case!
sunshinerag 3y ago
Aren’t they?. Cures all illness /s :)