Imagine all these people wasting time, energy and power, the last of which is a crime against the environment and an affront to good sense at a time of global concern.
But when it comes to money, greed and self interest always triumph and there will be dozens stretching logic and apologism as far as it can go.
'Proof of work' has to the most hare-brained, wasteful, anti-environment scheme ever thought of. Responsible people should not just be wasting electricity in this manner.
This is one of those positions I'm always baffled by. It's like complaining about Bell wasting copper wire or encryption wasting space and computation power. If this crowd still don't get it I guess we're further from mainstream than I imagined. Also by Q1 2018 this will be a non-issue for Ethereum.
Yet, here we are - wasting resources to post trivialities online. Their consumption is generating value, yet our comments are just yelling into the wind.
Proof of Work is inefficient by design. The transaction speed of the entire network is equivalent to that of an average node. Adding more hardware increases inefficiency.
A centralised service like HN on the other hand could be designed to scale linearly with the amount of hardware resources.
Edit: Now that I think about it I wouldn't be surprised if someone makes a cryptocurrency based around "digging holes" keynesian style. I've even found a name for it: captchacoin.
And our comments are creating no value. We're just ephemerally yelling into the wind. If the claim is about resource usage, the concern is about value. If nothing else, they are at least creating value - something we both aren't doing.
Hell, I don't even expect you to agree with me. I'm just posting to speak my point of view and amuse myself. This conversation is pretty much the most wasteful thing we are going to do today.
Real life is less utilitarian than many people wish. Even if our conversation is more efficient, it generates not one bit of value - at least financially. It does amuse me, but I'm not really sure that's very valuable.
>It does amuse me, but I'm not really sure that's very valuable.
That's valuable. It lowers the demand for jetskis and cocaine, at a fraction of the price. Also, there's not much point in life if being entertained isn't valuable.
I can cut down trees and exchange it with my friends as a
medium of exchange and call it value.
It has no value to the wider economy or world but to us, and even though it has value to my friends it's a terrible, wasteful and unethical way to generate value. I am not generating value, just wasting trees.
You just can't create money or value out of nothing. Its linked to utility, markets, labour and the wider economy and belies the fundamental confusion in the crypto world about money. But intoxicated by the prospect, like alchemists and other charlatans before them the crypto community continue to fantasize about gaining something from nothing.
You know that trees are pretty much the definition of a renewable resource, right? As in, I have a large sustainable forestry operation and they are cutting trees down as I type this. I own it, I don't do the work.
That wood builds your house, provides heat, provides jobs, makes dowels, and makes paper - depending on what is harvested. And, it will be able to do so in perpetuity. The process is called TSI and is even able to increase habitats for the animals - they are delicious.
I'm not sure we can have a productive conversation.
The value of wood derives from utility. You can see and understand the utility of wood and yet do not see the absurdity of cutting down trees and burning them as 'proof of work' for zero utility simply because 'you' want to use it as a medium of exchange and speculation?
This is what current crypto currencies are doing. How long before people notice you are wasting wood for no purpose and put a stop to your activities?
It's not just the electricity, it's major wear and tear on lots of hardware with no real purpose.
This get's worse the more different currencies there are and the more people are farming them.
While I like the basic idea behind Bitcoin, I really don't like this development of "Let's invent a couple of dozen more of those!".
It also shows the ugly face of how what we as human societies actually value. While I haven't compared any numbers, I'm pretty sure Folding@home or Seti@home can only dream of having the kind of computing power available to them that some of these cryptocurrencies manage to mobilize.
You want my cycles to find a cure for cancer? Nah, I'll keep my cycles to myself.
Using my cycles to make the imaginiary profits? Sweet, let's buy warehouses full of hardware!
You say "no real purpose" but what you mean is "a purpose I don't value". That's fine, don't do it. The problem comes when you think that people doing things you don't like is somehow wrong.
People have attempted to make scientific computing good for proof of work-- GRIDCoin is an example. But it doesn't work for actually securing the network, due to the nature of how blockchains work.
You're free to work or mine or do whatever you want and then donate that money to scientific research.
But what makes you think you know better how I should spend my money? You don't even know how I'm spending my money.
> The problem comes when you think that people doing things you don't like is somehow wrong.
I should have clarified that more: As I said before I have no issue with the basic concept behind cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is a great thing and will hopefully do even greater things in the future.
And of course, everybody is to free to do with their time and resources as they please, never suggested otherwise.
What I have an issue with is how new currencies seem to be popping up like mushrooms because they've become the current "thing" to do if you want to make a quick buck. From the outside, it just looks like a bunch of pump and dump schemes, with no purpose besides offering a couple of early adopters the chance to make temporary huge profits, comparable to a digital Wall Street.
Originally I imagined BC as the solution to all the exchange rate shenanigans and whatnot, have one global and digital currency for everybody. Instead, we are now forking currencies like software, I'm not sure I like the possible long-term ramifications of that. Do we really want a future with hundreds, if not thousands of different, and competing, cryptocurrencies? Is such a future even viable?
Alts, like internet startups in the Dotcom era, fall into three categories:
1. Genuinely new ideas from clueless people who will fail (because they don't understand that distributed systems are hard, Satoshi made it look easy)
2. Genuinely new ideas from good devs that will succeed (extremely rare, I consider that Bitcoin is the only chain that meets that requirement for me, though some others might in the future)
3. Blatent schemes to try and grab money because there is huge interest.
It's really hard to tell what category something is going to fall into... but the thing is, bitcoin has had massive returns and if you can produce a really good innovation, the impact on society and consequently the returns could be equally massive.
So yes there is a lot of speculative money out there, but the only way to tell the good from the crap is to do your due diligence.
For me, even if the good is %1 (and I think it's a bit less than that right now) it's ok.
Competition is not always the best approach, especially for a currency.
I'd rather see a unified and simplified monetary system than "cryptocurrency wars" where vast amounts of "wealth" would just suddenly vanish into thin air, as a myriad of different currencies would struggle for relevance.
It's not like we haven't learned these lessons before in the real world, we have, plenty of times. That's why it's so surprising how keen we seem to be on repeating them in a digital format for the sole sake of having yet another speculative vehicle from which we can deduct some imaginary "economic growth".
Cryptocurrency "mining" consists of essentially burning money, by design (proof of work and all that). I don't have to know a lot about you to know that's a poor way to spend your money.
Silly. Comparing the entire infrastructure of bitcoin to just a tiny sliver of the credit infrastructure. You need to include on the other side, all the energy the employees use, the buildings, the gas in their cars, the computers they run, and all of this for the related companies and the like. Or you just look at the cost in energy of finding the one correct hash for that block-- which again is going to be two or three orders of magnitude less than a credit card swipe (and the communications systems it needs for an auth)
Further, the cost per transaction in bitcoin a year from now will be about 1,000,000 times lower due to Lightening Network.
I know there's a political desire to demonize bitcoin (this is vice, not exactly an objective source) and that ignoring one side of the equation to try and make bitcoin out to be an environmental evil seems the best approach you can get but its' absurd on its face.
why stop there? Why not complain about the wealthy individuals over at Wall Street or Silicon Valley syndicates? Or how about the amount of food waste that occurs everyday?
You're argument barely makes a blip. Perhaps if you should choose not to browse reddit or hacker news at least 3 times per week to save the environment.
But when it comes to money, greed and self interest always triumph and there will be dozens stretching logic and apologism as far as it can go.
'Proof of work' has to the most hare-brained, wasteful, anti-environment scheme ever thought of. Responsible people should not just be wasting electricity in this manner.