Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

And once you've built it, you have to have the aluminum ore shipped to you, and get the processed aluminum shipped to the world market.

A BTC mine fits into a few shipping containers, needs no in-out logistics, and can easily be transported around as needed

View on HN

Plus the whole environmental nasty thing. I was born in a town which hosted an aluminium smelter, my parents moved from there when I was 10 months old on the advice of a doctor who was a friend of theirs and who had told them they should most probably seek a better place for me to grow up, environmentally-wise.

Shame about that other environmental nasty thing related to proof-of-work that renders the entire earth somewhere you'd prefer not to raise a kid.

I was just commenting on the aluminium smelter thing being very, very non-environmentally friendly at a local level.

Depends on what the miners are being powered with.

Geothermal energy has very few emissions.

If Iceland shuts down aluminium smelters in favor of bitcoin miners it is a net benefit.

I wonder if it's more complicated that that. Narrowly looking at the CO2 effects of shutting down AL smelters in Iceland, that will make the global supply for the metal lower, raising prices. Perhaps that would make it uneconomical for usage in vehicles, meaning that cars would again use heavy steel instead of aluminum. Perhaps that would cause the global car fleet to burn more fuel and net pollute more CO2.

CO2 doesn't directly poison people in the same way the industrial waste/emissions poison people. This fundamental fact is one of the major reasons it is difficult to coordinate CO2 emissions reductions -- the harm is global but diffuse.

> A BTC mine fits into a few shipping containers, needs no in-out logistics, and can easily be transported around as needed

...yet creates absolutely zero actual value.

it is one of the greatest and most destructive speculative pyramid schemes yet.

> ...yet creates absolutely zero actual value.

It's only the first uncensorable / decentralized kind of money, nah must be nothing.

Is this censorship? https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-excha...

Yes it is.

Censorship doesn't necessarily mean the thing being censored is deterministically "bad" or "evil".

Bitcoin is above morality, morality is a human construct, Bitcoin is math and computer science, by definition it cannot have morality.

Now, you might or might not agree that Bitcoin should be allowed to exist given it facilitates activities such as the one you linked.

But since it's uncensorable in the first place... you cannot outlaw it.

Pandora's box is open, and it cannot be closed once it is open (unless you break Bitcoin's cryptography).

Uncensorability /is/ valuable, to the people that don't want to be censored, and want to exchange money without asking anyone permission, whether that's a drug dealer, or an unbanked worker in Venezuela.

So…how? What? Bitcoin is supposedly uncensorable - yet he was censored? Which one is it?

Only because governments don't give a flying fuck about it... Yet.

They'll catch up eventually. See how some politicians are already starting to call on mining bans.

They can easily fully ban it and enforce it. Let's say, put mining on the same level as growing weed or making heroin.

Your super first kind of decentralized money is now fucked.

Then all of mining would just move to places like Venezuela, where a lot of drug trade (per your example) already goes on, and they would get even more money for their extremist endeavours. Sad.

Containers or a warehouse of miners also has far less effect on anything local. You don't have to worry nearly as much about local oligarchs or regulators getting uppity and trying to shut you down.

> Containers or a warehouse of miners also has far less effect on anything local.

uhm what? the presence of miners mean energy prices rise as well as more environmental destruction to produce energy, especially if it's a place without green(er) energy production.

prices rise until mine is moved to different place with cheap (for now) energy.

Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away?

Obviously it's all stupidly chaotic, there might be a huge waterfall somewhere, and if we ignore the natural beauty aspects, before some cryptobros show up with money (however tangible) to build a hydropower plant and some wires to their container site, that waterfall's energy is not being utilized...

> Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away?

yep, that's my argument above. and i personally wouldn't say hashes "are mostly thrown away", i would argue they're all thrown away, especially when considering this 'tech' will become defunct in a few years.

“In what may be the best expression yet of capitalist realism, a new tool for free market speculation has become for many a populist symbol of resistance to the ravages of finance capitalism.”

https://mronline.org/2021/12/28/cryptocurrencies-a-view-from...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com