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Comment by arthurcolle | Hacker News Reader

So earning income is less important than letting people play video games? Let's just say I'm unconvinced by this argument.

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I think it's quite fair to say earning income is less important than allowing people to achieve happiness and video games are a pretty well known way to accomplish that.

I unequivocally disagree with this statement - "happiness" achieved by video games is superficial, without real meaning. They are thrilling endeavors and fill time effectively, but they are absolutely secondary to the absolute positive of actually deriving income. I seriously can't believe that anyone would seriously argue a distraction is worth more than actual income.

What does mining crytprocurrency have to do with earning income? The two are completely mutually exclusive, in fact mining is a great example of making money without doing any useful work

Securing the network is useful work.

Would you say the same if you could mine bitcoin by buying up as much medicine as you could, and burning it?

Because if you think the above behavior isn't "earning income" clearly better than "play video games", then your argument falls completely flat.

this is a total false equivalence. you’re really comparing computing hashes to buying medicine and destroying it?

>Air pollution accounts for 1 in 8 deaths worldwide - approximately 7 million deaths in 2012, according to new data from the World Health Organization (WHO). The findings, released in late March, doubled previous estimates from just a few years ago in 2008. WHO now characterizes air pollution as “the world’s largest single environmental health risk.”

https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/geh_newslett...

This is beyond a stretch. Fascinating that this is how people are rationalizing being dismissive of cryptos.

I'm comparing taking a useful resource and deliberately destroying it in order to "prove work".

It's a very accurate comparison.

It's actually worse, climate change is going to kill all of us, medicine unavailability will only kill some of us.

I don't know any gamers who can game 24/7, 7 days a week with multiple GPUs.

Mining and gaming aren't even close to comparable in power usage.

Mining crytprocurrency isn't "earning" income. Doing work is warning income. Crypto miners are about as useful as landlords - they shouldn't exist and don't deserve any money

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