Bitcoin Miners Want to Recast Themselves as Eco-Friendly | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Miners Want to Recast Themselves as Eco-Friendly

nytimes.com

1 pointspenrose7 comments

Non-productive work will always be looked down upon and shaming people for being wasteful with resources is an absolutely correct attitude.

Crypto-bros are just the next generation of the emptiness of finance-bros pre Bitcoin -- but somehow worse. They add 0 value to open market economies with stable political systems.

Crypto allows for getting around sanctions, currency controls, and inflationary economic systems. This effectively supports incompetent or unethical regimes by either allowing privileged people to be unaffected by bad policies and disincentivizes political revolution towards more open markets and free political systems.

Hence why established democratic systems and free markets see no real value in Crypto except for speculation and illicit activities.

> Crypto allows for getting around sanctions, currency controls, and inflationary economic systems.

These would be the benefits, as it takes government out of the equation and permits free exchange. That's not a bad thing and is especially important when there are corrupt governments or government's not working in their citizen's interests or respecting citizen's rights (see Canada)

The real problem with cryptocurrency is that instead of being a medium of exchange, it's ended up as a way to circumvent securities law and other regulations related to MLM, pump and dump, ponzi schemes, etc, that have already been addressed for traditional mediums of exchange. So substantially all crypto activity ends up just being variations on the above schemes, instead of actual exchange.

If there was such thing as a teleporter that let me send physical currency (or gold if you like) to someone else without state intervention, that would be awesome, but crypto is not that

Those are benefits in failed states and under despotic regimes. There's no real benefit in stable open-market systems.

Crypto benefits privileged people under bad regimes, the same ones who are necessary to actually overthrow despots.

It doesn't benefit, and will never benefit, the general populace who make less than $5 per day.

Pro-crypto people trying to use Canada as an example are all living privileged lives in free democratic societies with a persecution complex

If your government is actually corrupt and does not respect your rights, I think you should be more worried about physical threats. No amount of bits in your encryption key will save you from a $5 hammer. A corrupt government will get what they want from you or disappear you regardless of how you protect yourself.

"A single Bitcoin transaction now requires more than 2,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, or enough energy to power the average American household for 73 days"

It's shouldn't be thought of as energy per transaction. It's energy protecting all productivity that has been transferred into the network. Also there's so many places that use heat energy (drying grain for instance). We're going to be seeing a lot more interesting uses of the heat energy being expelled to secure the bitcoin blockchain.

Energy per transaction is the fundamental metric of efficiency in market systems.

Literally every single product and service boils down an exchange of currency for some embodied (goods, services) or pure energy (electricity).

Banking services are an exchange of currency for the energy embodied in protecting the accounting system and providing secure access to money.

Crypto mining uses several orders of magnitude more energy per serviced individual than the entirety of the global banking system combined.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com