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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

Cryptocurrency doesn’t come out of thin air and it’s not free. It costs money for your electricity and your cpu. It would be much more efficient to just write them a check.

I was trying to figure out if you could encode a bail arrangement with ethereum somehow before clicking on it and was disappointed when it was just fund raising.

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Wrong, depending on electricity costs, at current prices it is more efficient to mine Monero than to just write them a check.

https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/xmr

Completely agree and was thinking the same thing about it being some sort of 'bail contract'. I stopped reading after:

> If generating money out of thin air by using a computer program seems absurd, that’s because it is

If generating money out of thin air by using a computer program seems impossible, that’s because it is.

There are no free lunches.

If you're looking for a distributed computing initiative to support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_...

Correct, generating money out of thin air is absurd.

Not sure what that straw man has to do with being rewarded for mining cryptocurrencies and exchanging them for fiat though. That is clearly very possible and often profitable.

Even being generous you'd be lucky to generate a $0.25/day profit mining Monero with a normal desktop. Factor in wide variations in electricity cost, the wear on PC components and fluctuating currency value and this is simply not practical.

This idea is predicated on an intellectually dishonest premise that mining crypto is "free". Naive do-gooders will run this app without realizing the hidden costs.

It is predicated on the honest premise that mining Monero is likely profitable.

Do you feel the article does a suitable job of describing cryptocurrency mining such that a non-technical reader of injusticetoday.com would be adequately informed of the implications of installing the software?

>Once a user installs the app on their computer, it automatically harnesses a small amount of unused processing power to mine for cryptocurrency

It defaults to 25% CPU usage (and appears to be an electron app). Which I would've placed as greater than small.

https://github.com/thenewinquiry/bailbloc/blob/401cb4f288d88...

Concede the point that users would be making an informed (albeit minimally) decision.

That is false, it defaults to a maximum of 10% CPU usage, which I would've placed as small.

https://github.com/thenewinquiry/bailbloc/blob/401cb4f288d88...

Awesome, 10% is small [though that miner is initially instantiated at 25% ;)].

Thanks for engaging in a friendly, respectful dialogue with links to source!

I don't disagree that cryptocurrency is a valid technology, nor its profitability, nor its contribution to society. I do disagree with presenting it to a non-technical audience in such a fashion as to give the appearance of being zero cost.

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