Whenever Bitcoin collapses, whether it be next week or 5 years, we will look back in history and wonder what the fuck we wasted all that energy on.
If we ever make it to a cashless utopia, I'm pretty sure someone's going to look at us and see how much untapped human potential was wasted on years of watching a screen and experiencing dopamine release.
If we ever make it to post-scarcity, we need to still be producing something. Or we may as well be batteries plugged into the Matrix.
What else would have done? Hiked and played sports? Or let me mention the cool/hip things — “build shit” “ship things” “be productive”? For what? Some other chemical release?
This will keep going in a loop.
Energy is being wasted everywhere on much sillier things at much grander scales.
Setting aside for a moment that I don't believe this, it's not even a valid argument to begin with.
Humans around the world are consuming food, heating/cooling themselves, all in the service of some gamified activity. Some of these activities are as useless as mining Bitcoin. Yes, these activities aren't burning through energy, but people are burning through energy, with the sole focus of doing the activity.
Any justification for these activities can most definitely be used to justify people wasting energy on mining Bitcoin.
This reasoning has no bearing on whether or not bitcoin is a waste of energy or whether its energy use is justified. It is akin to saying, "Sure, I burn ten tons of coal a day to power my iPhone, but someone else burns twenty tons a day to do the same thing. Therefore, I'm not being wasteful." This logic doesn't cut it.
I was making an argument that deciding what is a valuable human activity does not include wastefulness at all. (OP was implying that someone from the future will value these mining efforts in a regretful way)
People are having fun earning money by burning gas and mining Bitcoin. There are so many other equivalent activities that do not receive any uproar but are even more wasteful.
For example, eating meat is insanely wasteful. Yet you will find people defending it.
Wasting energy is the thing we do for various reasons. The underlying "regret" that someone from the future should have due to it not being productive or useful is completely irrelevant. We rarely do things because they are energy efficient.
I'm just laughing at the inconsistency. If people were really consistent in their views of (un)justified waste, I just don't see the same uproar to those other magnitudes more wasteful things (like eating meat, spending a life playing video games etc.).
It's like being mad about one of the fastest functions in your code when there's many others to optimized.
I also do not want to talk about the philosophical side to taking a life of an ant (delve into what waste is justified or not, and which degrees of dopamine response would justify it).
I really like this term.
It is wasted in terms of burning fossil fuels though, since that is stored energy that took millions of years to charge up.
The original factory was built to take advantage of the power from the dam. The dam needs a constant draw of power in order to maintain it and smelting potlines were perfect for this.
Today, transmitting the electricity further would be too cost prohibitive due to the remote location. In this case, bitcoin is less polluting energy arbitrage than aluminum smelting.
Only if 100% of global aluminum smelting occurred from green sources. As that’s not the case the world would be better off if they had kept smelting aluminum as long as the reductions occurred in less green locations.
However the real point about bitcoin is it’s efficiency decreases as adoption or speculation increases, whereas another use of computation such as say Google search this is not the case and they are actively trying to make it more efficient.
In contrast to energy credits in scifi which is something like a promise to deliver a fixed amount of energy, like how a dollar used to have an equivalence in gold.
Like, do you imagine some future spacefaring civilization going around and blowing up stars in order to calculate hashes for their currency? I can, but really only as something that an evil civilization or runaway automation would do.
Why not build a dyson sphere and sell contracts on the energy instead, to people who will use it to be productive? Why is it better to burn all stored energy you can find off as quickly as possible to generate numbers you don’t otherwise need?
People use this argument a lot, and I don't get it. You're trusting that miners don't perform a 51% attack; you're trusting that the underlying crypto doesn't have shortcuts; you're trusting the wallet software. Some of these things are unverifiable, leaving you only with trust.
Because bitcoin miners would buy it and "waste" it
If you see a lot of people doing something intentionally and you think they’re wasting resources, you probably just don’t understand what they’re spending resources on.
I can understand the claim that PoS was impractical even a year ago. But given Ethereum 2’s massive success, it’s an untenable claim. If you really think PoS in insecure, don’t bother at arguing it. Just go hack some of your share of that $14 billion.
Mining bitcoin won't stop. Emissions will stop.