What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town

Price is correlated to power usage. There's an odd sort of feedback loop where a rising bitcoin price causes more mining which raises the price of bitcoin and so on exponentially.

You may ask why not just walk away and let bitcoin return to zero but there are a large number of people in the mining industry and similar with incentives to promote and prop it up.

Only the people who pay little attention and wildly overestimate bitcoins impact on these things.

Besides, the "Who cares?" was mostly aimed at the irrelevant comparisons made by gascan.

The guy who probably designed it writes "its prolific resource consumption and poor computational scalability is buying something even more valuable: social scalability."

Not quite sure about that one myself. You can motivate a lot of people to do something social pretty well with fiat currency.

> * Gold Standard =~ Lightning Network (2018)

the crucial difference is that nothing is held in reserve. ie. you don't have to trust that the bank is going to run away with your deposits.

Fiat currency would probably be something like Fiat = Cardano (2019) or one of the other proof of stake non mining coins. (Or Credits tokens - buy those! I'm long them.)

Your uninformed opinion only serves to mislead others. You should at least have the courtesy to preface your post with a "I don't know anything about Bitcoin" to warn other readers.

Anyways: The mining difficulty is dynamic. If mining becomes unprofitable and miners stop mining the difficulty will adjust downwards making it easier to mine and hence profitable again.

It's kind of the way with all capital intensive industries - airlines, car and steel manufacturing and the like. People put in capital till the profits are gone.

That's the point: more services, more jobs are all part of the quoted energy consumption.

Thanks. Good rebuttal.

If it wasn't for all the speculation and grotesque scams surrounding it could actually be useful as a decentralized currency. But we can't have nice things.

Before blockchains, I wondered about how to prove something on the internet. I thought about an authority that could hash any piece of data and you could query it. For example if someone claimed someone tweeted "X", the authority website could show that the hash is really from that Twitter account and is the sentence "X", or disprove it.

I didn't really think about distributed cryptographic "proof" and the chaining so you can't delete B from A - B - C and chain up A - C, indeed the authority would just have to be trusted and be somehow tamper proof.

Blockchain would be interesting to record the sequence of events you want to make sure people can't change retroactively, making it distributed means it's ecologically disastrous though.

Easily moving money between countries. Not every country makes this as easy as it is in Europe.

I had to buy mine direct from the manufacturer for MSRP for a new build.

Still cheaper than Newegg/Amazon/etc.

I know! I was browsing for one and all the mid-range cards are out of stock, only low-end and super high-end are available. What a ridiculous situation.

to be more specific bitcoin mining is not driving up your GPU pricing (bitcoin has been uneconomical on GPUs for years, since the advent of dedicated purpose hashing ASICs), but it's ethereum mining and other cryptocurrencies that can still be mined on GPUs that are influencing the price.

>meaning they could just use any much cheaper sharded data storage.

There are a plenty of regulatory reasons why this is simply not true. Cryptocurrencies may sound stupid from a technical point of view, but clearly they have a bunch of very real advantages over e.g. liberty reserve.

Edit: I guess I'll be waiting for Show HN: MongoDB based money laundering platform. :)

People need something to put money in. They work, they run a surplus. They need to keep it somewhere. You could keep your local currency or buy some other but hyperinflation is a thing and also plain inflation can eat your money in few decades. You could buy property but it can be bothersome to pick, buy, hold and sell. You may end up with a loss if you are unlucky or need money back quick. You could buy gold but it can be easily stolen.

People need gold but better. Bitcoin is just that assuming bitcoin network survives.

I generally find 'Whataboutism' to be an incredibly annoying form of argument. Sometimes though there are useful arguments about priorities of the form: 'x is a problem but y is such a larger problem that spending time and energy on x instead of y is actually an additional problem'. Is there a useful strategy to help distinguish such an argument from 'Whataboutism' when constructing such an argument?

(Note: I don't think the grandparent's argument is of this form as there don't seem to be any obvious shared constrained resources which could be applied to reduce precious metal mining that are instead directed at reducing bitcoin mining ... I'm curious though if you have any suggestions for how to shift one's thinking when _trying_ to make an argument about priorities so as to help prevent oneself from making arguments that amount to whataboutism ...)

And yet an argument such as this does serve a purpose. It draws attention to the larger follies we commit. It may even give a better perspective from which we might see a common cause for such behaviour.

Rather than shutting a conversation down with cries of "off topic" or "fallacy" (I'm addressing the crowd moreso than you in particular) maybe we should all be looking towards the question of why all of us have a propensity for wastefulness? Surely, some waste is necessary when figuring out new processes or keeping old ones up to date but is there a way we can reduce waste without reducing or putting limits on innovation?

The argument being challenged is a comparison -- "... is used for such purposes" that clearly make the point that this purpose is a bad one. That is, the argument is "this use of energy is worse than most others".

It is not specious to confront the argument head-on. If someone says "I am the strongest person in the world" and you say "what about that guy over there", you are not engaging in a useless rhetorical device, you are making a valid counterpoint to the original point.

I can see how the OP visualizes mining as wasteful. But it's easy to forget how much energy is consumed by resistive electrical heating.

Using British Columbia as an example, which until recently had very cheap electricity relative to North America as a whole, for many years a huge number of apartments, condos and houses were built with resistive electrical heating as the default option.

Laws of thermodynamics say that if a hashing ASIC isn't doing physical work, it's producing a huge amount of waste heat. The problem is that waste heat is being vented into the atmosphere rather than being used to heat offices, homes and warehouses. I know there's a few startups that have tried to produce cryptocurrency-mining waste heat appliances that can be installed in decentralized locations. Not sure how successful they have been.

If the waste heat can be used from October to April to heat offices, homes and other things that consume vast amounts of electricity via resistive heating (swimming pools, etc), it would accomplish both the function of hashing and heating.

This is interesting. How would people acquire coins in the proof-of-stake model?

There is no dollar amount attached to bitcoin. The moment a fraction of the coins are being sold, the exchange rate will drop dramatically.

Not to mention that a vast portion of the coins are probably lost in forgotten wallets, while the rest is in the hands of the early investors who will never sell it to not drop their value.

Wow, you named one. Congrats. I'm referring more to small businesses. To name a few I've seen: A bed and breakfast I stayed at in Tulum, a cellphone repair shop not far from my home, a small theater also near my home.

Bitcoin has better characteristics than the USD. If people continue to see that, it'll succeed. There's of course an element of speculation when buying bitcoin -- I'm hoping other people see value in a currency which can't be manipulated by governments, can't be confiscated, can't be censored, has a known supply, can transfer instantly anywhere in the world, and anyone can open an 'account' with.

To quote Julian Assange: "Bitcoin is the real Occupy Wallstreet".

To me, it's the fact that all this power, all these computing resources, are basically being thrown away. Nothing useful is done with the computational power. If it was doing something like folding proteins or otherwise using that computational power to better humanity, then it'd be different.

Because long-term you'll end up with a situation, where your special profitable customers leave for greener pastures (those willing/able to pay higher fees) and your base customers can't or won't afford it.

Short-term they can make some money raises the prices, until supply-demand equilibrium is reached again. But then you shoot yourself in the foot for the long term.