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This post really is less of a rebuttal and more of a DoS attack. The tl;dr amounts to: * author agrees with Stross that bitcoin is energy intensive. * author
by knowtheory 13y ago
This post really is less of a rebuttal and more of a DoS attack.
The tl;dr amounts to:
* author agrees with Stross that bitcoin is energy intensive.
* author says there have been improvements to carbon footprint (as if that some how address the issue of theft of other people's electricity/CPU cycles being more efficient than spending your own electricity)
* An argument about deflation that amounts to "there's no consensus in economics so it's fine if we run speculative experiments with economies"
* A non-argument assertion that bitcoin is somehow no worse than cash as a vehicle for illegal/unethical behavior.
Somehow this is suppose to amount to a take down of a dude who wrote literally an entire book about how algorithmically mediated systems which do not depend on human judgement are inherently inhuman and unconcerned about human ethical concerns.
"It’s hard to believe that an author who wrote about algorithmically run 2.0 economies and trading exchanges for personal reputations can fail to see the precursors of that tech in the real world."
wat.
Seems like the author seems to be the primary source of misunderstanding.
- dllthomas 13y ago"Theft of other people's electricity" in the form of botnets, for the purpose of mining bitcoin is addressed by raising the difficulty to the point where you cannot meaningfully mine on CPUs or GPUs. This is done by prevalence of ASIC miners. In theory a botnet would still generate some revenue eventually, for any difficulty level, but there are expenses (time, if nothing else) to setting up a botnet; most importantly, there are more profitable uses a botnet could be put to if you're going to the trouble of building one.
- wyager 13y agoNo one steals CPU cycles to mine Bitcoin. CPUs are no longer profitable in the wake of Bitcoin ASICs, even with huge botnets. Most of theoretical economics is, at best, approximations that only work sometimes. I don't care if Krugman tells you otherwise; economic theory is, at best, a feeble attempt to find a pattern that matches experimentally observed behaviors. So yes, it is fine to run economic experiments. And the great thing about Bitcoin is that no one is being forced to use it, which I can't say is true for most economic systems. Do you disagree that Bitcoin is no worse than cash for illegal behavior? Stross didn't actually describe or design any of the economic systems he wrote about; he just imagined them from an external perspective and wrote some vague description of what they might accomplish.
- tlb 13y agoA large botnet for bitcoin mining was stealing CPU cycles last week. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25653664 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25653664
- wyager 13y agoEither the botnet operators are small-time fools or the article is incorrect. More likely is that the malware used some more CPU-friendly cryptocurrency. Even if you had a million slave computers, you really couldn't make all that much Bitcoin. There are significantly more profitable things to do with CPU time.
- wmf 13y agoBitcoin has cash-like properties and it is also digital (allowing fast transactions at a distance), making it more powerful than cash. I've come to see Bitcoin not as a neutral entity but as a force multiplier for criminals, scammers, and sociopaths. I am inclined to agree with Stross that law-abiding liberals (or as Bitcoiners call them, "sheep") have more to lose than gain from Bitcoin.