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Comment by KozmoNau7 | Hacker News Reader

People are burning gigawatts of electricity on creating "proofs of ownership" which aren't actually proof of anything other than a massive expenditure of electricity.

In other words, wasting extreme amounts of energy that could have been put to productive use, to generate in essence a glorified MD5 hash, which points to a URL that could be deleted or changed at any time in the future.

It is the ultimate in pointless and useless conspicuous consumption, so of course people are going wild for it.

And the world burns for it.

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Sure, I don't think it's good tech, and I don't like it. But I don't like a million things people do, and I don't try to make some convoluted argument that their weird activity is a matter of public concern.

> And the world burns for it.

Please support this with data. It doesn't literally burn for it; fires are down, what, 90% from a century ago?

According to Cambridge University, Bitcoin alone consumes more electricity per year than the entire country of Argentina, for no actual tangible benefit to the world. It creates nothing but an imaginary store of imaginary wealth.

That makes it an issue of global concern.

It obviously has value to the people who are involved with it. We don't decide if other people are allowed to do the things they're interested in by comparing their activity to something in Argentina. If you are able to say precisely how some particular person or organization is harming you, I encourage you to file a lawsuit against them. If not, I encourage you to take up some kind of spiritual cultivation practice to help you not be unduly concerned about the activities of others.

> We don't decide if other people are allowed to do the things they're interested in by comparing their activity to something in Argentina.

why not

> It obviously has value to the people who are involved with it.

It's not obvious at all. A title of ownership that doesn't grant ownership of anything at all is, in principle, worthless.

The presence of harm cannot be decided solely on a individual basis, to be solved by lawsuits.

Just as you cannot solve the problem of harmful emissions or pollution by measuring individual harm and somehow tracing that back to the source.

How would a person trace their illness caused by PFOA emitted by DuPont, if DuPont could simply counter with "prove that the specific PFOA molecules that made you sick came from our plant."?

It doesn't work that way, and for damn good reason. You don't have to prove specific individual harm, in order to condemn and regulate actions that do harm on societal, national or global scale.

Cryptocurrency demonstrably does harm by vastly increasing global power consumption, plus the cost and environmental damage from producing the increasing amounts of hardware needed to run crypto as a whole.

That is why regulation is needed, because we cannot let the misguided desires of a few crypto-obsessed tech heads contribute to climate change on such a scale.

>Please support this with data. It doesn't literally burn for it; fires are down, what, 90% from a century ago?

Got a source for the "fires are down 90%" statistic?

I think it's pretty clear that GP was referring to climate change, which wastes of energy like NFTs and BTC exacerbate. A side note - climate change means that bushfires are more common and their severity is worse than in the past. I don't think it's a stretch at all to say that the world burns for it.

But that is what capitalism ultimately is when pushed to the extreme.

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