this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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Bitcoin is just a scam in general.
"Bro, I'll sell you this really complicated number. No one else has it."
"What can I do with it?"
"Sell it for more money to a bigger fool than you."
"I'm in.*
That's not fair. You can also ruin the environment with it, it's baked into the technology.
It's actually not. If the energy used to mine is sustainably generated, there's nothing BTC can do to hurt the environment.
IMO the fundamental problem with all (PoW) cryptos is the assumption that computing power is distributed fairly when it's clearly not. Building microchips is not easy, it would not be hard for a government who wanted to to amass >50% of its nation's compute power.
And PoS assumes that you'll never end up in a situation where a small number of users own the vast majority of the wealth...(lol)...and that even if they could they would be disincentivized from destroying their own wealth. But the ability to devalue a society's currency has immense value, especially if you're powerful enough to be positioned to fill the vacuum with something of your own design.
And the last holdout argument is that "the network belongs to the people, if the people don't like certain behavior on their network, they can fork a version without it". Except that no lay-person will ever make a decision like this. Virtually every single crypto miner downloads someone else's code and runs it without question. You can't have accountability in a distributed system if it relies on intelligence and integrity that doesn't exist (or the cost of which is unreasonably high).
The environmental cost is a red herring, but that doesn't mean the technology isn't fundamentally flawed as a currency. Maybe for other, more technical applications, but not currency.
Edit: consider the situation where I hook my own solar panel to a PC and just mine Bitcoin with it. Does this hurt the environment? Of course not. Is it a good use of the power being generated? Of course not. Do people have any reason to be outraged at me doing this pointless thing? Of course not. That's my point.
Now if I hooked a gas generator up to the PC, that would be another story.
Except of course, use the sustainable energy that was otherwise used for actually useful things.
The real fundamental problem with crypto is of course that it is just going so great.
But you could use that argument against literally anything you don't like.
Consider the situation where we live in a society where 100% of energy generated is sustainable. Now imagine the society faces a problem where 90% of that energy is being sold off to private citizens to use for whatever they choose, be that mining crypto, or space heaters (same thing, really) and as a result the society's infrastructure is left without enough energy (hospitals, emergency services, etc). What would you say the solution is in that situation?
Yeah, that tracks.
Energy is never generated, power is, from energy conversion.
Also "energy" and "sustainable" intersect with a word called entropy.
@teawrecks @halm