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Servers convert pretty much all their energy into heat. Plus the energy required to chill the datacentre which will typically be about another 1/5 of the energy used for the power on top of the IT load and that is being generous.

I was going to look for more bold claims, but in the first site linked by q_w_e_r_t_y has this little nugget:

In an equally interdisciplinary pursuit, previous episodes of TWIMS have explored the qualities of money through a lens of Austrian economics and philosophical thought while also taking inspiration from physics and biological evolution. Past guests of the podcast have described Bitcoin as a form of cybernetic life (Michael Saylor), an augmentation of humanity’s psychotechnology (John Vervaeke, assistant professor of cognitive science) and a form of liquid biological fitness (Geoffrey Miller, professor of evolutionary psychology).
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TWIMS is The ‘What is Money?’ Show


The Wiki on Austrian School said:
The Austrian School is a heterodox[1][2][3] school of economic thought that advocates strict adherence to methodological individualism,
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The Wiki on Methodological Individualism said:
In the social sciences, methodological individualism is the principle that subjective individual motivation explains social phenomena, rather than class or group dynamics which are illusory or artificial and therefore cannot truly explain market or social phenomena. This concept was introduced as an assumption in the social sciences by Max Weber, and discussed in his book Economy and Society.[1]
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So even a webpage posted by someone who continually claims Crypto is for the betterment of the masses is just a webpage with a load of libertarian and anarcho-capitalist wank, which time and time again has been proven not to work when tried on even a small scale; most people aren't that individualistic and it's only the powerful that benefit.
 
Storm Fox said:
TWIMS is The ‘What is Money?’ Show
Click to expand...
Each of those idiots can have one each.

:facepalm:

:facepalm:

:facepalm:

I watched a few seconds of each and that's all it took for them to say something stupid. The evo-psych man thinks money replaced barter. You'd think a show calling itself 'What is Money?' would have got some of the basics sorted out.

That's the problem with most of this stuff. It's wrong about something very important right at the start of its thinking. it then builds an edifice of bullshit, much of it no doubt internally consistent and likely-sounding.
 
Rob Ray said:
What a fluffy world you live in.

All this reminds me of the telephone directory-sized lists of UK benefits rules, where they spent decades trying to codify every aspect of the complexity of human experience so no-one got more than they should. All those little things that can go wrong like the milk money not being there one week because your bastard kid nicked it. That whole attitude has caused nothing but the most dystopian possible situation, with volunteers who half-understand the system trying every day to help people who don't understand it at all, yet have to try and navigate its labyrinth of bullshit just to try and get enough to cover their basics.

The trouble with "smart" contracts is that they aren't smart at all, nor particularly new. In fact they're just a tech fetish re-imagining of a very old, and miserable, concept in which, as you so proudly note, "human terms" are an inconvenience. But "human" is messy, it's not clean nor codifiable.
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It's nothing like the old benefits system. You're comparing apples to sea-lions.
 
I'm very confused by that.

First up, even renewable energy sources are not carbon-neutral. You have to factor in the energy used to manufacture the infrastructure in the first place.

But second, this idea of carbon-negative electricity production is puzzling.

If they mean making electricity from methane using, say, bacteria, that's a tech that is very much in its infancy.

If, more likely, they mean burning methane from landfill, well that's a good way to make electricity, but there is only so much landfill - if it's being used to power bitcoin miners, then it's not being used for other things. Hogging resources isn't carbon neutral.

Otherwise, there is the greenwashing idea of 'offsetting' your carbon footprint – buying carbon credits, planting trees etc – which isn't carbon-neutral at all.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
I'm very confused by that.

First up, even renewable energy sources are not carbon-neutral. You have to factor in the energy used to manufacture the infrastructure in the first place.

But second, this idea of carbon-negative electricity production is puzzling.

If they mean making electricity from methane using, say, bacteria, that's a tech that is very much in its infancy.

If, more likely, they mean burning methane from landfill, well that's a good way to make electricity, but there is only so much landfill - if it's being used to power bitcoin miners, then it's not being used for other things. Hogging resources isn't carbon neutral.

Otherwise, there is the greenwashing idea of 'offsetting' your carbon footprint – buying carbon credits, planting trees etc – which isn't carbon-neutral at all.
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Using flared gas.
Excess methane is usually burnt off but if it is used, it is rendered less harmful.
It produces less CO2 to mine bitcoin in this scenario than not to
 
q_w_e_r_t_y said:
Using flared gas.
Excess methane is usually burnt off but if it is used, it is rendered less harmful.
It produces less CO2 to mine bitcoin in this scenario than not to
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Not really true, is it. You're hogging resources that could be used for other things.

That's a bit like Western countries claiming to have reduced emission when in reality they've just exported them to the countries they buy stuff from.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Not really true, is it. You're hogging resources that could be used for other things.
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But what else are you going to use the flared gas for. Its waste material. It is literally burnt for no purpose. If it could be used it would be, gas is not cheap these days as anyone looking at their bill will attest to.
 
q_w_e_r_t_y said:
But what else are you going to use the flared gas for. Its waste material. It is literally burnt for no purpose. If it could be used it would be, gas is not cheap these days as anyone looking at their bill will attest to.
Click to expand...

If it could be economically turned in to energy, it already would be - much of it is intermittent or remote and can't be contained safely. There's already several systems in use for capturing or generating energy from flare gas; most APG flarings in the UK at least are only done as a last resort and you need special dispensation to be allowed to do so. Russia, surprise surprise, is the biggest polluter in this regard.

Still, the article's position that flared gas is somehow carbon neutral is pure bunkum in the same way that setting fire to some coal because no-one is using it is not carbon neutral. And if it were possible to turn flare gas in to energy (and it is, and it's been happening for years already, just not everywhere) then there's a thousand other more useful things to use it on than bitcoin et al.
 
It already is turned into electricity.
90MW from the UK Landfill Gas Monitoring | Landfill Gas To Energy - Biffa for example.
So all this is not new, nothing to do with bitcoin and just ensuring that energy used for bitcoin it is wasted as heat from servers doing pointless math for a volatile commodity that if it does become widely used is going to back libertarian ideas.
The energy is not going to be magically tied up in the results as that is not how reality works.
 
gosub said:
fortune.com

No one's using crypto to pay for things anymore, JPMorgan payments boss says

As crypto prices get battered, its use as a payment service tool doesn't look so great either
fortune.com fortune.com
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To declare 'crypto' as unsuitable for payments is laughable.

It's also a very lazy and clumsy statement.

It's long been established that native crypto tokens are not really suitable for payments to conventional businesses. However some blockchains are already being used for payments of USD.
 
Ahlan said:
I've been away on summer travels for a short while.
How well this has aged in only a month :eek:
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The change over 5 days in sterling versus the dollar is about 5% and there is a fuckwit in charge and it is a total disaster. But that's just a typical day-to-day fluctuation in Crypto land and happens quite often.
So are you saying that most days Crypto has catastrophic price fluctuations?
 
Storm Fox said:
The change over 5 days in sterling versus the dollar is about 5% and there is a fuckwit in charge and it is a total disaster. But that's just a typical day-to-day fluctuation in Crypto land and happens quite often.
So are you saying that most days Crypto has catastrophic price fluctuations?
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This morning it was actually a 9% swing over the last 5 days, which seems very high for a currency of a developed country imo. 22% over 7 months. It really is getting into crypto volatility territory.

Besides, pointing out that there's a fuckwit in charge isn't really a good arguement when holding any given fiat currency up against bitcoin.
 
Crispy said:
With crypto, the fuckwittery is distributed
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Bitcoin's immutable hard coded policy is distributed, yes. Whether you like it or not is up to you, but at least you can trust that it won't be changed on a whim.
How's your trust going with the government and central bankers?
 
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