Bitcoin Consumes 'More Electricity Than Argentina' (bbc.com) 355
Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: Bitcoin uses more electricity annually than the whole of Argentina, analysis by Cambridge University suggests. 'Mining' for the cryptocurrency is power-hungry, involving heavy computer calculations to verify transactions. Cambridge researchers say it consumes around 121.36 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year -- and is unlikely to fall unless the value of the currency slumps. Critics say electric-car firm Tesla's decision to invest heavily in Bitcoin undermines its environmental image.
The online tool has ranked Bitcoin's electricity consumption above Argentina (121 TWh), the Netherlands (108.8 TWh) and the United Arab Emirates (113.20 TWh) - and it is gradually creeping up on Norway (122.20 TWh). The energy it uses could power all kettles used in the UK for 27 years, it said. However, it also suggests the amount of electricity consumed every year by always-on but inactive home devices in the US alone could power the entire Bitcoin network for a year. "Bitcoin is literally anti-efficient," David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, explained. "So more efficient mining hardware won't help -- it'll just be competing against other efficient mining hardware. This means that Bitcoin's energy use, and hence its CO2 production, only spirals outwards. It's very bad that all this energy is being literally wasted in a lottery."
In regard to Tesla's decision to buy bitcoin, Mr Gerard added: "Elon Musk has thrown away a lot of Tesla's good work promoting energy transition. This is very bad... I don't know how he can walk this back effectively. Tesla got $1.5 billion in environmental subsidies in 2020, funded by the taxpayer. It turned around and spent $1.5 billion on Bitcoin, which is mostly mined with electricity from coal. Their subsidy needs to be examined."
The online tool has ranked Bitcoin's electricity consumption above Argentina (121 TWh), the Netherlands (108.8 TWh) and the United Arab Emirates (113.20 TWh) - and it is gradually creeping up on Norway (122.20 TWh). The energy it uses could power all kettles used in the UK for 27 years, it said. However, it also suggests the amount of electricity consumed every year by always-on but inactive home devices in the US alone could power the entire Bitcoin network for a year. "Bitcoin is literally anti-efficient," David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, explained. "So more efficient mining hardware won't help -- it'll just be competing against other efficient mining hardware. This means that Bitcoin's energy use, and hence its CO2 production, only spirals outwards. It's very bad that all this energy is being literally wasted in a lottery."
In regard to Tesla's decision to buy bitcoin, Mr Gerard added: "Elon Musk has thrown away a lot of Tesla's good work promoting energy transition. This is very bad... I don't know how he can walk this back effectively. Tesla got $1.5 billion in environmental subsidies in 2020, funded by the taxpayer. It turned around and spent $1.5 billion on Bitcoin, which is mostly mined with electricity from coal. Their subsidy needs to be examined."
Electricity usage is proportional to its price (Score:4, Informative)
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If Bitcoin's price goes up by a factor of 10, then so does its electricity usage. That's the nature of mining and it can't be escaped. The only thing that lowers mining electricity usage is the halving events that cut down the mining reward for each block in half - the next one is due in 2024.
How did you reach that conclusion? Electrical usage and coin price seem loosely correlated at best. I don't believe electrical usage halved with previous block reward halvings.
Re:Electricity usage is proportional to its price (Score:5, Informative)
Suppose there's a world with 100 mining machines on it that aren't turned on. Electricity costs $1/hour for each machine when turned on. On this world, Bitcoin's price is $4 and every hour one new Bitcoin is minted that gets distributed to miners. So starting from 0 machines running, the first owner thinks "I should turn on my miner to earn $4/hour minus $1 electricity costs for a profit of $3/hour", so he does. Now the second owner thinks "If I turn on my Bitcoin, I have a 50% chance of getting that Bitcoin worth $4, so my profit is 0.5*$4-$1=$1/Hour. The third thinks 0.333*$4-$1 = $0.33/Hour. The fourth thinks 0.25*$4-$1 = $0/Hour. So it reaches equilibrium at 4 miners and no more miners come along. Now, multiply the price of Bitcoin by ten and start this reasoning again. What you'll find is that there are exactly 10 times as many miners before equilibrium is reached again.
In reality it's messier than this due to the costs and time taken of buying new mining hardware and the varying costs of electricity in the world - this creates a lot of noise that makes it hard to see the relationship were you to just look at the data. But it is at the core of Bitcoin that it's electricity price will always be tied to its price.
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That equilibrium is an over simplified view of the world. There are many other factors. E.g.
Financial: Telsa invests $1.5bn into bitcoin and the price shoots up by 25%. For that time there's no change in mining. It still consumes as much energy as before. Many miners do not magically appear out of nowhere for a new peak. It will take a while for new miners to come online *if* they come online. The reality being that many expect this to be a short term bubble and will not invest to meet the current price.
Gov
Re: Electricity usage is proportional to its price (Score:2)
Increase the price
Or decrease expense
Right now its being burned at bot
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The last guy who tried to prove the inevitability of an economic result like that from first principles rediscovered a maxim of economics: "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
Re: Electricity usage is proportional to its price (Score:2)
how much will bitcoin be worth (Score:5, Insightful)
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That will never happen. For the time being, crypto mining is profitable and poorly-understood enough that authorities haven't done anything to curtail Proof of Work mining on a meaningful scale. Any significant drain on grid power will inevitably involve the authorities as they sort out why there are power shortages, outages, and other problems.
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On the other hand, crypto mining is essentially constant over the entire day, good for baseload power plants. And if miners are paying for electricity, the government may actually like the extra income for electricity.
AFAIK, soem countries have datacenters near big power plants for the reason that mining can be used to take the output from the power plant when the demand on the grid is too low (and selling it cheaper to the miners gets you some money compared to none).
Re: how much will bitcoin be worth (Score:2)
Enough! (Score:3, Interesting)
First, it was a bubble waiting to burst but considering its age and interest even among large corporations it turns out to be not that bubbly, now all the crap talk about its power efficiency.
Let's talk about all the banking institutions which have large buildings, servers, millions of people working in them using electricity, water and other resources. Let's talk about bailouts and how nowadays they primarily serve the riches and goverments.
Let's also talk about how people waste literally millions of tons of resources on things which end up in landfills.
If Bitcoin is worthless crap why are you even talking about it? Maybe in reality someone is scared losing control over the money printing machine and as a consequence control over the world? Is this what it's really about?
And, no, PoS doesn't seem to be a solution. It has its huge pitfalls which have yet to be addressed. As inefficient as PoW is, it has proven to work. Maybe a PoS/PoW combo is the best way going forward.
Re:Enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
LN is a mess. I don't know why people keep trying to hype it up.
LN what a joke (Score:3)
Re:Enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually Bitcoin can process unlimited transactions per second through Bitcoin Lightning network.
Join the Bitcoin network. Every transaction is on the chain. You don't need to trust some government or some bank with your money. No trust needed. It's inherent in the design.
Wait a minute. It looks like Bitcoin can't handle the volume. Lets solve that by taking our transactions off the chain and putting it into the Lightning Network, where we can designate people that we trust to monitor all the transactions for us.
Re: Enough! (Score:2)
I look forward to the wide scale use of Bitcoin in jewelry so that I have a opportunity to mock the wearers in person.
Re:Enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's talk about all the banking institutions which have large buildings, servers, millions of people working in them using electricity, water and other resources. Let's talk about bailouts and how nowadays they primarily serve the riches and goverments.
Banks and other financial institutions perform useful functions in commerce, which is more than can be said for bitcoin mining. What gets me is that, for no good reason I can see, bitcoin mining appears to be designed to consume resources as greedily as possible. It is a bit like those competitions where people have to eat as much as possible in order to win, so pure greed and waste is rewarded.
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Let's talk about all the banking institutions which have large buildings, servers, millions of people working in them using electricity, water and other resources. Let's talk about bailouts and how nowadays they primarily serve the riches and goverments.
Banks and other financial institutions perform useful functions in commerce, which is more than can be said for bitcoin mining. What gets me is that, for no good reason I can see, bitcoin mining appears to be designed to consume resources as greedily as possible. It is a bit like those competitions where people have to eat as much as possible in order to win, so pure greed and waste is rewarded.
Found the MBA. Charging a fee for everything isn't a "useful function in commerce" it's a drag placed on all commerce so that the people with the most money can rent seek from everyone else with minimal effort.
Bitcoin = Mass Consumption (Score:2)
What gets me is that, for no good reason I can see, bitcoin mining appears to be designed to consume resources as greedily as possible.
Exactly. And what's sad is that those corporations could be reinvesting in their labor pool, instead of wasting it away on consumption of electricity. It sure worked well back in the 50's and 60's, before the hourly compensation diverged from hourly production, [epi.org] giving corporations a lot of capital to mess around with.
I have a colleague who is investing in Bitcoin, and he h
Re:Enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
I read the article you linked, and I still do not know why bitcoin needs to consume so much energy in order to work. If I understand the argument correctly, bitcoin acquires value because of the work involved in its production, like gold being valuable because it is difficult to extract from the environment, This strikes me as a cock-eyed notion of value. To me, as an engineer, something is valuable to the extent that it is useful, or maybe just pleasing, regardless of how much effort it took to produce it. So I tend to admire efficiency, which means producing more value with less effort. Bitcoin still seems to be the opposite of that.
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One way to hack the blockchain is by doing a 51% attack. That requires the attacker to have more computing power than the rest of the network.
So, if Bitcoin mining currently uses about as much energy as Argentina, the attacker would have to use a bit more energy than that to double-spend coins. As such, this provides security for the network.
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PoW is slow and cumbersome. All those bank buildings and servers and such you're talking about handle far more in total transactions than PoW-based algorithms ever will. If we attempted to carry out all the world's financial transactions using PoW, we'd be in a terrible state.
Space Heaters (Score:5, Interesting)
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Please stop. We don't need any more of your silly inefficient ideas.
You want to save the world:
a) abolish bitcoin
b) abolish restive heaters and switch to heat pumps.
c) heat cities with waste incinerators + CCS + scrubbers.
Literally throwing bitcoin at anything you can suggest will result in a *less* efficient way of doing something than what we can achieve with current (dare I say, 30 year old) technology.
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Sweden has an electricity shortage as it is. We don't need more server farms that only "mine" cryptocurrency.
There is no shortage of central heating. Most central heating is hot water, heated in the cooling system in power stations, i.e. as a by-product of electricity production. This allows very efficient use of the energy from the fuel (nuclear or otherwise).
Swedish homes are also typically well insulated, with triple glazing etc. So we don't need more central heating. The system is efficient as it is.
Ene
So? (Score:2)
Use the heat to heat up homes or make hot water, then it's not energy wasted.
No electricity used in trading Bitcoin (Score:2)
Re:No electricity used in trading Bitcoin (Score:4, Insightful)
The bitcoins that you send to someone were sent to you from someone else. When they sent them to you, the address that they sent it from was registered on the bitcoin blockchain (the encrypted and unaccessible register) as the transaction input, and your address—the address they sent it to—was registered on the bitcoin network as the transaction output. [thebalance.com]
Crypto operations take energy to perform. Sending fractional bitcoin is even worse as it requires multiple crypto operations. This is why settlement time has gotten longer for Bitcoin. This also means Bitcoin is using a lot more energy than, say a Visa card transaction. [statista.com]
Scalability (Score:5, Interesting)
So, since we are using Argentina for scale.
Argentina has a population of about 45 million. Bitcoin can handled about 400k transactions per day (you can fit about 2760 transactions per block, and a block is mined about every 10 minutes). So that's about 146 million transactions per year.
So by using the electricity of the entire country of Argentina, Bitcoin could allow each person in the country of Argentina to make 3.2 transactions per year. Better stock up on non-perishables.
Re:Scalability (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, so lets scale it out to the world. 7 billion people. Bitcoin is so groundbreaking that everyone should get on this, so that we can move most of the transactions off the network (negating most of its benefits), so that we can just leave the important transactions there...lets see, that comes to about 1 transaction every 48 years for each person. Hey, if you're really lucky, you might get to use it twice in your lifetime.
So what does that leave us with? Oh yeah. A deflationary currency. You know, so all the people that got in early before it exploded can be rich while the vast majority can just fight for the scraps. Yeah, pretty sure we've already got that system in place.
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Solution (Score:2)
Re:OK (Score:5, Insightful)
Urban street lighting is basically useful (although it could be made more efficient, and is slowly being improved). Bitcoin is just dumb. Musk has been spending too much time with Larry Ellison, and seems to be behaving more and more petulantly as time goes on.
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I respectfully disagree
Now that solar power is straight-up cheaper than fired power plants, I would argue Musk is actually encouraging people to use his own products and services by encouraging bitcoin use.
Re: OK (Score:2)
Considering that the majority of Bitcoin mining being done is in China using dirty coal as fuel the use of solar elsewhere is not relevant.
Re: OK (Score:2)
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About as much as anything else that consumes that amount of energy.
Most of electricity consumed turns into heat, it does not really depend on what device uses that electricity..
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Dude... WTF.
The heat from LED lightbulbs is a fraction of the CFL lightbulbs because the electricity consumption is also a fraction.
Duh.
Also, you compare apples to oranges.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A 60W incandescent produces 60W of heat A 12W CFL produces 12W of heat A 9W LED produces 9W of heat.
100W of LED bulbs will produce exactly the same heat as 100W of incandescent bulbs, but a lot more light, and spread over a larger area, so a lower temperature.
It is quite simple, every electric device turns 100% of its electric consumption into heat.
No they fucking dont.. are you deliberately this stupid? 100% of the energy production does NOT go into fucking heat.. otherwise they would produce no light at all. And the difference between a 9w LED and a 12w CFL is absolutely more significant in terms of surface temperature than 3w can explain. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only altered in form. If 100w electricity became 100w of heat, then NO energy could produce light. This is basic electrical theory 101. Your f assumption is 100W produces th
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:OK (Score:4, Insightful)
Or maybe they just want a reasonable compromise.
Modern LED street lighting sends a lot less light upwards. In some areas it could be combined with motion sensors to automatically dim when nobody is around, saving the city money as well. Street lighting isn't the only way to provide safety either, there are other forms of lighting that produce less pollution.
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the dude has a different opinion than you, not better, not worse; was totally up front about his might be different than others
even if he is arrogant and selfish and biased... we all are, including you
pull the plank from your own eye
Supply and demand (Score:3)
Re:OK (Score:5, Insightful)
Standby power also has far more utility than Bitcoin's differences compared to a non-blockchain digital payment system. Unless you think that pseudonymous Internet funny money is inherently useful, cryptocurrency energy usage is completely indefensible.
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the market has assigned a value to the bitcoin proof of work, who are you to disagree with it? are you an oracle?
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I'm not arguing with the market value of Bitcoin (although I could because tulipmania speculation is nonsense), I'm arguing with its energy usage vs. fiat currencies that don't need energy to be utterly wasted just to give them value.
Re:OK (Score:5, Informative)
Can someone now please calculate the global electricity consumption for all urban areas' night street lights?
Globally, street lights consume 159 terawatt-hours of energy each year. [nationalgeographic.com]
So more than either Bitcoin mining or Argentina.
Re:OK (Score:4, Informative)
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is this information old?
It's from 2011.
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LEDs have been widely installed since then.
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Sodium lamps are about as efficient as LEDs, just that they have worse visibility due to color.
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LEDs have been widely installed since then.
But population has grown by approximately 1 billion, urbanization has moved a very large number of people from the country-side to cities and some countries without fully built out street lighting have expanded street lightning significantly as part of their economic development.
So exactly what has happened to the street lighting power consumption is hard to say.
Re: OK (Score:2)
The real question is are they also factoring in the HEAT these super hot bitcoin machines put out? If not then they are not calculating the true consumption. Those devices (someone paid my company to colocate a few in our data center a year ago) get hot enough to cook an egg. Not as fast as a stove, but definitely hotter than a battery camping skillet. You might be able to hold your finger on it for 10 seconds but that would be the max and it would hurt like hell.
Streetlights are evolving into LED that pro
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Exactly, streetlighting energy consumption is going down. Bitcoin energy consumption is rising as the bitcoin network expands. By design.
While Mr. Gerard has some misunderstandings about "subsidies" (apparently thinks the US government is paying Tesla $1,5B a year, when the vast majority of automotive credits (available to manufacturers) come from Europe, and the US actually anti-incentivizes Tesla, offering EV buyers $7500 each to not buy from Tesla or GM)... I share is his displeasure with all this. I thi
Re: (Score:3)
Can someone now please calculate the global electricity consumption for all urban areas' night street lights? Just out of curiosity...
Sure.
Would you like that broken down by break-ins, kidnappings, robberies, rapes, and murders, or just dollars?
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Congress libraries, please.
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but conveniently forget how much more energy the system that Bitcoin replaces consumes.
What system does Bitcoin replace?
Re:Out of context (Score:5, Funny)
What system does Bitcoin replace?
Electric space heaters.
I have to admit it's pretty nice to be paid for heating my apartment.
Electric heat is anti-efficient, could be mining (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Out of context (Score:2)
Government.
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How? Where?
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I love how Bitcoin advocates always pretend it replaces "the banking system". As if Bitcoin handles, say, derivatives trading, safe deposit boxes, loan deparments, etc. It's just a transaction processing system, like Visa, PayPal, or Apple Pay, but they never want to compare to these things, because BitCoin looks horrible in comparison to them. Heck, it doesn't even do everything that they do. There's no department with bitcoin for investigating and compensating for fraud claims. There's no attempt whats
Re: Out of context (Score:5, Insightful)
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Also, Bitcoin would be useless and it wouldn't be worth a penny if that "normal bank system" wouldn't exist, to provide real money that Bitcoin can be exchanged in and to execute all transactions connected with real money.
Re: Out of context (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin is neither "sound, hard money" nor "sound, hard currency" because it is neither has nor is backed by something that has intrinsic value. It is literally backed by nothing at all.
Bitcoin is not fiat currency. Fiat currency is backed by a powerful entity which sets its value. No one sets the value of Bitcoin.
One Bitcoin could be $50,000 one day and $5.00 the next day because it is not backed by anything. Bitcoin is not a value store. Bitcoin is unsound currency.
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Now, think about what you just said. Bitcoin is not money because it has no intrinsic value and it has no entity setting it's value so it is an unbacked fiat currency. The Zimbabaean dollar was backed by a weak nation. The Zimbabwaen dollar crashed because the backer destroyed the value. No one backs Bitcoins. There is literally zero reason for the price it holds.
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but conveniently forget how much more energy the system that Bitcoin replaces consumes.
We didn't; the system that Bitcoin replaces uses per transaction something like 0.001 % of the energy that Bitcoin uses per transaction.
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True, Bitcoin does not replace a transaction network. It tried and failed.
It isn't actually good for anything except gaining value. Otherwise it is mostly non-functional.
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Re: (Score:2, Informative)
If Bitcoin is a replacement for gold, then the price of gold should be declining as Bitcoin rises.
That is the opposite of reality.
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Bitcoin was designed as a peer to peer electronic cash system, the title of the original white paper is "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".
Bitcoin is built to move from anywhere to anywhere quickly. It has value in the sense of a dollar. i.e. for trade, not in the sense of an inert thing like gold.
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pd... [bitcoin.org]
Re:Out of context (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Out of context (Score:2)
Lightning network is an overly complex mess kept afloat by Bitcoin millionaire hobbyists providing liquidity essentially for free. That charity won't scale.
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Nobody is trying to sell anything here but you.
Re: Out of context (Score:2)
Why do you say shitcoins are easy to inflate? Because they have convinced their miningpool to hard fork already and Bitcoin supposedly hasn't?
Because Bitcoin HAS hardforked in 2013 ... try validating the current blockchain with the original software, it won't work without first changing database settings.
Re: Out of context (Score:2)
You can convert all your money and indeed your entire range of diversified investments into Bitcoin easy. But few people have that much faith ... do you?
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly, Satoshi's whitepaper didn't say any of those things. BTC just sucks in its intended function. LN is still a joke.
Re:Out of context (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that Bitcoin mining can be done wherever there is a source of cheap energy.
Thus driving up the price of electricity for others because demand rises.
This includes energy that otherwise would be wasted
Along with the street light fallacy, this has to be one of the dumbest defenses of Bitcoin yet. None of what you mentioned is "wasted". If there is excess capacity from hydro, they simply turn off a turbine or two so capacity meets demand. Gas flares will not magically go away by people mining coins, guaranteed. For renewables, I have no idea what your comment even means. Renewables can't meet demand now as it is so there is no "waste".
Re:Out of context (Score:5, Insightful)
The ability of Bitcoin to monetize energy that is otherwise wasted
This is a false statement. Bitcoin doesn't monetize anything. It is an unbacked fiat currency that is generated by literally wasting energy to solve meaningless puzzles.
To give you an example: Imagine a wind energy plant. It will produce a varying amount of electricity that is uncorrelated to demand. There may be a peak in demand when there is no wind, and there may be a lot of wind when there is no demand. You can try to store that energy, but that is also very costly and inefficient. You can also have a lot of overproduction, so the moments where there is more demand than supply are less, but then you waste a lot of energy. Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used in these situations to monetize excess energy when there is less demand.
This is not how it works. I don't know where you got your information, but excess supply in one area is sold to another area that has an excess demand. Bitcoin mining just wastes energy.
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Money (real money) doesn't need gold to be based on, which it has proved for ages. In our economic operating system, a currency gets its value from the work men invest to transform resources and goods into more valuable goods, generating profits in that currency on markets dealing in that currency. If Bitcoin replaces gold, it doesn't replace anything necessary for a financial system.
Re: Out of context (Score:2)
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Bitcoin is not meant to replace gold. Bitcoin is meant to be a system of resolving debts. It's just really, really bad at it. Due to its deflationary nature, it is mistaken for a "replacement for gold".
Re: Out of context (Score:2)
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People do not realize that Bitcoin is meant to replace Gold as a store of value and Gold transport worldwide as a settlement-layer.
Gold has use value. It is intrinsically valuable. Bitcoin has no use value and is not intrinsically valuable. If you believe that it should replace gold then you are clueless about money, currency, and value.
Re: Out of context (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
"Forget your password and you shit is gone forever."
Kind of like when a buried gold treasure is lost because the pirate who put it there loses his map or dies;-)
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Pirate treasure can be found later by somebody else.
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Gold might be capable of being used for more than catching dust in bank vaults. However the reality is most of it is.
Re:The Free Market (Score:5, Insightful)
The free market is where you find unfiltered factory chimneys.
The worst air pollution in the world is in Harbin, China. The pollution comes from state-owned coking kilns and steel mills.
The free market is where you find dead seas
The Aral sea was destroyed by Soviet socialism.
Re:The Free Market (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Free Market (Score:4, Insightful)
The free market is where you find unfiltered factory chimneys.
The worst air pollution in the world is in Harbin, China. The pollution comes from state-owned coking kilns and steel mills.
The free market is where you find dead seas
The Aral sea was destroyed by Soviet socialism.
Never heard of Love Canal or the Cuyahoga River catching fire, have you? For the record, Love Canal, and all those other Super Fund sites created by free market capitalism were, and are, cleaned by up socialism, i.e. the U.S. taxpayer footing the bill instead of the companies who created the environmental nightmares.
Re: The Free Market (Score:2)
Try flowing pollution into a river or airspace that is owned by someone other than the government. Theyâ(TM)ll bankrupt you in court.
Now, I totally see the benefits of keeping rivers and airspace under government control. But you cannot then blame the free market for the governments poor stewardship.
Re: (Score:2)
Try flowing pollution into a river or airspace that is owned by someone other than the government. Theyâ(TM)ll bankrupt you in court.
Well, that's not what happened historically and why would it if there is no law against it? I know that US law has some specific rules about pissing upstream which were at the time quite enlightened compared to the English laws at the time they were drafted.
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Unless your pollution is flowing to poor neighborhoods, then there is no one to bankrupt you in court UNLESS the federal government gets involved and says you cannot do that without penalty. Then there are the commons that isn't owned by anyone, you get to pollute that for free UNLESS the federal government gets involved.
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That argument can only be made once there is absolutely zero fossil fuels used for generating electricity. Until then, David Gerard will continue to be 100% correct.
I have a lot of respect for Elon Musk, but he's screwed up big time on this one.
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Doesn't mining precious metals consume an horrific amount of energy?
There is an actual product with intrinsic value that come from the mining of precious metals. There is nothing of intrinsic value created by mining bitcoin.
Doesn't gold come tainted with blood from certain places?
I think you are thinking of blood diamonds, not gold but regardless Bitcoins mining takes place all over the world, including places, such as North Korea, where that electricity could be better used in hospitals, schools, etc. resulting in "blood tainted" Bitcoins.
Doesn't the mercury and arsenic that washes into our lakes and rivers as a result of this mining, doesn't that poison all life including us?
Mercury and arsenic and other pollutants that are generated
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That is based on the assumption that "Legacy Finance" and "Bitcoin" are equivalents in their services and scope, which is absurd.