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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting downvoted on my original comment, sigh HN.

> Perhaps you are right about power companies wanting to sell more power (although it seems like that is not the case for the marginal kWh given all that power companies do to incentive energy efficiency for their customers).

It is literally called a power company. They offer special rates for large customers. That alone creates a marketplace.

> But even so, at least that power would go to something useful (keeping buildings comfortable, purifying water, who knows what) rather than being burned in the crypto-pit.

Did you have a choice in where that power went to begin with? No.

"No one has the moral authority to tell you what is a good or bad use of energy (ex: watching the Kardashians)" -- https://twitter.com/danheld/status/1479135584685854729?lang=...

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That tweet thread is 100% wrong. I absolutely do have the moral authority to tell everyone that burning billions of joules per day in a bank of resistive elements and then dumping the heat directly into the atmosphere is morally wrong. It's not even a tough question. It is clearly a malicious (hypothetical) act being done only to hurt others.

So if there's an unambiguous case of morally abhorrent energy use, everything else is up for debate. That tweet thread goes off the rails early, as it's clear the author is financially incentivized to not understand the position he is arguing against. So it's no surprise the argument is nonsense.

It opens a can of worms. If you start telling people how they should or should not use any form of energy, then you have to ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° at yourself first.

https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/bitcoin-energy-c...

https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

> then you have to ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° at yourself first

Yes, and?

It is absurd as: your website makes money from Google Adsense and therefore is a waste of power because google is profiting off people advertising crap to others.

I'd posit that your argument is ridiculous, but that doesn't make anyone else's silly by default.

Nothing wrong with having an opinion.

Nothing wrong with pointing out when that opinion is ridiculous either.

I pledge to not spill 4.9 million barrels of oil into the gulf of mexico.

So you don't ever take advantage of an ICE? Fly a plane? Drive a car? Nor do you ever get a delivery to your house.

In other words, those things work because you directly or even indirectly support the system which causes those sorts of catastrophes to happen.

Isn't this just the "yet you participate in society" meme? We all can and should attempt to reduce our impact, that might mean we don't own a car, or we fly less frequently and take trains instead, perhaps even just working from home... If I need to fly from North America to Europe, I really don't have a choice. You could do it by boat, but ships are largely powered by fossil fuels too. That doesn't mean I actively support fossil fuel companies.

> burning billions of joules per day in a bank of resistive elements and then dumping the heat directly into the atmosphere is morally wrong.

Does this include mean computer gaming? How about watching movies? Is it morally wrong if done using computer "burning joules..."?

In most ethical frameworks, making many people happy vastly outweighs making a few people rich. In some ethical frameworks, making people happy is the most moral thing it is possible to do.

Just imagine the amount of compute, mechanical and human, that's spent trying to force people to watch ads that they don't want to see to convince them to buy things that they don't need.

Alternatively consider planned obsolescence. Devices are designed to break and be replaced rather than last today, as a rule. Consider just phones alone on this front. The amount of resources that consumes is unimaginable, and that goes well beyond just electricity or manpower.

Ultimately our entire society is built around the largely arbitrary expenditure of absolutely massive amounts of energy and resources to accomplish tasks that, in most cases, are not especially useful or necessary. Optimizing GDP, a goal of most all developed nations now a day, is often just a proxy for increasing waste. Buying the same phone 20 times gives a 20x boost to GDP relative to buying it once. And yet this is the metric we've chosen as a measure for progress.

The history of moral rectitude justifying forcing such rectitude on others is very bad.

There’s a big difference between doing something that’s maybe not the best use of resources, but still serves a purposes, even if it’s just pleasure (ex: watching the Kardashians) and doing something for no reason that makes any sense at all.

We should all be judicious with how we use our limited resources. The market often serves to incentivize that good judgement. When the market starts incentivizing waste (e.g. “cryptocurrencies”) that’s when you need to start banning things.

It's not possible to perform any action without using energy, so why not just say "No one has the moral authority to tell [me] what is a good or bad."?

The parent to your post never asserted “moral authority” around how power is used, only that they think this shift is a good thing in their view.

> at least that power would go to something useful

I consider that a moral opinion.

Ultimately it wasn’t the grandparent that asserted that proof-of-work Etherium mining wasn’t useful, it was the Etherium blockchain community themselves — which is why they have stopped doing it.

It’s not a “moral opinion” to accept someone else’s assessment of the utility of their own actions.

Is it a “moral opinion” to state a preference that crude oil is more useful when refined and injected into an ICE vehicle than if it’s burned on site in an oil well fire?

My point is that it is not your (or my) right to tell anyone what a good use of power is or is not. Simply because we all consume power one way or another. Expressing an opinion is fine... we can all have one of those, but we should be considerate of pot/kettle there.

You have this backward actually, the fact that Ethereum went to great lengths to design a more power-efficient replacement for PoW (rather than, say, doing something else with their lives) shows that PoW was useful to begin with.

The fact that Ethereum went to great lengths to design a more power-efficient replacement for PoW shows that the developers of Etherium derive personal value from an engagement with a technical challenge. It does suggest but doesn't prove that any permutation of the project was/is actually useful.

Your definition of useful sucks, and you should feel really bad about that. I don't get too concerned about how you waste my oxygen, but you're making me rethink that decision.

I’m sorry to hear that you’ve become stuck in a semantic bog-hole, but amused to learn that my words are so powerful that they overwhelm your conscious agency.

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