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This is just willful blurring and contradiction of terms really.

What do words even mean? That's why I wanted to affirm the definition of money we were using.

The idea that having a product that consumes energy being intrinsic to searching for renewable sources is classing free market fundamentalist thinking. People will use the cheapest energy available, whilst doing their best to attain security for the future, sure. But that can be said of any business that has energy demands - even petrol companies are investing in renewables.

It doesn't mean we'll get there before the earth is uninhabitable - that's capitalism.

Your point about self aware machines predicates itself on the idea that bitcoin miners are slaves.

E2A: Edited for grammar and clarity
 
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q_w_e_r_t_y said:
NoXion The idea that beavers dont have a value system is simply human supremacy, thinking that human are somehow more sophisticated than those dumb animals that are purely motivated by survival and instinct. Survival and instinct are certainly related to what mammals ...human and non-human....give value to, but both beavers and humans make value based decisions in the context of survival and instinct. Value in an economic sense is merely the reifiation of that expression of values.
Click to expand...

It is more than that. Where are the trade routes that beavers operate? Even pre-agricultural humans traded goods over long distances. There are none, because social relationships between beavers do not extend beyond the familial. Whereas humans have developed a vast, highy interconnected global economy which they actively participate in, and which they shape with their every action. This isn't human supremacy or whatever other rhetorical distractions you want to throw up, I'm talking about directly observable behaviours. The differences are so great and numerous that I am honestly astonished that you are trying to meaningfully equate them.

Your point about AI becoming a worker when it is fully autonomous is interesting. Why does it have to be a "worker"? There are loads of examples of workerless production. I produced a set of shelves the other week, no one told me to do that, no one paid me to do that, I was not a "worker" in any traditional economic sense, but still the shelves got built. Why can AI not become autonomous agents seeking out the means by which to express their value schema to the world?
Click to expand...

Your example of "workerless" production is nonsense - did you cut the wood for the shelves yourself, or was someone else paid to do it? What about the land the tree was grown on? Who tended that?

An AI will still need electricity to run, even if it doesn't need to sleep or eat. It can't pursue goals while switched off for a lack of energy. Even if it has access to its own renewable energy sources, those would still have to be maintained. If the AI is completely self-sufficient for all things, then what possible reason does it have to participate in human economies? If its producing stuff because that's its only overriding goal, then what we would have is a paperclip maximiser. Such things are more likely to try turning the universe into paperclips than actually do anything useful for humans. If you replace "paperclips" with "profits" in the link given, you get something that looks a lot like the corporations that are currently trashing the planet in the pursuit of their goals. To avoid this, AIs must have goals and values more akin to people than corporations.

Until then, stuff like robotics and AI are tools. Powerful ones yes, which can make a handful of workers vastly more productive than before. But the same dynamics still apply. Capital is still needed to start up, where's that coming from? They make maintenance and operations less labour-intensive than it used to be, but you still need humans pressing buttons somewhere.
 
Hearse Pileup Some people who do bitcoin mining are autonomous, some are wage slaves. Same as any industry really.

NoXion Yes, humans have a much more sophisticated and extensive economy than beavers, and their value system is imposed because of this, but the fact that humans can enact their values more effectively than beavers doesnt mean that a beaver doesnt understand value or operate within a values based system.

Take it closer to home with companion species. If you have ever had a dog, you will know that a dog has values...beef is valued over turkey, squeeky toy is valued over fluffy toy, loyalty over inquisitiveness, affection over stimulation or vice versa. Every dog is unique and has a unique value system, just like humans. Training is a way of working with a dog to negotiate your value system (cushions are valued by me) and theirs (ham bones are valued by Rover). You and the dog mutually communicate and exchange those values. Dogs dont (usually) use money, but treats, toys, affection etc are all used as proto-currency.

It doesnt matter about the wood or the land, I had a pile of screws and wood, now I have shelves. I produced those shelves from screws and wood, without external instruction or compensation. The production of the shelves from the wood and screws was "workerless".

[QUOTE[ To avoid this, AIs must have goals and values more akin to people than corporations [/QUOTE]

But this is just more human supremacy. Corporations are human entities. To avoid paperclip/profit maximisation AI must have goals and values that are less akin to people and more like the value system of all living beings. The idea that people (which people? Wall street financiers? Amazonian tribesmen? Coalminers?) have an inherantly superior value system just because they are human is the problem, not the solution.
 
q_w_e_r_t_y

I'm saddened that you have wasted many hours thinking about this. It's hard to work out the best way in, but it seems to me that this:

"Bitcoin is crystalised stored energy."

is the core mistake from which everything else grows.

All I can ask is that you think about this, and think carefully about what energy is. It's not an abstraction, but a finite, measurable physical quantity that changes from one form to another - in this case, from a lower entropy form to a higher entropy form.
 
qwerty said:
Bitcoin has been around for 11 years. Humans have been destroying the environment for centuries, the last century in particular has seen a massive acceleration in that destruction. The petro-dollar runs on finite energy (oil) with infinite currency; a bitcoin economy is run on finite currency with unlimited energy. It is directly in the interests of people who believe in bitcoin to maximise the resources and attention going to renewable sources. The idea that if bitcoin didnt exist we would have all this renewable energy for other things is a nonsense - we wouldnt have the renewable energy with bitcoin miners driving its sourcing. The technological advances driven by mining far outweigh any other drivers.
Click to expand...

oh come on. You made a claim that there was no more environmentally friendly industry than bitcoin mining. Do you want to defend your claim that bitcoin mining is the most environmentally friendly industry on earth "bar none"?

Now you are claiming that it is the biggest driver of renewable energy capacity.

Lets see
Paris climate accords. Was this because of bitcoin miners? No?
UK national grid will be carbon neutral by 2025. Is this because of bitcoin miners? No?
Solar and Wind supply is now the cheapest form of electricity to put into place so that drives the installation. Did that happen because of bitcoin miners? Of course fucking not.
and so on and on and on.
bitcoin miners look for places with cheap electricity to supply and setup there. They are not driving fuck all, as LBJ I think posted about already. apparently 0.21% of energy usage is in bitcoin mining. This is obviously tiny in the context of global energy supply, even just google alone uses 1/3rd of that. It's a total waste of energy which is why it's a problem where google et al isn't. Google have commiteed to 100% renewable energy, as have other tech companies, and between them they will be using more energy than bitcoin mining without a doubt. There are other industries that use far more energy than bitcoin mining does but you think that mining drives advances far more than anything else?

stop with these stupid fucking claims. There are far bigger drivers than bitcoin which has only existed since 2009 ffs. Do you really think that the weight of EU governments pursuing the paris climate accords is because of bitcoin miners??

As for lost coins, the coins dont cease to exist, they are still there, inaccessible, but still there. Approx 4m coins are assumed to be lost. A person who owns 1btc still owns 1/21m of the total supply, but a greater percentage of the circulating supply, which increases as per the mining schedule and decreases with the monetary velocity. Lost coins decrease the monetary velocity, but they do not change the total supply.

Bitcoins are infinitely divisible. You can get 0.00000000000000001 of a bitcoin, so if the circulating supply of btc decreases significantly, the greater the subdivision. But as I explained before dividing doesnt increase the supply. In fiat, when a dollar is printed it is worth the same as all the other dollars out there. In bitcoin when it is subdivided it is only worth a fraction of the original, the total supply is fixed.
Click to expand...

So what you are saying is that as coins get lost, you effectively create new ones by dividing the existing ones.
I mean if I have to buy something and someone wants 1btc for it, then I need 1 btc. 0.00000000000000000000000000000001 btc is no help. Not unless they change their prices.
So as btc gets further and further divided to cover the needs of transactions in the economy, people must drop prices right? Which means deflation which means people hold onto money instead of spending it which means economy goes fucked.
Why would I spend a btc today if it's going to be worth more tomorrow? And if you are saying everyone will hold onto their btc then this is just speculation now, just another commodity like any other, since nobody is actually using it as a currency.

What happens to a business that bought something and now has to lower its prices because coins are being split because of lost coins and now they are losing money on anything they sell?

What happens when all 21m coins are lost and inaccessible?
What happens when the coins that there are do not circulate quickly enough to cover the transactions required in the bitcoin economy?

The phrase "the price of everything and the value of nothing" is perfectly exemplified by that comment.
Click to expand...

Are you trying to claim bitcoin has an intrinsic value, in and of itself?
Because the only value I can see of it (or any currency, money or store of value) is the things that you can buy with it.
And since you can't buy fuck all with bitcoins, its value is totally dependent on the exchange value to £ or whatever currency things are actually priced in.
 
q_w_e_r_t_y: Yes, but the machines involved are what I'm talking about. As far as I can tell you are trying to conflate labourers with the tools they use. Do you bear a distinction to the bitcoin miners' owner (they guy who set up the server that runs the machine), and the server itself? If you do, do you consider them both 'labourers'? If you do, do you condone machine slavery? Does this not make bitcoin mining unethical?
 
Chilli.s said:
Don't all investments, shares, currency trading etc use electricity though, not just bitcoin?
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BigTom said:
Yes [...]
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Well, no, not really. I mean, these things predate electricity. The modern electronic trading of these things, the facilitation of the market, is different to the underlying 'value' of the things being traded. You can ask questions about whether those things do have tangible value, but it's not a value inherently linked to resource consumption. Often the two are roughly proportionately linked somehow, that's capitalism after all, but not always.
 
q_w_e_r_t_y said:
NoXion Yes, humans have a much more sophisticated and extensive economy than beavers, and their value system is imposed because of this, but the fact that humans can enact their values more effectively than beavers doesnt mean that a beaver doesnt understand value or operate within a values based system.
Click to expand...

No, you have to prove that they do such a thing in the first place. That's how the burden of evidence works.

Take it closer to home with companion species. If you have ever had a dog, you will know that a dog has values...beef is valued over turkey, squeeky toy is valued over fluffy toy, loyalty over inquisitiveness, affection over stimulation or vice versa. Every dog is unique and has a unique value system, just like humans. Training is a way of working with a dog to negotiate your value system (cushions are valued by me) and theirs (ham bones are valued by Rover). You and the dog mutually communicate and exchange those values. Dogs dont (usually) use money, but treats, toys, affection etc are all used as proto-currency.
Click to expand...

Now you are moving the goalposts to talk about a species domesticated by humans, rather than a wild one. But in any case, what you are doing here is applying economic concepts to an organism that doesn't even know what money is. I don't think it's a coincidence that in this neoliberal age, this kind of market logic unrooted in reality is trampling on ground where it doesn't belong.

It doesnt matter about the wood or the land, I had a pile of screws and wood, now I have shelves. I produced those shelves from screws and wood, without external instruction or compensation. The production of the shelves from the wood and screws was "workerless".
Click to expand...

Without the wood or the land to grow it on, you can't make any shelves! That's fundamentally important. That you dismiss them as irrelevant just goes to show how detached your conception of economics is from the real world. Those screws had to be manufactured as well. The raw ores had to be mined, then processed into metals, then made into blanks before being made into screws. Transportation would be involved between many if not all of those stages. The fact that you built the shelves yourself does not isolate it from the rest of human labour.

But this is just more human supremacy. Corporations are human entities. To avoid paperclip/profit maximisation AI must have goals and values that are less akin to people and more like the value system of all living beings. The idea that people (which people? Wall street financiers? Amazonian tribesmen? Coalminers?) have an inherantly superior value system just because they are human is the problem, not the solution.
Click to expand...

Corporations are not human, no more than cars are human because we build them. Are people not living beings?
 
This obsession with inflation is a weird one. It's only right that money should slowly lose its value over time if it doesn't circulate. Why? Entropy - the work it represents mostly goes down in value over time as order gives way to disorder. I've said this before, but this obsession keeps coming up. I paint a wall in a way that will last 10 years - there is 10 years' worth of painted wall when I finish. In five years' time, there is only five years' worth of painted wall left. The value of my work painting the wall has gone down over time. After 10 years, it has no value left, and the wall has to be painted again.

This isn't me cheerleading capitalism or anything. It's just the wrong thing to be attacking. And as others have pointed out, bitcoin mining is nothing if not a typical capitalist activity, with one crucial difference - most capitalist activities build value of some kind or another. Newly painted walls.

And it's worth repeating: money circulates. That's its job. It's a crucial part of what distinguishes it from commodities, which are things people own and buy and sell. Aside from the small amounts of cash we carry around, none of us really has any money at all most of the time. Our current accounts empty and fill again on roughly monthly cycles, while our savings accounts accrue interest because the money has been loaned out back into circuation.
 
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q_w_e_r_t_y said:
Whether or not people knew about the energy is irrelevant. They chose something that takes a great deal of energy to create to represent value.

Let me see if I can break down my last paragraph a bit.

The value of bitcoin is unchanging, one bitcoin is always worth one bitcoin, 1/21m of the total supply.

Bitcoin is mined according to an algorithm. That algorithm controls the fixed total supply of 21m and the gradual increase in the circulating supply from zero to 21m over 130ish years on a known release rate. Contrast with the dollar, one dollar was worth more of the total supply than it was ten years ago and there is no way to predict what percentage of the total supply it may be in the future. So within the dollar system, one dollar in 2010 is worth less than one dollar in 2020, but one btc is, was and will always be 1/21m of the total supply.



Yes its exchange rate with the dollar goes up and down in the short term, but over the longer term the exchange rate operates predictably on a four year cycle that can be relatively easily calculated.from the amount of energy that has been dispensed into the network (the hashrate) and current dollar cost per joule summed.

This is a good read on the energy value equivalence.

medium.com

Bitcoin Value-Energy Equivalence

The Intrinsic Value of Bitcoin as Determined by Energy Spent
medium.com medium.com
Click to expand...
The value of good doesn't come from the energy needed to create it but from the labour that goes into prospecting and mining it. It's scarce so takes a lot of labour to extract. Don't know why anyone would think this somehow discredits the labour theory of value.
 
SpineyNorman said:
The value of good doesn't come from the energy needed to create it but from the labour that goes into prospecting and mining it. It's scarce so takes a lot of labour to extract. Don't know why anyone would think this somehow discredits the labour theory of value.
Click to expand...
The labour RELATED theory of value apparently.
 
Saul Goodman said:
I get the feeling those hours would have been better spent Googling "environmentally friendly"
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Really they should use Ecosia rather than Google. The most environmentally friendly way to search the internet.

www.ecosia.org

Ecosia - the search engine that plants trees

Ecosia uses the ad revenue from your searches to plant trees where they are needed the most. By searching with Ecosia, you’re not only reforesting our planet, but you’re also empowering the communities around our planting projects to build a better future for themselves. Give it a try!
www.ecosia.org www.ecosia.org
 
free spirit said:
Being as bitcoins are now trading at 1/3 of the rate they peaked at towards the end of last year, and have been falling almost continuously since the summer, is it now safe to assume that as predicted, Bitcoin was just an investment bubble and that the bubble is deflating?
Click to expand...

No
 
What alternatives are there to Coinbase? The pricks seem to request Photo ID every sodding time I log in - not the largest of issues (I've little to hide, etc) , but it's now it's been under review for 3 days :mad:
 
Ted Striker said:
What alternatives are there to Coinbase? The pricks seem to request Photo ID every sodding time I log in - not the largest of issues (I've little to hide, etc) , but it's now it's been under review for 3 days :mad:
Click to expand...
I've been using Binance, this is a cheeky referral link should you wish to sign up :)

www.binance.com

Bitcoin Exchange | Cryptocurrency Exchange | Binance

Binance cryptocurrency exchange - We operate the worlds biggest bitcoin exchange and altcoin crypto exchange in the world by volume
www.binance.com www.binance.com
 
I seem to be seeing more Bitcoin spam over the last few months, mainly this 'Mirror' article where various famous people appear on breakfast telly where the guest has the presenter invest £250 live on air.

Today it's Bill Gates taking time out to share his financial wisdom with presenter Charlie who turned £250 into £483.18 in 3 minutes! :eek: :D


Screen Shot 2020-12-01 at 12.19.20.png
 
NoXion said:
If bitcoin is so great, why haven't billionaires bought them all? They've got more than enough money to do it.
Click to expand...

I understand that they are increasingly becoming concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer super-rich individuals.
 
Athos said:
I understand that they are increasingly becoming concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer super-rich individuals.
Click to expand...

I know that, but there's a whole spectrum of wealth that exists between billionaires and ordinary schmoes. My impression was that the crypto hoarders were largely rich hustler types who may well be trying to become billionaires, but haven't done so yet.
 
Ted Striker said:
What alternatives are there to Coinbase? The pricks seem to request Photo ID every sodding time I log in - not the largest of issues (I've little to hide, etc) , but it's now it's been under review for 3 days :mad:
Click to expand...

Crypto.com?

You can also get a visa card from them (with crypto cashback under certain conditions)
 
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