Waste from one Bitcoin transaction ‘like binning two iPhones’
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
About five minutes before this comment, I just bought the new iPhone. And, no doubt, many people, perhaps rightly, would criticize the yearly upgrade. A coin functions at a much much larger waist scale than my yearly upgrade. Kind of mind-boggling the more I try and wrap my head around it.
That your market logic. The more demand the more incentivised production is. That's a spin on the famous example breaking windows, so later your business can set new glass panes.
In practical terms you are talking about planned obsolescence exactly the same thing. Companies make product so the last no more then X years, even though they could last way longer.
You are forced to buy a inferior product because all companies conspire not to produce longer lasting goods.
In your example its like buying an apple and being force to throw it away after one bite.
But hey, at least we're incentivizing the farming industry!
Yes, I am somehow missing the point. Whats this counter argument about?
Oil is finite and becomes exponentially harder to extract/find.
Not necessarily true because energy transport and storage can be a serious issue that makes other usages impractical. Bitcoin mining can be done at the energy source regardless of the location.
Sage.
Ah, Application-specific integrated circuit. 1 out of 4!
This part is at least disingenuous. The real movement away from PoW is in PoS coins but all they say is that it 'ha[s] been less successful' citing the worst that has come out and from a small project at that, and mentioning ETH's slow move to it as if there aren't other projects already using it.
These days climate change and pollution is in everyone's minds. Can't blame us for lashing out at wasteful practices.
I think cryptocurrencies get more hate here that electron apps here, and that's saying something.
You could also say me boiling the kettle is killing the earth, but thankfully I've never heard anyone say that.
But as others already have pointed out, this is not what the article is about.
We'll have to disagree on that one. If the energy companies won't invest in the greener solution, I don't see how people consuming that energy can be blamed.
As much as I hate miners, blaming them for the disaster that is the energy industry is wrong.
And no one is demanding that you should stop using energy completely because you only can buy dirty energy, but you can choose to use less of it, by not using it for something that so far only have proved to be a huge Ponzi scheme. In many parts of the world you can choose to pay more for cleaner energy. But that would of course reduce the profit from mining.