Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey Argue that Bitcoin Incentivises Renewable Energy (bbc.com) 135
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, tweeted Wednesday that bitcoin "incentivises renewable energy." And Elon Musk responded "True."
The BBC adds that the tweets came "despite experts warning otherwise." The cyrptocurrency's carbon footprint is as large as some of the world's biggest cities, studies suggest. But Mr Dorsey claims that could change if bitcoin miners worked hand-in-hand with renewable energy firms.
One expert said it was a "cynical attempt to greenwash" bitcoin. China, where more than two-thirds of power is from coal, accounts for more than 75% of bitcoin mining around the world...
The tweet comes soon after the release of a White Paper from Mr Dorsey's digital payment services firm Square, and global asset management business ARK Invest. Entitled "Bitcoin as key to an abundant, clean energy future", the paper argues that "bitcoin miners are unique energy buyers", because they offer flexibility, pay in a cryptocurrency, and can be based anywhere with an internet connection. "By combining miners with renewables and storage projects, we believe it could improve the returns for project investors and developers, moving more solar and wind projects into profitable territory," it said.
Author and bitcoin critic David Gerard described the paper as a "cynical exercise in bitcoin greenwashing".
"The reality is: bitcoin runs on coal," he told the BBC.... "Bitcoin mining is so ghastly and egregious that the number one job of bitcoin promoters is to make excuses for it — any excuse at all."
The BBC adds that the tweets came "despite experts warning otherwise." The cyrptocurrency's carbon footprint is as large as some of the world's biggest cities, studies suggest. But Mr Dorsey claims that could change if bitcoin miners worked hand-in-hand with renewable energy firms.
One expert said it was a "cynical attempt to greenwash" bitcoin. China, where more than two-thirds of power is from coal, accounts for more than 75% of bitcoin mining around the world...
The tweet comes soon after the release of a White Paper from Mr Dorsey's digital payment services firm Square, and global asset management business ARK Invest. Entitled "Bitcoin as key to an abundant, clean energy future", the paper argues that "bitcoin miners are unique energy buyers", because they offer flexibility, pay in a cryptocurrency, and can be based anywhere with an internet connection. "By combining miners with renewables and storage projects, we believe it could improve the returns for project investors and developers, moving more solar and wind projects into profitable territory," it said.
Author and bitcoin critic David Gerard described the paper as a "cynical exercise in bitcoin greenwashing".
"The reality is: bitcoin runs on coal," he told the BBC.... "Bitcoin mining is so ghastly and egregious that the number one job of bitcoin promoters is to make excuses for it — any excuse at all."
Or nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear is good too.
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No, and deliberately misspelling words doesn't make an actual argument. It just makes you a moron.
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No, and deliberately misspelling words doesn't make an actual argument. It just makes you a moron.
Assuming that you mean "is good" is an actual argument...
Don't you mean, "Nucular is good too."? -- There, I fixed that for you.
Sorry for the mistake. I'm so glad you pointed it out to me. Thanks for helping me to grow as a person.
Re:Or nuclear [waste is good, too] (Score:5, Insightful)
You were going for Funny, right? But you FPed it.
My takes are:
(0) Creating fake demand is not productive.
(1) Waste is not good, and Bitcoin wastes power for no reason. (The calculations are just a pointless lottery to create an illusion of scarcity.)
(2) Musk and Dorsey are not heroes, but merely noisy lottery winners who managed to forget what their original scams were. (That's assuming that they are sincere, which might be too generous an assumption.)
(3) Scams collapse. The only question is when.
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You think Ima waste an FP?
And no. I meant nuclear seriously. It's the best, densest, long-term option assuming humanity isn't strictly Earth-bound.
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Hmm... I actually think that nuclear power is good, too, but I think it's been rendered politically impossible. We don't have a time machine to go back and undo the decision for BWR reactors using those particular nuclear reactions. They originally WANTED the Plutonium for military considerations... If safety had been the #1 design focus way back when, then the nuclear power industry could have been saved.
Ergo, I thought you were joking.
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I concur that BWRs are nothing short of fucking stupid, and I also wish we'd gone with passively walk-away safe designs like the MSRE.
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(1) Waste is not good, and Bitcoin wastes power for no reason.
(The calculations are just a pointless lottery to create an illusion of scarcity.)
Ya, but one can use it to buy gum anonymously. How else can someone do that, wish cash? Pffft ... /s
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I had considered including a numbered point about using Bitcoin for crime, but I didn't see a sufficiently direct link (in spite of my penchant for indirection) until your reply reminded me that criminal shenanigans are probably the motivation of the Chinese government (and probably the CIA, too) to "discreetly" invest in Bitcoin. One of the rumors I heard was that the Chinese were using renewable energy for their Bitcoin mining, which seems to be nearly a perfect circle back to the story.
No waste, but spending on change (Score:1)
0) Obviously the Demand is very real, or crypto would not be where it is in terms of price and people could not buy things with it as they can now.
1) There is no waste to Bitcoin, at least any more than the vast datacenters that power banks. If you think a Bitcoin transaction takes a lot of money, have you calculated how much processing power is involved in a SWIFT transaction?
2) Musk is hardly a lottery winner, he spent a huge amount of effort building up the companies he has been involved with. It wasn'
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Lets say there are 400 billion transactions for traditional currency world wide yearly, lets say you would do that with Bitcoin transaction energy costs of 700 kWh ... that mean it would take 2.8e17 Wh for the Bitcoin blockchain to facilitate world wide transactions, that's an order of magnitude more than current total electricity generation.
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1) There is no waste to Bitcoin, at least any more than the vast datacenters that power banks
The "vast datacenters" need perhaps hundreds of joules per transaction, not hundreds of kilowatthouts. Why? Because they have locked doors and guards instead.
have you calculated how much processing power is involved in a SWIFT transaction?
Have you? Please share your numbers with us.
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The when is post IPO of the bitcoin holding company. Once the do the IPO and insiders dump the shares, then they will bet the crash of that corporation and cause it to happen by dumping all their crypto and makes lots of money on the way down. The when is not that far off, it will not go down will, criminals are heavily involved in crypto and will likely seek revenge against those insiders gaming the system with the IPO.
With countries no producing their own crypto backed by the economy of their entire coun
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Not very clear, but I think I mostly concur. Except that i think the serious professional criminals will be more interested in a "settlement" rather than revenge.
Re: Or nuclear (Score:1)
Of course this would make the nuclear nutters would come out and troll Slashdot again.
Look, we already got a fusion reactor. ;)
You might have heard it in tales from your mom, when she talks about "outside" again.
And regarding storage:
40 REM Elon Musk:
50 GOTO 10
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Yes, a fixed position one. Interested more in things we can position arbitrarily. I'm glad you're convinced the future of humanity is to remain on Earth forever. Enjoy your asteroids and lack of backups.
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Hydro is only a small part and limited in availability. All the other renewable sources are intermittent and the depreciation on mining hardware is rapid ... you need power 24/7, cheap intermittent need not apply, burn that coal baby.
Re: Or nuclear (Score:2)
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In China where a lot of the power comes from coal, a lot of the new energy comes from renewables like the Three Gorges Dam.
You might want to rethink that statement. [yale.edu]
Re: Or nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
Except no. When someone buys an ASIC, they want to get all the value out of it that they can NOW. The value of that ASIC declines exponentially over time. They want to be able to run it 24/7. The cheapest way to do that is to reactivate mothballed coal plants, stranded oil and gas assets that otherwise would be uneconomical, etc.
That's not that it's not also stressing grids - it certainly is. Here in Iceland Bitcoin is forcing us to build some more of that renewable power that Bitcoin advocates trip over themselves to plug as their excuse for deliberately burning six times more power per transaction than VISA** in their giant game of Dunning-Kruger economics. Which here generally means hydro. I want people to look at these beautiful canyons, these beautiful waterfalls, that are being lost, and say, "F*** you canyon. F*** you waterfall. I want to mine digital gold!"
** - While doing less per transaction, to boot. No fraud detection / protection, no compliance with sanctions / laundering laws, no assured exchange rates, etc, etc. But of course that doesn't stop cryptovangelists from pretending that Bitcoin, with its mere 7 transactions per second max rate, is equivalent to the energy consumption of "all banking", down to the footprint of the janitor cleaning out the bathrooms at a derivatives office at Goldman-Sachs. It's a de-minimus VISA / PayPal / ApplePay, things that have tiny footprints, and is deliberately inefficient by design. So go ahead, cryptovangelists, and pivot from "it's banking" to "it's gold" - as if the world loves gambling-addict gold speculators either?
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While doing less per transaction, to boot. No fraud detection / protection, no compliance with sanctions / laundering laws, no assured exchange rates, etc, etc.
The creator would argue that most of those are benefits, if not the entire point.
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It's nice when people openly admit that their goals are crime.
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"Obeying the law" ~!= "Good" although there is a lot of overlap.
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Crime is only what the biggest group in thugs in a country say crime is. It has little to do with morality.
I think you would like to read Kohlberg's stages of Moral development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Short version: "It's ok if you don't get caught" "It's ok if you don't break the law" "It's ok if it's ethical"
Re: Or nuclear (Score:2)
Whoosh!
Maybe you have never given yourself a chance to really understand exactly what BTC is good for.
Not trolling, I was in the same boat for years.
Just remove all these preconceived notions which are valid for fiat and try to list all the major disadvantages of fiat & regulated asset classes.
And then think how you would solve these problems.
You will realise how impossible these problems are to solve and then you will understand how BTC solves them (not other crypto coins, they have issues. Mainly do t
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Safest places to live are police states, and getting rid of all privacy is a good way to work around those pesky rights that stop the government from entering your house and seizing your papers. Think about it, making all personal papers public will result in a safe society.
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Which makes the creator either an idiot or a conman.
Re: Or nuclear (Score:4, Informative)
The guy's name is Jim Bell, but yes not enough people know about this:
https://reason.com/video/2020/... [reason.com]
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Jim Bell is not Satoshi Nakamoto.
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Bitcoin's power usage is due to it generating hashes as part of its block rate limiting system, not for transaction processing as such. It could process any rate of transactions without increasing power usage. By "any rate" I do mean a mean at least a thousand times greater transaction rate with current technology.
The people that actually read the paper want cheap and easy to use peer-to-peer electronic cash for the entire world, as per the original plan. They want all the people in third world countries cu
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Guess the system wasn't all that resilient after all then.
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Bitcoin's power usage is inevitable even without the use of proof of work algorithm.
Bitcoin miners are incentivised to process transaction blocks because they get rewarded a bitcoin if they get the winning hash.
The proof of work algorithm is basically an expensive way of choosing a random miner from all the competing possible miners.
Even if the power cost of generating that hash was zero, and we had some magical algorithm that could fairly choose a miner at random for zero power cost, you still hav
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deliberately burning six times more power per transaction than VISA**
If you saw the same power comparison chart I did, you might have missed the scaling factor under the column for visa in the bar graph
The actual power use of a bitcoin transaction is about 600 000 times more than visa, not six times.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
Bitcoin is truly a horrendous waste of resources, and Elon's unfortunate backing of it is undoing a lot of the good he has done for the environment in making electric cars commercially viable.
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That was supposed to read six orders of magnitude, not six times :P
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The business of power comes from extracting wealth in exchange for electrical service, and as demand increases, so too does the need to build infrastructure. And in some places, they actually add that as another line item on your bill.
Unless they're powering a bank of ASICs and misused graphics cards from their own property using a mountain of wind generators, solar power, or their own nuclear reactor, they're not reducing the cost of power, but they are increasing demand for it. A
Just like airconditioners (Score:5, Funny)
Poor home insulation with electrical heating also incentivizes renewable energy. Making electric cars heavier and less aerodynamic also incentivizes renewable energy.
Re: Just like airconditioners (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Just like airconditioners (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yep. In fact, not only does it prevent their decommissioning, here's an article about a natural gas plant expanding specifically to handle Bitcoin mining.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/w... [google.com]
There are also links in that article to other plants (coal and oil) that are being run specifically for mining. So this sorta shoots down the narrative that btc mining incentivises investment in renewable energy.
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I think (and I dont own bitcoins, so dont think me a proponent), that you have to look at the subtle difference between "incentivising" and "utilizing".
Because as a previous poster wrote, ANY use of energy means that more energy will need to be produced. In todays world, majority of NEW energy sources are renewable. Thus "incentivising" is syntactically correct .
However, as with all energy, it just gets generated, then spent. So no matter how anyone claims, your energy spent is not better than the average o
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Energy consumption incentivizes renewable energy. But the subtlety you are overlooking is that Bitcoin mining is new demand which requires new infrastructure, and the new infrastructure is renewable.
The obvious thing you are overlooking is that without bitcoin, that new renewable infrastructure would instead replace the dirty stuff.
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Bitcoin mostly incentivizes energy theft.
Re: Just like airconditioners (Score:2)
Yep, sounds like a great broken window fallacy. ^^
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No one needs cryptocurrencies. Air conditioning is becoming vital to billions. Thus the incentives are vastly different.
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Bitcoin Musk and Twitter in the same story? (Score:5, Funny)
The forbidden slashdot trifecta. Comments here should be a total shit show.
Re: Bitcoin Musk and Twitter in the same story? (Score:1)
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People here wanting to make bitcoin illegal is the most hypocritical thing ever. Like when a judge declared DeCSS illegal and even linking to it illegal so people would post the entire source code in the comment. Whatever happened to the internet routing around censorship and damage? How about people trading "linux isos" on bittorrent? File sharing is illegal but we see how well that worked out.
And people think making bitcoin illegal is a good idea?
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Don't make it illegal, just put a healthy tax on it.
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Slashdot as a whole has been overwhelmingly against regulation of financial instruments? Since when? Or is your view that bitcoin transactions are actually about copyrighted media being suppressed by corporate giants?
1, I have a DeCSS T-shirt in a box somewhere.
2. F*** Bitcoin.
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Bitcoin is a technology. Wanting to ban something because you dislike it is silly. Not one person here cared how much energy bitcoin used until some stories about it were published. Now every bitcoin story is met with comments about wasting energy, from the same people who dislike solar and wind power.
Saying you want to ban bitcoin is like saying you want to ban exploit code because it can used for nefarious purposes.
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Leaded gasoline is a technology. Wanting to ban something because you dislike it is silly.
Radium dials are a technology. Wanting to ban something because you dislike it is silly.
Genetically engineered anthrax bombs are a technology. Wanting to ban something because you dislike it is silly.
Yes, we ban things all the time when their general effect on the world is considered to be adverse.
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To be more specific: financial regulations contain thousands upon thousands upon thousands of specific types of financial instruments and practices that are banned, because they tend to be used in ways that tend to have an overall negative impact.
Bitcoin would just be yet another entry on a very long list.
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What would in reality happen is that Bitcoin would hard fork, and the vast majority of the money (legit investors) would flee to whatever forked variant complies with the new regulations, and the rest would be left to criminals and extreme libertarian types, with a tiny market cap.
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I'm telling you, if regulators say "The only legit cryptocurrency is one where all wallets can be associated with identities by regulators and contains technological safeguards against mixers and will comply with sanctions-, money laundering-, and taxation-regulations... Bitcoin will hard fork. The legit money (most of the money) is not going to volunteer to become criminals in order to stay invested. A fork will arise, and they'll switch to it (or leave altogether), and only criminals and hardcore libert
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only criminals and hardcore libertarians will remain in "Bitcoin Classic".
It will go back to what it was originally intended to be. That is not a bad outcome. It is a good outcome actually.
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That's why they put in Jack Dorsey to prevent the singularity.
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The forbidden slashdot trifecta. Comments here should be a total shit show.
Bill Gates approves.
If you take the (very) long view (Score:2)
sure, coal is a renewable source of energy. Just ask China.
Diabolical Liars (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is on par with burning down your neighbor's house will incentivize fire safety. Seriously, wasting electricity is only doing one thing: wasting electricity.
These arguments are diabolical in the most earnest sense in that they are type of argument the biblical devil would make.
Ganja Tweet (Score:2)
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, tweeted Wednesday that bitcoin "incentivises renewable energy." And Elon Musk responded "True."
Wednesday morning tweet... was this after Dorsey's ganja smoking session the day/night before?
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The day after 4/20? That can't be right.
Logic fail: (Score:5, Insightful)
Being completely flexible to the location where you can waste electricity does nothing for existing energy consumption other than divert resources away from green energy projects that could otherwise be put to use where energy *isn't* wasted.
You can build your bitcoin farm on 100% renewable power. All that happened is emissions and resources were wasted building a power plant producing green energy which is then also completely wasted and contributes nothing to humanity. In the meantime I'm still here posting on Slashdot with coal power because you idiots diverted investment away from solving actual world problems.
I had a lot of respect for Elon Musk and tolerated a lot of his ... shall we say less desirable shenanigans. But congratulations Elon you just shat on the credentials of what was possibly your most important contribution to humanity: A proof that we can drive green.
They can burn "clean coal"® (Score:1)
That should make everybody happy, right?
Too bad all the heat will boil off the oceans though...
Analogy (Score:2)
Interesting point (Score:2)
This is an interesting point. Bitcoin mining does incentivize increasing the electrical supply, and renewables are the cheapest way to do that. Bitcoin is also arguably illegal in many countries already, and probably would be in the US too except their old timey law against issuing your own currency only covers metal coins. So perhaps governments are waiting to crack down on bitcoin because bitcoin investors are currently paying an effective subsidy for new power generation rollout. Just wait for a while, t
Broken window fallacy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Textbook broken windoe fallacy.
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I came here looking for this comment, just disappointed it was so far down the list of responses.
Burning down my neighbors' houses also incentivizes the construction industry. Sheesh
Nuking China incentivize nuclear disarmament (Score:2)
More lacking of seriousness (Score:2)
Is there a problem with CO2 emissions? Is a large portion of the CO2 er emit from electricity, industrial heat, and transportation? Then look at what energy sources are low in CO2, reliable, affordable, plentiful, and is available today. Those are onshore wind, hydro, geothermal, and most of all nuclear fission power.
If the people demanding a lowering of CO2 emissions cannot mention nuclear fission power then they are not serious about lowering CO2 emission. If they keep demanding we prop up the failing
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"If the people demanding a lowering of CO2 emissions cannot mention nuclear fission power then they are not serious about lowering CO2 emission. "
Renewables are cheaper than nuclear power. Why would you go with the more expensive option?
"Solar power on the grid is a very stupid idea. "
Are you insane?
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Renewables are cheaper than nuclear power. Why would you go with the more expensive option?
Hurricanes.
Well, not just hurricanes but severe weather in general. While a hurricane was running over Florida the nuclear power plants were still producing power. The windmills were locked down because such turbulent winds could tear them apart, and the clouds and rain blocked out the sun from the solar PV panels.
Oh, right, batteries. Could we ever build enough batteries to power everything while riding out a monsoon in Japan? Or a snowstorm in the US Midwest?
I'll hear morons talk about how people would
dyson sphere (Score:1)
Reminds me of a Simpsons joke (Score:2)
Dunno if its perfectly applies but...
SKINNER Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
LISA But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
SKINNER No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
LISA But aren't the snakes even worse?
SKINNER Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
LISA But then we're stuck with gorillas!
SKINNER No, that's the beautiful part. W
People listen to celebrities for no good reason (Score:3)
I really don't understand it, but people seem to pay attention to individuals who are famous, irregardless of whether that celebrities reason for being famous has anything to do with the topic at hand. It's why presidential candidates on the campaign trail like to trot our hollywood actors and sports stars.
And that adulation helps reinforce, in those celebrities, the natural human tendency to believe their opinions on any topic are more important than anyone else's.
Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk are way out of their lane here. They deserve at most an eye roll and a shoulder shrug on this one.
Gaslighting at it's finest (Score:2)
Just fucking stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
It's like arguing that slavery is actually a net good because it encourages the shipbuilding industry.
What Bitcoin incentivises is people trying to look for ways to take advantages of externalities at any possible opportunity. One of my favourite Bitcoin exploitation stories is the one about Iranians figuring out that mosques don't pay for electricity [yahoo.com] and setting up mining rigs in them.
Given huge, vast chunks of our energy market are built almost entirely on externalities, most of Bitcoin mining is still just fucked.
In slightly related energy exploitation news - in our city we have Lime scooters. They have some programme where they pay people to drive around and pick them up flat ones and take them to recharge them. A couple times I have come home and seen scooters plugged into my apartment building's "public" wall sockets (the ones in the hallways intended to be used for the cleaners and tradespeople). The energy bill for these goes to the body corporate.
So these people have figured out how to game this source of "free" energy to make a few extra bucks.
It could, if only... (Score:2)
For now, Bitcoin mining just consumes more energy, and assuming that there are incentives to make that renewable energy (dubious), it won't help phasing out existing power plants.
The only way for it to work is to crash Bitcoin and all "proof-of-work" cryptocurrencies after all these renewable power plants have been built. Or maybe turn into another system that doesn't require wasting energy on pointless calculations (proof-of-stake?).
Load shedding using miners (Score:2)
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How about that capacity gets built up before people suck up all that power?
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Yeah, in an ideal world. In this world profit motive may be needed.
Think outside the box (Score:2)
There is an opportunity here to think outside the box. Large solar farms arc off large amounts of power on clear summer days because of a lack of storage technology. n-2 generation miners are cheap because it's not worth the power to run them. If that power were free, i.e. using what would be otherwise be wasted at the point of generation, is not a terrible idea. ... but what about climate control for them? Good question. You'd need to experiment to see how much you'd have to downclock them to run them
CEOs (Score:1)
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Who gives a flying fuck what ceos think ?
What is wrong with america where if you have a title of ceo its almost like you are a god.
You also have to have the accomplishments to go with it. Anyone can create a company and be a CEO. Create a company with a billion in income and you're the CEO, now you're doing something.
Have to admit, he's the Howard Hughes of our time. Wonder if he's going to build a hotel in Las Vegas with secret stair cases and such.
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Strange i thought Twitter and Tesla employ thousands of people, but your telling me they do nothing and the ceo did everything
How does Musk manage to build thousands of tesla cars every day by himself and why does he bother employing those do nothing workers on his plants ?
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> You also have to have the accomplishments to go with it.
Strange i thought Twitter and Tesla employ thousands of people, but your telling me they do nothing and the ceo did everything ... so why have employees ?
How does Musk manage to build thousands of tesla cars every day by himself and why does he bother employing those do nothing workers on his plants ?
Here we go into the leftist lies again. Did those employees organize something into the company? Did they take all the risks associated with all of that? Did they own this stuff? Nope. Musk did. Those employees traded their labor for money. They were paid. That's it. No more. When you run a company it never ends. Run one sometime and you'll see. As the leader it's possible that you personally will go to jail. It's not hard. The employee? Generally speaking no. Not unless they steal or commit a crime. They j
gah (Score:2)
It's a goddamn lie and they are goddamn liars.
Renewable energy is not the purpose though (Score:3)
The purpose is creating less CO2.
Renewable energy is generally a good thing because it replaces fossil fuels. People need to heat their houses and drive their cars and charge their phones, it's much better for the environment if the energy needed for this is renewable rather than fossil fuel.
But while renewable energy emissions are lower than fossil fuel emissions, they are not zero. Some CO2 is still created in the manufacture and transport of solar panels and wind turbines. Perhaps more importantly, a lot of waste, including toxic waste, is created during these products' life cycle. So while renewable energy is much better than fossil fuel energy, it's much worse than not needing to generate the energy in the first place.
The claim here is that Bitcoin is good because (theoretically! at some point in the future!) it could be run on renewable energy. But even in that circumstance, it would demand a lot of energy, and do a lot of environmental harm, for the only purposes of creating a speculation market and enabling drug sales and ransomware. That's not worth it.
Everything uses electricity, why are we stuck at B (Score:2)
Everything uses electricity, why are we stuck at BTC ?
I mean people can come up with alternatives to the entire jewellery industry or the even the car industry - for eg wear tiny government certificates for different amounts in place of jewelry; use govt mandated & manufactured standardized functional cars, no iPhones ipads coz they eat up electricity - Nokia Asha for everyone, fashion ? Nah, Govt designed & produced Dungarees for everyone -US can have 4 colors being land of the free.
I mean why bot
"Space heaters" (Score:2)
BitCoin miners are space heaters. I once looked at them, they were advertised to use special server PSUs (2000W+), and run 24/7. The space heater in my kid's room does not use 2000W, neither it runs 24/7.
And people put them row after row, probably requiring hook up of commercial electric service. (Your home probably has 20kW connection, so if you turn off everything at home, you can maybe run 10 of these devices).
*If* you run them in the winter to heat your home, there could be a valid case.
*If* you need to
Greed makes everyone a sellout. (Score:1)
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Is this cancel culture?
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Torrenting movies is illegal. That still happens.
The cat is out of the bag and there is no putting it back in.