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Comment by CryptoUnchained | Hacker News Reader

You're so angry about the greenhouse gases that you're completely missing the logic behind an energy currency. You complain that the energy and dollars are spent speculating because you're flat out ignoring that miners are re-investing their profits to become more efficient and productive. Bitcoin mining is a rat race to develop efficiency in technology and energy deliverance.

Oil companies capturing the wasted natural gas, Hydro dams capturing the wasted water energy, etc. Bitcoin is a battery or energy credit where areas with abundant energy can benefit from their standing in the world and benefit the people of the region. Bitcoin has its ebbs and flows but eventually balances to where your typical american household cannot afford to mine bitcoin and profit.

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> Bitcoin mining is a rat race to develop efficiency in technology and energy deliverance.

The cloud computing companies and EV companies and every other company that spends large amounts of its budget on buying electricity is doing the same thing. The difference is that (at least some of) cloud computing or driving is doing useful work with the energy being consumed, whereas 100% of energy going into bitcoin mining is simply getting converted to bitcoin, a speculative asset, and heat.

And the greenhouse gases are the largest problem the civilized world has ever faced, they are not some small aside. We need to figure out ways to produce less energy while still powering the important parts of our economy (transport, production of goods, research etc). Bitcoin is doing the opposite - it is creating a need for more energy production to create and exchange money, when we already have much more efficient ways of creating and exchanging money (the whole banking infrastructure of the world consumes less electrical energy than bitcoin, while doing orders of magnitude more transactions per second than bitcoin can hande in a year).

>doing useful work with the energy

yea is video games useful work?

youtube videos perhaps?

twitter?

It's nice that you have a sliding scale of what utility is that only you can define, you seem completely trustworthy.

Art and entertainment are useful work, yes, obviously.

But it is true and I pointed that out that there is a lot of waste going on in the cloud as well.

>Art and entertainment are useful work, yes, obviously.

why?

Because they bring enjoyment to people, and all that truly matters is the happiness of people.

Money is only useful in so far as it can buy the things that people need, but making those things still requires energy in addition to money. Burning energy to make money when you can literary just will money into existence is completely absurd.

what fucking moron you are.

HN is no place for this kind of comments. Either be civilized or go away. You're polluting this forum.

please provide a better worded response to such an inane generality then.

> Because they bring enjoyment to people, and all that truly matters is the happiness of people.

my response was actually the politest way I knew how to respond to someone pulling argument after argument out of their backside without any introspection whatsoever.

I honestly think they're just trolling at this point.

A better response would have been to come up with a different definition of what you understand by useful work. A better response would have been to turn my own definition around by saying that bitcoin also brings people happiness. A better response would have been to say nothing and down vote.

Calling me a fucking moron without anything at all to add, after I took the time to reply to your 1 word comment (or to someone else's comment? I'm not clear if you're mr_woozy as well or not; I'm not leto_ii) then I have nothing else to add.

Oh, and accusing me of spewing inane generalities when the real value of art and entertainment has been called into question and vindicated throughout all of economic theory is quite rich.

>Oh, and accusing me of spewing inane generalities when the real value of art and entertainment has been called into question and vindicated throughout all of economic theory is quite rich.

This is completely circular login, if you're valuing those things as purely economic goods then you're ascribing a monetary value to them, which you could just as easily to bitcoin mining, startups and associated industries.

>and all that truly matters is the happiness of people.

This is the laziest argument I've seen on how to measure relevant value, I mean if I'm a murdered them murdering people is going to make me happy, so what does this argument even mean?

If thousands of people derive meaning and enjoyment out of a movie or a book, without the production of said movie or book killing anyone, it is quite obviously a much greater good than a single person committing murder for their own enjoyment.

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