Comment by z0mbie42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by z0mbie42 | Hacker News Reader

Hi HN, creator here!

Today is a good day, the achievement of months of works (but also the start of a great adventure ).

I'm very excited to announce Bloom: A free and Open source ‘Google’.

Our mission ? Empowering the world with open technologies.

Why? How? What? https://kerkour.com/blog/bloom-a-free-and-open-source-google

Website: https://bloom.sh Android App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bloom42.bl... Code: https://github.com/bloom42

All the backend and services are written in Rust (You can learn more on the rust forum why I written it in JavaScript, then rewritten in Go and finally in Rust: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/bloom-a-free-and-open-source-g...) and is entirely free and Open Source on GitHub. No opencore, no bullshit.

The project seems awesome and you want to help ? - By spreading the word on Twitter: https://twitter.com/z0mbie42/status/1136297238387482625 - by contributing on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/bloom42 - By becoming a patron: https://www.patreon.com/bloom42 - By becoming a sponsor: https://bloom.sh/become-a-sponsor

Let's spread freedom

Sylvain Kerkour, a.k.a z0mbie42

It's a laudable project but why are you accepting bitcoin if you're so concerned about the ecological crisis? It seems kind of contradictory, given how bitcoin transactions are so computationally expensive now that they reportedly consume about the same amount of energy as Denmark.

I have a feeling that for Bitflow (the Bittorrent downloader) many customers will strongly prefer bitcoin. Offering it is not an arbitary choice but a requirement for success of that part of the product.

You are totally right and I've to admit that I didn't thought about so much.

I'll fix it !

Maybe the raping of the earth done by the corrupt financial and banking system is an even greater evil.

but an evil that isn't going away, so now you have two.

I'm not anti-cryptocurrency, but we should be striving to be better than what we're creating an alternative to.

How would we know if that were too much? What if you were to describe the amount of energy consumed by the airline industry? Or all of the world's motorcycles? Would that be more or less than Denmark? And if it were more than Denmark's energy consumption, is that okay? Certainly more people benefit from the world's motorcycles or airplanes than just the population of Denmark, so why is that the reference? IMO including an arbitrary reference like some country's power consumption is the stuff of clickbait headlines, not useful discussion.

IMO a more constructive discussion point might be: "the power consumption required for Bitcoin's proof-of-work is 15x that of the power consumption of: { the equities markets + banking + US Treasury + EU Treasury }." The number I've cited is arbitrary, it could easily be 1/15 of that, for all I know. But normalizing the energy in terms of the related/baseline industry makes sense and would make for a clearer conversation on the topic.

But individual bitcoin transactions aren’t expensive, running the network is.

Thank you for the work and for open sourcing it!

I hope you can keep up the good work and would love to see more of this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com