• SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    They don’t produce anything except some numbers. A total waste of energy. I had to laugh when this guy I know who is very “progressive” and environmentally concerned got pissy when I pointed out how much energy was wasted on bitcoin mining just because he was into it.

    • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      Right this is the fundamental problem. There needs to be some value to the Blockchain application which the crypto tokens support beyond just token speculation.

      • iquanyin@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        no. it just needs to end, as does pretty much our entire economic system, worldwide. and the social systems that support wasteful, destructive living. transform or die. that’s the point we’re at. is humanity up to it? well know within our own lifetimes.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          10 months ago

          Money is how you get people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. Farmers don’t like farming they do it for the money, truck drivers do it for the money, factory workers do it for the money.

          So if we get rid of economics then who’s going to farm the food, who’s going to pick the food, who’s going to transport the food to the stores (although at that point I guess they are just public distribution centers), who’s going to run the stores?

          They only solution to all of these problems is automation but we’re not there yet. So what is your solution for today?

          • hatedbad@lemmy.sdf.org
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            10 months ago

            you understand there’s more than one way to have an economy right? that there’s more than one way for labor to be rewarded for its output?

            saying “our economic system needs to end” has nothing to do with what you wrote

            • maniclucky@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              Do you have a proposal or are you just theorizing? Obviously there are more economic models, but all of them center on allocation of finite resources. As stated above, automation isn’t there yet to even approach post-scarcity.

              So, what you got?

              • orrk@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                seeing as everyone starved before the advent of capital… oh wait

                The reason we don’t have famines isn’t because of money, it’s because of one Jew’s patriotism to what he saw as his German fatherland.

                The reason we have the internet is due to an organization need in warfare, not a profit motive.

                The reason we have modern medicine was because people wanted to help other, even if they went broke to do it, sometimes even being outcast from society.

                The reason the Nazis were stopped was not because it made a lot of profit, but in spite of it.

                do not conflate the achievements of modernity with the inherent economic system you ascribe to.

                • maniclucky@lemmy.world
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                  10 months ago

                  So many words shoved in my mouth. At no point did I say that people can’t do good things with minimal incentive. Though it’s either naive or disingenuous to pretend that some form of bartering didn’t exist before capital or would be suitable solution the modern problems.

                  Could that one person feed a city on his own? Or keep it clean? Or supply it power? Water? Maintain the infrastructure?

                  I wasn’t talking about individual achievements and technological leaps. I’m talking about the day to day necessities that a functioning society requires. A city like New York is not some simple thing. To make it possible for all those people to coexist, the effort and man power is staggering.

                  And a bunch of it sucks.

                  Garbage, sewage, paperwork. You name it, there’s some poor bastard that has to deal with it and doesn’t want to. In fact, there’s a shortage of power lineman (I may be out of date) that can stand as my example. Difficult job, risk of death, need a bunch of them. And you’re not going to find enough people passionate about power lines to fill the roster and that job is essential for modern lives.

                  Now, I’m not rushing to defend capitalism. Holy shit the crimes committed for the unholy dollar. No. I’m generally for socialist practices in any industry that should be a public work (education, utilities, healthcare, etc) and leave capitalism to the luxuries. But I’m getting off track.

                  I wasn’t defending capitalisms many crimes. I’m calling you out for being a child about what can be done about it. Ideals don’t pave roads, specific plans and actions do. So what are yours? This system sucks? I fucking know. What changes should be made short of a violent revolution that would almost certainly leave everyone in a worse place? We don’t have the luxury of sci-fi tech that can provide for our needs with trivial cost.

                  Example: taxing the fuck out of the rich, single player health care, investment in green energy, walkable cities, forbidding Congress from owning individual stocks. These things push the world in a better direction.

                  Next time you advocate for burning it all, try to remember that we live in the most peaceful time in all of human history.

    • Aniki 🌱🌿@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      Why is commercial power so cheap and residential so expensive? We could fix two problems by balancing that back.

      • Nighed@sffa.community
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        10 months ago

        My understanding is tha some commercial/industrial users will get a highly variable tariff. This may be cheaper much of the time, but can get ridiculously expensive at times of high demand.

        The difference is that a bitcoin farmer can shut down at those expensive times, but a home user still needs to heat/cool their house, run their fridge etc, so the savings cancel out. Because of this, averaging the costs works out easier/better for most home consumers

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          10 months ago

          You can get time of use billing at home with many power companies. Only makes sense if you have solar panels or storage batteries or some such.

          • st3ph3n@midwest.social
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            10 months ago

            I have real time pricing from my utility. It works out well because we charge 2 electric cars overnight for a fraction of what they would cost to charge at the standard fixed kilowatt-hour rate. My house is heated by natural gas; I don’t think the savings would be there if I also was heating my house with electricity as I live in the midwest, where it gets cold as fuck for the winter.

    • WallEx@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      More like fuck crypto mining. There are cryptos that dont need mining.

      • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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        10 months ago

        If there’s no demand for a particular crypto then people mining it can’t sell it and go out of business. People mine this stuff because other people will pay them for it.

      • jollyrogue@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        Which ones? I’m curious since I don’t follow the scene and only know of mainstream stuff.

        • WallEx@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          Beats me, I’m only interested in the technology :D Chia was plotted and not mined I think, but other then that …

      • Wodge@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Crypto isn’t a currency, it’s a commodity for trading. One that doesn’t physically exist. No inherent use and no inherent value.

        • S410@kbin.social
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          10 months ago

          The vast majority of “real” currencies are fiat currencies and don’t have inherent value or use either.
          US dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since 1971, for example.
          The only reason money has any perceived value at all, is because it’s collectively agreed to have some value. Just like crypto currencies.

          • darthelmet@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            But this is actually why crypto isn’t a real currency: we haven’t collectively agreed to value it, or at least not in any way that makes it useful as a medium for exchange. Ironically it can’t possibly become a proper currency while speculators are making its price so volatile. The very act of investing in it is making it worthless.

            • S410@kbin.social
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              10 months ago

              Anything can be a currency, if you use it as a currency. A currency is not defined by its ability to be exchanged for gas or used to pay taxes.

              If children in some school start to exchange pogs for junk food or video game cartridges, the pogs become a currency. By definition. The fact that the use is clearly limited and the value is a subject to rapid change or speculation is irrelevant.

              There isn’t a single currency in the world the value of which is set in stone. There isn’t a single currency in the world which is universally accepted. Just because there exist currencies linked to some of the strongest economies in the world, which are relatively stable and incredibly hard to affect the value of via speculation, doesn’t mean they’re immune to speculation, nor does it mean that any smaller currencies, be it currencies or small countries, crypto or pogs, are “not real”.

              • darthelmet@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                I mean sure. Anything someone is using like currency can be called currency. But we’re talking practical terms here. Things we “collectively agree to value.” My WoW gold might be useful for buying potions, but it’s not generally accepted anywhere outside that narrow context. The fewer people who are willing to accept the currency, the less useful, and arguably less “real” it becomes, in so far as currency is defined by its value to others. I could print “me bucks” that I value at $1B USD, but that doesn’t mean much if nobody will give me a sandwich for it.

                • S410@kbin.social
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                  10 months ago

                  If you’re in the US, it’s not very practical to try to pay for things using Turkish liras either, for example. But it’s not any less “real” because of it. There is still a market for that currency, even if you might need to look around for a bit to actually use it or exchange it for a different one. Same for WoW gold or crypto.

          • frezik@midwest.social
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            10 months ago

            But there’s so few uses of actually buying things with crypto. People don’t use it as a medium of exchange outside of illicit goods and money laundering. We’re more than a decade into this and using crypto to buy a pizza is still a novelty.

            A major proof of this is that FTX collapsed and took a chunk of the crypto market out with it. The market at large shrugged this off. If it were actually linked in to the broader economy, then it would have had similar ripple effects to a major US bank failing.

            • S410@kbin.social
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              10 months ago

              I, personally, use crypto to do art commissions (I’m an artist) and to pay my VPS’s rent. Neither is an illicit good or related to money laundering.

              And, honesty, it’s pretty great, compared to alternatives.
              Last time I’ve used PayPal, it decided to withhold the funds for a month, for whatever reason. Plus, the transaction fee was about a dollar.
              Transferring the same amount of money via Monero is guaranteed take only about a minute or two to process, since a transaction in that system would never get withhold, plus the processing fee would be about a hundred times smaller.

              • honey_im_meat_grinding@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                10 months ago

                In the EU they’re getting a digital euro which allows them to avoid bowing down to Paypal, Payoneer, and all the services interlinked with them (e.g. Patreon) - the ancillary services can even offer digital euro payouts instead, too. So as long as what you’re doing is legal, you can break the Paypal/Payoneer terms of service as much as you want and avoid their privately enforced authoritarianism that goes beyond the scope of the law for whatever reason. So those problems are being solved as we speak, depending on where you live.

                • S410@kbin.social
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                  10 months ago

                  The “Criticism and risks of the digital euro” section on Wikipedia outlines my concerns about such a system pretty well.

                  Unless they are going to implement a cryptocurrency with centralized minting (essentially giving themselves both as much and as little control over the digital currency as they have over physically printed money), it doesn’t seem that much different from what we have already. Just because it’s going to be a new system, doesn’t really mean it not going to have issues with false-positives suspending regular transactions or fees that are higher than they need to be.

        • bhmnscmm@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          You literally just defined the attributes of a currency. The only difference is that crypto isn’t backed by a government.

          Edited. See below. Apparently some crypto is government backed. There is no functional difference between traditional currency and (at least some) crypto.

            • bhmnscmm@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              I stand corrected. There is literally no functional difference between “currency” and (at least some) crypto.

            • kirklennon@kbin.social
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              10 months ago

              CBDC is blockchain based, i.e cryptocurrency.

              A CBDC can be blockchain based, but almost none actually will be. China’s isn’t. Japan’s CBDC is not. In the US, the Federal Reserve is still in early stages but I’m confident it won’t use blockchain either.

          • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            The big difference is that crypto is “decentralized”. Traditional currency is, to some extent, controlled by a central bank. The CB seeks to ensure price stability.

            Digital cash schemes are much older than bitcoin/crypto. It’s not “crypto” just because it’s digital money.

        • doylio@lemmy.ca
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          10 months ago

          Tbf, most money nowadays doesn’t physically exist nowadays. Only a tiny fraction of the “money” that is out there has a physical instantiation. Most of it is just numbers in bank servers

        • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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          10 months ago

          Sure, it’s like if you printed ink on paper and pretended it was equivalent in cost to material goods.

            • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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              10 months ago

              Pretense is not required for inherently valuable material goods.

              Two sheets of cloth sewed together into pants provide protection, warmth, legal obedience.

              Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.

              Ink stamped onto a piece of paper(or usually plastic)? A bunch of people with shared values have to agree that it means something, even though it inherently does not.

              Carrying your stamped paper or plastic doesn’t mean you won’t freeze to death, starve to death, or anything else.

              It’s only value is by societal consensus, which while valuable, is not inherent, as with certain material goods.

              • snooggums@kbin.social
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                10 months ago

                Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.

                Can be, but pants do not have inherent value in the context of a tropical climate where freezing is not an issue and nudity is allowed. They have contextual value.

                Food does not have inherent value, it scales with availability and demand. An excess of apples that will spoil before they can be processed into something that can be consumed do not have inherent value.

                This is important because while money’s value is far more volatile, the argument that material goods have inherent value as a comparison is flawed.

                • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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                  10 months ago

                  Pants have value in any climate.

                  Exposure is a problem in any climate.

                  Dehydration, sunburns, bug bites, there are plenty of reasons you want clothing.

                  Clothing has inherent value whatever climate you’re in.

                  Food does have inherent value.

                  Food is necessary to keep the human body, and the body of many other species, alive.

                  The excess of food for a given population may have less value, but you can trade that excess, or harvest or store it; the food itself still has inherent value to humans and other organisms that eat food.

                  You’re looking for particular circumstances that mitigate or otherwise affect the inherent value of certain goods, though your scenarios depend on those goods having inherent value in the first place.

                  The fact that certain material goods have inherent value is not flawed, but you can keep trying.

              • pirat@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.

                Sounds like without pants, I’ll be freezing to death — then going to jail for that!

              • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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                10 months ago

                Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.

                This is still dependent on societal consensus. Well, the going-to-jail part, anyway. The protection from cold issue is dependent on the climate and time of year of where you happen to be located. There are many parts of the world where you could comfortably go naked.

                • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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                  10 months ago

                  Clothes have inherent value by protecting you from exposure.

                  Spoons have inherent value in conveying food.

                  Containers have inherent value in holding and protecting resources.

                  Many material goods have inherent value, currency simply does not.

            • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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              10 months ago

              Indeed. All “value” is ultimately something that is collectively decided upon by society. A chunk of rock could be worthless or worth billions depending on how much people want it.

        • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Not all crypto are the same.
          Nano has been designed as digital money.
          It has no mining, 0 fees (none for transactions, none for opening accounts), finalizes transactions sub-second (typically), has no built-in throughput limits and works across (political) borders.
          I’d say these attributes offer some use and value.

                • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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                  10 months ago

                  At which point your local grocery store or gas station wouldn’t be accepting whatever currency is your current local currency. The point would remain the same - a currency doesn’t have to be universally accepted everywhere on the entire planet for it to still be a useful currency.

      • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Except it’s not really a currency is it? Nobody actually uses this stuff for buying goods and services, they treat it as a stock. Usually short-term trading that’s essentially just gambling.

        Normal currency also doesn’t use more than 2% of the power generation of a massive country.

          • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            I’m well aware.

            But far, far, far, far more people use it as currency. Exchanging it for goods and services is clearly the main use for it.

            Crypto is used like a stock.

            • deafboy@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              There are people who ride the bike as a means of transport. Then there are people who build their entire identity around riding a bike. That doesn’t mean one or the other rides it wrong.

              A token of value can have multiple different usecases at the same time.

              • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                Bikes are used as a mode of transport. That’s what everybody uses them for.

                Crypto isn’t really used as a currency. It is used like a stock. That’s what everybody uses them for, if we’re being honest.

            • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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              10 months ago

              In addition to using it as a currency, sure. But as I asked rigatti, is that a problem? At worst one might perhaps argue that the name “cryptocurrency” is misleading, but I’ve never cared much about semantics like that.

              • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                You’re saying “in addition to using it as a currency” as if that’s actually what people do with crypto. They don’t.

                And yeah, it is a problem. It renders it useless outside of as a bit of gambling on the side.

                • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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                  10 months ago

                  Alright, so let’s call them cryptotokens instead. I’ve always preferred that myself, it’s a much more general description of what they do. It doesn’t change what they are but if that term makes you happier we can go with that.

                  It renders it useless outside of as a bit of gambling on the side.

                  Hardly, there are lots of things you can do with these things. A ledger is more than just for tracking money, it’s a database. You really can’t think of useful things that could be done with a completely decentralized and permissionless database?

          • rigatti@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            But faaaarr fewer than those who use it for transactions. In the crypto world it’s reversed.

              • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                Yes, the price fluctuations created by speculation make it hard to use for payment. How do you agree on a fair price when you don’t know what the “money” will be worth in a few weeks.

                The deflationary effect caused by hoarding currency, as is done with bitcoin, would bring about a Great Depression scenario in a real economy.

                • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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                  10 months ago

                  If you need the token’s price to be stable then there are stabletokens specifically designed for that.

        • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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          10 months ago

          Yes, cryptocurrencies, aka “currencies”, are used for buying goods and services.

          Energy consumption is a great point if you ignore the material resource acquisition cost, worker cost, production cost, sundry cost, hardware cost, conventional debit and credit fees, service personnel cost, data centers, servers, and telecommunication network costs of conventional currency infrastructure.

          Yeah, if we ignore all of that, then the resource consumption of a single energy intensive cryptocurrency seems high.

          • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            Yes, cryptocurrencies, aka “currencies”, are used for buying goods and services.

            No no no. Cryptocurrencies aren’t used for buying goods and services outside of extremely fringe scenarios.

            People trade them like they do stocks. You can pretend that’s not the case all you want, but you know it to be true.

            I can’t go to Aldi and pay for my shopping with bitcoin or whatever shitcoin you hold. I can’t pay my bills with it. I can’t go get a haircut with it.

            All I can do is treat it like a stock.

            Energy consumption is a great point if you ignore the material resource acquisition cost, worker cost, production cost, sundry cost, hardware cost, conventional debit and credit fees, service personnel cost, data centers, servers, and telecommunication network costs of conventional currency infrastructure

            I’m not ignoring any of that. Crypto still uses far more, and to top it all off, can’t really be used as a currency.

            You cryptobros have been saying crypto will replace real currency any day now for years. It’s not happening. Sorry to burst your bubble.

            • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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              10 months ago

              Yes, you can buy groceries or a haircut with cryptocurrency.

              Because most of them are less than a decade old, it isn’t as widespread as many more established currencies, but you can absolutely buy groceries, buy a haircut, eat at restaurants, buy a house, buy a car, pay utility bills, obviously pay for various forms of entertainment like twitch, hardware at newegg, there’s tons of stores that you can use cryptocurrency.

              You can also buy gift cards with cryptocurrency that you can use for literally anything.

              It’s fine if you don’t like it, but people are using it as a currency to purchase any type of material good you would purchase with conventional currency.

              You keep throwing your tantrum about how cryptocurrency is going nowhere while it grows by 100 million per year and many of the world’s governments are developing and purchasing cryptocurrencies.

              They’re probably developing those cryptocurrencies for fun, right?

              It’s probably like that dumb digital debit and credit card system they came up within the '70s.

              Total bullshit, credit and debit cards.

              Good thing that credit rating system never caught on, huh?

              • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                Cool. I’ll explain this to the person at the till next time I’m buying some milk, then I’m sure they’ll accept my dickbutt coin.

                People are developing crypto as a gamble/investment. Not as a real currency.

                And lol at you saying crypto is like debit/credit cards. It isn’t.

                • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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                  10 months ago

                  They probably won’t take such a disused currency.

                  But you can use more popular crypto to buy groceries, yes.

                  Look at you, confident that digital currency is fundamentally different than…digital currency.

              • BleatingZombie@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                Where? Where do you see that? I’ve literally never been to a grocery store or hairdresser that accepts ANYTHING other than cash or card (maaybe checks)

                • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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                  10 months ago

                  Haha, checks! Yeah, we live in different areas.

                  Whole Foods(this little supermarket chain) accepts crypto, coffee shops, bars, hair stylists, there’s a bunch of places.

                  Might want to open those peepers.

        • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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          10 months ago

          Except it’s not really a currency is it? Nobody actually uses this stuff for buying goods and services

          Except Montero

      • Aniki 🌱🌿@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        LOL wake me up when you’re circulating currency instead of just speculating against the bag holders.

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              10 months ago

              You think that there are only two possible uses for these things, and if I’m not interested in one of them I must therefore be using it for the other? Pretty weak logic.

              • BleatingZombie@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                You keep saying there are lots of uses, but you haven’t listed a single one

                I don’t want you to feel bad for being a fan of crypto, but passionately (and incorrectly) defending it just makes you seem like a shill (or worse, a fool)

                • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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                  10 months ago

                  Heh. I bet if I had been suggesting particular uses you’d be calling me a shill for those particular uses. “Shill” is such a lazy accusation to throw about, you can sling it at anyone who’s interested in anything.

                  How about ENS? It’s a decentralized version of the Domain Name System.

      • bamboo@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        Real currencies use significantly less power despite orders of magnitude higher transaction volumes. They also have physical exchange options that incur no transaction costs and require no digital infrastructure. Crypto is just bad as a currency.

        • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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          10 months ago

          Love to see some proof. Seems unlikely with the amount of necessary infrastructure, especially relative to ultra high efficiency cryptos.

          • bamboo@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            What proof do you want? Real currency can be printed on paper or forged into coins, and then used until the physical medium wears out with zero electrical usage and zero transaction fees. No digital currency of any form can beat literally zero.

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              10 months ago

              Literally zero.

              Everybody keeps every dollar they own physically on them at all times.

              These dollars do not have to be printed, the cotton does not have to be woven, the plastic does not have to be stamped, the dyes do not have to be mixed, nobody has to account them, nobody has to account for their storage, nobody is maintaining the number and circulating supply of them, nobody is regulating the distribution and influx through centralized institutions.

              Sounds like a cakewalk.

      • lobotomo@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Yes, all those dollars that get pulled out of the earth by the blood sweat and tears of miners?

        What are you talking about. If there are coins that don’t need mining why are we wasting electricity (or anything really)on the ones that do.

        • bamboo@lemm.ee
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          10 months ago

          Don’t most crypto users use one of a handful of highly centralized exchanges anyways? Like sure you can self host everything, but you can do that with real money too, and most people don’t have the care nor the skill to do it.

      • brophy@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        That’s. That’s the whole point. Things costing their true value.

        Business exist to make money (even non profits need to make enough money from either sales or donations to cover operating costs). If something costs them more, it’s going to cost their customers more. This way negative externalities aren’t swept away to become an unmanageable problem in the future. The true cost of consumption is reflected in the price we pay.

        What you’re describing as a bad thing is really the system working for good, as it was intended.

        • evranch@lemmy.ca
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          10 months ago

          Unfortunately they are correct as the carbon tax in Canada is indeed a racket. It’s only on consumer consumption.

          • oil exports, our largest source of emissions, are exempt
          • agriculture and forestry, the next largest, also exempt
          • shipping and rail, oh look, exempt
          • heavy industry can buy phoney carbon credits for $5/ton instead of paying the $65/ton tax. Some of these are for forests that have already burned down
          • oh yeah the greatest emission source last year, dwarfing all others, 80% of our total emissions came from the massive forest fires for which our policy is just to LET THEM BURN

          So the only people who carry the burden of the Canadian carbon tax are the ordinary taxpayers. But hey, the optics are good! Looks very progressive. Despite the fact that Canadian consumer consumption is the definition of a drop in the bucket that is global emissions.

          If Canada wanted to make a difference they would nationalize the grid, build nuclear and renewables. Or forget it all for now and just put out the damn fires!

          Edit: I forgot one more, as imports are not taxed, the carbon tax actually encourages the import of goods made with coal power in China, over goods made with hydropower in Canada!

          • SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            Do you have a source of your wildfires cause 80% of our carbon emissions?

            Only thing I could find was about 25% which is much different then the number you showed.

            • evranch@lemmy.ca
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              10 months ago

              I believe it was a CBC article last fall that mentioned it, talking about the massive rise in acres burned from previous years. But I can’t directly give you a link at this time unfortunately, am on mobile and can’t find it either.

      • SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I’m Canadian and I support the carbon tax.

        I would like to see our government stop subsidizing the fossil fuel companies and establish a national oil fund too.

      • dgmib@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        And you get CAIP now, which, for most Canadians, especially lower income Canadians, CAIP is greater than the additional cost you pay for goods and services due to the carbon tax.

        The carbon tax is quite literally a tax on the rich that gets given to the poor, while at the same time making high carbon intensity products more expensive incentivizing choices that lower carbon emissions.

        Only the very rich lose.

        The people who speak out against it, are either rich, or they are useful idiots, people who are ignorantly shilling to scrap the tax to their own detriment because they were told by their rich tribe leader it’s bad.

        Which one are you?

      • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        There’s still market incentive for reducing emissions. Either lets you charge the same and for higher margins, or reduce prices and be more appealing to consumers.

      • Frostbeard@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        The tax will just be the cost of doing business. But surely “tHe MarKeT” will correct this by finding cheaper non carbon transport sell a cheaper product.

        Personally I support tax of fossile and subsidization of alternatives. Worked like a charm to electrify Norways car park.

        The cons are however that increased demand for electricity means building wind, hydro, solar power, with a huge cost to local environent both in most land and the diesel used by construction euipment

      • Chocrates@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Any suggestions on how we can actually make corporations pay for the carbon they emit if a carbon tax isn’t it?
        Doing nothing is what we have been doing and it isn’t working.

          • Jojo@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            How would you implement that? Like, how do you propose to impose a tax on the company that they can’t just pass along to the customer?

              • Jojo@lemm.ee
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                10 months ago

                How would that law work? Unless you’re setting the price as a matter of law, how could you ever prove that a price rise was because of the tax and not “other economic factors”?

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        10 months ago

        What does the government do with all the extra revenue? Theoretically it should be able to reduce other taxes proportionally so that those with low carbon usage come out ahead instead of just being a negative for everyone.

        • n2burns@lemmy.ca
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          10 months ago

          Yup, the Climate Action Incentive is a Pigouvian tax, so the government estimates the revenues, divides that up to comes up with a number for each resident, and we receive it back in quarterly payments.

      • Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de
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        10 months ago

        With the disadvantage of large stakeholders dominating the network and undermining the decentralization.

          • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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            10 months ago

            It’s actually more true for proof-of-work mining than it is for proof-of-stake. PoW mining has strong economies of scale, a professional miner with a warehouse full of mining rigs and a special deal with an industrial electricity supplier can churn out hashes more cheaply than a home miner can. Whereas the hardware needed for PoS is negligible so there’s nowhere near that disparity between small and large miners.

            Also, under Ethereum at least (the largest proof-of-stake chain and the one I’m most familiar with the workings of), stakers don’t “dominate” the network. They have no decision-making power over what the consensus rules are. If the users decide to upgrade to a new version and the stakers refuse to go along with that or try to push an upgrade that the users don’t want then those stakers lose their stake after the resulting fork.

              • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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                10 months ago

                I went Googling for sources, and what I found says the opposite. Ethereum was becoming increasingly centralized under PoW but after the switch to PoS it became significantly more decentralized.

                in order to stake to a pool, you need to lock your tokens away, making them impossible to spend for a specified time period.

                This is exactly the point of proof-of-stake. You can’t prove you’ve staked some coins if you don’t actually stake them. If you’ve retained control over your tokens then they’re not staked. I’m not sure how you think it could work otherwise.

                most of the criticisms I have of ETH are more damming of the way they went about the transition between two radically different consensus algorithms than about Proof of Stake itself.

                The transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake has been on Ethereum’s roadmap since the beginning. It was rolled out in stages over the course of years. What was “damning” about the transition?

                • demesisx@infosec.pub
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                  10 months ago

                  This is exactly the point of proof-of-stake. You can’t prove you’ve staked some coins if you don’t actually stake them. If you’ve retained control over your tokens then they’re not staked. I’m not sure how you think it could work otherwise.

                  WOW. Straight up wrong.

                  I’m guessing you have a YUGE bag of ETH staked. 🤣

                  Since you’re so wrong, it’s clear that you are absolutely guessing here while anon is spitting facts, being intellectually honest about which drawbacks actually exist in the world for proof of stake. Take the L, dude. haha

          • Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de
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            10 months ago

            I don’t defend anything - I simply do not consider the existing crypto assets as an alternative to currencies at all. They are still so far from being reliable or stable to be a good means of general exchange. They have their place in the area of investment and speculation and that works fine for me.

          • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            Prime numbers are searched for doing the PoW. The blockchain essentially contains a data base with prime numbers. As far as I can tell Primecoin never was popular,.but I like the novel approach of doing things, when most cryptocurrencies of that time were lame copies.
            Btw. the Primecoin creator made Peercoin, which was afaik the first (and apparently still running) network being secured by Proof-of-Stake.

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    10 months ago

    Whoever Satoshi was, I wonder how he’s responding to the thought that he’s personally contributed more to global warming than the average billionaire.

    • maness300@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      It’s a drop in the ocean compared to how much energy the banking industry uses.

      • UnrepententProcrastinator@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        Watch out! Lemmy is full of Fudd that are not part of the cult. You need actual data to convince them and not even just the comparison of 2 numbers but something that takes into account the comparative size of both industries.

        Don’t worry, you will be able to laugh at them after your gambling addiction pays up.

        (Jk you might not even be a line goes up guy but you do seem to have a lot of the crypto bible memorized)

        • Snekeyes@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Lets talk about the bank branchs, data centers, and energy consumption vs crypto.

          "Research has found that bitcoin miners alone consume approximately between 60 to 125 TWh of energy annually, which is equivalent to around 0.6% of global electricity

          “Traditional banks’ total annual energy consumption of traditional banks is around 26 TWh on running servers, 26 TWh on ATMs, and 87 TWh from an estimate of 600k+ branches worldwide. Totaling 139 TWh.”

          Not to mention banks impact on people’s lives. Limited purchasing power of the poor and soon to join them middle class… to purchase disposable products. Like the old tale of buying a expensive boot vs a cheap one.

          I’m all for less power usage … but seems like a witch hunt compared to what banking gets away w. It’s the the first time banks can point the finger at someone other then themselves.

          https://www.iyops.org/post/energy-consumption-cryptocurrency-vs-traditional-banks

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            10 months ago

            A system used by everybody, and a system still used by a tiny fraction of the population are using a comparable amount of energy?

            • orrk@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              hey, most of the crypto fans are all temporarily embarrassed billionaire libertarians anyway, so the bottom 99.5% can all eat shit and die

          • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            So it’s okay for crypto to consume more energy than banks because… Banks somehow limit the purchasing power of the poor?

            I don’t think I’m understanding your argument.

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      10 months ago

      Probably not thinking about it on his yacht that he doesn’t pilot or maintain, having built the most successful grifter scheme of all time

      • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I feel like calling bitcoin a grifter scheme is kind of like calling fiat currency (edit: in general) a grifter scheme. Which I guess isn’t entirely untrue…

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          10 months ago

          Oh not this again.

          Crypto is also fiat. It’s backed by nothing except the trust that it exists, therefore it’s fiat.

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              10 months ago

              no, the US dollar is backed by the fact that you can use it to pay your taxes to the US government, and interact with the US government in general, quite literally backed by more than crypto.

              and I hate to break it to you, but all currency, ever, is fiat.

              all that gold standard stuff? you just abstracted the fiat nature from the money to the metal, there was never any actual basis for the value of gold outside its value, and there are plenty of more sparse metals that people don’t value as highly

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      10 months ago

      Satoshi is estimated to have wallets totaling as much as 1.1 million btc. That would make them the 26th richest person in the world.

      If, Satoshi and the wallets actually still exist. Most of those wallets have been completely idle since they were mined

      I imagine that “Satoshi’s Wallet” is the stuff of legends among cryptographic security researchers.

        • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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          10 months ago

          Ok I was kind of dumbing it down when I said “if the wallet exists”, but yeah, obviously a wallet and key “exist”, but whether or not anyone actually has them is unknown.

          Really sucks for Satoshi, too. If the keys are still in someone’s position, they can’t use it, because people are watching those wallets like hawks and if they move, that means there’s a new billionaire. For a brief moment. Until Bitcoin takes a massive nosedive from which it’ll never recover.

          That must be some special kind of hell. To be an actual billionaire (and truly of their own making, which is even more rare) but not able to spend a cent of it. Spending it instantly reduces its value and likely kills the very thing that created it. Man, that’s like a Monkeys Paw billionaire.

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Misleading title - the problem is not “crypto”, it’s pretty much all Bitcoin and the people against the change in the consensus mechanism. Out of the top 10 9 coins in market cap, Bitcoin is the only one using proof of work, which demands such high energy requirements.

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        ah yes the 10th place - still, Doge is estimated to use ~1% of the energy Bitcoin uses and it’s been in steady decline since the meme blew up.

        • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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          10 months ago

          the entire Bitcoin block chain could be run on the phone I’m using to write this. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.

          and dogecoin merge mines with all the other script coins so how can you even calculate its independent usage?

          • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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            10 months ago

            there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.

            Yes there is, massive power use is the entire point of proof-of-work. If Bitcoin blocks could be produced without massive power use then the blockchain’s system of validation would fail and 51% attacks would be trivial.

            • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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              10 months ago

              the hash rate for the first blocks was achievable with a pentium 3. the protocol functioned then. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates more hashpower is used. a 51% attack is the protocol functioning properly.

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                10 months ago

                That’s because there were just a handful of people mining the first blocks and there was no demand, so the price was basically zero.

                The protocol is meant to promote decentralization, so I have no idea how a 51% attack would be an example of the protocol functioning properly. A 51% attack is a demonstration that the protocol is controlled by a single entity.

              • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                then there’s no reason to believe they got it wrong.

                also they’re vague estimates, even bitcoin has a huge margin for error.

                • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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                  10 months ago

                  there is every reason to not believe them. they clearly have a motivation to paint power consumption as worse than is true, and the complexity of extracting the use of dogecoin mining from the rest of the mergedmine is, personally, unfathomable. maybe i’m dumb and there is a simple calculation that can be done, but without evidence of their methodology, i’m not going to believe them, and no one should.

        • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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          10 months ago

          >it’s been in steady decline since the meme blew up.

          it got a pretty big bump from elon a couple years back, but dogecoin is nearly perfect money. it isn’t deflationary, it’s cheap to transact, and the on-ramps are ubiquitous.

    • SuckMyWang@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Isn’t it strange no one gave a shit about this a year and a half ago when the price was lower? It appears everyone’s concern for the environment and energy consumption only increases when the price goes up. Interesting correlation or may be causation.

      • Nilz@sopuli.xyz
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        10 months ago

        Everyone already gave a shit about this a long time ago. It’s also one of the reasons Ethereum switched from proof of work to proof of stake.

        • SuckMyWang@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Yes but only when the price was high did anyone care and ethereum switch. Barely a peep for the last 2 and a half years

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        10 months ago

        I’ve been hearing about the stupid amount of energy usage for years and years. You just created a straw man that isn’t based on reality.

        • SuckMyWang@lemmy.world
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          I’ve been keeping a close eye on the news about crypto and there has been virtually no stories about any crypto for the last 2 years, prior to that when the price was high there were a lot of stories about it which is my point. They only started to come back into circulation about 6 months ago. If you remember otherwise you are wrong.

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        10 months ago

        can always just pump up more oil out of the ground.

        No, this is actually exactly the fucking problem

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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        You mean proof of work? And I disagree, Ethereum moved from PoW to PoS and gained market cap since then. The high costs are just a consequence of the consensus mechanism in use.

      • adrian783@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        bitcoin has got to be invented by an alien or something so that we would terraform for them…

        • Alex@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Probably just a fool thinking free fusion energy was just around the corner

          • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            10 months ago

            It’s more that it was originally a theoretical white paper meant to present a potential solution for a very specific problem space. Energy use wasn’t a consideration in the design, because that wasn’t part of what it was meant to address. Likewise, anonymity in the sense of hiding transactions wasn’t part of the design either, besides avoiding centralized banking’s requirement that every “wallet” is associated with a government ID.

            It was a fun toy meant as a proof of concept solution to centralized banking.

            Eventually market speculators saw what the nerds were getting up to, got some ideas, and everything freaking exploded. It wasn’t meant to drive speculative markets.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Modern day gold rush.

    Digging up more and more dirt for diminishing returns while destroying the environment.

    Bitcoin using more and more power for essentially the same.

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    10 months ago

    You’d think with all of the money they’re pulling in, they’d invest in solar panels or something to lower their overhead.

    Or am I making the mistake of approaching the situation with common sense?

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      10 months ago

      With how volatile the value of Bitcoin is I don’t know whether or not they feel safe trying to take that money and reinvest it you’re walking by one of the coin ATMs that’s at one of my local stores I’ve watched the value of Bitcoin halve its value than double it overnight basically every single day for the last 3 weeks

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      10 months ago

      Solar panels give about 100 watts per square meters best case, practically you’ll be on half of that… With the amounts of electricity they use, they’ll need to cover entire nature reserves with solar panels to feed their miners. It’s simply not practical

      • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Solar panels can have more than 200 watts peak per square meter and provide around 200 kWh per year and square meter, although these values vary a lot depending on where the panels are installed.
        Given these numbers, generating 200 TWh annually (which is more than the current electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining devices) would require 10^9 square meters; that’s slightly more than 31 square kilometers.
        Don’t misunderstand this as defending the electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining! I’d rather see this electric energy being used elsewhere.
        I merely wanted to show how much electric energy can be harvested using solar panels.

    • long_chicken_boat@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      they should be doing that, otherwise I don’t get how they are making any profit with those huge electricity bills. Last time I checked it, with electricity prices it wasn’t worth it to mine cryptocurrency.

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      10 months ago

      Maybe pay off would be so far into the future that they don’t want to risk it? Who knows how long crypto will be a thing.

      • darthfabulous42069@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        You can get solar panels for like $100-$200 on Amazon right now. Nice ones. The price of them dropped like a fucking rock since China got involved.

    • Snekeyes@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Vs. Banks. That have offices, branches, atms, data centers… banking does use more energy yearly. So why not both invest in renewables

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        10 months ago

        Sure, but how much of the global financial market does crypto represent?

        I susptect that the energy consomption per transaction is considerably higher for crypto than for a normal financial transaction.

          • stoy@lemmy.zip
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            10 months ago

            I did find some information about this, and have posted about it in the thread, and you are absolutely right about this in regards to Bitcoin, I did not find a lot of information about other crypto apart from Etherium, which claimed that the energy use of one Etherium transaction would not consume any power at all, which I doubt.

            • makeasnek@lemmy.ml
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              10 months ago

              Ethereum uses proof-of-stake, there is no “mining” in a traditional sense, so its power consumption is more akin to e-mail than mining crypto. But proof-of-stake leads to centralization over time, which is antithetical to what Bitcoin people want.

    • Pulptastic@midwest.social
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      10 months ago

      Don’t forget the opportunity cost of achieving orbital velocity.

      I’d say ban it but the cat is out of the bag. Tax it and provide alternatives and hopefully it will die.

      • orrk@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        dude you can totally ban it, it’s not even difficult, you just don’t let them suck up infinite power

      • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        What year do you think we’ll get the first product mined and manufacturered in space? And how about the first space grown food sold commercially?

        I would guess 2040 and 2050 respectively, we’ll have the automation tools to get started by 2030 with government science projects then a decade for it to mature into something a company can try to create a market with, probably something that can only be made in low gravity like solve form of novelty such as space glass spheres or a special use material.

        I think food will be fast behind because people will pay a lot for it and there’s already a lot of research into it for use in space based living facilities.

        • Simulation6@sopuli.xyz
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          10 months ago

          There may be some manufacturing processes that need microgravity or a good vacuum and could be be profitable, but I think you are being much too optimistic.

          • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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            10 months ago

            Maybe, it’s so hard to guess which way things will go. I would place a safe bet though that a rich person will buy a bit of jewelry or a watch that was made in space from space mined metals within in the next ten years.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          10 months ago

          The problem is still rocket launches are expensive and complicated. But if maybe we can get orbital tethers working then we may be okay.

          • burble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            10 months ago

            I don’t think this is true anymore. The cost of a rideshare with SpaceX is super accessible. Companies can launch for <$1 million. This has been huge for a lot of companies trying to launch a proof of concept or one-off, and even for some operational constellations.

        • burble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          10 months ago

          AstroForge thinks they can close the business case for asteroid mining. Their concept is to launch mining satellites to near-Earth M-type asteroids to mine platinum group metals. These would go on 2 year missions to bring back $100 million+ in metal at a time. With launch and satellite costs dropping, it might just work. Their forge demo sat has been struggling but moving forward. Their asteroid flyby demo sat should launch later this year.

          Redwire 3d printed a meniscus in space last year. That’ll take awhile to get worthwhile scale and cost, but it’s another interesting avenue.

          Varda hit regulatory trouble, but their orbital drug manufacturing demo did its job.

          • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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            10 months ago

            Oh I had totally missed the 3d printing in space that’s really cool, just watching their video about it and wow is it painful with the marvel tie ins and stuff but looks very cool

            Seems like the ability to control temperature dissipation without convection could be really useful especially with metals like platinum, might be even sooner that it’s commercialised at scale if they can gather raw platinum and make high quality parts especially something like premium bike or boat parts, the corrosion resistance would make it perfect for tidal generation components too.

            That could be a possible first strong business, if the space platinum to earth pipeline is already in progress then it should be relatively cheap to divert some for manufacturing then parachuting them in splash down zones would make sense for tidal generator parts.

            Of course with progress on fusion it’s possible there won’t be a huge market for reliable cheap energy but we’ll see. I suspect the first thing made will be jewelry that’s sold in small amounts for absurd prices.

    • pirat@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      What makes it less real than other fiat currencies, if I may ask? If a currency is agreed upon being valid by multiple parties, I’d argue it is “real money”.

      • n2burns@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        If a currency is agreed upon being valid by multiple parties, I’d argue it is “real money”.

        That right there. The vast, vast majority of people don’t think it’s valid, therefore it’s not real money.

  • crossover@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    The miners are taking power from the same grid as everyone else. Miners don’t emit carbon. Electricity generation from fossil fuels does.

    The focus should be on moving to a renewable and abundant energy grid. Then let people use it for whatever the fuck they want.

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      Even if it was green energy (which doesn’t generate zero pollution over its lifetime by the way, we still need to produce the equipment to generate electricity and that’s a source of pollution), that’s extra power that needs to be generated that wouldn’t need to be otherwise and it’s used for something intentionally inefficient.

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    10 months ago

    I’ve always found this argument against crypto to be a bad one. The headline will say something like “Crypto mining uses XYZ total energy” and we’re supposed to infer that this means crypto is polluting a lot. But it doesn’t say how much pollution there actually was. For economic reasons, these miners often use cheap excess energy that would have been produced anyway or green tech. Not all of it obviously, but that level of nuance is missing.

    Also, we don’t make the same moral arguments against other energy uses. Air conditioners use more energy than Bitcoin mining does, but we don’t go around saying the government should ban people from using AC.

    There are legitimate problems with crypto, but this one never convinced me

    • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Air conditioning literally saves lives, especially medically vulnerable people, the hell are you on about?

      As others have pointed out, ~2% of the entire US’s energy output is absolutely insane. According to the eia.gov, the US produced around 100 quadrillion BTUs worth of energy in 2022 (I don’t fully know why they chose BTUs to measure the total energy output, they explain on the website, but that’s besides the point). 2% of that is 2 quadrillion BTUs. According to psu.edu (I googled these sites on my laptop so don’t have exact urls on my phone at the moment), the entirety of US households in 2017 used 4.58 quadrillion BTUs.

      Think about that. Bitcoin/PoW coin miners are using enough electricity to power around half of all homes in the US. According to statista.com, in 2022 there were 144 million homes. These miners consume 72 million homes worth of energy. And for what? To solve math problems that benefits no one but Bitcoin/PoW coin investors?

      We’re literally seeing our weather patterns become more and more extreme every year due to climate change, which is also killing our oceans which is causing a severely negative chain reaction in the rest of our ecosystems… But, you know, fuck all that, I need to use an extremely inefficient method of generating currency that no one but enthusiasts/speculators/investors asked for. I’m not inherently against cryptocurrency; however, fuck Bitcoin and other extremely wasteful PoW coins.

      And yes, printing dollar bills/other fiat currencies creates pollution, too. I agree that process should be modernized as well. And in some ways, it already has been undergoing modernization as more and more people use electronic payments vs cash, thus decreasing the need to print more bills.

    • drcobaltjedi@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      Dude. It’s 2.3% of a massive industrialized nation where most citizens have access to some luxury goods. A nation with nearly 350 million people being the 3rd most populous country.

      It does NOT fucking matter if it’s “”“”““waste””“”“” energy. And no, we don’t fucking make that arguement about things like ac because you know why? Someone is getting comfort out of it instead of burning seals to make a line go up.

      • doylio@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        It does NOT fucking matter if it’s “”“”““waste””“”“” energy

        Sounds like you don’t actually care about the energy use, you just hate this for moral reasons. Using excess energy has zero externalities

        • drcobaltjedi@programming.dev
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          10 months ago

          Yeah, its not like we could store that energy in say a battery and then use it another time when demand is higher for actually useful things instead of jerking off techbros/cryptobros.

          • doylio@lemmy.ca
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            10 months ago

            I would love if this were an option, but it’s not. The current battery technologies don’t have the scale for grid level storage capacity. The only grid scale storage solution that is really being done is to build very expensive infrastructure that moves water between two dams of different heights, and building more of those doesn’t seem politically likely at the moment

            The reality is that there is much a whole bunch of excess energy supply that is produced because power plants can’t cycle up and down with demand. So they have to keep producing at peak demand 24/7 (there is some nuances based on the type of power plant, NatGas is faster to turn on/off, but this is broadly true)

            I have my qualms with Bitcoin. As a currency it has significant transaction speed problems, and potential security ones after a couple more halvenings. But I don’t see a problem if Bitcoin miners want to pay energy producers to use energy that would be produced anyway and earn the producers nothing.

            • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
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              10 months ago

              There are plenty of projects that use spare computational power for useful things. Like folding@home, which models protein structures to come up with potential drugs. Why not use the excess electricity for one of those?

              • doylio@lemmy.ca
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                10 months ago

                That would be great! And I’m sure there are people doing it. And if 2.3% of the US Power grid were dedicated to that I’m sure some people would be upset about it too

                My basic point is I don’t think there is anything morally wrong with Bitcoin miners using energy, even though this is a narrative that is very popular now. There are plenty of other valid criticisms of Bitcoin, but I don’t think this one stands up to scrutiny.

    • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      It’s a lot of energy for a global (!) maximum of around 7 transactions per second.
      Unless you want to use the replica of traditional finance called Lightning Network. Then you have more transactions per second and a whole new set of drawbacks.

      • BleatingZombie@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Holy shit. 7 transactions a second is horrible and pretty much definitively proves (to me) that it’s not currently used as a currency

        By chance, do you have a source for that or know where I would go looking?

        • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          You can look how much space a transaction requires, how much size is available per block and how many blocks per time are being created (at average).
          The only way to exceed the figure is by creating transactions with 1 (or few) input(s) and a lot of outputs as they are more efficient in terms of space per tx. Individuals rarely have use for that, but exchanges tend to do that.
          If you want to do your own research, start with the fundamentals and investigate the numbers (size per tx depending on type of tx, size per block, blocks per time).

        • ililiililiililiilili@lemm.ee
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          10 months ago

          Because the max blocksize of BTC is heavily crippled, max transactions per block is around 3,500ish. That puts us at about 500k transactions max per day (1 block every 10 min). So divide 500k by how many seconds are in a day (86,400) and you get slightly under 6 TPS. Whoever came up with 7 TPS probably did more accurate math than me.

          • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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            10 months ago

            Different transactions use different amounts of space so it’s always going to be a rough estimate.

            • ililiililiililiilili@lemm.ee
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              10 months ago

              Yep. That 3.5k I pulled out of my ass was just by looking at a graph of max transactions per block thus far. It highly depends on the efficiency of the transactions and size of each.

          • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
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            10 months ago

            So what happens if a lot of people want to make transactions at the same time? Do they have to queue? Also, this sounds like anyone can cripple the system by scheduling a few thousand tiny transactions.

            • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              Yes, there’s a queue called mempool.
              Clogging up the network is possible, but costs money (BTC), because transaction fees need to be added to the transactions and those fees need to be higher than those of the highest not yet processed transactions if “regular” users’ transactions shall be delayed.
              Miners prefer transactions with higher fees (to be precise: higher fees per occupied block space), because they earn them when creating the block successfully - together with the BTC that get issued when a block gets created.

      • doylio@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        Oh yeah there are many criticisms of Bitcoin one can make, I just don’t think the energy one is very convincing if you think about it a bit

        • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Shall I add the mountain of electronic waste to the list?
          I mean, Bitcoin mining devices can literally do nothing else but calculate SHA256.
          Once they can no longer be operated economically, they’re garbage.
          At least Ethereum’s PoW ran on GPUs, which can be used for, let’s say: gaming!
          And Ethereum showed that a transition from PoW to PoS is possible.
          I think that Bitcoin sparked a great idea, but way better implementations of that idea are available. Bitcoin has a massive network effect and first mover advantage. technology wise it’s no longer on top of the list.

          • doylio@lemmy.ca
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            10 months ago

            I agree with everything you’ve said

            Pretty much the only things Bitcoin has on Ethereum today is a better brand and Lindy effect

  • prole@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    Just a PSA that the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap (ETH) is no longer proof of work, and in the process, reduced their power consumption by ~98%.