newbie
undisambiguated
if there is a simple fix to reduce the insane power consumption the Bitcoin project uses, then it needs to be implemented asap. Reduce by a factor of 100 million or so.
Bitcoin discussion and news
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bimble
floofy
Attempts to defend the energy use do lay bare the blinkeredness and selfishness of some of its cheerleededs.
Eg)“It costs $1000 to mine 1 bitcoin. What does it cost to print US dollar? which one is the fraud?”
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/why...e-electricity-than-159-countries-is-positive/
Eg)“It costs $1000 to mine 1 bitcoin. What does it cost to print US dollar? which one is the fraud?”
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/why...e-electricity-than-159-countries-is-positive/
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
That article is complete nonsense. It is not a 'robust store of value'. This is simply absurd. It only has any value at all if there are people prepared to pay for it. What it has is, as the article says, immutability. And that comes at a very high cost, so it's a really shit store of value - a huge chunk of the value you want to store has to go towards paying to get the storage jar to put it in. A good store of value is something like a fiat currency, which can be run at a tiny fraction of the actual value the currency represents.
This article doesn't get the nature of money at all, imo. It is mistaking the symbol for that which it symbolises. This is dangerous nonsense.
Far from storing value, bitcoin destroys value. In the case of the coal-powered 'mines' mentioned earlier, it literally burns value.
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mauvais
on reddit or something
No, because exactly like any commodity, the biggest and most powerful players in the market sell first and everyone else is johnny come-lately-fucked.
not-bono-ever
meh
Bitcoin and the Law of Conservation of Energy - CoinDesk
Do not know where to start on this. So will just leave it out there
Its almost Reichian IYKWIM
Do not know where to start on this. So will just leave it out there
Its almost Reichian IYKWIM
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
It's a cult, complete with its own pseudoscience. He takes his metaphor about energy and treats it as a literal truth. That's the first paragraph. After that is classic nonsense on stilts.
not-bono-ever
meh
Orgone
Holy crap. That’s one of the worst examples of mistaking a metaphor for reality I’ve ever seen.
It reminds me of the ridiculous jokes that start with “money = root(evil) and derive some formulaic “proof” from it. Money is not LITERALLY work, in the sense that physics means it!
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
This is a batshit example, but other things quoted have been saying similarly stupid things, such as that it is a robust store of value. Money is simply an idea we have in our heads, a chain of ious, and we use an agreed system of tokens to symbolise it. Moving away from the idea that the tokens themselves need to have an intrinsic value was an advance in the idea of money, imo. This tries to go back to that, but most absurdly, it tries to make a virtue out of the amount of actual real value (stuff in the world, real, physical energy being turned into higher entropy forms of energy) needed to make the tokens. Add to that the fact that it 'stores' the value in a way that means it stops circulating and you have a doubly destructive thing. Whatever your criticisms of money, if you don't understand that its utility comes from its circulation, you don't understand money, imo. These people don't understand money. Either that or they understand well enough, and are simply selling a con.
There is one crucial difference between gold and bitcoin, and it is that, while gold may mostly be essentially useless, it can be used as a ostentatious display of wealth, in jewellery etc, while losing none of its exchange value. It is desired for itself, for its shininess. There's nothing shiny about a bitcoin. You can't wear it on a date. It's not a coincidence that the things used as currency in the past, like cowries or gold, were considered to have an essential aesthetic value to them that inspired the confidence to accept them as payment.
I made a mistake earlier in thinking that this was like going back to the gold standard. It's not really. It's like going back to using actual gold coins.
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ffsear
Well-Known Member
The miners are the biggest players surely ?
wayward bob
i ate all your bees
re power consumption mr b says
i'd ask him what proof of stake means but it'd only encourage him
i'd ask him what proof of stake means but it'd only encourage him
mauvais
on reddit or something
No. You can mine and hold as much Bitcoin as you like, but it's only worth whatever other people think it's worth, just like any other commodity. Whoever has best access to the market - the one involving real money - and the best ability to manipulate that market is the one who will win biggest in a crisis, a crisis that they may well initiate. The idiots will be left with their exact same amount of bitcoins but they'll be worth nothing.
Who are those people? The same as with any other commodity - the algorithmic traders and the serious money. And they'll be trading via entities outside of blockchain rather than fucking about with transactions.
Think The Big Short but instead of increasingly shit mortgages and obfuscated CDSs, it's worthless tokens all the way down from the beginning.
ffsear
Well-Known Member
Confused, I would have thought the miners have the best access to the market, because the decision ultimately lies with them as to how many bitcoins are publicly available to everyone else. The bitcoins they mine don't go direct to the public exchanges, they go into their wallets. Coins that the have earned without paying the full market price for. They control the flow of bitcoins.
joustmaster
offcumdun
Has anyone bothered to read the power claims properly?
It seems a bit vague... When people are saying its per transaction, are they correct? Or do they mean per block?
It seems a bit vague... When people are saying its per transaction, are they correct? Or do they mean per block?
camouflage
gaslit at scale.
It takes quite a setup to mine bitcoins seriously, you'll have power costs, maintenance, utilities. So you need to sell at least some of the bitcoins to pay these costs.
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mauvais
on reddit or something
No. Imagine this. You have some large percentage of the world's bitcoins, acquired through mining. You are keeping them because they are appreciating. A larger percentage are in free circulation. They have to be, because liquidity is required to generate a successful market. Absolute hoarders of bitcoin would fuck themselves over.
Me, I borrow as many bitcoins as possible from whoever will lend them, and lend they will, because of their halfwit belief in the infallibility of bitcoin. This is my short. I can pay for this borrowing because I have actual money.
Because I'm well connected in this real world of actual money, and actual morons, and not just your cryptocurrency imaginationland, I can make real world dollar trades en masse very very quickly. This is what I do.
I sell all the bitcoins I borrowed as quickly as possible, flooding the market and causing an enormous crash. Confidence collapses and causes a chain reaction of selling. With the price in the toilet by a much bigger factor than I could have achieved on my own, I buy the same amount for next to nothing. That I can do this effectively is key. I give these dirt cheap purchases back to whoever I borrowed the other ones from, settling my loan. Short complete, I am loaded. You are having a terrible time.
Then I go & do it all again until you are broke.
Under the right conditions I could do this with any commodity and I could certainly do it with bitcoin. There's nothing special about it in this context.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Can you answer that? I don't know. The idea that each transaction takes that much energy makes no sense to me given that I've seen various things for sale in bitcoins - drugs from Chinese pharmacies, for instance - that it wouldn't be feasible to sell at those prices using that much energy.
ffsear
Well-Known Member
Yea, i fully understand how short selling works, but if you want to borrow a large amount of bitcoins in order to set of some kind of market panic and drive the market down, where do you go? There's not enough transparency in the market.
Say i offered to lend you 10,000 bitcoins right now and wanted them back in 1 month. Would you go short? Is 10,000 enough? Do you think you can move the market? Do you think you'll make money?
joustmaster
offcumdun
I can't answer it...
Miners create blocks. Each block has thousands of transactions in them. But not a set number. It also generates some coin for the miners. I kind of think thats what they are talking about. But I can't (be bothered to) find an news article telling me.
mauvais
on reddit or something
Of course I personally don't, because I'm not a bank. But you should be afraid of the bank that's big enough to successfully strategise this, because this is fuck all to do with mining or blockchain or any other magic bollocks, and everything to do with the mainstream economics that this lot think they're not part of.
As for how you assemble a short, I think you're too late in asking the question. Look around, there's already a massive derivatives market for the stuff. It doesn't matter whether you yourself are willing to take part, just whether enough people are.
not-bono-ever
meh
there is a finite number of BC obvs, thats how it works, this is why the algos get more progressively difficult to solve and require more power to mine.Its hard to draw a comparison to the real world, as pretty much nothing else had this limit imposed.Will there be a Damascene moment when there are no more BC to find and the 21 million have been got - what then?
for sure in the world of BC, mining ( and the obsene energy expened) will cease. unless there is another one to take its place.
for sure in the world of BC, mining ( and the obsene energy expened) will cease. unless there is another one to take its place.
joustmaster
offcumdun
the mining will continue.
with out the "mining" there can be no transactions.
mauvais
on reddit or something
You don't need BTC transactions to transfer value, and thus to use the things, although it becomes pretty stupid without them.
joustmaster
offcumdun
I'm not sure what this means.
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