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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

How does crypto mining come even close? Sorry, which beings am I immersing in extreme pain and suffering by running hashes on my GPU?

Environmentally, Bitcoin and Ethereum's combined production of greenhouse gasses - ~50M tons CO2 - does not come anywhere close to the over 6 billion tons of CO2 of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by meat production.

Again, orders of magnitude more environmental damage, alongside the greatest cycle of sheer pain and suffering this planet has ever seen, and we don't even get something out of it. How can people point fingers at crypto miners while engaging in this far more harmful behavior?

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The one system is providing sustenance for billions of people, the other is used by tens of thousands of people. As is always forgotten to mention when this argument is made.

But this is an even worse argument than usual - the people speculating with crypto constructs are very often also part of the groups who consume a whole lot of meat...

"tens of thousands of people"

You are off by 3 orders of magnitude. Bitcoin alone validates 7 million transactions monthly. If there were only 50k users, an average user would be sending 140 transactions per month.

What about trading and wash sales? Would not that make the average very high? I have no numbers so I can't say more, but 140 transactions per month per user doesn't sound that high considering the above.

Much of that trading will happen off-chain using local accounts on some exchange and thus not contribute to the transaction count. Only the deposits and withdrawals require on-chain transactions.

The average centralized financial processor can process that many transactions in about 10 seconds, with the option of reversal,

You are not making a great case here.

"in about 10 seconds"

Patently false. For example an "average" processor like Western Union processes only 25 million transactions monthly.

"with the option of reversal"

Which is the whole problem. Bitcoin is irreversible, by design. That's crucial.

Oh for the love of Christ. Unless you go fully Jainist, and eat only what you grow, after painstakingly removing insect pests and placing them elsewhere gently, nothing you eat is pain/suffering free.

Modern agricultural harvesting and processing always has a bykill of small mammals and ground nesting birds.

Organic farming often uses companion planting to attract natural predators of insect pests, so that insecticides don't need to be used (as much anyway, there's plenty of rather toxic compounds that are perfectly natural and organic yet kill things well, like derris dust).

How, though, do you distinguish between the suffering of cows, and the suffering of a dormouse, or the suffering of caterpillars that are being eaten from inside by the larvae of a parasitic wasp?

Are you basing your morality on "there's an arbitrary level of suffering I'll accept" or "I'm only opposed to the suffering of life that has at least N neurons?"

Or are you sweeping the path as you walk lest an ant be harmed?

I read somewhere that the death ratio of meat vs vegan diet is about 1 cow vs 30 mice, not sure if it was a reliable figure.

That sounds incorrect since around 3/4 of the agriculture production is used to feed lifestock

In your country. In my country, we don't advertise beef as "grass fed" as a market segmentation tactic, because all our beef is grass fed, that's the only way we feed stock raised for beef.

Once again, it's not just a simple case of "all animal husbandry is unsustainable", but we need to pick apart why the unsustainable practices have been developed into what they are now.

My gut feeling is that Government subsidies of corn in the US create an oversupply of it, so sure, why not feed it to cattle?

It's not like the American beef industry was predicated on grain feeding, it started with ranchers grazing them on prairies.

So what changed?

No, it is the worldwide use. In my country it is around 80% for lifestock and 10% for human food.

Averages are terrible across widely disparate data points.

It is not a average, it is the total global use of farming. Just because a few countries does better does not mean that it is okay. And that does not also change the fact that the 1 cow vs. 30 mice sounds like nonsense. And that if everyone ate less meat we would need less space for farming.

It's a really terrible comparison and nothing but a cheap tu quoque.

Crypto contributes nothing but a speculative asset to society.

Meat production, while derailed into unsustainability, has a lot more utility and is also a lot harder to unwind from current culture. Try running a survey on which of the two people would rather forego, and your 100M to 6B ratio will look rather stupid.

One shitty behavior doesn't excuse another.

> Meat production [...] has a lot more utility

We will have to agree to disagree that stimulating the taste buds has more utility than providing a trustless financial system.

I've used bitcoin as a currency in 2011, and now people keep telling me I shouldn't have because all I got for 2-million USD equivalent BTC then was a video game.

What's the point of a currency that doesn't scale and that everyone is too afraid to spend because of volatility.

Speculative asset, that's all you'll ever have there.

That comment belays a misunderstanding of the crypto sphere as a whole. If you don't want to partake in the speculative nature of the asset, you can simply transact with a stablecoin.

So, A cryptobro that eats soylent paste?

Didn't have that one on my bingo card...

ha! Made me laugh, this was me 10 years ago

I'd say we get more out of meat, having delicious stuff to eat is awesome.

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