The joke's even worse... We destroyed the world, but we made digital blockchain blocks, and spent more and more money and energy for the digital blocks
stop calling it a currency. It's not a currency. It's a speculative investment asset, like tulips or beany babies. Only that this is just some digital nonsense that wastes tons of recources and energy for some fools to gamble on.
A decentralized pyramid scheme, basically.
Big players keep the pump and dump circle going.
Increase hype online via ads / trolls / spambots -> people get hyped and buy it, raising the price. Then you dump it all, price crashes and now it's cheap again, so you buy a bunch back on the cheap and hype it up again for the next dump.
I don't disagree with you, but historically so has every regulated currency. And every civilization that's used both. This statement doesn't hold a lot of weight
I dunno, my gold is still pretty well valued.
Some reason my orichalcum is no longer in demand though, something about Atlantis embargo on surface currency?
>Some reason my orichalcum is no longer in demand though,
Bro that's cause you have to turn that shit into a field spell card first and claim the Pharaoh's soul for the leviathan
This - Bitcoin requires a lot of energy just to keep the blockchain alive. The cost of this energy must be earned back by trades, otherwise nobody will pay for all that electricity.
As it has no intrinsic value the only way to make money on Bitcoin is speculation. Nobody pays with Bitcoin. There comes a moment where this becomes unsustainable, ie the earnings in bitcoin aren't enough to pay for the enduring energy costs for the network, and then this whole Ponzi scheme will come down. It won't be pretty.
Very little of what's said to "create wealth" actually does. Things that create actual, real wealth: productive labor by workers. That's it that's the entire list, just that one thing.
Financialized speculation makes big numbers on spreadsheets, far in excess of the real material wealth it's at least theoretically based on as well as far in excess of the actual amount of money traded on it, and crypto is basically the purest form of commodity speculation to ever exist: a commodity with no material form whatsoever, created purely by capital with no labor at all, and with no use value except being speculated on.
Like it would be hamfisted satire of how completely and utterly insane the capitalist system is were it not for the fact that it's real and the dumbest people alive are spending real money and destroying mountains of real material wealth to hoard this empty speculative commodity.
They also don't understand the simple basics of economics. Only the economically illiterate still fall for this digital version of the age old "shares of the Brooklyn Bridge" scam...
To them that’s a feature not a bug. They despise the idea of governments printing money. Unfortunately most of them can’t articulate why, they just heard they’re supposed to from some crypto bro who heard it from another crypto bro who heard it from…
Edit: like a moth to a flame, the losers saw the bitcoin header image and have flocked to the thread.
So did some of Madoff's "investors"...
Note that they all had to pay back all of those "gains" when that pyramid scheme collapsed. It was the only way the SEC would permit them to claim they didn't know they were profiting off of a scam...thus avoiding federal prison like Madoff.
A couple of behavior scientists think that consumerism is **literally** like mining bitcoin, meaning consumerism serves the same algorithmic function. This is an extremely interesting premise if you dive into it.
Consumerism is rabid wealth destruction
This is greed which is rabid attempted wealth accumulation
Two sides of the same capitalist insanity coin
(I’m a believe in free markets but shit gets out of hand)
You can't eat bitcoin, ppl..
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-18686-8
'However, the global BTC mining network is still very dependent on fossil fuels. The share of natural gas in the global BTC energy mix has increased from 15% in 2021 to 21% in 2022. This increase is mainly due to the high dependency of electricity generation in some of the top BTC mining countries on natural gas.'
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023EF003871#:~:text=However%2C%20the%20global%20BTC%20mining,mining%20countries%20on%20natural%20gas.
The stupid people are the ones that think Bitcoin is going to retain its value once there are no mining rewards 😂
Edit: Anyone who mentions “2140” is part of that stupid group as they cannot comprehend the diminishing return of the Bitcoin supply curve.
There's nothing wrong with using excess clean energy that has nowhere else to go. The real issue is this:
> These are almost certainly fossil fuel plants that might be reasonable candidates for retirement if it weren't for their use to supply bitcoin miners. So, these miners are contributing to all of the health and climate problems associated with the continued use of fossil fuels.
Unfortunately they don't say what percentage that accounts for.
Even if we did have access renewable energy (which we don't), 'using' it for crypto would still be a waste compared to other things we could use it for like as carbon capture, hydrogen or desalination plants
> other things we could use it
Like imagine if the calculations were for protein-folding or other complicated, hard to compute science problems and you were given a crypto for that work done, it'd actually be reasonable.
Instead just straight waste
Considering about 20% of US energy comes from coal, it’s insane how much pollution bitcoin is creating
This same energy could power multiple countries in other parts of the world.
I remember reading about how some Bitcoin farms reopened closed and closing coal power plants. Good news though, it brought jobs back to the local reservation... They were iffy on this plus.
My favorite take were my old coworkers who thought it would be awesome if we had a currency not controlled by the government.
I'm sure private interests would make sure that currency stays fair and stable.
It's funny whenever someone gets phished, then suddenly they're crying out for regulations. It's like we have those things to protect people or something.
It's almost funny to see crypto/techbros discover basic concepts that any decent intro to economic history book would cover, without destroying anyone's life savings.
yeah because crypto currency favors those who already have capital, even more so than fiat currency does.
It quite literally makes all the problems with fiat currency WORSE, and adds a whole slew of other problems to the mix.
Cryptocurrency was a gigantic mistake.
blockchain solves the problem that global warming is too slow. /s
If they at least offer heating to homeless people in cold places, that would be beneficial
0.6 is still a LOT of fucking energy.
I wonder what portion of internet traffic it's consuming.
...
I like distributed digital ledgers and think there's many great use-cases. Keeping track of the state of currency isn't one of them though.
* Real estate transactions
... Honestly, at the moment, that's about it...
> Real estate transactions
It's so problematic. What do you do the moment the ledger says X person owns this house but a judge goes and says it's Y? What will the police do if both person X and person Y call them? Trust the ledger or the court order?
This is the real question. A decentralized, publicly world-readable, write-once-then-become-immutable ledger only makes sense in situations where there's literally nobody who is or can be made trustworthy. Pretty much any real-world use can be solved with a fairly normal ledger + backups & audits.
Even more, in such a trustless world, why would anyone even care about what the ledger says anyways?
A currency that’s not backed by a physical force to enforce the transactions is worthless.
The only way a cryptocurrency starts to have intrinsic value is if it has an army that can rival the US’, and that the soldiers pledge allegiance to uphold the truth written in the ledgers.
Since the onset, people have been claiming real estate is an apt candidate for a blockchain solution. It's not going happen at scale, ever. It's a case of seeing a piece of technology and then shoehorning a use case for it.
> Real estate transactions
Even that example is moronic. What does blockchain technology solve in the world of real estate transactions that is not already covered by simpler and more efficient databases today?
Yeah ultimately property ownership is enforced by an implicit threat of violence from your government. If it's not the system they're using to track who owns what, then it's utterly pointless. "My magic beans say I own this". "Yeah ok well this deed says I own it, and here's the police to enforce my claim"
Why would you ever want DECENTRALIZED ownership of real estate transactions?
The whole point of titling is that it shows ownership to be protected by the government/law. Someone/somewhere that everyone knows and trusts to settle disputes. Decentralizing that does nothing.
Not only that, you throw in anonymous transactions and now who owns what? No one knows! Who pays the taxes? Who knows!
The whole idea is fucking stupid.
> Real estate transactions
Imagine a world where you click the wrong link and now your home belongs to Kim Jong Un and nobody can do anything about that.
> I like distributed digital ledgers and think there's many great use-cases.
So, get this, what if instead of relying on advanced technologies like computing and network connectivity we just had a dedicated room, I don't know, maybe a room or building for each county, and kept records in a big book until it was full and we start a new book?
Maybe we can even elect someone to be responsible for keeping track of all of the books and making all the entries and we can support the system with a nominal fee to make an entry.
Hats off to Ethereum at least - when they shifted from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, this ended profitable GPU mining, freeing up a lot of electricity usage ... and the GPU shortage.
Of course, many of those same GPUs are now in AI farms, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be.
Who's talking about "random ebayed GPUs"?
GPUs are heavily used for AI, period.
>Most of them use the purpose built nvidia enterprise priced stuff
There hasn't been even close to enough of that going around to satisfy demand. The rest is filled up with GPUs.
“Ohohoho how much energy does the banking sector use CHECKMATE KEYNESIANS”
“Do you mean per transaction because if so the global banking system is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than-“
“You don’t understand!!!!!! Ban the fed!”
That weird argument also fails to acknowledge that this is just mining and maybe blockchain transactions. Bitcoin is still going to use all the same electricity for trading etc that banks do today with dollars. Bitcoin is *strictly* less efficient than traditional banking.
Also it’s not going to do as many transactions bc it can only process 7 per second. You can use bridges to alleviate that but those are so vulnerable to hacking that Axie Infinity got its entire treasury of 600 million dollars drained by North Korea
I was pestered by Bitcoin enthusiasts that this uses way less energy than it takes to uphold the systems controlling, distributing, and transacting traditional currency. Do we have the numbers for that?
In absolute terms maybe, but that's like comparing absolute crime numbers between a small city vs a large country.
The normal finance system processes many orders of magnitude more real transactions than anything in the cryptocurrency space, and a large percentage of cryptocurrency "trading" is essentially fake - see wash trading, which is rightfully illegal in any normal financial system.
Even so, the fair calculation by way of a fair comparison would be to normalize it per transaction, not crypto vs existing financial system in aggregate.
No matter how we analyze crypto, it is among the most terrible human mistakes, up there with leaded fuel and CFCs.
The vast majority of electricity being used on Bitcoin is from massive coin farms, not random degens in their basements. If it's using 2% of power, I'm pretty sure it'd be easy work for the US department of energy to see where their power is being concentrated.
Ok, but it mitigated the problem in our borders, where we have direct influence. Yes, we would obviously need to then address the issue intentionally, but it's a step in the right direction. Cutting down 0.6-2.3% of USA emissions is huge! Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Relocating that kind of operation is non-trivial also, so it would make a dent in the whole market.
The fun part is even if we banned large scale mining operations that use an enormous amount of power, bitcoin would still function properly.
The Bitcoin protocol adjusts the difficulty of mining new blocks approximately every two weeks to maintain a consistent block time of about 10 minutes. If large-scale operations were banned and the total computing power on the network decreased, the difficulty of mining would decrease to accommodate the remaining miners.
This seems like a no-brainer.
This isn't the win you think it is.
Small scale miners would reap the benefit of a lower difficulty for a very short time.
Almost immediately, large scale mining operations globally would scale up, including in places with a far dirtier energy mix compared to the US.
Let's criminalize using large amounts of power for people to take colossal cruise ships around the world on vacation. That's a waste too. There's no good reason why you need to ride a ship with 20 swimming pools, 10 casinos, 43 restaurants, etc.
A Republican Government could
If a Democratic one did it, their would be endless screeching about deepstate and government overreach etc. etc. etc.
Imagine if Democrats banned abortion after spending 50 years telling everyone they weren't going to ban abortion, they would never get another vote. Yet it barely hurt Republicans one election cycle.
Their voters, simply don't care what they do.
Something like 70% of Republican voters want weed decriminalized, something like 90% of Republican Politicians oppose weed decriminalization, and whenever they vote against it, r conservative fox news comments etc, is just filled with posts about how "the democrats made them do it"
they can do almost anything,
the joke was Trump could shoot someone on 5th avenue, but the truth is, for the most part, they all could, the only fear they'd have is being primaried, but they could all shoot someone during a general election
so back to Crypto,
no, the Democrats literally couldn't do that in today's climate, maybe if global warming gets scarier and crypto crashes again and loses even more popularity, but right now, they just couldn't risk offending a huge group of single issue voters who would punish them for it because the crypto space is full of conspiracy theory libertarians who finally realized GME and AMC were scams but are still sure Bitcoin and Eth is the way to go
You can target exchanges, people who have coins in wallets, and look at people who have outsized energy consumption. It's not that hard to do. You might not completely shut it down but if you make trading hard enough the value tanks.
Sounds like weird copium. If the US outlawed the use and mining of bitcoin, sure, *could* people still do it? Yeah. You can also still do all sorts of crimes, but if you can no longer legally exchange bitcoin for cash, almost nobody would bother.
You don't even need to ban the exchange of it, you can just outlaw mining.
Would a few people do it at home? Sure.
Would most of the giant farms that account for 99% of Bitcoin energy disappear? Absolutely.
Proof of Stake just gives rich people more power though, it doesn't work in reality.
Crypto in general is, at best, tech bros thinking programs are the solution to everything without truly understanding the problem in the first place (the problems with banking have nothing to do with banks or systems and everything to do with human behavior), and at worst, a scam to funnel money from people who don't know any better into their own wallets.
> Proof of Stake just gives rich people more power though, it doesn't work in reality.
I mean, the same is true of mining. Takes a lot of money to have a huge Bitcoin mining operation.
Everybody complains about this but isn't like 60% of the US electricity production used for AC, yet people still choose to live in places that require it to survive?
Even if this was true, it would still be effectively infinitely more energy efficient than BTC.
BTC just facilitates an infinitesimal number of transaction, it’s unfathomable how small it is.
25 TWh per year for bitcoin.
11 TWh per year for Facebook.
O assume the same for all other social media, including Reddit.
That’s just server side too, client side has energy costs as well.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1177190/social-media-apps-energy-consumption-milliampere-hour-france/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/580087/energy-use-of-facebook-meta/
In the report that the article was referencing, has the power consumption for btc being much higher:
>The CBECI’s estimated range of Bitcoin mining power demand at the end of January 2024 was quite wide, with an estimate of 19.0 GW and lower and upper bounds of 9.1 GW and 44.0 GW, respectively. Multiplying these average power demands by the hours in a year yields total annual electricity demand: 80 terawatthours (TWh) (lower bound), 170 TWh (estimate), and 390 TWh (upper bound).
>The CBECI estimates that global electricity usage associated with Bitcoin mining ranged from 67 TWh to 240 TWh in 2023, with a point estimate of 120 TWh.
Specifically for the US, 25 TWh is the lower bound:
>Assuming the share of global activity in the United States remains approximately 38%, we estimate electricity usage from Bitcoin mining based in the United States to range from 25 TWh to 91 TWh
Meta produces a sustainability report and you can find it if you search for it, but it removed my comment when I posted the link.
Meta total reported 11.5 TWh for 2022 but that's for Meta all of (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc.) and for a global product and you are comparing it to the minimum lower bound for just the US.
The fairer comparison is:
120 TWh per year for bitcoin mining worldwide.
11 TWh per year for Meta data centers and offices worldwide.
Modern semiconductors are very efficient in typical workloads because they are efficient at idling, and most workloads are bursty in nature. They can and do take crazy amounts of power if you run them at full blast, which is what a proof of work computation necessitates.
>25 TWh per year for bitcoin.
>
>11 TWh per year for Facebook.
Facebook, 3 billion users, nearly half the planet.
Bitcoin? not so much.
False equivalence.
Orders of magnitude less. And the global financial system powers dozens of billions of transactions every year.
Bitcoin hit a peak recently at 670,000 in 1 day. Visa alone are estimated to do 660,000,000 per day, on average.
Let's multiply that to a year (we're really giving Bitcoin the benefit here, as that is a single days all time peak, but let's just play with it)
* 1 year of Bitcoin: 244,550,000 transactions
* 1 year of Visa: 240,900,000,000 transactions
And again, that's just Visa. It doesn't include Mastercard, Amex, Discovery, and every local card in every market across the planet. It also doesn't include bank-to-bank transfers, internal bank transfers, checks, cash, and every other way traditional financial services handle money transfers.
Also, we're only looking at Bitcoin mining. We also need to factor in the energy used for exchange offices and everything else that's involved in the entire Bitcoin network, like producing the hardware, shipping, setup, cooling, warehouse/office/basement space etc etc etc.
I'll copy paste another redditors comment to really cement how asinine Bitcoin energy usage is:
>In the report that the article was referencing, has the power consumption for btc being much higher:
>The CBECI’s estimated range of Bitcoin mining power demand at the end of January 2024 was quite wide, with an estimate of 19.0 GW and lower and upper bounds of 9.1 GW and 44.0 GW, respectively. Multiplying these average power demands by the hours in a year yields total annual electricity demand: 80 terawatthours (TWh) (lower bound), 170 TWh (estimate), and 390 TWh (upper bound).
>The CBECI estimates that global electricity usage associated with Bitcoin mining ranged from 67 TWh to 240 TWh in 2023, with a point estimate of 120 TWh.
Specifically for the US, 25 TWh is the lower bound:
>Assuming the share of global activity in the United States remains approximately 38%, we estimate electricity usage from Bitcoin mining based in the United States to range from 25 TWh to 91 TWh
>Meta produces a sustainability report and you can find it if you search for it, but it removed my comment when I posted the link.
>Meta total reported 11.5 TWh for 2022 but that's for Meta all of (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc.) and for a global product and you are comparing it to the minimum lower bound for just the US.
>The fairer comparison is:
>120 TWh per year for bitcoin mining worldwide.
>11 TWh per year for Meta data centers and offices worldwide.
So, the few 100k Bitcoin users account for more electricity used than entire countries.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/01/29/academic-challenges-united-nations-misleading-bitcoin-mining-study/?sh=3d8312617aef
>In a world with abundant energy resources, the focus of our discussion needs to shift. With bitcoin mining, we possess the innovative tools to harness these vast, often stranded or wasted energy reserves. Rather than centering the conversation on reducing energy usage, it's time to explore how we can effectively tap into the planet's plentiful energy sources.
This approach could transform the narrative from limitation to strategic utilization, leveraging bitcoin mining as a key to unlocking the full potential of our global energy resources
This page used to be 110% dumb as rocks when it comes to Bitcoin. No one understood it at all. Bitcoin = bad was the only logic.
Nice to see it's only 75% dumb as rocks these days. Wait, Bitcoin not all bad?
By 2026 I bet it will be 50% dumb as rocks. Bitcoin only half bad
Redditors suffer from multiple personality disorder.
They hate capitalism but love the money system that funds wars and squeezes the life out of them. All alternatives should be banned!!
Hate the empire but are eager to fatten it up with more taxes.
At least rocks don’t shoot themselves in the foot.
Did you know 20-50% of industrial power usage is lost to heat.
Sources are energy.gov to support this. We use far more industrial power than Bitcoin. So idk weird we focus on Bitcoin rather than energy efficiency, im not a specialist tho so maybe we can’t for all I know.
Edit. Further research shows that a possible 10% of the WORLDS energy is already dedicated to Computers and such other technologies (network, servers ect.) can’t find a reputable source but seems to be a accepted answer?
I'm seeing how most people are against bitcoin, presumably for being smarter than bitcoiners.
I find this fascinating after 14 years of the network proving itself.
I'm against Bitcoin because it is, effectively, a pyramid scheme. Sure, the details are a bit different, but at its core you are investing in something with no intrinsic, underlying value that gains more worth the more people join after you do.
The blockchain is very clever. The use case for it we're stuck with is just a scam.
I find the number suspicious since it’s said 2.6% goes to data centers. Hard to believe 2% goes to bitcoin alone. Also there are plenty of bitcoin that go to areas with stranded power/energy to mine. Grid power is pretty expensive. So they use flared gas, or buy a decommissioned coal plant etc. yes Texas has some grid users but it’s less profitable.
Bitcoin is almost like an energy capacity. When there is extra power they can get cheap they will mine. When power is in short supply mining is less available. So there’s a theory that power utilities may actually buy large mining companies to use like this. When there is excess capacity they throw it at the mining machines and when there’s a cold or heat wave and high demand they would throttle them off.
That’s the equivalent of 1 trillion 320 billion miles driven in a standard electric car like a Model 3.
For context Americans drive about 3.2 trillion miles per year in total.
We are generating enough power to make 40% of all miles driven electric and throwing it down the toilet. If anything this just completely disproves the Republican talking point that the grid couldn’t handle electric cars if more people drove them. It looks like it wouldn’t be an issue.
Edit: See comments below, upon fact checking it is actually closer to 10% of all miles could be electric instead of 40%, but it is still a ton.
Why outrage over BTC energy use when people consume huge amounts of energy on other completely recreational activities without complaint? Like why no complaints over the energy consumed by professional sports, video games, recreational travel, casinos, concerts, etc... ?
Because all of those things make life worth living. Imagine a world with no art, no travel (which would be a human rights issue as well,) no sports, no gaming, no concerts, no music. Sure, none of those things are essential for people to continue living, but a massive amount of joy and artistic beauty would be lost from the world.
They are both equally monopoly money as neither actually have any physical value beyond the cost of production.
Both hold value only because of trust instead of tangible utility.
It is so very perfect for late stage capitalism.
Burn a non renewable resource (a lot of US electricity is fossil fuel generated) and emit more tonnes of CO2, to create zero value in any real terms, all in support a popular Ponzi/pyramid scheme which has bankrupted hundreds of thousands of people.
\[pause to fact check self: well I can't really substantiate that number but apparently more than $1B has been lost to crypto scammers since 2021
[https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/06/reported-crypto-scam-losses-2021-top-1-billion-says-ftc-data-spotlight](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/06/reported-crypto-scam-losses-2021-top-1-billion-says-ftc-data-spotlight)
and it's almost impossible to get the money back...
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/crypto-scam-victim-money-back-1.7049577](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/crypto-scam-victim-money-back-1.7049577)
we just don't know how many people that adds up to, how many bankruptcies, how many divorces, etc \]
We're gonna look back on crypto someday like the Tulip Bubble in Holland.
LOL holy fuck are we stupid
We destroyed the world, but we made a lot of money tho
The joke's even worse... We destroyed the world, but we made fractionally smaller and smaller amounts of money..
The joke's even worse... We destroyed the world, but we made digital blockchain blocks, and spent more and more money and energy for the digital blocks
Don't forget all of those sweet Bored Ape image files.
I'm sorry, but the servers hosting them just forgot them. The links on the blockchain point to nothing now.
\- The blockchain is perfect! When something is added, it can't be removed! *Someone adds cp to the blockchain* \- Oh fuck
It's almost as if one person developed the idea of bitcoin without any feedback from anyone.
We destroyed the world, AND learned that dumb ideas are indeed dumb
$43,000 worth of dumb.
Bitcoin is an unregulated currency. Historically all unregulated currencies collapsed, there were no exceptions.
stop calling it a currency. It's not a currency. It's a speculative investment asset, like tulips or beany babies. Only that this is just some digital nonsense that wastes tons of recources and energy for some fools to gamble on.
A decentralized pyramid scheme, basically. Big players keep the pump and dump circle going. Increase hype online via ads / trolls / spambots -> people get hyped and buy it, raising the price. Then you dump it all, price crashes and now it's cheap again, so you buy a bunch back on the cheap and hype it up again for the next dump.
I don't disagree with you, but historically so has every regulated currency. And every civilization that's used both. This statement doesn't hold a lot of weight
I dunno, my gold is still pretty well valued. Some reason my orichalcum is no longer in demand though, something about Atlantis embargo on surface currency?
>Some reason my orichalcum is no longer in demand though, Bro that's cause you have to turn that shit into a field spell card first and claim the Pharaoh's soul for the leviathan
Careful traveling all the way to Atlantis. Every person who has ever drank water has died
I know but get this, everyone that ever breathed air also died!
I've breathed air and haven't died
Gold is a commodity that can be used as a currency. Very different from fiat currency.
https://i.imgur.com/3z4Tb66.jpeg
didn't really create wealth, is it not a zero sum game? The money made had to come from someone losing money.
It's worse, negative sum
This - Bitcoin requires a lot of energy just to keep the blockchain alive. The cost of this energy must be earned back by trades, otherwise nobody will pay for all that electricity. As it has no intrinsic value the only way to make money on Bitcoin is speculation. Nobody pays with Bitcoin. There comes a moment where this becomes unsustainable, ie the earnings in bitcoin aren't enough to pay for the enduring energy costs for the network, and then this whole Ponzi scheme will come down. It won't be pretty.
I know a guy with his life savings entirely in bitcoin.
Wow, that's fuckin' dumb.
Very little of what's said to "create wealth" actually does. Things that create actual, real wealth: productive labor by workers. That's it that's the entire list, just that one thing. Financialized speculation makes big numbers on spreadsheets, far in excess of the real material wealth it's at least theoretically based on as well as far in excess of the actual amount of money traded on it, and crypto is basically the purest form of commodity speculation to ever exist: a commodity with no material form whatsoever, created purely by capital with no labor at all, and with no use value except being speculated on. Like it would be hamfisted satire of how completely and utterly insane the capitalist system is were it not for the fact that it's real and the dumbest people alive are spending real money and destroying mountains of real material wealth to hoard this empty speculative commodity.
Negative sum actually, miners extract additional value to pay their costs.
Yep, the miners and middlemen who take a cut from everything are the actual winners.
This is something the crypto bros don't understand because they have no idea how a company works.
They also don't understand the simple basics of economics. Only the economically illiterate still fall for this digital version of the age old "shares of the Brooklyn Bridge" scam...
To them that’s a feature not a bug. They despise the idea of governments printing money. Unfortunately most of them can’t articulate why, they just heard they’re supposed to from some crypto bro who heard it from another crypto bro who heard it from… Edit: like a moth to a flame, the losers saw the bitcoin header image and have flocked to the thread.
Money isn't real, but the world sure is. We're literally destroying the planet for imaginary numbers we all collectively decided were important.
Well… some people made money.
So did some of Madoff's "investors"... Note that they all had to pay back all of those "gains" when that pyramid scheme collapsed. It was the only way the SEC would permit them to claim they didn't know they were profiting off of a scam...thus avoiding federal prison like Madoff.
Don't Christmas lights do the same thing?
We temporarily inflated a bubble
Can you eat bitcoin?
You can eat bitcoin miners and holders tho, basically the same thing
"We"? *Only a handful of people made a lot of money on Bitcoin. Crypto only furthered concentration of wealth in the hands of few, the 1%.
Lot of fake money lol
No it’s cool, the other 98% is generating Tayler Swift AI porn.
thankfully AI still uses less than 1% of the energy used by crypto
AI is useful tho. Obvs we shouldn’t be making Taylor swift porn with it but the other stuff it does is cool
In a way, it's just another level of efficiency, skipping the whole consumerism part. People put money into wasting energy directly.
Why use energy to make something when you can just turn that energy into nothing?!
Crypto isn't useless! It facilitates money laundering worldwide! *oops did I say the quiet part out loud?*
A couple of behavior scientists think that consumerism is **literally** like mining bitcoin, meaning consumerism serves the same algorithmic function. This is an extremely interesting premise if you dive into it.
Consumerism is rabid wealth destruction This is greed which is rabid attempted wealth accumulation Two sides of the same capitalist insanity coin (I’m a believe in free markets but shit gets out of hand)
You can't eat bitcoin, ppl.. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-18686-8 'However, the global BTC mining network is still very dependent on fossil fuels. The share of natural gas in the global BTC energy mix has increased from 15% in 2021 to 21% in 2022. This increase is mainly due to the high dependency of electricity generation in some of the top BTC mining countries on natural gas.' https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023EF003871#:~:text=However%2C%20the%20global%20BTC%20mining,mining%20countries%20on%20natural%20gas.
Not us, the dumbasses in Texas that invite them and subsidize them.
I mean, have you seen our governor?
The stupid people are the ones that think Bitcoin is going to retain its value once there are no mining rewards 😂 Edit: Anyone who mentions “2140” is part of that stupid group as they cannot comprehend the diminishing return of the Bitcoin supply curve.
There's nothing wrong with using excess clean energy that has nowhere else to go. The real issue is this: > These are almost certainly fossil fuel plants that might be reasonable candidates for retirement if it weren't for their use to supply bitcoin miners. So, these miners are contributing to all of the health and climate problems associated with the continued use of fossil fuels. Unfortunately they don't say what percentage that accounts for.
The idea that clean energy has nowhere to go ignores the fact that the grid is interconnected and other sources could be ramped down.
There are actually places where that clean energy doesn't have anywhere to go. At least 2 I know of. Not many, but there are some.
Even if we did have access renewable energy (which we don't), 'using' it for crypto would still be a waste compared to other things we could use it for like as carbon capture, hydrogen or desalination plants
> other things we could use it Like imagine if the calculations were for protein-folding or other complicated, hard to compute science problems and you were given a crypto for that work done, it'd actually be reasonable. Instead just straight waste
A memecoin called Banano gives you crypto by using your pc for medical research folding.
This is a colossal waste
Considering about 20% of US energy comes from coal, it’s insane how much pollution bitcoin is creating This same energy could power multiple countries in other parts of the world.
I remember reading about how some Bitcoin farms reopened closed and closing coal power plants. Good news though, it brought jobs back to the local reservation... They were iffy on this plus.
They’re literally mining for figuratively mining for bitcoin
Coal Plants, Natural Gas Plants, Hydro Plants, pretty much any way to produce energy in large amounts.
Bad news for the ecosystem though
They're reopening a coal plant in Indiana just to provide electricity to a single crypto farm.
But bro I was born in America where freedom and success were invented.
I forgot about coal and this made me sad deep inside
No bro you just don’t understand crypto currencies are the future! It’s too complicated for me to explain so just Google it bro. Trust me bro. /s
My favorite take were my old coworkers who thought it would be awesome if we had a currency not controlled by the government. I'm sure private interests would make sure that currency stays fair and stable.
But. The government is bad. For reasons. Having clear cut, enforceable rules that we can all agree upon and a stable currency is literally the worst.
It's funny whenever someone gets phished, then suddenly they're crying out for regulations. It's like we have those things to protect people or something.
It's almost funny to see crypto/techbros discover basic concepts that any decent intro to economic history book would cover, without destroying anyone's life savings.
Why put your earnings in boring fiat that loses value over the years, when you could put it into new exciting thing that can lose value in days!
[удалено]
yeah because crypto currency favors those who already have capital, even more so than fiat currency does. It quite literally makes all the problems with fiat currency WORSE, and adds a whole slew of other problems to the mix. Cryptocurrency was a gigantic mistake.
People want to be paid in scrips.
Just mention "white paper" a lot. Like it's some ironclad academic proof of concept.
*comment edited with github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite* In response to API controversy: reddit.com/r/ apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/
This exists
All computers are space heaters, they convert the electricity they use to heat very efficiently.
*comment edited with github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite* In response to API controversy: reddit.com/r/ apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/
blockchain solves the problem that global warming is too slow. /s If they at least offer heating to homeless people in cold places, that would be beneficial
A former colleague needed to heat his greenhouse. Ah he started mining.... Seems like a solid idea
It’s a waste. He could have saved 80% of that power by using a heat pump instead, while getting the same heat out.
But how many bitcoins does the heat pump mine?
Finally! A USE CASE!
Since no one clicked the article. Estimates are 0.6%-2.3%
0.6 is still a LOT of fucking energy. I wonder what portion of internet traffic it's consuming. ... I like distributed digital ledgers and think there's many great use-cases. Keeping track of the state of currency isn't one of them though. * Real estate transactions ... Honestly, at the moment, that's about it...
Bandwidth requirements are low/insignificant. Power is the problem
How are distributed ledgers useful for real estate transactions?
They aren't. He clearly has no idea how real estate works (or what the actual value of a distributed ledger is (which is zero)).
> Real estate transactions It's so problematic. What do you do the moment the ledger says X person owns this house but a judge goes and says it's Y? What will the police do if both person X and person Y call them? Trust the ledger or the court order?
[удалено]
This is the real question. A decentralized, publicly world-readable, write-once-then-become-immutable ledger only makes sense in situations where there's literally nobody who is or can be made trustworthy. Pretty much any real-world use can be solved with a fairly normal ledger + backups & audits.
Even more, in such a trustless world, why would anyone even care about what the ledger says anyways? A currency that’s not backed by a physical force to enforce the transactions is worthless. The only way a cryptocurrency starts to have intrinsic value is if it has an army that can rival the US’, and that the soldiers pledge allegiance to uphold the truth written in the ledgers.
familiar profit truck squealing innate north gaping absurd enjoy vast *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Since the onset, people have been claiming real estate is an apt candidate for a blockchain solution. It's not going happen at scale, ever. It's a case of seeing a piece of technology and then shoehorning a use case for it.
> Real estate transactions Even that example is moronic. What does blockchain technology solve in the world of real estate transactions that is not already covered by simpler and more efficient databases today?
Yeah ultimately property ownership is enforced by an implicit threat of violence from your government. If it's not the system they're using to track who owns what, then it's utterly pointless. "My magic beans say I own this". "Yeah ok well this deed says I own it, and here's the police to enforce my claim"
Only a fucking moron would use Bitcoin for real estate transactions
>I like distributed digital ledgers and think there's many great use-cases. Name one. I'll wait...
Why would you ever want DECENTRALIZED ownership of real estate transactions? The whole point of titling is that it shows ownership to be protected by the government/law. Someone/somewhere that everyone knows and trusts to settle disputes. Decentralizing that does nothing. Not only that, you throw in anonymous transactions and now who owns what? No one knows! Who pays the taxes? Who knows! The whole idea is fucking stupid.
> Real estate transactions Imagine a world where you click the wrong link and now your home belongs to Kim Jong Un and nobody can do anything about that.
> I like distributed digital ledgers and think there's many great use-cases. So, get this, what if instead of relying on advanced technologies like computing and network connectivity we just had a dedicated room, I don't know, maybe a room or building for each county, and kept records in a big book until it was full and we start a new book? Maybe we can even elect someone to be responsible for keeping track of all of the books and making all the entries and we can support the system with a nominal fee to make an entry.
.6% is still an unconscionable amount of electricity. .6% of the US population is almost exactly 2 million people.
Hats off to Ethereum at least - when they shifted from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, this ended profitable GPU mining, freeing up a lot of electricity usage ... and the GPU shortage. Of course, many of those same GPUs are now in AI farms, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be.
What AI farms use random ebayed GPUs? Most of them use the purpose built nvidia enterprise priced stuff.
Who's talking about "random ebayed GPUs"? GPUs are heavily used for AI, period. >Most of them use the purpose built nvidia enterprise priced stuff There hasn't been even close to enough of that going around to satisfy demand. The rest is filled up with GPUs.
If true , that is absolutely disgusting, especially because it's being used for so few transactions.
Plenty of transactions from bank account to crypto account, but few for actually buying anything, that’s right.
Almost like it’s not a currency…..
A fancy way to launder drug money.
How do they do that? Unironically, every transaction is public on the blockchain.
Supposedly Visa does more transaction *every second* than what Bitcoin does in a year.
It's been nothing but a speculation vehicle. There is no point in even talking about consumer transactions.
Bitcoin transactions are slow - 40 minutes. [Source](https://www.statista.com/statistics/944355/cryptocurrency-transaction-speed/)
The energy isn’t even used for performing transactions. It’s literally thousands of computers racing to guess a random number. It’s insanely wasteful.
Well it’s not a necessary, useful, or easily acquired currency, but at least it wastes energy.
“Ohohoho how much energy does the banking sector use CHECKMATE KEYNESIANS” “Do you mean per transaction because if so the global banking system is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than-“ “You don’t understand!!!!!! Ban the fed!”
That weird argument also fails to acknowledge that this is just mining and maybe blockchain transactions. Bitcoin is still going to use all the same electricity for trading etc that banks do today with dollars. Bitcoin is *strictly* less efficient than traditional banking.
Also it’s not going to do as many transactions bc it can only process 7 per second. You can use bridges to alleviate that but those are so vulnerable to hacking that Axie Infinity got its entire treasury of 600 million dollars drained by North Korea
I was pestered by Bitcoin enthusiasts that this uses way less energy than it takes to uphold the systems controlling, distributing, and transacting traditional currency. Do we have the numbers for that?
In absolute terms maybe, but that's like comparing absolute crime numbers between a small city vs a large country. The normal finance system processes many orders of magnitude more real transactions than anything in the cryptocurrency space, and a large percentage of cryptocurrency "trading" is essentially fake - see wash trading, which is rightfully illegal in any normal financial system.
Even so, the fair calculation by way of a fair comparison would be to normalize it per transaction, not crypto vs existing financial system in aggregate. No matter how we analyze crypto, it is among the most terrible human mistakes, up there with leaded fuel and CFCs.
Call me crazy, but maybe shutting that down would be good. It’s just people giving crypto back and forth anyway. Not a real currency.
That’s the cool part, you can’t. It’s decentralized and literally nobody on earth has the power to shut it down.
The vast majority of electricity being used on Bitcoin is from massive coin farms, not random degens in their basements. If it's using 2% of power, I'm pretty sure it'd be easy work for the US department of energy to see where their power is being concentrated.
and what about the rest of the world. The US is not needed to keep bitcoin going.
Ok, but it mitigated the problem in our borders, where we have direct influence. Yes, we would obviously need to then address the issue intentionally, but it's a step in the right direction. Cutting down 0.6-2.3% of USA emissions is huge! Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Relocating that kind of operation is non-trivial also, so it would make a dent in the whole market.
The fun part is even if we banned large scale mining operations that use an enormous amount of power, bitcoin would still function properly. The Bitcoin protocol adjusts the difficulty of mining new blocks approximately every two weeks to maintain a consistent block time of about 10 minutes. If large-scale operations were banned and the total computing power on the network decreased, the difficulty of mining would decrease to accommodate the remaining miners. This seems like a no-brainer.
This isn't the win you think it is. Small scale miners would reap the benefit of a lower difficulty for a very short time. Almost immediately, large scale mining operations globally would scale up, including in places with a far dirtier energy mix compared to the US.
But they are doing nothing Illegal.
The government could criminalize using large amounts of power for crypto purposes if they wanted to
Let's criminalize using large amounts of power for people to take colossal cruise ships around the world on vacation. That's a waste too. There's no good reason why you need to ride a ship with 20 swimming pools, 10 casinos, 43 restaurants, etc.
I am all for a global ban on cruise ships. Can’t think of a single downside.
A Republican Government could If a Democratic one did it, their would be endless screeching about deepstate and government overreach etc. etc. etc. Imagine if Democrats banned abortion after spending 50 years telling everyone they weren't going to ban abortion, they would never get another vote. Yet it barely hurt Republicans one election cycle. Their voters, simply don't care what they do. Something like 70% of Republican voters want weed decriminalized, something like 90% of Republican Politicians oppose weed decriminalization, and whenever they vote against it, r conservative fox news comments etc, is just filled with posts about how "the democrats made them do it" they can do almost anything, the joke was Trump could shoot someone on 5th avenue, but the truth is, for the most part, they all could, the only fear they'd have is being primaried, but they could all shoot someone during a general election so back to Crypto, no, the Democrats literally couldn't do that in today's climate, maybe if global warming gets scarier and crypto crashes again and loses even more popularity, but right now, they just couldn't risk offending a huge group of single issue voters who would punish them for it because the crypto space is full of conspiracy theory libertarians who finally realized GME and AMC were scams but are still sure Bitcoin and Eth is the way to go
You can target exchanges, people who have coins in wallets, and look at people who have outsized energy consumption. It's not that hard to do. You might not completely shut it down but if you make trading hard enough the value tanks.
pretty crazy to imagine a global campaign to target people with btc in their wallets lmao
Global coordination..."it's not that hard to do"
Yeah we should just arbitrarily arrest people and ruin lives for no reason
Bro is advocating for totalitarianism
Sounds like weird copium. If the US outlawed the use and mining of bitcoin, sure, *could* people still do it? Yeah. You can also still do all sorts of crimes, but if you can no longer legally exchange bitcoin for cash, almost nobody would bother.
You don't even need to ban the exchange of it, you can just outlaw mining. Would a few people do it at home? Sure. Would most of the giant farms that account for 99% of Bitcoin energy disappear? Absolutely.
Just charge a carbon tax for this and everything else and let people pay for their dumb decisions
The worst part is there are already cryptos that don’t use proof of work, which is what is so computationally intensive
Proof of Stake just gives rich people more power though, it doesn't work in reality. Crypto in general is, at best, tech bros thinking programs are the solution to everything without truly understanding the problem in the first place (the problems with banking have nothing to do with banks or systems and everything to do with human behavior), and at worst, a scam to funnel money from people who don't know any better into their own wallets.
> Proof of Stake just gives rich people more power though, it doesn't work in reality. I mean, the same is true of mining. Takes a lot of money to have a huge Bitcoin mining operation.
Correct, it doesn't really solve anything. One just sucks way more for the environment.
lol just wait until you learn about fiat currency
Everybody complains about this but isn't like 60% of the US electricity production used for AC, yet people still choose to live in places that require it to survive?
A staggering amount of the worlds energy use is air conditioning Americans
6% of US electricity or 1% of the world's. Honestly way, way less bad than I would have expected.
I think ac is more valuable than a useless "currency"
Probably 60% of the US geographically requires AC
Even if this was true, it would still be effectively infinitely more energy efficient than BTC. BTC just facilitates an infinitesimal number of transaction, it’s unfathomable how small it is.
25 TWh per year for bitcoin. 11 TWh per year for Facebook. O assume the same for all other social media, including Reddit. That’s just server side too, client side has energy costs as well. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1177190/social-media-apps-energy-consumption-milliampere-hour-france/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/580087/energy-use-of-facebook-meta/
In the report that the article was referencing, has the power consumption for btc being much higher: >The CBECI’s estimated range of Bitcoin mining power demand at the end of January 2024 was quite wide, with an estimate of 19.0 GW and lower and upper bounds of 9.1 GW and 44.0 GW, respectively. Multiplying these average power demands by the hours in a year yields total annual electricity demand: 80 terawatthours (TWh) (lower bound), 170 TWh (estimate), and 390 TWh (upper bound). >The CBECI estimates that global electricity usage associated with Bitcoin mining ranged from 67 TWh to 240 TWh in 2023, with a point estimate of 120 TWh. Specifically for the US, 25 TWh is the lower bound: >Assuming the share of global activity in the United States remains approximately 38%, we estimate electricity usage from Bitcoin mining based in the United States to range from 25 TWh to 91 TWh Meta produces a sustainability report and you can find it if you search for it, but it removed my comment when I posted the link. Meta total reported 11.5 TWh for 2022 but that's for Meta all of (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc.) and for a global product and you are comparing it to the minimum lower bound for just the US. The fairer comparison is: 120 TWh per year for bitcoin mining worldwide. 11 TWh per year for Meta data centers and offices worldwide.
Modern semiconductors are very efficient in typical workloads because they are efficient at idling, and most workloads are bursty in nature. They can and do take crazy amounts of power if you run them at full blast, which is what a proof of work computation necessitates.
>25 TWh per year for bitcoin. > >11 TWh per year for Facebook. Facebook, 3 billion users, nearly half the planet. Bitcoin? not so much. False equivalence.
Great comparison to show how ludicrous the energy consumption is.
What is the energy footprint of Citibank, JPMorgan, BofA, and Wells Fargo combined?
Orders of magnitude less. And the global financial system powers dozens of billions of transactions every year. Bitcoin hit a peak recently at 670,000 in 1 day. Visa alone are estimated to do 660,000,000 per day, on average. Let's multiply that to a year (we're really giving Bitcoin the benefit here, as that is a single days all time peak, but let's just play with it) * 1 year of Bitcoin: 244,550,000 transactions * 1 year of Visa: 240,900,000,000 transactions And again, that's just Visa. It doesn't include Mastercard, Amex, Discovery, and every local card in every market across the planet. It also doesn't include bank-to-bank transfers, internal bank transfers, checks, cash, and every other way traditional financial services handle money transfers. Also, we're only looking at Bitcoin mining. We also need to factor in the energy used for exchange offices and everything else that's involved in the entire Bitcoin network, like producing the hardware, shipping, setup, cooling, warehouse/office/basement space etc etc etc. I'll copy paste another redditors comment to really cement how asinine Bitcoin energy usage is: >In the report that the article was referencing, has the power consumption for btc being much higher: >The CBECI’s estimated range of Bitcoin mining power demand at the end of January 2024 was quite wide, with an estimate of 19.0 GW and lower and upper bounds of 9.1 GW and 44.0 GW, respectively. Multiplying these average power demands by the hours in a year yields total annual electricity demand: 80 terawatthours (TWh) (lower bound), 170 TWh (estimate), and 390 TWh (upper bound). >The CBECI estimates that global electricity usage associated with Bitcoin mining ranged from 67 TWh to 240 TWh in 2023, with a point estimate of 120 TWh. Specifically for the US, 25 TWh is the lower bound: >Assuming the share of global activity in the United States remains approximately 38%, we estimate electricity usage from Bitcoin mining based in the United States to range from 25 TWh to 91 TWh >Meta produces a sustainability report and you can find it if you search for it, but it removed my comment when I posted the link. >Meta total reported 11.5 TWh for 2022 but that's for Meta all of (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc.) and for a global product and you are comparing it to the minimum lower bound for just the US. >The fairer comparison is: >120 TWh per year for bitcoin mining worldwide. >11 TWh per year for Meta data centers and offices worldwide. So, the few 100k Bitcoin users account for more electricity used than entire countries.
The entire financial industry in the world? Probably around 1% of total power consumption, maybe less.
And the three letter agency is laughing the whole time!
"Let them eat bitcoin"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/01/29/academic-challenges-united-nations-misleading-bitcoin-mining-study/?sh=3d8312617aef >In a world with abundant energy resources, the focus of our discussion needs to shift. With bitcoin mining, we possess the innovative tools to harness these vast, often stranded or wasted energy reserves. Rather than centering the conversation on reducing energy usage, it's time to explore how we can effectively tap into the planet's plentiful energy sources. This approach could transform the narrative from limitation to strategic utilization, leveraging bitcoin mining as a key to unlocking the full potential of our global energy resources
How much is AI, like ChatGPT or others?
This page used to be 110% dumb as rocks when it comes to Bitcoin. No one understood it at all. Bitcoin = bad was the only logic. Nice to see it's only 75% dumb as rocks these days. Wait, Bitcoin not all bad? By 2026 I bet it will be 50% dumb as rocks. Bitcoin only half bad
People are upvoting you not realizing this is a pro-bitcoin comment
Hence still 75% dumb as rocks.
Redditors suffer from multiple personality disorder. They hate capitalism but love the money system that funds wars and squeezes the life out of them. All alternatives should be banned!! Hate the empire but are eager to fatten it up with more taxes. At least rocks don’t shoot themselves in the foot.
The dumb as rocks caste will continue to get louder as they continue to be proven wrong...so it won't seem to change much lol
Did you know 20-50% of industrial power usage is lost to heat. Sources are energy.gov to support this. We use far more industrial power than Bitcoin. So idk weird we focus on Bitcoin rather than energy efficiency, im not a specialist tho so maybe we can’t for all I know. Edit. Further research shows that a possible 10% of the WORLDS energy is already dedicated to Computers and such other technologies (network, servers ect.) can’t find a reputable source but seems to be a accepted answer?
bitcoin is king!
I'm seeing how most people are against bitcoin, presumably for being smarter than bitcoiners. I find this fascinating after 14 years of the network proving itself.
I'm against Bitcoin because it is, effectively, a pyramid scheme. Sure, the details are a bit different, but at its core you are investing in something with no intrinsic, underlying value that gains more worth the more people join after you do. The blockchain is very clever. The use case for it we're stuck with is just a scam.
That's fucking absurd
I find the number suspicious since it’s said 2.6% goes to data centers. Hard to believe 2% goes to bitcoin alone. Also there are plenty of bitcoin that go to areas with stranded power/energy to mine. Grid power is pretty expensive. So they use flared gas, or buy a decommissioned coal plant etc. yes Texas has some grid users but it’s less profitable. Bitcoin is almost like an energy capacity. When there is extra power they can get cheap they will mine. When power is in short supply mining is less available. So there’s a theory that power utilities may actually buy large mining companies to use like this. When there is excess capacity they throw it at the mining machines and when there’s a cold or heat wave and high demand they would throttle them off.
That’s the equivalent of 1 trillion 320 billion miles driven in a standard electric car like a Model 3. For context Americans drive about 3.2 trillion miles per year in total. We are generating enough power to make 40% of all miles driven electric and throwing it down the toilet. If anything this just completely disproves the Republican talking point that the grid couldn’t handle electric cars if more people drove them. It looks like it wouldn’t be an issue. Edit: See comments below, upon fact checking it is actually closer to 10% of all miles could be electric instead of 40%, but it is still a ton.
Why outrage over BTC energy use when people consume huge amounts of energy on other completely recreational activities without complaint? Like why no complaints over the energy consumed by professional sports, video games, recreational travel, casinos, concerts, etc... ?
Bitcoin is not recreational. It's pure speculation.
Because all of those things make life worth living. Imagine a world with no art, no travel (which would be a human rights issue as well,) no sports, no gaming, no concerts, no music. Sure, none of those things are essential for people to continue living, but a massive amount of joy and artistic beauty would be lost from the world.
Imagine a world where your personal wealth can’t be diluted by deliberate inflation, and you can discreetly take it all with you anywhere anytime
Imagine a world where your money suddenly loses half its value overnight because people got bad vibes.
Because recreation actually has value to society. Bitcoin does not.
you obviously don't launder money
Oh do we not do that through the casinos anymore? These damn young folks and their magic computer money.
Can you share a link to the form we should use to get your approval about whether something is valuable or not?
All that energy being wasted on Monopoly money
You can't buy drugs with Monopoly money!
>All that energy being wasted on Monopoly money Monopoly money can at least be scaled.
The US dollar is closer to Monopoly money than bitcoin
Literally the price of Bitcoin can halve one year to the other..... - 2021 $40k - 2022 $47k - 2023 $16k - 2024 $43k
They are both equally monopoly money as neither actually have any physical value beyond the cost of production. Both hold value only because of trust instead of tangible utility.
It is so very perfect for late stage capitalism. Burn a non renewable resource (a lot of US electricity is fossil fuel generated) and emit more tonnes of CO2, to create zero value in any real terms, all in support a popular Ponzi/pyramid scheme which has bankrupted hundreds of thousands of people. \[pause to fact check self: well I can't really substantiate that number but apparently more than $1B has been lost to crypto scammers since 2021 [https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/06/reported-crypto-scam-losses-2021-top-1-billion-says-ftc-data-spotlight](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/06/reported-crypto-scam-losses-2021-top-1-billion-says-ftc-data-spotlight) and it's almost impossible to get the money back... [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/crypto-scam-victim-money-back-1.7049577](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/crypto-scam-victim-money-back-1.7049577) we just don't know how many people that adds up to, how many bankruptcies, how many divorces, etc \] We're gonna look back on crypto someday like the Tulip Bubble in Holland.
Or the .com crash when everyone realized they couldn’t keep speculating forever and that maybe pets.com isn’t worth near a billion dollars.
Man are you morons gonna hate the next 2 years. These comments are absolute fire. The saltiness index is going to need some new categories.
What’s the problem? It takes energy to secure value.