Hacker News Reader

Comment by roland35 | Hacker News Reader

Other industries use energy to produce useful things.

Problem is that usefulness is not universal past essential things. I’m sure we can find many things you find wasteful that I consider useful and vice-versa.

Having a bunch of computers that don't trust each other all performing random calculations to find a specific hash and then add a small block of data to a globally duplicated append only data structure that processes about 7 transactions per second is pretty useless.

I agree with you here. Which is why I use Bitcoin Cash instead.

But I believe people should be free to waste/risk their money in general.

That's all fine, except in this case there are some extreme externalities unfortunately. We are all going to pay the price in the long term for this environmental waste. Sometimes regulations are required to protect a shared resource.

I don't think I should be allowed to buy all the used tires and burn them on my backyard in an open flame next to the local middle school, even if it is my money and my backyard. What do you think?

Why do you think is designed this way? Some think that proof of work is essential in order to have a monetary system that it’s really hard to corrupt hence essential for them. Search for thermodynamically sound money. I’m sure proponents would be open to alternative designs if desired properties are retained.

“Hard to corrupt” is not the choice of phrase I would use, given the last month of cryptocurrency news.

An irresponsible centralized exchange crashing doesn’t challenge the fundamentals of the bitcoin protocol.

Sure. It just belies motives and incentives that I don’t want anywhere in my society, much less near fuel-burning power plants.

Similarly: nothing about forbidding the use of fossil fuels challenges the fundamentals of the Bitcoin protocol. It’s merely been promoted to the same regulatory status as “burning tires in your backyard for heat.”

You (and everyone else quoting low transactions per second figures) seem to be ignoring the parts above BTC that just use it as a net settlement layer, but allow for large numbers of transactions for almost no marginal energy usage per transaction. Lightning wouldn’t be able to do all those transactions without BTC providing that security.

The only thing crypto needs is another layer of crypto! I'm sure there is another crypto layer that provides FDIC insurance, fraud and loss protection, physical offline methods of payment, etc etc...

All it serves to do is create more techno-babble that confuses 99% of the population which has no ability to actually understand what the technology actually is and does. So scams fill the void

Bitcoin like any other protocol has certain characteristics and tradeoffs. The traditional monetary system is layered too (credit cards is one of the consumer facing ones). Layered architectures are found everywhere. See the Web: IP, TCP, HTTP. Any concern about those? Do you think a protocol that does it all would be better or even possible?

Who decides what is useful? There's gotta be millions of people playing video games on their 600W RTX builds - how about we ban it as they're obviously not producing anything useful?

If instead of picking on specific uses of power, we put a price on carbon that allowed us to remove the carbon, most people won’t find it worthwhile to run 600W PCs either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com