
Is Bitcoin a Waste of Electricity, or Something Worse? - chenster
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/business/economy/bitcoin-electricity-productivity.html
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exabrial
I would imagine the vast majority of bitcoin is not mined using clean energy,
so yes, something far worse.

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prostoalex
When the electricity prices are demand-driven, the question is meaningless.

If one thinks that the energy can be put to a better use, they can set up a
shop next door and start paying slightly more per kWh than the miner, thereby
destroying their margins.

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anyfoo
Except that the resources here are finite, and using them has side effects.

Gosh this is ridiculous, why do I even have to explain it. If someone starts
wasting fire extinguishers by emptying them out a window, do you proclaim that
"if one thinks that the fire extinguisher can be put to a better use, they can
start using them for that better purpose next door"?

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prostoalex
Where do they get the money to buy new extinguishers?

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anyfoo
Depends on who buys them. The point, to completely overdraw the analogy, is:
Fire extinguishers are finite, and using them damages everybody's house. So
wasting them excessively on pointless activities might not be the smartest
thing to do, even if you just waste your own money on them.

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jakupovic
You still don't get that if that electricity had a better/profitable use it
would be used for such a purpose rather than Bitcoin mining.

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peterburkimsher
Is Bitcoin efficient? Perhaps not. But it's no worse than the alternative -
banks.

Story 1. I went to Taipei to meet someone from HN. He wanted to pay me back
for my train tickets. His American bank card didn't work in the ATM. I
suggested, half-jokingly, "Why not Bitcoin?" When he was back in the US, I set
up an account, and the transaction was easy.

Story 2. I wanted to donate to a webcomic:
[http://blog.mixflavor.com/p/donate.html](http://blog.mixflavor.com/p/donate.html)

First I tried PayPal. "We're sorry. You cannot use your PayPal account
registered in Taiwan to send payments to, or receive payments from, other
PayPal accounts registered in Taiwan."

This lunchtime I went to my bank, to try to make a transfer. The guy at the
entrance saw the screenshot, and asked a colleague. She and he then made a
phone call. A third person came downstairs, and she spoke English. She
couldn't understand the written Chinese, and told me it's not their bank's
problem. She told me to go to another bank down the street.

The second bank involved 3 people reading, translating, discussing, searching
Google Maps, to then send me on to a third bank.

The third bank had a security guard at the entrance who asked what I was
trying to do, and took me to an ATM to make a deposit. He navigated the
Chinese-language menus, asked for my phone number, took cash, and finally made
the deposit.

It took 45 minutes and 8 people to try to send money to someone, and I was
late to come back to the office.

Bitcoin is doing well, not because the blockchain is so hot right now, but
because banks are just awful.

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bb88
I don't know. My bank account doesn't drop %20 in one day.

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GreaterFool
> Now, the nation’s hottest investment is buying money. And the investment
> rush is raising questions about whether one reason for the slow pace of
> economic growth in recent years is that the nation is busy distracting
> itself. I can't stop laughing at this sentence. Oh the boogeyman!

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arisAlexis
Bitcoin is a first iteration of a greater group of technologies. Latest
versions do not require extra energy at all.

But even Bitcoin uses much less energy for transmitting money than bank
buildings etc.

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JudasGoat
As a New England resident I was always curious about the heat output
efficiency of a miner compared to electric resistance heating. Somebody really
wants that waste heat. If only it were useful in warm weather...

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bb88
So moving an electron generates heat. While we use transistors at the low
level to do the computation, the method they work by is shuttling electrons
through substrates, which have some kind of inherent resistance.

So it's all I^2R heat losses.

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lafar6502
Is it any worse than burning the electricity with electric cars? The energy
burned is never coming back in either case... I mean, why one is
environmentally friendly and the other not?

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cycrutchfield
Electric cars are moving a person from one place to another, often displacing
fossil fuel engines that would otherwise be used. Bitcoin miners are...
facilitating one of the least useful currencies for doing transactions?

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mozey
I agree bitcoin is an extreme waste of electricity, but plastic bottle caps...
maybe it's "good" plastic and most of it is recycled

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bb88
Why is this flagged?

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mirimir
My guess: Someone with flagging rights either likes Bitcoin, or feels that
it's a divisive topic.

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c8d3f7b49897918
This headline is a good example of getting the target (you) to think past the
sale: if you deny bitcoin is "something worse" you are implicitly conceding it
is, in fact, a waste of energy (when contrasted with HFT server farms, I
suppose?)

Trump did this with the "and mexico will pay for it" addendum to building the
wall. By getting people to say "Mexico will never pay for it!" they are
mentally conceding the wall.

I dislike these sorts of verbal tactics, but they are effective manipulations.

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RandomInteger4
This might sound weird, but we should teach rhetoric in schools, which
includes these kinds of dishonest player verbal tactics, because my thinking
is that if we can name and speak openly on a meta level about these types of
manipulative tactics, we can defend against them more effective.

Similar to teaching people how to hack for the sake of improving computer
security, or maybe more similar to the old fantasy trope of the monster /
sorcerer or whatever losing it's power if you know it's name. I feel like most
people know of these tactics, but they can't call them out effectively,
because it's cumbersome and awkward to do so.

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pbh101
We used to: the ‘liberal arts’ originally referred to the ‘quadrivium:’
arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy; and the ‘trivium:’ grammar, logic,
and rhetoric.

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phil248
Move over Betteridge!

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gojomo
“Has Bitcoin Stopped Beating Its Wife Yet?”

