996
submitted 7 months ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to c/technology@lemmy.world
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] furzegulo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 110 points 7 months ago
[-] WallEx@feddit.de 46 points 7 months ago

More like fuck crypto mining. There are cryptos that dont need mining.

[-] FaceDeer@kbin.social 14 points 7 months ago

If there's no demand for a particular crypto then people mining it can't sell it and go out of business. People mine this stuff because other people will pay them for it.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[-] Varyk@sh.itjust.works 11 points 7 months ago

This is as useless as saying "fuck currency shit ffs".

[-] Wodge@lemmy.world 58 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Crypto isn't a currency, it's a commodity for trading. One that doesn't physically exist. No inherent use and no inherent value.

[-] S410@kbin.social 22 points 7 months ago

The vast majority of "real" currencies are fiat currencies and don't have inherent value or use either.
US dollar hasn't been backed by gold since 1971, for example.
The only reason money has any perceived value at all, is because it's collectively agreed to have some value. Just like crypto currencies.

[-] darthelmet@lemmy.world 20 points 7 months ago

But this is actually why crypto isn’t a real currency: we haven’t collectively agreed to value it, or at least not in any way that makes it useful as a medium for exchange. Ironically it can’t possibly become a proper currency while speculators are making its price so volatile. The very act of investing in it is making it worthless.

load more comments (4 replies)
[-] frezik@midwest.social 11 points 7 months ago

But there's so few uses of actually buying things with crypto. People don't use it as a medium of exchange outside of illicit goods and money laundering. We're more than a decade into this and using crypto to buy a pizza is still a novelty.

A major proof of this is that FTX collapsed and took a chunk of the crypto market out with it. The market at large shrugged this off. If it were actually linked in to the broader economy, then it would have had similar ripple effects to a major US bank failing.

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[-] bhmnscmm@lemmy.world 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

You literally just defined the attributes of a currency. ~~The only difference is that crypto isn't backed by a government.~~

Edited. See below. Apparently some crypto is government backed. There is no functional difference between traditional currency and (at least some) crypto.

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (24 replies)
load more comments (9 replies)
[-] rusticus@lemm.ee 78 points 7 months ago

JFC how long do we have to wait for a carbon tax

[-] FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 75 points 7 months ago

There is no good reason why this isn't illegal.

[-] GiddyGap@lemm.ee 24 points 7 months ago

Not a good reason, but money.

[-] TheAlbacor@lemmy.world 23 points 7 months ago

Not even real money, tech bro phantom bullshit.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de 68 points 7 months ago

Crypto is the digital coal of our times.

[-] wahming@monyet.cc 50 points 7 months ago

Whoever Satoshi was, I wonder how he's responding to the thought that he's personally contributed more to global warming than the average billionaire.

[-] kautau@lemmy.world 13 points 7 months ago

Probably not thinking about it on his yacht that he doesn’t pilot or maintain, having built the most successful grifter scheme of all time

load more comments (5 replies)
[-] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Satoshi is estimated to have wallets totaling as much as 1.1 million btc. That would make them the 26th richest person in the world.

If, Satoshi and the wallets actually still exist. Most of those wallets have been completely idle since they were mined

I imagine that “Satoshi’s Wallet” is the stuff of legends among cryptographic security researchers.

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 45 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Misleading title - the problem is not "crypto", it's pretty much all Bitcoin and the people against the change in the consensus mechanism. Out of the top ~~10~~ 9 coins in market cap, Bitcoin is the only one using proof of work, which demands such high energy requirements.

[-] bigMouthCommie@kolektiva.social 11 points 7 months ago
[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

ah yes the 10th place - still, Doge is estimated to use ~1% of the energy Bitcoin uses and it's been in steady decline since the meme blew up.

load more comments (32 replies)
load more comments (9 replies)
[-] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 40 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Modern day gold rush.

Digging up more and more dirt for diminishing returns while destroying the environment.

Bitcoin using more and more power for essentially the same.

[-] darthfabulous42069@lemm.ee 34 points 7 months ago

You'd think with all of the money they're pulling in, they'd invest in solar panels or something to lower their overhead.

Or am I making the mistake of approaching the situation with common sense?

[-] RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 19 points 7 months ago

It's Bitcoin, of course common sense isn't involved.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (11 replies)
[-] PanArab@lemmy.world 30 points 7 months ago

Destroying the environment and not even for real money

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 28 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd's 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).

Edit: Fixed URL. Edit2; Add transcript link.

load more comments (4 replies)
[-] crossover@lemmy.world 21 points 7 months ago

The miners are taking power from the same grid as everyone else. Miners don’t emit carbon. Electricity generation from fossil fuels does.

The focus should be on moving to a renewable and abundant energy grid. Then let people use it for whatever the fuck they want.

[-] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 35 points 7 months ago

Even if it was green energy (which doesn't generate zero pollution over its lifetime by the way, we still need to produce the equipment to generate electricity and that's a source of pollution), that's extra power that needs to be generated that wouldn't need to be otherwise and it's used for something intentionally inefficient.

[-] doylio@lemmy.ca 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I've always found this argument against crypto to be a bad one. The headline will say something like "Crypto mining uses XYZ total energy" and we're supposed to infer that this means crypto is polluting a lot. But it doesn't say how much pollution there actually was. For economic reasons, these miners often use cheap excess energy that would have been produced anyway or green tech. Not all of it obviously, but that level of nuance is missing.

Also, we don't make the same moral arguments against other energy uses. Air conditioners use more energy than Bitcoin mining does, but we don't go around saying the government should ban people from using AC.

There are legitimate problems with crypto, but this one never convinced me

[-] bassomitron@lemmy.world 24 points 7 months ago

Air conditioning literally saves lives, especially medically vulnerable people, the hell are you on about?

As others have pointed out, ~2% of the entire US's energy output is absolutely insane. According to the eia.gov, the US produced around 100 quadrillion BTUs worth of energy in 2022 (I don't fully know why they chose BTUs to measure the total energy output, they explain on the website, but that's besides the point). 2% of that is 2 quadrillion BTUs. According to psu.edu (I googled these sites on my laptop so don't have exact urls on my phone at the moment), the entirety of US households in 2017 used 4.58 quadrillion BTUs.

Think about that. Bitcoin/PoW coin miners are using enough electricity to power around half of all homes in the US. According to statista.com, in 2022 there were 144 million homes. These miners consume 72 million homes worth of energy. And for what? To solve math problems that benefits no one but Bitcoin/PoW coin investors?

We're literally seeing our weather patterns become more and more extreme every year due to climate change, which is also killing our oceans which is causing a severely negative chain reaction in the rest of our ecosystems... But, you know, fuck all that, I need to use an extremely inefficient method of generating currency that no one but enthusiasts/speculators/investors asked for. I'm not inherently against cryptocurrency; however, fuck Bitcoin and other extremely wasteful PoW coins.

And yes, printing dollar bills/other fiat currencies creates pollution, too. I agree that process should be modernized as well. And in some ways, it already has been undergoing modernization as more and more people use electronic payments vs cash, thus decreasing the need to print more bills.

[-] drcobaltjedi@programming.dev 17 points 7 months ago

Dude. It's 2.3% of a massive industrialized nation where most citizens have access to some luxury goods. A nation with nearly 350 million people being the 3rd most populous country.

It does NOT fucking matter if it's """"""waste"""""" energy. And no, we don't fucking make that arguement about things like ac because you know why? Someone is getting comfort out of it instead of burning seals to make a line go up.

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (12 replies)
[-] prole@sh.itjust.works 13 points 7 months ago

Just a PSA that the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap (ETH) is no longer proof of work, and in the process, reduced their power consumption by ~98%.

load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
996 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

58125 readers
3892 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS