TripSitterNZ
Bluelighter
elon musk was just rich dude already with some ideas to pay smarter people than himself pretty shit wages in comparison to the money he has to bring them to life.
No it is an intrinsic problem with POW currencies, at least with most of the schemes that use POW. It works like a lottery, and the vast amount of the work burned by miners is discarded to heat providing absolutely nothing of value. It's like a lottery where all the money gets burned, and the winner gets a very fancy pokemon card that they can optionally sell on ebay. No matter if the energy comes from coal, the sun, or a fusion reactor, it's still a massive waste of energy that could have been used for something that adds value.
It's not strange to focus on BTC's energy consumption, what is strange is that hardly anyone is. So many people who are ostensibly concerned with climate change either completely don't want to take a look at it, or pull mental gymnastics to justify this colossal energy pig.
Not to mention the e-waste...
Hah, OK I'm lured. And no worries, I'll take the "of all people" as a compliment.We do know how to lure you into these threads @Vastness
I could feel it coming, but it really does strike me how you of all people could not be annoyed. Don't overthink the 'of all people' of course
You dislike his public persona. To me this is superficial. Consider also - Tesla has 0 marketing budget - so PR stunts in this case as effectively an extremely cost effective form of marketing, although to be honest I'm finding it hard to think of what "PR stunts" he's actually done, unless you just mean Twitter. A lot of people point to the Falcon Heavy launch as a PR stunt - it was not, at least not primarily, it was a test launch of a cutting edge heavy lift rocket.But this reveling in some sort of amazing genius persona is just extremely annoying, and I am opposed to the worshiping of just about any living human. Much of what he does is in my opinion PR stunts to raise money, shift public perception and get ludicrous tax cuts here and there.
But... Bitcoin does have value. Yes, it has value because people believe it has value but ever since fiat currencies have been uncoupled from precious metals the same is true of fiat. If we could somehow get to a place where we didn't need capital for society to function, we would immediately eliminate a huge amount of arguably wasteful overhead in how human society functions, but given the fact that we seem to live in a capitalist world and there do not seem to be any easy routes to changing that, tokens of capital be they physical and issued by governments or virtual and issued by an algorithm serve a certain purpose, and cryptocurrencies exist because they have properties that fiat currencies do not, and are therefore valuable in different ways.No it is an intrinsic problem with POW currencies, at least with most of the schemes that use POW. It works like a lottery, and the vast amount of the work burned by miners is discarded to heat providing absolutely nothing of value. It's like a lottery where all the money gets burned, and the winner gets a very fancy pokemon card that they can optionally sell on ebay. No matter if the energy comes from coal, the sun, or a fusion reactor, it's still a massive waste of energy that could have been used for something that adds value.
It's not strange to focus on BTC's energy consumption, what is strange is that hardly anyone is. So many people who are ostensibly concerned with climate change either completely don't want to take a look at it, or pull mental gymnastics to justify this colossal energy pig.
Not to mention the e-waste...
Hah, no worries about bringing Trump in, funnily enough quite similar dynamics are at play there. An inkling that public perception may be somewhat clouded... -> so I pushed in the opposite direction.Hah, OK I'm lured. And no worries, I'll take the "of all people" as a compliment.
You dislike his public persona. To me this is superficial. Consider also - Tesla has 0 marketing budget - so PR stunts in this case as effectively an extremely cost effective form of marketing, although to be honest I'm finding it hard to think of what "PR stunts" he's actually done, unless you just mean Twitter. A lot of people point to the Falcon Heavy launch as a PR stunt - it was not, at least not primarily, it was a test launch of a cutting edge heavy lift rocket.
Personally I'm convinced that anyone who can easily dismiss SpaceX and Tesla as "not that impressive" or useful or whatever just hasn't really looked into them enough. The amount of engineering leaps and technological innovation that has happened in such a short time is staggering. SpaceX is frankly in a different league to any other space company and has no serious competitors right now. Additionally, it's not a requirement that you buy into the value of travelling to Mars, or indeed, electric or self driving cars (although the latter is a lot harder for me to understand) for the technologies that these efforts will develop to have immense value in other fields (for example - Tesla battery and proprietary regenerative braking tech).
By many accounts Musk is difficult to work with and his huge ego is real, fine, if anyone here had actually worked with him and was saying they just don't like the dude, fine. I just roll my eyes at people ranting about and abstractly hating public figures they've never met, especially when the specifics of these complaints seem to be pretty vague. A far more interesting discussion obviously (IMO) would be the value of certain technological developments to the human race, but this is just short-circuited by Musk this, Musk that, whatever, oh he said something annoying on Twitter again, I'm fuming!
An example I like to use to illustrate this is Donald Trump. Arguably, his own financial manipulations to set up his doomed casinos in Atlantic City and New York real estate empire were far more shady and morally dubious than anything Musk has done, and hurt a lot more people on the way up. Before they went bankrupt though, they probably employed a lot of people, brought other businesses to the region, whatever, but primarily, who here can say that if they could see a route to having what is essentially a part time job for millions of dollars a year, they wouldn't do it? Maybe some of us here (hopefully) would do things slightly differently, settle with less, cause less collateral damage, whatever, all well and good. I'm getting a bit sidetracked here but the point I'm trying to get to is that even though I personally think a lot of what Trump did back then (let's just forget about his political life entirely for purposes of this discussion) was probably immoral - I don't dislike him, I don't know him. I dislike some things he's done, for sure, but I admit I find myself just dissociating a little from any conversation where people seem to be really angry at him personally, he's so stupid, he this, he that. It just doesn't make sense to me, and interferes with any effort to reach a common understanding for why people do certain things, and how we can stop people from doing things that are detrimental to humanity as a whole - or how we can promote traits which are beneficial to humanity as a whole.
I feel like I'm risking diluting my point by bringing up Trump here but it's hard for me to see that Musk has done that much explicitly harmful to anyone... residents of Boca Chica who didn't want to move, yeah maybe, people who got burned by stock movements caused by Tweets, yeah, maybe, but cheap spaceflight and huge advances in electric cars and autonomous driving, seem like good things to me.
I'm not advocating hero worship obviously, just remaining objective about people we've never met. We always find it easiest to see in others the faults we most fear in ourselves - and I would say that applies to some peoples' fixation on Musk's ego, or sweeping statements about his or anyone else's intentions or inner world that don't seem to be directly based on anything he's actually said.
It just occurred to me I should probably add because it's easily pointed out that I almost certainly wouldn't bother wading into a discussion about Trump in the same way - because I don't think that Trump's actions have value in the same way, so just lazily disliking him as a person has less consequence and is arguably even beneficial in some ways. On the other hand, I do think that the science and engineering advances that have occurred in companies under Musk's leadership have a lot of value, and there's a danger of this value being dismissed as "fanboyism", whereas in most cases, I think (although I could be wrong) what some would label fanboyism is actually just enthusiasm for the works of a group of pioneering technology companies that happen to fall under the leadership of a certain polarising individual.
I wonder if there is a level of power consumption that would be acceptable to you? If the power consumption of Bitcoin-mining was closer to that of digital movement or tracking of fiat currencies, or perhaps other digital industries, would that make a difference?
The man who can see outside the box is a dangerous man when he uses it only to his own advantage while trying to style himself as this messianic figure who is going to led us to colonize the galaxy. Maybe he is just a puppet in this grand game of life maybe human society is structured this way that for us to colonize other planets we need a ruthless company to spearhead the efforts first.
These 'advances' seem to be coming up a little short in the modern era... The best Teslas can drive what, 250 miles before they need a five hour recharge? I'm just gonna level with y'all, I've lived in Texas most of my life; with our power grid down for the week prior and a state of emergency in effect... how in the FUCK would having an electric vehicle be practical? Are they gonna start offering multi-thousand dollar backup batteries you can swap out to make it the 5-600 miles in an emergency evacuation? What about when you're stuck in traffic and HAVE to run the A/C because it's 110F outside?huge advances in electric cars and autonomous driving
lol ol' man Xorky! I'm so happy you're still here after all this timeWow you're right!
Jesus christ lol
These 'advances' seem to be coming up a little short in the modern era... The best Teslas can drive what, 250 miles before they need a five hour recharge? I'm just gonna level with y'all, I've lived in Texas most of my life; with our power grid down for the week prior and a state of emergency in effect... how in the FUCK would having an electric vehicle be practical? Are they gonna start offering multi-thousand dollar backup batteries you can swap out to make it the 5-600 miles in an emergency evacuation? What about when you're stuck in traffic and HAVE to run the A/C because it's 110F outside?
Until they can make car batteries that can meet gasoline mileage standards, electric cars are dead in the water. Both of my cars run on gas and can go further on a single tank, albeit both weigh well under 2600 lbs and lack modern 'safety' features and gadgets to weigh them down.
Do y'all legitimately believe that BTC could replace fiat currencies?
Yaay, happy belated BL cake day Xork ... hehe. I know all of us appreciate your presence hereWow you're right!
Jesus christ lol
Do y'all legitimately believe that BTC could replace fiat currencies? What happens to all my fiat liquid assets? Are my thousands of USD in savings gonna be worthless and only people who bought into BTC two years ago will be able to buy any equity? In an ideal future, the world would be unified, under one currency; however, humans are intrinsically self-defeating, divisive, violent. We will not unify in our lifetime, ergo how could BTC take the place of fiat currencies that already struggle to prop up other fake assets?
Did you end up taking a PCR test? I hope you feel better soon ! How is your girl feeling? The upside is , if she does end up getting covid, she will realize that being young and healthy the chances of getting a severe case are very very small, and she will be immunized by exposition, so anxiety about it should be finally gone, lol.
I completely agree with this. I've always seen this man as the closest thing to a "supervillain" in real life.
I think it is easily enough to damn it because we already have far superior and more energy efficient currencies - crypto and otherwise. I mean, it's not just less than ideal, it's colossally wasteful. Please look at some numbers:Personally, I don't think the less-than-ideal energy consumption of Bitcoin is enough to damn it. We have no realistic way of predicting the potential magnitude of positive impact resultant from the rise of Bitcoin. We're talking potential paradigm shifts, in numerous domains. It's difficult to imagine the first wave of consequences, let alone the second, third, and so on.
I think it is easily enough to damn it because we already have far superior and more energy efficient currencies - crypto and otherwise. I mean, it's not just less than ideal, it's colossally wasteful. Please look at some numbers:
Bitcoin network:
- the currency is using 121TWh/year at this time.
- BTC is supporting something like 144 million transactions per year
- This averages out to around 858kWh per transaction! The cost of one BTC transaction is equal to one American home's energy use for one month. Please note, this is not the cost to mine one bitcoin, this is the averaged cost of a single transaction.
- about $25 fee for transaction, and takes over 10 minutes to confirm.
Compare this to the visa network:
- 185 billion transactions per year
- Average energy cost per transaction 1.5Wh (572 000x more efficient than bitcoin)
If visa was the only other choice vs bitcoin, I'd go with Visa/fiat/digital banking because it's so much more efficient, fast, convenient. The main thing is that I care more about our planet than having a decentralized currency. And bitcoin isn't even that decentralized given that most of the hash power is in the hands of few large miners.
Bitcoin is a bad currency by any measure. Everyone is so focused on Bitcoin and thinks that we have to give it a free pass because it might lead to something better... well that better version is already here. We can have our cake and eat it too, we don't need to rely on centralized solutions like Visa. There are many cryptocurrencies that are decentralized, noninflationary, very energy efficient, low transaction fees, and fast.
Ethereum: is using POW and is basically just as wasteful as BTC. But at least they do have a path forward to switching to a POS scheme, which will use 99% less energy, when it comes
Stellar Lumens: uses a Federated Byzantine Agreement scheme. This is far more efficient and scalable. Transactions cost pennies and are fast (5s) and can process many thousands of transactions per second. I don't have energy stats handy, but it's multiple orders of magnitude more efficient than BTC. Ripple is meant to use roughly the same scheme.
Cardano: 37000x more efficient than BTC
Tezos: average transaction fee is $0.00232, uses delegated proof of stake (dPOS) for consensus which is many orders of magnitude more energy efficient than BTC
Nano: as mentioned by @Xorkoth uses a DAG and is super fast, scalable, free transactions (or just really cheap?), and extremely low energy usage.
This isn't a shill post, I don't own any of those cryptos. I've omitted the one project I'm hyped on because I don't want the purpose of this post to be about shilling my own pet project.
... I'm just scraping the surface here, there are many projects that are already solving this energy problem. We don't need bitcoin. What bitcoin has going for it is brand name recognition, hype, and belief. But those things can change, especially when the fundamentals (efficiency, scalability, utility) have major issues that are already solved by other cryptos.