Such a stupid fucking idea. The idea of cryptocurrencies aside, Bitcoin's system of mining is peak waste.
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
397 points (93.1% liked)
News
23311 readers
3552 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It's great that the idea got implemented in ways that don't have the ecological footprint Bitcoin has!
I'm glad Bitcoin brought this idea to life. But it's about time for Bitcoin to resign.
Bitcoin isn’t a good idea. It’s based on assumptions about how the world works that don’t actually exist and, the costs for finding a solution to these assumptions are so large that they make the product bad.
I think Monero has use cases (besides money laundering). And Monero is basically what people who don't understand cryptocurrency think Bitcoin is.
I beg to partly differ.
The idea of being able to transfer digital value safely without middlemen is great and has never been available before.
The implementation is bad in the sense that it's ecologically disastrous and economically unfit.
Bitcoin was developed on the idea that no one can be trusted and that everyone will act selfishly for their own self interest. This is patently not true, while many are selfish and are not to be trusted, a truly trustless society does not and cannot exist. People do come together and work in collectives and organisations and people do defer to the expertise of others. Imagine not being able to go to the doctor without first getting a medical degree because you can’t trust what the doctor will tell you or having to learn electrical engineering before having any electrical work done in your home. That is the ideology that helps spawn the no middleman trustless system that formed bitcoin in 2009. The truth is people don’t want to do that an the easy way to demonstrate this is to simply point at the huge amount of transactions that occur off-chain through exchanges (who serve as middlemen) vs the pitiful small number of transactions that occur on chain.
Trustlessness comes with huge costs. Firstly, you have huge amounts of redundant work to prove/verify everything. That’s why bitcoin is so terribly inefficient. Rather than having some you trust approve a transaction you now need to spend huge resources solving useless puzzles to prove that your transactions is the real deal. Secondly, without a middleman there is no one to hold to account. Make a mistake on your transaction? Your money is gone. Get scammed? Same deal. Accidentally leak your private key? Ditto.
Bitcoin is also based on the ideas of Austrian economics. Basically a ridiculous field of economics that doesn’t work. There are reasons why we left the gold standard and there are reasons why so called ‘sound money’ is a terrible idea. Just to simply illustrate. Bitcoiners love to celebrate the first transaction for real world goods using bitcoin. Some guy bought two pizza’s for 10000 btc around 2010 or something. They mock now for how much ‘money’ he wasted on two pizza’s. What good is a currency if you’re too afraid to spend it because its ‘value’ might skyrocket. In no uncertain terms Austrian economics is incredibly stupid. Bitcoin is built on this ideology.
Also Bitcoin is full of middlemen. Mining pools tend to congregate into large organisations lead by a small group of individuals due to economies of scale making larger pools more efficient than smaller pools and, because bitcoin has no real economy underneath it everything has to run back to fiat currency at some point. Whether you’re a baker or a drug dealer you have bills that need to be paid in fiat at some point; therefore, you need to exchange your crypto to fiat and, this is almost unanimously controlled by large exchanges who act as middle men. A big government like the US blocks the exchanges and bitcoin and crypto in general basically dies.
So in summary, bitcoin is based on the idea that no one can be trusted, which is false, that Austrian economics is a good idea, which is wrong and finally that it’s free from middlemen which it isn’t. The assumptions that made bitcoin are wrong.
It’s not that no one can be trusted. It’s that there is enough bad people and incentive to do real damage to everyone else (even the majority of good people) and unfortunately they may need to be protected from that. If we get another Great Recession that doesn’t snap back bitcoin will have its value proven, if that doesn’t happen then it’s a waste of time and effort. It’s really more of a hedge at this point until things play out
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
It's such a great idea that a good use case for it hasn't been invented in over a decade.
load more comments
(15 replies)
Monero is the only crypto I support
What an absolutely absurd waste of resources. There should be some sort of enforcement/restrictions of energy usage from these clowns.
Fuck stupid ass libertarian ponzi schemes
2% still seems really high.
It's absurdly high.
Context: The US consumed ~4 Trillion kWh for 2022. If you take 2% of that, you get 80 Billion kWh.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Eth has moved to staking, which is good for the environment because it doesn’t have a bunch of computers competing for transactions, unlike bitcoin - instead the network picks a computer for the transaction and takes staked coin if the computer does something nefarious to the transaction. The problem though is that staking requires coins / money. Mining requires electricity and can make money (albeit pennies depending on your setup and electricty costs). For this reason, it’s not just bitcoin that’s a problem, but a whole bevy of other mining-based coins like bitcoin cash, cudos, etc. That problem (the desire for folks to spin up new farms to mine crypto coins which they can mine using the spare CPU/GPU cycles) is likely not going to go away soon.
load more comments
(13 replies)
And less than 0.00000001% goes to Ethereum
How much electricity goes to normal financial institutions though?
A tiny fraction by comparison, given the amount of transactions they handle per second (Visa alone handles thousands per second whereas bitcoin only does 3-7 transactions a second). Either way, I wouldn't mind seeing the stock market and the vast amounts of effort wasted on that bullshit getting shut down.
It's estimated the finance industry issues about 260 TWh, JUST Bitcoin alone uses 114 TWh. So Bitcoin is using a little less than half as much energy as the entire financial industry.
Bitcoin is orders of magnitude less efficient than traditional finance.
The entire "web 3.0" scam has basically been selling "databases but worse" to people who don't know what a database is
load more comments
(1 replies)
Dunno but probably worth it for the amount of transactions they process.
load more comments
(1 replies)
POW has been out of date for years. POS solves these problems, but that would take an informed person to realize which seems to be in short supply.
Doesn't proof-of-stake boil down to "if you're hoarding a billion dollars, you're inherently more trustworthy"?
load more comments
(8 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Does someone feel like giving me an ELI5 why Bitcoin mining eats up so much electricity these days? Is it just because the problems the machines need to solve have gotten more complex? Do other cryptos tax the resources as bad? Is there a viable crypto that would be considered “green” at this point?
Sorry for overboarding my questions if anyone even attempts to answer this lol
All crypto is essentially designed around competition for who gets to be the one mining it. Things escalate, and that's how you end up with these ridiculous crypto farms that use as much power as entire cities. No crypto currency is "green". And UNLIKE cars, lights or banking, crypto serves no purpose, it's currency that doesn't get spent, it's basically just there to fuel speculation for tech bros.
Crypto is a complete waste of energy, it's not 'big money spinning Bitcoin as negative', it's just objectively idiotic, don't listen to that comment.
If you haven't, I recommend watching Dan Olson's documentary "Line Goes Up" on Youtube.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Price goes up, chances go down, more people/machines trying to mine, more electricity usage.
If you want to have rather green cryptos, you need to exclude those who rely on proof-of-work to secure the network.
Btw. Ethereum showed that a transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake is possible.
If you're not interested in the complexities that a lot of cryptos have, because you just want to transfer value efficiently, have a look at Nano (https://nano.org)
load more comments
(7 replies)
load more comments
(8 replies)
view more: next ›