You'll listen to Bitcoin FUD all day but you don't seem to care about the hydro carbons purged in the process of strip mining the earth for shiny rocks though.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/why-bitcoin-may-actually-spe...
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/why-bitcoin-may-actually-spe...
All the power funneled into BTC would be far better spent doing anything useful. From electrolysis to protein folding.
Also, it should be noted that shiny rocks have intrinsic value beyond their aesthetics. BTC is literally just a number with no value.
There's your problem, you don't understand that bitcoin is trustless and the worlds first implementation of it's kind. If you can't understand why that's important I don't have the time to convince you.
Just because someone does something first, doesn't mean that thing is useful or good.
Don't use it then, but why would you also disparage the millions of people who are happily finding value in it?
>Just because someone does something first, doesn't mean that thing is useful or good.
Well done creating your amazing straw man.
Because it's an environmental disaster causing a bunch of modern issues and the defenders are being annoyingly naive about.
BTC uses a ton of power, requires a ton of equipment. They solve a problem with TWh of power that is simply solved globally with kwh of power. It is beyond wasteful.
> Well done creating your amazing straw man.
Nah, BTC is just beyond pointless. You are arguing that it's special, but have a hard time actually articulating WHY it's special "If you can't see this, then I don't have time to explain".
That's the same line cult members use defending their faith. It's a mental shortcut to avoid critically analyzing something you've bought into.
BTC isn't bad for the environment carbon poluting energy is. Energy from non-carbon freeing sources makes bitcoin a greencoin. We need to fix where we get energy from and price it accordingly. BTC exposes this.
Bitcoin is a censorship resistant, neutral money and payment network. Banks don't do that. Banks don't consume "kWh of power" by the way. From the endless wars to protect the US (dollar) hegemony to 50 floor buildings draped in marble. Thats all cost + energy.
That's why it's a bad faith argument. The only thing bitcoiners want to compare is the power cost of running the mining rigs. Why don't they include the cost to manufacture said rigs? To mine minerals to build the silicon needed to power their currency? Why don't they include the governments needed to make sure the equipment supply chains are properly maintained? Why don't they include the amount of power needed to run the servers and switches needed to power the internet needed to run btc? Why aren't you looking at the construction costs for the buildings housing the mining rigs?
I'll tell you why, because they aren't making a good faith argument. They are trying to come up with ways to make BTC good and banking bad. That's it.
Lots of things cost energy. The question has to be "what are we accomplishing with that spent energy". When two algorithms do the same thing and one burns TWh while the other burns kwh.. guess which one I'm going to favor?
Every Bitcoin defender repeats this line, but I never see any numbers. Whatever the energy use is, it's provably less than Bitcoin by any metric like transaction volume or market cap, by the simple fact that if you were to scale up Bitcoin's energy use for comparison to the world financial system, it would use magnitudes more energy than humans produce.
https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2
However, it's a terribly bad faith argument.
Essentially, they wrap up everything that isn't involved with ledger maintenance (ATM power, data center power for running the website, Air conditioning at branches power usage) and compare that to Bitcoin, which is only doing ledger maintenance. They do that, because if you had a true apples to apples comparison, you'd end up with kwh of power usage. That's because a ledger is computationally cheap to maintain over a trust network. We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis.
And how do we know it's garbage? Because if banks stopped doing their own ledgers and instead did everything through bitcoin, would their power usage drop? Absolutely not. They'd still have branches, ATMs, and data centers running their websites. In fact, some banks do manage BTC. Do those banks have lower power footprints compared to like banks without BTC? Absolutely not.
You weren't able to send value from one part of the world to another in minutes without an intermediary for a tiny fraction of the transaction amount in the 70's and you still can't do it today without crypto.
You go through two intermediaries with crypto. One to turn your chinese currency into crypto, then another to turn the crypto into us currency.
It's like somebody at the bottom of the Ponzi scheme defending it to death because someday, maybe, just maybe, he'll rise to the top...
There are people living under governments that don't allow their citizens access to the global financial system (i.e. capital controls) and are often living in high inflation environments. Storing their wealth in an unseizable asset, even $100 worth, means that they are decoupled from their government financially and can escape their hell hole with their wealth in tact.
Inflation is theft. Crypto prevents this theft.
You mean the crypto that just lost 30% of it's value? Literally the topic of the article. THAT crypto is an inflation defense?
Remember "of course it's not a currency - it's a store of value, like gold"?
This persistent idea that people who care about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin somehow single it out is silly. I dislike unnecessarily large SUVs, cruise ships, American suburb culture, and diamond mining too. Bitcoin just happens to be the topic of this thread.