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Comment by cuteboy19 | Hacker News Reader

Fine, let's go through this one by one

The "shared goal" is burning electricity for no good reason. Bitcoin did the same calculations with 10 WHr that it does with 100 TWHr.

The true cost of energy was already known before Bitcoin. It's the amount of money people are willing to exchange for some unit of electricity. All Bitcoin did was raise this known cost a little higher for computing redundant calculations.

The energy that you put into Bitcoin can never be gained back. It's a consumer of electricity, not a store.

Star Treks economy was a utopian communist system. How is a hypercapitalist system ever going to approach that?

Finally, this whole question is not a scientific question in the first place. It is a mathematical one.

Mathematically, is the cash flow within bitcoin the same as a ponzi scheme? The answer is yes, since there is no source of net revenue and older investors are paid off using newer investors money

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The energy was already generated. Imagine you're a power company. You gotta sell your energy. Who do you sell it to? Locally? To that price-fixed monopoly who have exclusive control simply because they happen to be physically located near your very heavy and hard-to-move power station? Or do you mine Bitcoin?

As long as a free market exists, for whatever stupid ass reason, a fair economy will result from those economic pressures.

People are already restarting old coal plants to mine btc. This whole "it was wasted energy anyways" idea is nonsense.

This is fundamentally not how power markets work. You offer to sell the grid power before it is produced - you have this backwards.

You sell it to anybody you want (some regulations aside). The grid operator makes it available to anybody who wants to plug into the grid. There are many regulations that make it such that anybody who wants to plug into the grid can do so as long as it’s not destabilizing, and even then, they’ll often work with you.

If you were an expert in energy markets, you’d see that you can go to an ISO and see which entities are market participants - of which utilities are just a few.

I could, and regularly do, sell some random company power that the grid / transmission operator HAVE to transport for me as long as I’m not physically destabilizing the grid by messing with frequencies, etc.

You also have the location of the power stations backwards. We choose to build power stations in an area because we see unmet or growing demand, not because some utility showed up and demanded we do it…

Pretty much all of your arguments so far are based on premises that simply aren’t true.

> The energy was already generated. Imagine you're a power company. You gotta sell your energy.

You do realize that power stations can increase and decrease production to scale with demand?

> Who do you sell it to? Locally? To that price-fixed monopoly who have exclusive control simply because they happen to be physically located near your very heavy and hard-to-move power station? Or do you mine Bitcoin?

If you re-route 50% of your power output to a server farm and jack up prices for everyone else because free market, the costs of all the goods and services that you require to maintain your power plant and your server and the salary that your staff requires to feed, bathe and house themselves will all go up.

Crypto bros are 21st century gold hoarders. The idea that the value of crypto/gold is 100% intrinsic to the commodity itself and not related to the social and economic context in which it exists myopic and a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of value itself.

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