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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

People keep saying this, but I don't follow. FTT was a token manufactured out of thin air. Crypto works as a concept, I suppose, but people saying crypto works is like the people that say Agile works. How long do we have to wait to see crypto working? Where are the success stories of crypto? There's a long laundry list of hacks, scams, company failures, "tokenomics", NFTs, <x> on blockchain, etc. Saying crypto works as a technology base is not enough. Currencies and tradeable "assets" are a social thing. It isn't just a technology.

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This is what the entire cryptosphere always seems to miss - society. People have pitched cryptocurrency/blockchain/NFTs for all sorts of things, and every one is a pure tech solution that misses the social aspect.

I had someone try to tell me blockchain voting would fix Russian democracy, because it would ensure transparent, accountable elections. OK, so how are you getting it in there? Just going to stroll into the Kremlin and make the current leadership implement it? You’ll be laughed at shortly before your arrest. No, fixing Russian politics is primarily a social issue. Transparent, accountable voting could be part of a possible future effort at reform, but first you need to somehow gain the power to implement reform at all.

Coming up with a software solution alone does nothing. And this is what is often missed.

“I can imagine a better future in which my amazing software solution plays a pivotal role, therefore if I create that software, things are sure to turn out that way”

FTX is a centralized (not DeFi) exchange that used their own coin as collateral and obfuscated their liquidity. This wouldn’t be possible in open decentralized exchanges that many in web3/crypto were advocating for. However SBF made it his mission to lobby regulation on DeFi and a blind eye to CeFi exchanges like his own.

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-money/2022/10/2...

You just get a different set of tradeoff on a decentralized exchange. E.g. many users don't have the basic opsec required to protect their private key without losing it.

For a cryptocurrency owner taken at random, I think it's likelier that they make a mistake with their private key than they lose tokens held in a Coinbase (or another CEX among the less dodgy, regulated, etc.) account.

>basic opsec required to protect their private key without losing it.

Exactly. I've long wondered if there's any way to overcome this without essentially going back to a 'trusted broker/custodian' model

> many in web3/crypto were advocating for.

If many people in this space are advocating for decentralized exchanges, how come everyone uses centralized ones?

If there's ever a time and place for voting with your wallet, this seems to be it, and the wallets are speaking loudly and clearly.

The wallets are speaking clearly, DeFi volume is through the roof right now.

https://defillama.com/dexs

A lot of people put money on CEX because they are ignorant, or willing to take on some risk for slightly cheaper and faster trades. Those people probably regret their decision now. If they used Uniswap and Aave they could not have withdrawals paused because of one company’s insolvency.

"If many people in this space are advocating for decentralized exchanges, how come everyone uses centralized ones?"

Convenience.

DeFi doesn't interface with fiat.

Its really a viewpoint common to tech workers. They see and solve the technological aspects of a problem while remaining blind to the larger more complex social aspects that remain unsolved, but think the problem is solved.

Here are other examples:

- promising self driving cars (driving is more than a technical activity, it's a social activity. AI is nowhere close to driving the easier technical aspects, much less the more complex social aspects)

- AI is already better than or will replace doctors. As of all doctors do is look at symptoms and up with diagnosis. The social part of medicine is the larger job by far, not diagnosis.

- algorithms can't biased. My AI predicts some function that has some real life impact. That the input data is biased, and therefore the output data is just as biased or even more biased. Well that's not my problem. I only build models, and lines of codes are not biased. But the result of your work is being used in the society to perpetuate bias. It's not okay to remain wilfully oblivious to that.

Lumping diagonally opposed things (centralized coins like FTT or decentralized coins like BTC) under the same category (crypto) is quite misleading.

> How long do we have to wait to see crypto working?

BTC (on chain) is still working as intended, after all these years.

> BTC (on chain) is still working as intended, after all these years.

It's certainly working on destroying the planet with its obscene energy requirements.

Energy which was paid for. If there is a problem with that then price it accordingly.

Energy which is used to mindlessly calculate dumb hashes, trillions of which are discarded every second for the winning 'hash'. Proof of Work is basically lottery, but which consumes energy instead of tickets.

Not a miner. I do use a computer to calculate dumb stuff all the time for entertainment purposes.

I mean… Cyberpunk 2077 could run acceptably on an integrated 65W APU but instead I chose to crank everything on max with ray tracing through a 4090 just to see some dumb frames on a screen that are discarded at a hundred per second.

And I don’t ever remember having to ask permission to use the kW h I’m paying for.

I'm not sure gamers have over-specced their gaming machines to the extent they're using more electricity than a medium-sized European country...

Are you suggesting the combined power usage of gamers specing their machines above average recommended system requirements is less than the power used by mining industry? I’m skeptical about that.

And its beside the point because again its none of your business.

> Are you suggesting the combined power usage of gamers specing their machines above average recommended system requirements is less than the power used by mining industry? I’m skeptical about that.

Yes, of course, I am absolutely suggesting that overspecced gaming PCs played by a minority of gamers in their spare time don't use more electricity than a medium sized developed country (or indeed the 24/7 running of industrial scale server farms deploying chips designed because even the most powerful gaming chips weren't anywhere near energy intensive enough to win the energy-burning competition). Why would you possibly consider the small number of people using high spec gaming PCs a few hours a day use more electricity than a developed world country?

Still skeptical and like I said I would not care if they do because it’s none of my business how they use the energy they pay for.

Why don’t you go for power companies instead and demand clean energy investments? Might be a better use of your activism instead of just going for people using their own stuff in a way you don’t like. It’s not going to end well. I’m pretty sure the insane degrowth narrative will target gaming or other power intensive recreative uses sooner or later but that’s another discussion.

> just to see some dumb frames on a screen that are discarded at a hundred per second.

If these frames were really discarded (that is, not shown on your screen), then yes, it would be a waste. But my understanding of your example is that these frames were displayed, and their light reached your eyeballs.

They are if the thing about the eye being limited to 60FPS is true.

Calculating hashes in a loop is dumb, cyberpunk is a pretty complex piece of code which also utilises GPU aspects like ray tracing,

Nobody has the power to unilaterally “set the price” of energy, it’s set by the market.

Free markets are great for a lot of things, but pricing in externalities isn’t one of them.

Agreed but I think people should be looking at power companies and how they generate energy for accountability instead of going for industry A and B. Wiping PoW from the face of the earth won’t make those coal plants in China go away.

No, but it will reduce the demand for what they produce. This isn’t hypothetical, even in the US there are examples of coal/natural gas plants getting brought back online for bitcoin mining (finger lakes NY; Hardin, MT)

Well, maybe I should raise the example of ETH instead. It is still working as intended, decentralized, and consuming little energy.

Given ETH only switched to proof-of-stake this year, I think perhaps it's a bit early to call it out as a long-standing energy efficiency success.

I am not a fan of "destroying the planet" arguments mainly because anything goes, super ambiguious and not very precise. Buy our razors because cartridge razors are destroying the planet! https://bandisposablerazors.org/

Destroying the planet = Can't question it, can't argue about it, it is the end all of all arguments. How could you ever oppose something that destroys the planet?

They all sound the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing

On top of being hard to argue against, it just isn't true. It's a net positive for the environment, at least it will be in a couple of years: https://batcoinz.com/50-landfills-mining-bitcoin-a-zero-emis...

This is wrong and green washing.

We could also use this energy for better things than Bitcoin.

And while BTC doesn't make any value besides moving money from one person to another, it also produces hardware garbage like ASIC chips and power supply.

It also steals demand from others too.

There is only downside for most of us than benefit of allowing Bitcoin mining independent of it's source.

No, this is not wrong. You can't magically just "use it for something else". That's not how this works. You need to generate electricity where it is needed (or transport it, which costs money).

If there are landfills out there that are just spewing methane gas (20x worse than CO2, btw) into the atmosphere, why not make sure that is burned and used more efficiently? Please show me a realistic plan to do this. Bitcoin does it without forcing anyone and without taxes directed towards it.

Aren't landfills close to civilization usually, so it would not be hard to transfer the electricity some miles to charge Teslas, heat homes or power etc.

Where are landfills too remote to transport electricity away from?

I'm sure that's the case for some of the landfills, but definitely not all of them.

In the US 70% of the methane from landfills is vented, rather than flared. That means that for some reason, either it's too expensive to do or something else is blocking this. And that's just the US.

You can also imagine that landfills in the developing world are better targets. Infrastructure is not as good there as it is in the US or in Europe.

The profit is too small.

Easy to solve with laws. Shouldn't be allowed anyway to just pick the good things from a gas field...

Yeah, let's use laws instead of something that makes monetary sense...?

It's not a gas field, it's a land fill.

Just because it makes monetary sense doesn't mean it makes ecological sense. Therefore a law

Generally though, conceptually the argument goes like this "You can't do X because it destroys the planet. Since we cannot destroy the planet, there is no other option but to accept banning of X". But, there is no limits or guards to this. You can easily go down the slippery slope and say X is the city of Chicago that needs to be destroyed for the collective good. It consumes too many resources.

Riddled with subjectivism. You cannot do less since there are no objective limits to what is "acceptable levels of destruction of the planet" means. It has a different subjective weight to different entities arguing the position. In the limit, this would mean we erase humanity all together and leave the planet alone.

You can bully a lot of things your way before any one can speak up against it. There is a level of insidious moral superiority built into it which makes it prime for exploitation. Corporations are doing exactly that.

is this paper saying that Bitcoin _will_ all be mined using methane, or that it _could_? because those are two vastly different conclusions.

I don't believe it's saying either. It's saying that the trend is towards net zero emission and that this will happen by the end of 2024. After that I would assume we go into the negatives and improve the current situation.

"Based on the estimated average growth rate of bitcoin mining operators using vented methane of 6.9 MW/month, the Bitcoin network will become Carbon Negative in Dec ’24."

So… we will solve global warming by running a network of computers with custom ASICs at 100% utilization, cooling them as necessary, performing useless computation, so a cabal of technobros can move imaginary internet money around 10 times per second?

Oh and increasing the power usage of this fire pile will, as you say, “improve the current situation”?

Your point is that the only way we can avoid burning methane is to use that to power bitcoin mining rigs???

No, I've never claimed that. Regardless of what you think about Bitcoin, if it's useless or not, don't you agree that net negative is better than zero?

Burning methane (flaring) is most definitely an improvement over not doing it. That's just a fact. It accounts for about 20% of global emissions and is 25 times as potent as CO2. https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane

You would use Bitcoin mining as a monetary incentive to flare methane. You could do other things but it requires more infrastructure investment and might not even be possible in certain locations that are far from where the electricity would be used.

I would agree that not performing useless computations is better than performing useless computations. If monetary incentives are all we need, then just use tax incentives to do so. That seems much easier than shipping mining rigs and the corresponding cooling to locations apparently too far from civilization to produce energy for anything useful.

A tax would result in a cost for the business.

Bitcoin mining results in a profit.

Why would you pick the first one?

Transporting miners is not the hard part, you just keep them in containers. What is hard is building the necessary stuff to actually flare the gas properly.

A tax incentive, as in an offset on their costs.

Sure, so we just move the cost to someone else effectively? Seems unfair and unnecessary when they can just mine bitcoin instead.

It's an interesting level of abstraction question. On a fine-grained level, yes, BTC works algorithmically as you have pointed out, and FFT is not the exact same thing as BTC. The question the is whether either of these things work socially / for society.

Whether it's accurate or not, I imagine non-experts would regard the difference between BTC and FFT as pretty negligible, perhaps akin to the difference between "social media" and IG vs. Reddit.

The creation, distribution and governance are completely different. The public may not care but in the long run we mow see it matters.

To support my point:

https://mobile.twitter.com/whale_alert/status/15916165982801...

This doesn’t happen with BTC because it wasn’t created out of thin air.

> Lumping diagonally opposed things (centralized coins like FTT or decentralized coins like BTC) under the same category (crypto) is quite misleading.

Crypto generally means digital currency, does it not? I think leaving them out would be actually misleading.

> BTC (on chain) is still working as intended, after all these years.

Working in what sense?

> Working in what sense?

That you can securely and cheaply transact value without a third party being involved?

That governments can’t directly block your account the way Trudeau blocked protestors bank accounts?

Probably a few other ways as well ...

Bitcoin fees are often not cheap at all.

Just a week ago someone got cought and the fbi took his 3 billion dollar worth of BTC.

Sending crypto to someone in Iran or Russia is against the law independent of how you do it.

And just because you can send BTC to Iran someone in Iran also needs to exchange it to something real again.

While banking is more restrictive, when you go to your bank with your passport, you actually can recover your account. I know someone who lost 10k because he lost his key.

For most people it's saver and easier and they are not affected and don't care about all those BTC/crypto benefits at all

You need to start backing up your statements with facts. Please show us that bitcoin fees are "often not" cheap at all.

Here's some actual data you can look at: https://mempool.space/graphs/mining/block-fee-rates#all

Look at the "Min" fee rate; regularly very close to 1. That's $0.02 at current prices.

Sources? I was buying and transferring bitcoins over 8 years as I bought weed through it.

Of course you can even pay 0 but you know it's not the normal someone would wait days for the transaction going through.

You clearly did not use Bitcoin often enough otherwise you could just looked the spikes up yourself. That first corona year was even worse with the fees.

That's not a source.

I literally posted a source showing you it's very cheap. The minimum fee is the lowest fee you'll pay to get into the next block.

I used Bitcoin way back in 2010. Though I don't understand why that makes a difference since you can look up the prices in hindsight.

> Sending crypto to someone in Iran or Russia is against the law independent of how you do it.

One thing to keep in mind: laws are not always just.

I believe it's okay to sometimes not follow the law, if the law is unjust. One example: in WW2 Germany there were many laws against minorities that were unjust [0]. Most law obedient people would follow these laws regardless.

Perhaps a person want to support his family in Iran or Russia that's going through difficult times. And perhaps crypto is the only way to help. In such cases I think it's okay to oppose the law.

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[0]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nuremb...

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