this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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RIP climate targets
Well the head of the EPA called climate change “a religion” so that ship has sailed for the US.
Wouldn’t it be funny if it got special protections because it was declared a religion?
Wouldn't it be funny if conservatives actually gave a shit about being blatant hypocrites?
Certainly less depressing at least.
Religion [Evil Islamic] not Religion [Glorious Christian]
modernproblemsmodernsolutionsmeme.jpg
Shit, lets fucking do it. What is J.R. "Bob" Dobbs' stance on the issue?
Funny that actual religion is being embraced by all the Republicans
It's funny that they use it in a derogative way, but it's not like they've ever been bothered with hypocrisy.
To be fair, the SEC has only really gone after cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin, which is the only major blockchain that uses the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work. The things the SEC was trying to regulate, that it considered securities, are almost entirely running on Proof-of-Stake networks, which have negligible relative energy consumption.
This will almost certainly have a lot of other negative impacts, but I doubt it will have that much on the climate.
You say that now, but wait for the US economy to completely shit itself.
COVID and the Great Recession were both spectacular for reducing emissions.
I mean, global economy really. Crypto has the potential and already fucked a few banks when it shit itself which could've led to awful bank runs.
If/when it destabilizes the American banking system the entire global economy will follow its lead down, at least a bit.
Like I don't think people understand how devastating letting a scam like this into proper finance can be. Finance itself already has way more latitude than it should- wait until this just splits everything wide open.
For some, that is the point.
One of the nice things Trump has been doing has been decoupling the US domestic market from the global chain. If we can keep ourselves propped up for another couple of years, the collapse will remain contained to ourselves and our immediate allies. I mean, case in point, Russians and Iranians and N. Koreans and Cubans are so sanctioned to shit that they don't really care if the dollar takes a tumble.
2008 was the hard lesson. Too Big To Fail means the scammers are the only ones who walk away from the mess.
Yeah I had arguments with my late brother about this, but 2008 could have been the perfect time to let banks fail or be completely federalized, and directly bail out home dwellers and implement universal basic income at the same time to make the “payment systems and retirement funds will vanish” argument invalid.
Only if Bitcoin remains predominant. The rest of the ecosystem largely moved on to proof-of-stake validation years ago, which doesn't require significant amounts of energy expenditure.
Proof of work is inherently ecologically flawed, but proof of stake is inherently socially flawed. It's literally "the people with the most money get to make the rules". While it's undeniably better for the environment, it doesn't seem like an improvement to me. If anything, it undermines crypto's greatest strengths, decentralization and equal access.
No, it's not. Ether is not a governance token, Ether holders have no influence over the rules of the blockchain. This is a very common misconception and I can understand why it's easy to fall into, but consider it this way; when someone puts up a stake they are not buying "influence" over the blockchain, they are giving the blockchain a hostage. They're putting their money under the control of a contract that will destroy their money if they do anything that contravenes the rules of the blockchain.
So who gets to decide what rules the blockchain runs under? Everyone who uses it. They're the ones who are generating transactions, and those transactions are cryptographically signed to work on the particular version of the blockchain that they want to use. If they collectively decide to switch to a different version of the blockchain then they collectively change what version of the blockchain their transactions are going to. If the stakers don't go along with that transition then they're left holding Ether on a blockchain that nobody is using, which means that Ether is valueless.
This isn't hypothetical. Ethereum undergoes routine hard forks to upgrade the network, adding new features. Proof-of-stake itself was one such upgrade. There have been subsequent upgrades that did things to the network that the stakers probably weren't happy with - notably the one that added EIP-1559, a change that causes transaction fees to be burned rather than giving them to the stakers. It was a change that literally took money out of the hands of the stakers. But they went along with it because they had to. They were not in charge.
How easily can you get into Bitcoin mining right now? Regular computer hardware doesn't cut it, hasn't cut it for a long time. You need a purpose-built ASIC, a piece of specialist hardware that is only manufactured by a handful of computer hardware companies. You'll also need extremely cheap electricity, which you won't be getting out of the wall of your house. You'll need an industrial power feed, probably located somewhere near a power plant with excess capacity where you can get it particularly cheap.
If you want to set up a solo Ethereum validator, all you need to do is buy ~$120,000 worth of Ether and make a transaction to stake it. You can do that anywhere. No special hardware is needed, no ongoing significant power cost. You do need a reasonably stable internet connection, but it doesn't have to be a high-speed one. You could probably do it from a cabin in the woods over Starlink. Nobody can stop you. Nobody will even know who you are.
If $120,000 is a bit much for you (it's still far less than would be required for a Bitcoin mining farm) and you don't mind a little bit of reliance on third parties, you could buy some liquid staking tokens. Spend as little as you want, they subdivide. Or wait a little while, Ethereum's devs are mulling a proposal to reduce the minimum stake from 32 Ether to 1 Ether. That'll reduce the price for setting up a solo validator to $3,683 at today's price.
You can easily mine from home in a country like China that has $0.08 per kwh energy cost. Not everyone lives in California
This was a really interesting reply, thanks. I'd leave a longer response, but honestly I really need to be asleep right now.
I will say though, even today the barrier for entry is lower than that for bitcoin mining. You can definitely get started for $1000. I wouldn't really recommend Bitcoin mining as a hobby at this point, but that's basically the low end for a single machine.
Personally, that's about as much as I ever spent on mining equipment, and it was fun, I learned a lot, and it was even lucrative in the end.
No problem. It's past my bedtime too, but I'm really pleased that I'm able to discuss this stuff and I'm not getting downvotes or called a shill simply for providing information. It's always been a big area of fascination for me, the technology is really neat. :)
Sure, you could set up something that can process blocks. But there's no way you'd be able to make a profit with something that small. One of the fundamental tenets of cryptocurrency is that it doesn't rely on anyone acting altruistically, it assumes that everyone involved is in it for the money. It leverages greed to ensure that everyone "follows the rules", by making it so that if you break those rules you make less money. So I wouldn't consider a blockchain to be secure if it depended on miners who mined at a loss out of the goodness of their hearts. When people worry about centralization they overlook that Bitcoin has economies of scale that massively favors the bigger mining operations, the dollars-per-hash are much lower for the warehouses full of ASICs next door to a power plant than for the guy with a graphics card in a closet at home.
I did also mention that you could get involved in staking on Ethereum for much less than $120,000, at the cost of depending on third parties to handle the actual validation. You can do that either through staking pools or liquid staking. Essentially, you own a "share" of a single validator's stake and get a proportionate portion of the validator's rewards, minus a fee that the validator charges for actually running the validator.
That's not true if your home electricity cost is low. You will be still making a profit. Last I checked hardware pays for itself after a year if your electricity is very cheap. Then it's very slow profit and then it gets too old to make a profit.
With very cheap electricity you can expect 2x return after a few years and then it becomes garbage when the difficulty is too high
Eh. Bitcoin mining alone accounts for about 0.7% of 2024 global CO₂ emissions annually, with 40% of that mining happening in US and Canada. 130.50 Mt is nothing to sneeze at.
Far too little and too late.
I literally just said:
Yes, Bitcoin still uses proof-of-work. That's because Bitcoin is itself a fossil, its userbase and developers have consciously decided to not adopt new blockchain technologies and remain locked in the current protocol. Other blockchains have continued moving on. Alas, Bitcoin has name recognition and inertia on its side, which will keep it around for a long time. But at some point I expect its obsolescence will catch up with it and overcome that inertia.
I think it's early to call Bitcoin obsolete, it is still after all the dominant cryptocurrency by every measure.
So which systems do you see as offering real utility or innovation? Obviously there's etherium, and it has its own issues, but what else out there do you think is really more than a just gimmick or a scheme?
Its technology is obsolete. That doesn't mean it can't still dominate the market share.
For example, a case could be made that coal power is obsolete. There are still plenty of coal power plants on the grid. Windows 8 is obsolete, but you'll find plenty of computers still running it. And so forth. There's inertia in these things.
And Bitcoin's current "dominance" is 60%. That's not exactly an overwhelming position.
You answered your own question.
Ethereum's not just one token, mind you. There's an ecosystem on Ethereum with a lot of innovation that's not directly rooted in Ethereum's advances. That's the benefit of supporting smart contracts, it's a general purpose computer that other stuff can be run on. There are a lot of layer-2 blockchains running on Ethereum, for example Aztec which has Monero-like privacy built into it.
Yes, Etherium is very cool and it can do a whole bunch of really cool things! But on the other hand, it can't replace Bitcoin. It's too heavy, transactions are too large, the network can't hope to handle the number transactions per minute that Bitcoin does. I think most people agree that the two systems compliment each other, they each work well in their niche, but couldn't do the others' job.
So yeah, I don't see Etherium replacing Bitcoin. Perhaps a layer-2 could, but I have yet to see any that offer the kind of tangible improvements that would really make it stand out.
As of this writing, Ethereum is handling 21.1 transactions per second. Bitcoin is handling 4.9 transactions per second. So purely in layer-1 transactions per second Ethereum's got 4.3 times the capacity of Bitcoin.
Some of those Ethereum transactions are for running layer-2s, as you mention that greatly expands Ethereum's capacity. Ethereum is specifically designed to be able to handle layer-2s well, it has features that were added to make them easier to scale. Bitcoin, on the other hand, was never designed for layer-2s and what it does have are hacked-together bodges like Lightning that are going nowhere.
What "job" does Bitcoin do that Ethereum can't? And before you say "digital gold", there are literal gold-backed stabletokens on Ethereum if that's what suits your fancy.
A lot of bitcoin transactions are opening lightning channels so second layer is working there too
The comment you're responding to linked to a page giving statistics about the Lightning network. The number of channels peaked in 2022 and has been going down ever since then.
Number of channels is decreasing, but the money in each channel increased. In BTC terms the money decreased, but in real terms the money increased.
Real terms being 2022 dollar value
No it hasn't. Again, according to that link I provided, the total capacity of Lightning peaked in December 2024. These are not the graphs of a growing layer 2, it's been stagnant for many years.
Bitcoin simply wasn't designed for this sort of application, and Bitcoin's foundation layer is absolutely frozen due to the ideology of its users and developers so I don't expect the situation will improve. If you want to do a layer 2 then why not use a blockchain that's specifically designed to support it? If you use Ethereum you can even use token-wrapped Bitcoin as your medium of exchange. There's $14.4 billion dollars worth of WBTC on Ethereum available for exchange, as opposed to the $440 million worth in Lightning channels.
If bitcoin is worth more, you need to move fewer bitcoins to achieve the same result. If there USD value moved in lightning never increases then I would agree it's a failure
I was specifically speaking in USD terms, take a look at the page I linked above. It has graphs with both USD and Bitcoin on them. In Bitcoin terms Lightning's capacity peaked in early 2023. In dollar terms it was December 2024. The line is squiggly and has a general long-term upward trend overall on the net dollar capacity, but it really doesn't look very impressive compared to Ethereum's layer-2 architecture. And that's the only line where I see a long-term rise, the rest have been stagnant or declining for years.
I stand by my overall view that Bitcoin's technology is simply obsolete. It doesn't do anything, it just sits there being valuable because it's valuable. I don't think that's going to endure forever.
Sure. But they're relegated to the realm of highly sketchy pre-mining schemes and pump-and-dump market gambits. There's no serious third party mining community for these boutique coins.
We still have people digging yellow rocks out of the ground and shoving them in big vaults to store fiscal value.
If that's not obsolete, I'm not holding my breath on Bitcoin.
Ether has a market cap of $450 billion, and that doesn't count all the other tokens running on the Ethereum blockchain. It's been running since 2013. If you call that a "boutique coin" based on "pump-and-dump" then clearly you've either got a highly biased or highly ignorant view of cryptocurrency.
There are technical flaws in Bitcoin that could literally crash it if they aren't patched out before they become exploitable, as in it's at zero value and will never recover. That's not something that can happen to gold.
Ah, yes. The fine folks that gave us NFTs.
No pump and dumps to be found over there
Is that what the person you replied to claimed?