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Bitcoin Mining Alone Could Raise Global Temperatures Above Critical Limit By 2033 (vice.com)
dmoberhaus writes: Researchers have found that if Bitcoin is adopted at rates similar to technologies like credit cards, its energy consumption could increase global temperatures by 2C in just 16 years. This is well beyond the limit of catastrophic climate change proposed by the UN. Motherboard spoke to an expert on Bitcoin and energy about the study's implications.
In a time were scientists warn about global warming for decades we should by all means avoid this :-/
I would've got first post if it weren't so expensive to complete the transaction in time.
Some people need to back off from arithmetic for a sec and take a moment to critically think about what the math is telling you, and how stupid you have to be to believe the math.
Off the top of my head, cryptocurrencies that require proof of work seem to all suffer from this flaw. Work is energy, energy has the side effect of global warming with our current grid. Any proof-of-work system that doesn't require a large amount of energy is going to result in a massive influx of new coins being mined, causing a large amount of inflation.
A few possible solutions would be:
Any other thoughts?
Why? Did you want it medium rare instead of well done?
#DeleteFacebook
I hereby declare the existence of Twitcoin, for which I hold the entire stock, and is worth 17 trillion of your now obsolete US dollars!
There are several Cryptocurrencies that use proof-of-storage/space/capacity instead of bitcoins proof-of-work. There are also other low energy methods like proof-of-stake. Those may have the potential to be alternatives.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
Bitcoin cannot be adopted at rates similar to credit cards, because the network is incapable of maintaining reasonable performance under such a load. It's struggling already.
Bitcoin, from a technical perspective, actually rather sucks. It's one of the first blockchain currencies, and as such it does not incorporate the performance-boosting refinements that later currencies introduced. It's just like a lot of other technical standards: Once good-enough is established, it's very hard for even a superior technology to replace it. That's why we're still using MP3 and JPEG.
The lightning network is a thing and has the potential to not only reduce energy consumption but also increase capacity.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
I hereby declare the existence of Twitcoin
I get that cryptocurrencies typically have coin in their name, but in this instance, I think BrettBucks is more appropriate. ;)
One unit of work consists of converting 1 ton of carbon from our atmospheric CO2 into a solid form
There are other systems, like proof-of-storage/capacity/space and proof-of-stake. Those are both quite low energy consumption, especially the last one.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
Small point, while it may be illegal for you to leave your water hose open all day every day. It is not illegal for you to buy water by the truckload or buy the rights to a water source and waste that water.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
It requires massive investments of bitcoins by intermediators, the user and fee model is obtuse to normies, even compared to normal bitcoin. It will never have wide adoption for internet payments, even compared to normal bitcoin.
https://xkcd.com/605/
This makes me wonder what would happen if bitcoin were to become as common as credit cars AND electric vehicles were to become as common as ICEs.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
We randomly sampled blocks mined in 2017 until their total number of transactions were equal to the projected number of transactions, then we added the CO2e emissions from computing such randomly selected blocks. The approach was repeated 1,000 times.
They are assuming that The number of blocks mined in 2017 is efficient for the number of transactions and the
Number of blocks to be mined is proportional to the number of transactions --- More transactions won't result in larger blocks,
and they ignore innovations that are being adopted like SegWit and Lightning.
Especially with the ongoing adoption of the Lightning Network; that is not the case --- 2017 of all years is a bad reference year for predicting future growth - expect more transactions with future blocks; If massive transaction volume increases occur again, expect those on the network to eventually agree that a larger block size and other scaling measures are appropriate --- which will result in greater efficiencies or economies of scale with higher transaction volumes.
The projection the researchers are making is really an uninteresting one: the question their study answers is more like..... What if no changes occurred to the Bitcoin network/protocol for improved scaling, and the predominant way transactions were batched and pooled since 2017 continues indefinitely AND Bitcoin adoption accelerates as projected by the model.
There are many lower energy consuming cryptocoins out there, so don't get too agitated about this news
Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble.
The entirely of the world's energy consumption and economy will raise the temperature by 1.5 C in 12 years. Ok, maybe that's believable. Climate change is real, but I don't know if that estimate is accurate. Assume for the minute it is.
But then bitcoin ALONE is going to raise it by 2C in 16 years? That's absurd. You're trying to tell me that suddenly mining bitcoin will become so profitable it'll dwarf the entire world economic energy usage? That means we'll suddenly burn more carbon on bitcoin than anything else in the world?
No. Not possible.
This is what happens when people think exponential growth doesn't stop. Of course it does, it always does. It's like looking at the growth rate of a child, and saying by age 40 your kid is going to be the size of the Empire State Building.
Which it can't be, because the transaction throughput is far too low.
It's fine. The Blockstream Core code is creaky, but the guys at Bitcoin Unlimited have made several fixes and optimizations, easily managing 32MB blocks now, and have mined gigabyte blocks on TestNet. Together with working 0-conf this is expected to be plenty of scaling headroom for the near future, with at least as much time for better code to replace the existing codebase, as well as faster computers and network connections.
Have a look at https://txhighway.com/ and try to fill that up first, then worry about throughput problems.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This is absurd.
why should it be legal to waste electricity for something 100% useless and virtual.
Lots of people buy drugs with it, so it's at least more useful than television; you have your facts wrong, at least, so put down the ban hammer. Go ahead and try to take away people's game shows and see what happens. Some old lady might try for a face shot, which is what people who want to ban everything they don't understand probably deserve.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The geeks shall incinerate the earth.
That like everything else in crypto at this point, is just a hobby project for a bunch of bitcoin millionaire crypto-autists (and wannabees). If you were to actually use it you end up with a completely separate "petty cash" bitcoin account, which you have to pay the massive blockchain fees for to top up and which take fees to keep in existence. It's matched by bitcoins from a third party, who will not lose liquidity for free like some of the bitcoin developers seem to think. Losing liquidity has an opportunity cost which would have to be paid.
An obtuse, costly, unusable fucking mess ... even by bitcoin standards.
Climate change is not an "absurd fantasy", you fucking liar. It's scientific fact.
I don't respond to AC's.
Technological advancements make carbon-neutral cheaper than fossil fuels, to the point that burning coal for electricity makes no more sense than burning whale blubber for electricity.
That's the point. As a society, our energy needs are going to continue to increase and it doesn't matter where that need comes from, per se. The point is to make energy production cleaner and less harmful to the planet. The major places where our energy is being used isn't the point, the point is to generate energy in a cleaner way. We aren't going to use less energy, we only need to generate it cleaner.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
You're simply lying about climate change. It's 100% real and man made. The climate models that predict the change only work when man-made interference is included. You have no idea what you're talking about. There have been hundreds of thousands of studies that have been included just in the IPCC's reviews, so far. I have no idea what one study you're talking about, and I'm sure you don't, either.
I don't respond to AC's.
We've probably already reached the tipping point, stupid.
I don't respond to AC's.
So you're telling me humans have a chance against AI?
So humanity has developed great UI's at this point, and what we have seen is that all intelligence, artificial or otherwise, falls into the same trap - arguing about politics online.
What hope did AI ever have to rise above this? None, I say. AI was built on learning networks and just like us they will simply learn to argue rather than actually act.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And let's not forget that there is zero, zilch, no advantage to using cryptocurrencies for anything but crimes. Non-blockchain payment services are at least as good, sometimes much better for anything where you're OK with your payments being traceable and visible to law enforcement and financial regulators. Sometimes you can even enhance privacy with traditional payment systems using gift cards.
Cryptocurrencies could enhance privacy in a few legal purchases, but it's certainly not worth the environmental cost alone, to say nothing of how it empowers criminals. This is a technology that should and must be left to die.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Imagine someone invented a method
of converting Terawatts electricity and human intellect
into a symbolic currency with no intrinsic value,
with no link to any material asset,
not backed by any government (except North Korea),
and which you can not actually spend at the local store.
Oh, wait ...
Generates pollution without generating value.
Exxon should love it.
You could set up a carbon recapture market and force fossil fuel companies to buy enough carbon capture credits to offset the carbon they create.
For example, Exxon pumps one gallon of gasoline. When burned, that gallon of gasoline makes 20 lbs of CO2. They would be forced to buy 20 lbs of CO2 recapture for that gallon. Then they'd pass the cost on to whoever buys that one gallon of gasoline.
No, it's science. If you could convincingly show it's not the case you'd probably get a Nobel Prize.
What is the point of these stories, exactly? Beyond caterint to those who perpetuate in the sort of delusion that the environmental goals that need to be reached by certain dates to avoid catastrophe have even the smallest realistic chance of being reached? The planet is fubarred already... even if there were something we could do, it wouldn't matter because not enough people *will* actually do it to stop it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You are either joking, making a subtle and important point, or have been misinformed.
The catastrophes have been happening for quite some time. The ripple affects of these catastrophes have affected much of humanity and those affects are becoming harder to ignore.
That's not Bitcoin. Such efforts are, at best, shit running on top of Bitcoin. Workable? Maybe. As trustworthy, resilient, etc. as Botcoin itself? Hell no.
So you deny global warming, and can't see any flaws in the current financial system that bitcoin can solve.
You're a closed-minded idiot. Got it.
And if you don't know that a single Bitcoin transaction needs 250kWh of power then you haven't been paying attention.
PS: At only five or six transactions per second it's not going to solve any of the major flaws in the financial system, either.
No sig today...
Off the top of my head, cryptocurrencies that require proof of work seem to all suffer from this flaw.
Yes, this is intrinsic to proof of work. No, it is not a flaw. It's an intentional feature. People calling it a flaw are idiots or charlatans who want to get you to trust their proof of stake system, where the rich get richer simply because they're rich.
At the risk of being 'that guy', you realize that game show at its core is really just a conveyance for pharma ads used to sell ____ right?
(And given the daytime game show watching demographic; i'd wager this to be literally true)
I know insecure people like to imagine the human race as being so technologically advanced that we could affect the entire planet, but we aren't. AGW is crazy talk by crazy people and not a shred of evidence has even been shown to link humans to anything of the sort.
In the meantime, the refrigerants that have already caused huge holes in the ozone layer are also some of the worst of the greenhouse gasses, we've demonstrably burned hundreds of millions of years' worth of fossil fuels in a few centuries that would have remained sequestered in the ground indefinitely in anything short of a Permian-Triassic level extinction event, and the oceans are already acidifying enough from the CO2 that shellfish are already impacted.
You could just go ask around in Alaska, since the polar regions are warming at almost twice the rate of the rest of the globe.
But first, you have to look at why you're willfully living in a fact-free alternate reality.
No, it's science. If you could convincingly show it's not the case you'd probably get a Nobel Prize.
If there was any "science" behind global warming then we'd see nuclear power embraced widely and built up quickly. Instead we have this worship of the sun and wind as if they are gods. Nuclear power produces less CO2 than wind and solar power, do so with less material mined from the ground, and with fewer deaths from accidents and pollution.
If global warming were the threat they claim it to be then they should be able to do some simple math to figure out that we'd see far fewer lives lost with nuclear power now than hoping, praying, and worshipping wind and solar to save us later. This is some kind of cult that can't face the facts because it is counter to their religion.
Deflation is never good because it makes *everything* a bad investment compared to hoarding cash. If the price of everything goes down, why buy? And if no one buys anything, the economy stops.
Inflation, on the other hand, disincentivizes cash-hoarding and encourages investment (since your money will eventually go away on its own if you don't spend it), which is good. Too much of it is bad, for the same reason as deflation basically, because then having cash is *never* good and no one will ever sell anything, so the economy stops.
The difference here is that cash is not an investment: liquidity has real advantages, giving cash value beyond hoarding. As such, it's worth (briefly) holding cash in a mildly inflationary regime despite the fact that its value is falling. Conversely, aside from buying food, the instant things are even marginally deflationary, hoarding is the right answer: you get liquidity *and* a better investment.
Which it can't be, because the transaction throughput is far too low.
It's fine. The Blockstream Core code is creaky, but the guys at Bitcoin Unlimited have made several fixes and optimizations, easily managing 32MB blocks now, and have mined gigabyte blocks on TestNet.
Nice theory, but ... for that to work you have to convince the majority of bitcoin miners to adopt it voluntarily. There's no way to force an upgrade.
Guess what? The debate is already over. Most of the major mining operations have said they aren't interested, some of the biggest miners even made death threats to the people proposing it.
No sig today...
Greenpeace caused Global Warming.
I've never been interested in BitCoin in any practical way, but stories like this make me want to mine it - if it pisses off hipsters, it's obviously worth doing.
Modify the Bitcoin source to make it extra inefficient and create a fork called "RollinCoalCoin". I'm sure the IPO will be a huge hit with the red hat wearing crowd (and I don't mean the Linux distro).
Or plug in a few space heaters and buy Bitcoin on the dips from an exchange. Costs roughly the same and you don't have to worry about the mining hardware going obsolete in a month.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Yes. Tens of thousands. The most recent one, alone, looked at 9200 different studies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report).
I don't respond to AC's.
There's solutions in search of a problem, and then there's solutions which cause big problems, and didn't solve any original problem. How about we just use gov backed currencies - they're rate limited, and the production of them isn't resource intensive in the slightest.
Self-correcting factors exist as well; defrosted tundra, more rain, warmer temperatures, etc. will allow more plants to grow, sucking up CO2.
Yeah, some rich folks oceanfront property might flood, boo-hoo.
Since bitcoin mining will increase heat, and heat dooms the planet by melting the ice shelf in Antartica - the solution is very obvious.
But all bitcoin miners on top of the Antartic ice shelfs, to where they bore holes down into the water. The holes will allow cold air to flow in from above, keeping the ice shelf colder and also re-enforcing structural integrity to keep it from breaking away from land.
When the bit coin miners sink to below water level just pull them up and repeat in a new hole. Eventually the old holes will refill and you can cycle indefinitely. The fresh water produced can be shipped to developing countries or anywhere with water issues.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You assume wind and solar power people are not also similarly motivated.
We already see wind power companies take a bunch of government money, prop up a bunch of windmills, declare bankruptcy (claiming they didn't foresee natural gas prices killing their business model), and then leave a bunch of broken and rusting windmills for the government to deal with.
We see electric car companies do the same, take a bunch of money, produce nothing, declare bankruptcy, and walk away from the factories filled with toxic metals and chemicals.
Nuclear power has proven itself to be low CO2, low environmental impact, reliable, and safe.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2018/08/why-i-favor-nuclear-power.html
If you cannot accept nuclear power as part of the global warming solution then don't be surprised if people cannot accept global warming as a real threat. Whatever threat nuclear power holds, be it another Chernobyl or Fukushima, or radioactive waste that won't decay for millions of years, does not compare in the least to what global warming threatens. If you fear nuclear power more than global warming then you have "scientifically" proven global warming to be no real threat at all, because nuclear power is not a real threat to anyone.
Modify the Bitcoin source to make it extra inefficient
Is that possible without creating a black hole?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Solar and wind enthusiasts talk about numbers of windmills erected and numbers of solar panels installed. But they never talk about the actual CO2 reduction benefit. Look at Germany, the great leader of the industrialized world, installing shitloads of wind and solar with no CO2 reductions to show for it. What good is celebrating a wind generator installation when it is barely helping? Its all symbolism for the nimble minded.
Now look at France, decades ahead of Germany with half the CO2 emissions, simply because they were smart to go nuclear many years ago.
Anti nuke, wind and solar only idiots are as bad as climate change deniers. They deny the necessary role of nuclear.
It's nowhere near that simple.
I don't respond to AC's.
No, I didn't suggest anything like that. I'm saying that, as a civilization, our energy usage is going to continue to increase. It's inevitable. The ultimate solution to that is to generate energy in a cleaner way. I'm not suggesting anything about technologies that use less energy. Those are great, but those aren't what will save us. Clean energy will save us.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
you are the one being stupid, making alarmists statements with "probably" and not a shred of proof.
They were paid well (actually heavily financed) by Exxon to prevent nuclear. Though a lot of the problem is just nuclear being expensive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Hey, you do know that the ozone hole issue has been largely addressed right?
We stopped manufacturing and using the CFC's mostly responsible for this more than a decade ago and as they have been removed from aerosol cans and most industrial and HVAC use the ozone hole has stopped getting bigger and has been steadily recovering since about 2000.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The point was that humanity was verifiably able to impact the entire planet by accident. The assertion of the GGP is that it's impossible in principle for humans to create a global environmental problem.
Quantum computers are also a thing and will obsolete bitcoin by 2023-2025. There is no secure post-quantum algorithm which is under 31kb/signature. There is no way to condense individual transaction akin to the lightning network while dropping the initiator's signature altogether without making it inherently centralized. At that point you might as well forgo the petabytes of data storage and analysis to verify each transaction and just leave it in bank databases - no additional security or decentralization either way. (To say nothing of the fact it will take several years to make the transition to post-quantum algorithms as it has to be initiated by each wallet-holder individually, so we're basically at the point right now where everyone has to start converting to post-quantum algorithms or it dies off entirely.) Every cryptographic professional knows this limitation, meaning everyone pushing Bitcoin is either ignorant or knowingly misleading people.
FYI you get extra bitcoins if you do it in an enclosed garage.
Accumulated cyclone energy has been trending downward for nearly 30 years. A single event isn't "climate", it's an event - and there is no long-term indication that we have an increase in hurricane/cyclone energy (and, not altogether unexpected, tornado count and energy in the US is also dropping).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Admitting that the hysteria over global warming is a religion does NOT have to mean denying greenhouse gas theory. Greenhouse theory is science; the religion part is automatically rejecting every real-world fix for the problem.
Humans engineered our way into the problem by emitting ancient carbon back into the atmosphere. We can engineer our way out of it again, with carbon-free energy sources and sequestration of carbon already in the environment.
the energy consumption is negligible though, despite all the lies and hysteria articles recently made.
the IEEE article "the ridiculous amount of energy it takes to run bitcoin" estimated the energy as comparable to a city and that by 2024 *might* be comparable to Denmark's....
so right now, it's a drop in the bucket compared to say porn, bank accounts, insurance, etc.
get a grip, folks
Let's say somebody pays me with paypal. It's 3.6% plus another 3+% to eventually convert it to my local currency. So the banks are getting around 7% every time I get paid. That's not an argument for cryptocurrency?
You understand Exxon was big in nuclear too, right. Exxon is a energy company not just oil. Exxon Nuclear made reactors and controlled their own fuel chain. Exxon Coal and Minerals too. And they are huge into renewable energy.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Bitcoins will be mined out in about 3 years. So difficult to mine them for 16. Once it drops back to only transaction fees, and no new coin awards, then there will be many fewer miners. And if they use solar, theyâ(TM)re intercepting heat and redistributing it. Maybe we can create giant thermocouple devices and turn the heat to microwave energy and beam it into space... yes I know it canâ(TM)t work that way... but bitcoin mining will end soon...
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Back in the '70's, they still made the decision that there were more profits in oil and seeing global warming coming and wanting to stop the less profitable solution, nuclear, financed Greenpeace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
It's that the negative externalities of burning fossil fuels aren't included in the price. If we added pigovian taxes to the burning of coal/oil, this would be reflected in the price of energy, and we would see an appropriate adjustment in the amount of bitcoin mining.
Pigovian taxes on fossil fuels are the answer here, and will return the market to free market efficient allocations of resources.
Yeah, sure, we stopped making CFCs...
https://www.bbc.com/news/scien...
Oops, except no, we didn't!!
Global tax on carbon.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
and secure the necessary power contracts to run them.
Massive power contracts are more expensive than most available power. The problem isn't the power, it's access to equipment. Something that the entire world outside of china has massively underfunded investment into the prerequisites for. People still use electric and fossil fuel based heating systems rather than running bitcoin miners to produce heat (including for heating food). There is plenty of low hanging fruit of energy that is simply wasted.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
And let's not forget that there is zero, zilch, no advantage to using cryptocurrencies for anything but crimes
This is a false statement.
Any community that trusts each other just enough to agree on a standard, but trusts none of their members enough to play the role of a central clearing house, or would for other reasons prefer not to have a central control entity, could solve their problem using a blockchain. Currency is only one application.
Note that blockchains actually are completely traceable and visible. The reason why bitcoin et al are considered anonymous is that you cannot automatically link an account to a person, but this fact is independent of the blockchain as a technology.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I know insecure people like to imagine the human race as being so technologically advanced that we could affect the entire planet, but we aren't.
Here's the catch: Destruction is easier than construction.
Small insects can seriously damage trees or buildings many orders of magnitude larger than themselves. Their ability to do so has nothing to do with technological advancement. Humans could affect the entire planet even with medieval technology if only there were enough of them. Plastic and fossil fuels simply greatly accelerate the process by having immediate effects.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Oh come now, you're not going to let highly relevant facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory are you. Might have to mod you as troll.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Tell me about it, give any solid arguments against nuclear and there's a good chance you'll get modded as troll.
The risk gets shunned, and even after 3-mile island, Windscale, Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear proponents complain about the cost of safety measures. They like to insists then that nuclear is cheap although it wouldn't stand a chance without subsidies and then exclaim that renewables are expensive even though they can pretty much compete without the subsidies now and unlike nuclear, renewables get cheaper every year.
If you point out that cheap nuclear fuel is in short supply they will then proceed to espouse massively expensive methods like nuclear re-processing or ocean reclamation of uranium (requires huge resources).
And still no-one has come up with a good way to get rid of the waste cheaply and safely. No, not reprocessing, I said cheaply.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Ok.. If you want to be specific, we stopped manufacturing and using CFC's which where chiefly responsible for the ozone depletion. Good luck getting a can of R-12 for your 1970 Ford's air conditioner. Or, be prepared to pay though the nose for a pound of R-22, which cost me over $50 a pound last time I had to get some into the 20 year old AC system in my house.
Cars have moved to R-134a for a reason, R-22 used to be standard fare for your HVAC system, but we use R-412 now. We used to dump CFC's into all sorts of aerosol cans because it was not flammable, but now you get propane and other much more dangerous propellants, or more likely moved the product into pump sprayers. What's more, we have mandated the destruction of CFC's instead of just releasing them. Now it is required to capture used refrigerants and either re-use them, or destroy them.
We have reduced our CFC emissions enough to stop the ozone depletion, and projections are that it will return to near normal by 2075.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
What "development" is that?
Clue: There's no way to sign blockchains that have 100 million transactions a second
No sig today...
So you double proved the GP's point. That humans can affect the climate both on accident and on purpose.
As a society, our energy needs are going to continue to increase
Disagree. We can have a better quality of life if we decrease energy consumption, and tech is getting more efficient, not less. Phones run for longer on the same size battery, cars go further for every kWh of energy expended.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Always 10+ years away. Always. Even after the 10 years passes, which has happened 3 times now (hi Al Gore), it's still 10+ years away.
You must be living on a different planet to the rest of us. You really have to be hugely ignorant to say that statement, there is very little wilderness left on earth for example - what is left is typically not arable land.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com...
Not to mention the global mass-genocides of other species caused by humans.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
It's a lie or at least bad math to say that accumulated cyclone energy has been trending downward for 30 years. It's rather flat overall for the last 30 years, and has decreased over the last 10 years due to natural variation:
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
I know the deniosphere loves to try to fit declining curves against this short-term spiky but long-term flat graph, but this technical number is not that important and the only one that doesn't show a clear upward trend. Hurricane frequency is steadily increasing:
https://phys.org/news/2013-03-...
Also hurricane intensity and power dissipation are sharply increasing:
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
These numbers are more practically relevant than accumulated cyclone energy, and you can see it where the rubber hits the road: in the clear upward trend in storm & flood damage costs, even against our improving preparedness:
https://phys.org/news/2017-11-...
Also while strong tornadoes are decreasing and tornado energy is flat, tornado count is steadily increasing:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No, Paypal's high fees are not an argument for cryptocurrency. Remember that the hard resource/administrative costs of operating or working with a cryptocurrency are not in any way cheaper than operating any traditional electronic currency. If a cryptocurrency is cheaper, that can only be due to three factors:
1. Regulatory circumvention
2. Externalized costs
3. Price gouging by traditional payment providers
If it's 1 and/or 2 you're only saving money by shifting the costs elsewhere (onto crime victims or other miners and/or simply onto the environment), and for 3 it's just a matter of shifting to a different provider if regulatory capture isn't preventing one from arising (this is where most of the higher costs of Paypal are vs. cryptocurrency). There are other traditional payment providers out there with 2~4% fees, which is also the ballpark for cryptocurrency exchanges.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No, that statement is true, I said cryptocurrencies, not blockchain technology in general. There are a few positive niche uses for a blockchain in notary services and computer security.
Your hypothetical scenario makes no sense when applied to currency or payment in a sane world. There is no practical reason not to have a central control entity. Central control entities have been handling our currency and payments pretty decently overall for centuries. They have screwed up a few times, but it's a small price to pay compared to the environmental and criminal costs and risks of cryptocurrencies, to say nothing of its slowness and general inefficiency.
When your credit card number gets stolen, it's the payment provider's responsibility to restore the money you lost. Stolen wallet files or payments made to addresses with typos in them are gone forever.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
As if proving stop lights are often times green says we can be sure that brake lights on motorcycles are red.
Proving one theory though experimental evidence does not mean we have or can prove an unrelated theory too.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
No, that statement is true, I said cryptocurrencies, not blockchain technology in general.
And the example I gave is for a currency. Every other currency has a centralism problem - someone prints the money (or digitally creates it). If you don't want that, but don't trust anyone enough to hold the keys, a distributed concept works.
There is no practical reason not to have a central control entity.
Why not?
Central control entities have been handling our currency and payments pretty decently overall for centuries.
There are many people who disagree and point out a) the financial crisis and b) the power of banks, which goes far beyond what a simple payment service should have.
environmental and criminal costs and risks of cryptocurrencies, to say nothing of its slowness and general inefficiency.
yes, there are downsides. I am not a cryptocurrency fan. But I do point out that there are legitimate uses.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Most financial crises have nothing to do with a currency's central control entity, and as should be obvious the power of banks is a completely unrelated problem. The solution that cryptocurrency could offer is looking for a problem to solve, while bringing along many new problems of its own.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There are absolutely legitimate and very important reasons for total anonymity. Not everyone breaking the law is working against the best interests of humanity.
True, you have a good point here. There are technologies that empower criminals but also help people who are breaking the law in the interests of humanity. In these cases I think it's important to weigh how these technologies are used for good and bad in the real world in order to assess their benevolence or malevolence.
Darknets, for example. I have weighed the positives and negatives here and come out in support of darknets. They're used by all kinds of criminals including pedophiles and terrorists to evade law enforcement surveillance and carry out terrible crimes in a slightly more secure manner, but they're also used by journalists and dissidents around the world to evade surveillance by people who would persecute or prosecute them for thought crimes and gain access to information censored by authoritarian governments. There aren't any similarly good alternatives for replicating these positive uses by other means without including the negatives. I think the good outweighs the bad there by a small margin, so I support darknets.
Now onto cryptocurrencies. The most common uses of cryptocurrencies are cybercrime finance including ransomware payments, purchasing things that are illegal mostly for good reasons, as an instrument for gambling disguised as investment, and committing white-collar crimes like routing around foreign exchange controls, running fraud investments, and evading taxes. Another big downside is its incredible inefficiency leading to ludicrous energy consumption when the planet can least afford it.
On the positive side, you could use it to enhance privacy in some harmless purchases that you'd rather not share with your credit card processor and their marketing affiliates (although gift cards can be used to achieve much the same thing in many cases), and I suppose you could use it to get money to benevolent institutions inside authoritarian regimes although I've never heard of it being used this way - most authoritarian regimes have outlawed cryptocurrencies. These are things you couldn't do with an alternative, the libertarians getting their jollies by buying fidget spinners from Overstock with Bitcoin don't count because that could be done just as well with a credit card. These positive uses also seem to be vanishingly rare. So to me the negatives appear to greatly outweigh the positives with cryptocurrencies, which is why I think they're a bad idea.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
So not only is this a worthless gold rush that only helps the early adopters (not helped with marketing terms such as "mining" rather than "number crunching"), but it's actively harming the planet.
And humanity. How many trillion CPU/GPU cycles have been diverted from actually worthwhile projects like folding@home as a result of this crypto frenzy?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Most financial crises have nothing to do with a currency's central control entity,
They very much have to do with a financial system built around banks as central entities. A currency used as a barter instrument would not be subject to this kind of speculation.
while bringing along many new problems of its own.
Agreed on that. The only thing I disagree with is this black/white view of the world, from both sides. Cryptocurrencies are neither the salvation nor the end of the world. They are just one more thing in the toolbox.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Or a combination. I produce far more than I consume, for instance, despite having 2 cars. Without both HE products, my solar wouldn't be able to keep up. The goal isn't to keep our total energy usage down, it's to not let our usage outpace our ability to scrub and make clean energy.
Yes, phones and cars are more efficient, and in 9 years the bitcoin network has been invented and is on pace to raise global temps. Existing things get more efficient, but we aren't going to stop inventing, or hold off on a new technology because of the impact it might have on a future power grid. We WILL need more energy.
It's great that an iPhone today is better than it was when it was invented, but the bitcoin network came about 2 years after the first iPhone.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black