[I just, now, saw (and now reading) this thread, from the start…]
Exactly. Be it goats, rare heavy metals, or, well, this stuff. I kinda figured it out about 10 years ago though, and freely admit I’m surprised, in one aspect, that’s it’s still around. Great summation BTW @fearlessfrog .
Even if I thought it had legs, like the stock market in general, when everyone is trying to get in (ie; you hear the clerk at the mini-mart waxing on about the current DOW numbers) – it’s time to get out: take profits; pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered, etc, etc.
And yeah, I’m not a wealthy man. Money is like ‘water’…
There’s some sense in the stock market where it’s tied to the real world and finances production of actual goods. But as with every ecosystem, you take away the boundary conditions and leave it to itself, it soon deteriorates.
BitCoin don’t produce anything while wasting an impressive amount of energy.
Like, only a part of cryptocurrency operation is already using more TeraWatts than several small nations total consumption.
For. No. Products.
I want to stress this, Cryptocurrency doesn’t create anything for the energy it uses.
It’s the equivalent of using your life to do nothing else than keep on pressing the “=” button on your
pocket calculator to make numbers go higher. Or filling all the squares of a chequered notepad pages with a small X.
Cars, TVs, and all stuff we actually produce is not the equivalent of wasted of resources.
Right but wouldn’t you count that once the crypto is “realized” by using it to make a purchase?
You can argue that regular currency - bills or coin, are equally a waste of energy because they also don’t create anything useful for the energy produced (anymore - we have all digital payment without crypto so in that regard the physical currency is unnecessary) and the value only comes to fruition when you exchange it for goods.
(Not arguing for crypto - I want a reasonably priced GPU again in my lifetime!)
I disagree.
Also you’re confusing represented value vs cost of creation.
If I can convince my neighbor I have a great idea and he should give me all his money I created a transaction while still having created nothing.
Cryptocurrency has to be accepted by whatever party you try to sell it to.
Every other currency is actually regulated according to an economic model worldwide- which some claim it’s the strong point of Cryptocurrency to which I say “that’s BS”.
As it already happened, in fact, the value is dictated by whatever people agreed the CC is worth.
A mechanism that’s essentially a regulated scam.
My ideas are more articulated but there’s a million small things I’m unable to express in written form.
If you catch me on Discord feel free to HMU and we can chat about it.
TL;DR - Cryptocurrency must die fast and I don’t even care who is going to lose real cash over it.
By your definition, folding@home is just as much a waste of energy as is bitcoin. The blockchain is a tool to verify and document transactions. I’m not saying that the implementation that forms bitcoin is very efficient at what it is doing or that the resources are well spent, but i very much think that your argument is flawed.
How is a simulation of a protein model not a result?
Some can argue about what people consider a result but my “line in the sand” is based on common sense and I’m not willing to entertain a debate for debate’s sake.
My argument is flawed as it inherently expect said common sense.
If for anyone there’s no difference between folding@home at cryptocurrency I’m definitely not the guy willing to explain.
Your line in the sand also shifted in the course of just one post. If you think that secure immutable transactions aren’t a result, then there’s no argument to be had here.
51% attacks, while theoretically possible, haven’t occurred yet, so it’s not as bad as you make it look.
Again, i didn’t say that the implementation was perfect. But there is a result for the energy that is invested, the opposite of which was the argument that was made from the beginning. If we are going to switch the argument to “it’s not worth it”, i agree.
No switch. Just different views of what is a result.
The argument was made that the result of crypto hashes is not a result like a physical product.
That’s how I read your very interesting discussion, anyway.
The concept of value is tricky…
If nobody acknowledged crypto currency or allowed it to be traded for products, it would have no value. I.e. if you couldn’t use it for anything, why would you bother getting it…? But that’s true of any currency, isn’t it?
Imagine I said I have 1 Billion Trollcoins. Troll says the value of these coins equals 10 Billion USD. Now if I could convince the rest of the world that they could buy Trollcoins from me, at that rate, I would become incredibly rich. But why would anyone do that? Because of my good name?
Somehow, people are buying the concept of downloading software to their computers, that basically is a lottery, where anybody can win some if they let the software run long enough, or on a powerful enough computer. What would a bitcoin be worth if nobody accepted the idea and did the hash calculation?
We recently eliminated the penny (ours are made of the aforementioned valuable copper) for this reason. It had trivial buying power and while the face value of the coin was $0.01, the cost to manufacture the coin was $0.014 - $0.02 each. So even real currency is not immune to not being worth making.
We have had fiat money before the advent of cryptocurrency but somehow people only come to realize all these things now. That’s pretty odd.
While it is even more odd that I’m made to defend cryptocurrencies which i despise, some statements were made that are plain and simple factually false. The energy spent on bitcoin is used to cryptographically secure transactions. Whether we think that worth the energy or not has no bearing on the fact that the energy isn’t just transformed into waste heat. The result is like a cryptographically secured ledger of all the transactions that were made in the past, and as a sideeffect people get to make these transactions.
The fallacy here is simply to mix “produces something that has worth inside my value system” with “produces something”. In principle, the convenience of fiat money isn’t something that is worthless to our society. Banks burn a lot of energy in their servers too, you just don’t read about it in the papers every few days.
Sounds like a whole lotta nothing to me. But then I have a hard time understanding how my wife (data analyst) earns her wages, being just a simple landscaper. I know for a fact @sobek that you are one very smart cookie, so I’ll take it on your word that that’s something. To some people.
Let’s all unite and just yell wholeheartedly: “Fark Cryptocurrencies and the horse they rode in on!”
To add to what Sobek said, Ethereum is a network running distributed apps (dapps), so there is work and play being done on the network.
Another way to view this, is that since mining demand is causing us to pay inflated prices for our gaming hardware, which takes energy to operate BTW, by mining a hopefully appreciating asset during your rig’s downtime, you are mitigating the inflated price. Since your only cost is the GPU price and whatever watts your rig consumes mining, not that much in the case of a 3070 for instance, you can pretty much get that display adapter for free. Can’t beat them? I decided to stop bitching about it and join them
