Square to invest $5 mln in Blockstream's solar-powered Bitcoin mining facility | Hacker News Reader

Square to invest $5 mln in Blockstream's solar-powered Bitcoin mining facility

reuters.com

13 pointssamizdis9 comments

An impotent attempt to pump the worst craptocurrency in existence.

wow a whole 5 million! glad we can ignore the chinese coal plants that power the majority of mining now

My thoughts aswell lol

Square and Square Crypto both form Jack Dorsey, have done a lot for this space already.

Bitcoin mining farms will always look for the cheapest energy. If that is in a remote oil rig location where methane needs to be flared, or near a hydro power centre, or in a desert next to a bunch of solar panels. But yeah, if there is an excess of coalplant energy that will do as well.

I don’t really understand the hate ₿ gets for this. The existing alternatives (fiat currencies) are way more polluting, minus the dependable know inflation.

The existing alternatives are other cryptocurrencies, not fiat.

Yes I in particle hate how when I buy groceries thousands of computers worldwide have to burn electricity running trillions of wasted computations aiming to find the correct random sequence that allows the retailer to accept my $50

They are using the Bitcoin Lightning network - a layer 2 solution that uses orders of magnitude less energy than standard Bitcoin.

Based on your comment history I can see you have a habit of hating on cryptocurrencies but it would be nice if you could at least get your facts straight.

Is this like saying "I'm riding a public transit bus, it's already driving this way, so I'm not adding to usage or load"?

Lightning network relies on layer 1 nodes, right? So unless it reduces the load on the old dirty Bitcoin network, it's just lipstick.

Yes it is similar to the comparison between a single driver vehicle vs 50 people in a bus except Lightning can scale massively - to Visa/MasterCard country-level scale vs 6-7 tx/sec on Bitcoin layer 1.

If you can process 1 million times as many transactions per mined block that make it an innovative scaling solution - not sure I understand the lipstick analogy. Care to elaborate?

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