Genuine question: If I use a cryptocurrency such as Monero for its privacy benefits (only for spending, not as an investment), am I indirectly making crypto mining more profitable and hurting the environment?
ps. I don’t use any crypto yet.
Edit: actually I don’t care that much about private money. What if I were to just use some crypto because it’s convenient? Would that be bad?
There are so many things we interact with that hurt the environment that I wouldn’t take too much personal blame if I were you. The big time miners are the ones using the electricity, and they could use their profits to invest in renewable sources for their mining. They just don’t do it, much like how every other company in the world doesn’t take environmentalism seriously and just says “you first”.
The government needs to focus on making renewable energy investment a requirement for the biggest offenders. That is the only way we will force large scale change that actually matters.
This is dumb but only because we don’t worry about energy use any other time. Tons of places in my city keep all their lights on 24/7 unnecessarily, we all are sitting on a “useless” social media, video games and movies and music are all energy uses. I don’t want the government to start limiting energy use on things it deems unimportant. Who gets to decide what counts? Just implement a carbon tax and energy use will go down if people don’t want to pay. We don’t need to police everyone’s usage, we just need the cost to actually reflect the externalities.
Currently at least in the US we charge them less. This is usually due to something called Economy of Scale. As well as the fact there is more competition for Business energy. As well as the fact they are usually locked into a contract for energy. 1
Even so, consumer electricity habits make up a fraction of the carbon emissions on Earth. People driving cars, people buying plastic bullshit, or factory farming creates more emissions singularly.
So true. These fu**ing schools keeping their lights on the whole night and vacations, with their old lamps, while people like me measure their lamps and turn everything off…
Also the amount of 4K or more useless data transfer, ads, unnecessary youtube videos where there could be only audio (if they made that free, you can use any FOSS client and do the same)
How comes I never saw that implemented, then? Progressive taxation stops “progressing” at around the 100k threshold and that’s basically just a decent salary. The Rich are never really affected by it.
Carbon credits would be a way to level the ground in some situations and could give you a right to say NO to people consuming more than their share, or at least account for externalities and get paid if you allow them to use your “quota”.
There were sources in the article that says that Bitcoin mining basically wasted a countries worth of resources, increasing our overall electric bills.
Yeah I see that now. Thanks for pointing it out. It did take a minute to go through and find the actual sources as The Verge likes to source themselves. So I’ll put the two (at least I think) sources. This source shows where most of the mining is taking place.
The economic drivers of Bitcoin mining make it so that the cost of the electricity needed to mine a Bitcoin will always be just a bit less than the value of a Bitcoin.
Every time speculators hype up the value of Bitcoin the amount of money wasted on electricity increases.
Bitcoins are mined at a preset rate of 6.25 bitcoins every 10 minutes. Which does at least get cut in half every few years. But this waste of energy is going to continue so long as there’s a market for Bitcoin.
Somehow Ethereum 2 exists with Proof of Stake and everybody is still using Bitcoin. That tells me that nobody important (for this context) cares about wasted electricity.
It’s more that noone cares about the actual use cases of crypto and are just using it as speculative gambling.
Bitcoin is the literal equivalent of a horse and carriage while cars exist. If any crypto survives it should be the proof of stake crypto not the badly designed bitcoin (noting of course, for its time it was amazingly innovative, just that it’s no longer actually useful).
Not to mention the whole design flaw that it’s meant to be completely private/anonymous but ironically is one of the most public and traceable things ever created.
Not to mention the whole design flaw that it’s meant to be completely private/anonymous but ironically is one of the most public and traceable things ever created.
Bitcoin was never meant to be that, people were/are just idiots.
Monero on the other hand… Something made possible because Bitcoin came first.
Dude it wasn’t from a reasonable place if you immediately swing to screaming about masters like a delicate snowflake because people don’t like your MLM.
The conversation is about bonfire of resources this speculative “free” asset uses and you weren’t asking in earnest you just wanted a win that your blaze wasn’t the the only one.
I never liked this kind of argument, because if bitcoin ever becomes truly mainstream, the similar ecosystem will grow around it in addition to the mining itself.
We really should focus on the renewable energy sources rather than argue who burns how much and for what reason. There’s a price mechanism (albeit flawed) for that.
No. If a crypto were adopted at that scale, it wouldn’t be proof-of-work, so there would be no “miners” and (comparatively) no energy consumption whatsoever.
If what you said was true, Bitcoin would already have given its place to any of the proof of stake coins.
But it hasn’t because it won’t. Crypto people only care about becoming rich, so to them the technology behind doesn’t matter. And there is much more money to make using Bitcoin than the rest.
There is no clear advantage of proof of stake cryptocurrencies compared to blockchain-less centralized databases. IMHO It’s either Bitcoin, or PayPal 2.0
edit: But since people tend to be weird, maybe no advantage is needed…
I totally understand, I’m tired of having the conversation as well. In the video I posted earlier it sheds light on how renewable energy companies can be incentivised to add mining bitcoin to their process. Has a lot to do with modern tech and how energy is used/distributed.
Example of a mining company working with the Navajo nation in the US adding solar panels.
Yes. Legacy banking systems use way more than at least Bitcoin.
“Bitcoin’s emission intensity, a measure of emissions per unit of power, is now its lowest ever, dropping 18x faster than the banking sector over 4 years.”
Lol. Fucking batcoinz? That’s the source? Also love that you have to pay to read this random guys musings about bitcoin. The way to make money in Bitcoin is still mostly selling others on Bitcoin.
The link isn’t the sources but merely a conduit for the cited information. Also, you don’t have to pay to read it. Clearly you didn’t see the “continue reading” link to get passed the popup.
LOL I understand it just fine. I have made some money on it too.
Still a pyramid scheme. But so engrained that I’m not sure it will ever truly die because someone else will be along to swear it’s worth it cause of how much time, effort, money, and the energy of a small nation that was put into it.
But oh man “uhh Bitcoin isn’t like all the other crypto which is worthless scams” lol
You’re right I shouldn’t have lashed out, just frustrated. I’ve posted links to support my argument, not everything is black and white and some bad actors will always taint any good work done in any industry.
P.s I started swinging after everyone’s comments. Note the edit portion of my post
An alternative way to buy things or even store value (maybe not Bitcoin specifically on that one, but other currencies). Admittedly I don’t think its the best at any of those things, but it doesn’t have to be. I know that’s always the ant-crypto person’s next come back, suddenly change the goal post from having some value to being the best at a particular thing. Some people value the decentralized nature of it, and right or wrong, I don’t see why their choice of using something you don’t like shouldn’t be allowed.
I don’t use them, and agree with a lot of the reasons for not using them, but I just don’t see my self as the ultimate arbiter of what should be allowed. If there is no value, then eventually it will fizzle out, and we can all continue not using them like we have been. While the environmental angle is very convenient to vilify it (or any other thing you personally don’t like for that matter), I don’t see how it fairly gets applied to this and not almost every aspect of life. Cars for example, a great one because it falls into the same trap. The general consensus on Reddit/Lemmy is that any one who drives a pickup truck is a POS, but even if the anti-truck gang could wave a wand and ban them all, will it then become the anti-rav 4, CRV, etc etc. As long is there is any choice in a vehicle, someone could always they that someone is driving something bigger and worse for an environment than the need and that they are a bad person for it.
Another great example is air travel. This one gets some attention around celebs and private jets, but for the most part you don’t see people in here saying what a piece of garbage anyone who travels by air more than once a decade or so is. I mean I haven’t done any non work travel in that long, so clearly no one else should need to.
Sorry this got long, but it all comes back to the point of who gets to decide? Worth taking a setup back from the group think of Reddit/Lemmy and realize there are always going to be people who do things and even use resources on things that you (or me) think are stupid.
“if there’s no value it will eventually fizzle out”
Have you seen the capitalist hell scape around us? It will keep itself up and going because dummy’s want to do stuff inefficiently for no reason other than they think It benefits them. But except for the ultra wealthy, it’s a drain on the user and on society as a whole.
[…] use roughly as much electricity as all of the nation’s home computers combined
Bitcoin mining also risks stressing out the power grid in Texas, a crypto hub in the US where the state’s grid operator has paid Riot more than $31 million in energy credits to curb its electricity use during heatwave-induced demand spikes. Bitcoin mining has also brought sputtering fossil fuel power plants back to life and raised electricity costs for some residents in New York.
It’s clear why the survey is necessary.
Why did they make it an emergency survey in the first place? Is there no “normal” survey alternative?
Everyone is a bit shit here (including whoever came up with that title…). No one “won” anything here.
DoE wanted to use “emergency” measures to survey miner’s energy use, which is likely outside of the scope of the original intent of such powers (which appears to be why the judge granted a temporary restraining order?).
The Bitcoin miner’s claim the data release would cause “irreparable harm to their business…” If that’s not an admission of guilt, then I don’t know what is.
It's just a type of pretrial injunction. You need to show that irreparable harm would come if the DOE did this. It's helpful to have the case look like you'd win. Since the judge already said that it looks like they'd win, he'd likely extend it all the way to the end of the trial.
He was in early on the pyramid so he’s just got to keep selling it as if all the next people are gonna be super rich so that the pyramid scheme keeps going.
I mean I get it. It was super successful and made so much fucking money for whales and people who did Tupperware parties real early but they are so committed to the idea now.
Who knew you could get a bunch of men to happily sell MLM products though as long as you used a bunch of tech jargon and made it seem like you are smart for getting it. I mean I guess anyone that knows men right?
Is it sexist because you aren’t a male shilling this and wrongly assumed your gender based on the stereotype or are you just pretending it’s sexist so you don’t get hurt by the realization that this really is just the MLM for the male gender who makes up a grand majority of the base?
And sure you consider it undervalued because people still aren’t in the pyramid scheme so it can go up if only wasn’t for all the pesky people agreeing this is a scheme that’s gonna burst and not wanting in.
A pyramid scheme only gains value if you can lure in more people. Bitcoin gains value even if the number of people is constant because the measuring stick you use, the USD, constantly shrinks through inflation. Happy to clear that up.
They only make money if they can find bigger fools to buy into their pyramid scheme. So they will use anything to try and convince people. Even if it means to lie and cheat.
All investments are gambles basically. For example, I chose to do the “safe thing” a few years back to “invest” some of my savings into an index fund (stock market diversification basically). This is commonly expected to yield about 5% return on investment over time, historically.
What actually happened is that my Gamble lost about 40% of its value over the past couple years. I’d have been far better off just putting those savings into a good savings account.
I once hopped cryptocurrency was going to end capitalism, democratize the financial system and help redistributing wealth. Instead it became yet another stock to gamble on.
I bought €10 bucks of dogecoin all the way back in 2013. Thats the only time i ever did annything remotely close to ”investing”
I still have them and while i initially dreamed of using them to buy a gaming pc, i am a working adult now and the novelty of the coin is worth more then that. Regardless no tech store accepts doge as currency.
I never cared about any other crypto, if the point is to sell them for classical money then what is the point of it.
The price has remained a stable price of 1 Doge = 1 Doge regardless of Elon trying to wreck the system so i remain very happy with my purchase.
Yeah it's called a "dead cat bounce". Zoom out by about 7 years.
Take it from a veteran. They get longer and longer with each iteration of boom/bust cycle. I've been into this shit since 2012. Long before the cryptobros all piled in.
That's not my point. I was talking about the recent price rise.
Every boom/bust cycle so far (and there have been about 4 or 5 of them), you get an initial spike, followed by a second one, and then a long, drawn out "despair" period after a crash.
What you're seeing is the second bounce of a spike that has been ongoing since about 2019/2020. The "despair" phase is probably not too far off now.
I know the past is no indicator of future results, but when it happens over and over and over again, well...
Again, I’m not sure how much you know about bitcoin because the boom/bust cycles you’re talking about are reflections of the halving cycle, not dead cat bounces. The next halving is going to happen in April this year, and after that the price is going to go up even more. I’ve been through this before, I’m not worried about the despair phase but that’s not what’s coming next.
Anyway, bitcoin etf’s are a new thing and money is pouring in. Only time will tell, but with all the etf money and the impending halfing, the future looks bright.
As a former Bitcoin user and fan, I am also anti-Bitcoin. Until they can figure out how to run the network without drawing the energy equivalent of an entire developing country just to check if some numbers are correct in a database, I can't morally justify myself using it any more.
Wow, a volatile currency backed by nothing has large swings in value and if you pick the right date range you can tell any story you want? That’s pretty amazing.
It's not backed by energy usage. It's backed by pure, empty, meaningless market speculation. It's a digital baseball card. People use it in the exact same way. It has value because it's "rare", limited, and a bunch of people think so.
Yup. And prices go up from a combination of more idiots throwing money into it which is great for investing if you got into the game early and sure you can grab a chair before the music stops on this high energy use game of musical chairs and also because running those farms are getting so expensive the price had to go up to justify it.
Dude when it halves again and it’s suddenly taking the same amount of energy to do half the work I truly don’t know what’s gonna happen. I guess it depends how strong the sunk cost fallacy is in their heads for if it survives another round.
A nicer way to put that is that taxes are collected in national currencies. You can use any currency you want in private transactions but when the tax man comes calling, you better have the government’s preferred currency.
Also, what are cryptocurrencies backed by? Why do y’all exclusively call government money “fiat” when that just means it isn’t backed by a precious metal? Is there a Bitcoin Ft. Knox out there making it not a fiat currency?
It may require a bit of TradFi history to truly understand Bitcoin and why it was even created in the first place. Much too long to even attempt at concatenating in a lemmy comment. Bitcoin wasn’t a get-rich-quick scam like the majority of shitcoins today. CypherPunk movement had been working on a trustless system without a governing authority pre-Bitcoin (see e-cash).
Government backed currencies require trust. In the US you are trading IOUs issued by the Federal Reserve, which isn’t even a Federal branch, but privatized business. There have been numerous times where the heads of the Fed have outright stated they simply enter numbers into a computer to issue money to Central banks, etc. Since Americans were robbed of a tangible currency, backed by Gold, the money printer has quite literally gone “brrrrr”.
I don’t trust the government or the bankers who have repeatedly financially rape the citizens. Remember the 2008 collapse? No one was held accountable. So, they’ve found new loopholes to continue pillaging the fiscally uneducated. The trust has been long gone as we’re repeatedly lied to.
This is what Bitcoin has sought to solve in that it’s not debased due to over issuance, unlike most fiat currencies. It doesn’t contribute to inflation, causing your purchasing power to be decreased. It quite literally removes the powers from corrupt bankers and gives it to the people.
On the subject of energy consumption, yes it has historically taken quite a lot for Proof of Work miners. However, in year’s past the miners have done a significant job at only using either green power sources or buying overproduced energy from companies. This has seen it drop far below the energy consumption of legacy banking or the Military Industrial Complex.
So, what you’re saying is, if fiat is backed by militarism, it’s really backed by death.
Fiat currency is controlled by the government over which we have a bit of power (for those of us who live in a democracy).
Bitcoin is by definition controlled by those who have the power and thus the money to mine. It’s a bit like democracy only that the more money you have the more votes you have.
Bitcoin is by definition controlled by those who have the power and thus the money to mine
This is actually 100% wrong, miners are not in control, they depend on the users of the network. This has been demonstrated during the block size conflict where miners tried to get their way and couldn’t.
Bitcoin is by definition controlled by those who have the power
Bitcoin was specifically designed so no small group of actors has the power. That’s also one of the reasons it’s so hard to introduce any fundamental changes to it. Too many groups of people would have to reach a consensus on the new rules. Since each one of them is following their own set of incentives, they keep each other in check.
Which is why focusing on Bitcoin is a red herring. The power consumption issue with crypto was solved a long time ago, and has now shown for years that it’s viable on a massive scale (ETH). People need to stop acting like Proof of Work is all that exists.
So much for nuance. This place is just like reddit: black and white.
You have zero power as a citizen over the currency you use. You do not directly vote for the Central bankers, Federal Reserve board, etc. Even the politicians you might vote for who appoint them will almost always side in their own favor than their constituents. I’d hardly believe a word a politician ever utters. Just look at all the lies and false promising during the campaigns of the last 5 presidents and what they actually accomplished. Biden and college debt as a more recent example.
You are also confusing Bitcoin’s Proof of Work with a shitcoin’s Proof of Stake, which is where wealth gives you more votes. As for the hash rate you’re contributing as a miner, there’s no additional power you’re given. Even if you attempted to 51% attack the network, it’d be gaining nothing beyond a double-spend by rewriting the blockchain transaction. Likely causing the currency’s price to crash. Zero financial incentives for any rich people to do that, unless they’re part of a nation-state hoping to try and destroy the currency.
You have zero power as a citizen over the currency you use. You do not directly vote for the Central bankers, Federal Reserve board, etc. Even the politicians you might vote for who appoint them will almost always side in their own favor than their constituents.
I didn’t say it’s perfect, but it’s not zero power.
You are also confusing Bitcoin’s Proof of Work with a shitcoin’s Proof of Stake, which is where wealth gives you more votes.
Proof of stake is arguably even worse, but the energy required for proof of work isn’t free either (and that’s by design, if it was free Bitcoin wouldn’t work).
As for the hash rate you’re contributing as a miner, there’s no additional power you’re given. Even if you attempted to 51% attack the network, it’d be gaining nothing beyond a double-spend by rewriting the blockchain transaction.
There is more than double spending. Who decides how Bitcoin evolves? When new features are added, hard forks, etc. How much power do you have over that?
Well, luckily, you don’t have to worry about explaining TradFi history to me since I studied a lot of it in college and after. To me, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocates haven’t read enough about the 1800’s, whether it’s the Free Banking Era or all the post-civil war panics (including the Panic of 1907 so don’t stop at 1899). A lot of hard lessons had to be learned before we created the modern system.
Yeah and look at how much things have changed since then… Why throw the entire concept of creating a digital currency/ledger? Why be so against it at the core? It’s one thing to be against Bitcoin, or proof-of-work, or literally any other current method of digital currency, but why dismiss the concept outright as some kind of old-timey dog & pony show who will be another lesson we learn the hard way?
Sounds like Luddite thinking to me. Sounds like fear of new technology.
How many literally countless attempts at human flight were there, many that were awful, stupid ideas, before we finally figured out the best way to do it?
Or maybe we should have just given up on the idea of air travel altogether…
TL/DR: I think blockchain(s) have limited, niche use cases and we shouldn’t dismiss the technology entirely but I think the hype around it was misguided and its misuse has caused more problems than it’s valid use cases have solved. (There’s also a Luddite commentary.)
I’m not against alternate currencies or air travel. I have a ton of airline miles, in fact, which proves both of those things.
I’m certainly not a Luddite in the fear of tech sense. (Though, I do think the original Luddites are more sympathetic and interesting than we give them credit for. The first ones were skilled craftsmen who were just as mad that the automated products were shit quality made in horrific working conditions by people paid sub-poverty wages. So, their initial issue wasn’t automation writ large so much as “automation that only benefits the owners of the machines while customers get worse products and workers get sub-poverty wages.” It’s kind of where “A.I.” is now: low quality writing/art/video for cheap that’s only making a few people richer.)
As for blockchain, I don’t have a problem with it existing. Append-only digital ledgers already existed when public, decentralized ones came out in 2008/2009. There’s some real, but niche use cases where you’d want that ledger distributed and public with no central authority. I’m typing this on Lemmy; so, I’m not clearly not against decentralizing things just for the sake of it. But the proof of work version obviously doesn’t scale well if it uses more power than mid-sized countries. At this point, the tech isn’t that new and hasn’t really improved anything spectacularly. And it’s got some debt to repay for its use in money laundering and enabling ransomware attacks and shit like that. So, my hostility to blockchain isn’t the neutral technology component so much as misuses of it by people.
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