Between this and Tesla citing climate change as a reason for dropping crypto, this is actually a very interesting shift, and one that might be very bad for crypto.
The amount of money people actually donated or spent with crypto has always been minimal. (Wish I had harder numbers to back this up, but you can see second-order effects from e.g. Steam adding Bitcoin support but then taking it away. Or how Bitpay has stagnated heavily, while a purely investment/speculation platform like Coinbase is worth billions.) However, for a long time, the benefit of accepting Bitcoin as payment was the marketing. Accepting crypto signaled that you were a cool company, you could put out a press release and the news media would run articles about how X service is now accepting cryptocurrency for payments.
The same thing happened again years later with "blockchain." Remember Kodakcoin? Remember Long Island Blockchain? Nothing ever really surfaced from these initiatives, but again, it was all about that big marketing hype that came from saying your company was going to use blockchain for... something.
Where it gets interesting is... what if crypto becomes anathema? What if accepting crypto or holding crypto starts become so closely associated with directly causing climate change, that no company is going to want to be openly associated with crypto, NFTs, etc due to the negative association?
You have one side hyping up Web3 as the next evolution as the web, but if the perception of crypto continues to be that it's a significant contributor to climate change -- regardless of how true that may be -- we could see a major decline in mainstream support.
I wonder how those who work from a third world country like Argentina with a hard fiat currency control from our government will achieve to get paid without being robbed by it.
I'll explain: today our government forbids us from buying foreign currency such as the US dollar (200 tops for a really REALLY small portion of the population) so a black market has been at place since the prohibition started many years ago. In this market each dollar corresponds to 200 pesos while the government states each one costs around 100 pesos.
So, if you work for a company outside, and the pay you 1000 usd, you get 100,000 pesos when you could get 200,000 in reality. Not only that, you also are forbid from buying dollars, so if you want to get them to avoid our rampant inflation (50% average, around 100% for groceries) you only have the black market which is around 200 pesos.
I know about the damages to the cliamte of crypto mining but consider also that there are some beneficial uses of these currencies for people like me who don't live in the first world.
People have always used dollars on countries that prohibit it. On Brazil we used to have even official black market prices, that were announced nationwide on TV every day.
Anyway, yes, non-discriminating electronic money movement is a great product that improves the lives of many people. Blockchains are a very bad implementation of that concept and remove a lot of its potential value. If we are able to get some other one working, it's for the better.
Crypto won’t fix political and economic problems but only worsen them.
The debt that was imposed on you is inhumane and you shouldn’t have to pay it. The resulting attempts to solve it by selling public infrastructure only makes it worse.
Throwing crypto into the mix is pure insanity. It’s just gambling at a crippling ecological cost.
Does anyone local actually accept BTC? That is, do you need to sell your BTC for either USD or pesos before using your money for rent / groceries / phone bill / etc?
Incidentally, your defense of BTC is pretty much "it makes it possible to skirt laws and taxes" which seems to be the elephant in the crypto living room.
I sympathize, but your problems won't be solved by cryptocurrencies. Sure, those might patch things over, but systemic change is needed, or it'll be a never-ending series of such patches.
Well, you will get the full value of your pay, but you'll also be screwed by the collapse of the local currency until the local economy rebuilds itself using crypto.
Governments do such things to try and paper over economy shortfalls, keeping everything running kinda-less-bad-ish than if they just let it fail and start over.
When you are in this situation where a USD only gets half as many pesos as the free market dictates, that means a peso is only worth half as much as the government is trying to pretend it is, and (this is the point of the currency controls) they are trying to allow only the 50% of most productive usages of USD to go ahead, possibly in the hopes of getting enough USD back into the country that they can get the free market value back up to where they think it should be, and then stop pretending.
Damage to the climate is highly exaggerated. People waste insane amounts of energy washing their clothes every day, keeping their tropical homes at 60 degrees, commuting hours each day, maintaining incredibly polluting industry such as the military, etc.
Not to mention the energy currently used by traditional financial services and banks.
We are talking about a small small fraction of the worlds energy use. Its virtue signaling by wealthy 1st world people who simply dont get it.
I'm also from Aegentina and a climate doomer. I will keep burning resources for personal profit, my own personal contribution will not move the needle that much anyway.
I’ve often wished there were a way to organize against crypto, since the incentives are so high for true believers to organize for it and find more people to buy into the ecosystem.
Yeah the incentive system is stacked for people to invest in crypto - everyone in the ecosystem is pulling for it to make money off their investments - and thats what this is at this point. There are for sure some cool projects but the lions share is to make money (hence the big push from VCs - see A16z investments) and they are taking a lot of talent to if Chris Dixon's comment's are accurate.
What better way to make something stick then make peoples livelihoods depend on it?
> I’ve often wished there were a way to organize against crypto,
From my perspective, it's a peaceful revolution against a corrupt global status quo.
The only people hurt by this false perception (bitcoin makes renewables more profitable by acting as a buyer when nobody else will) are people who don't buy bitcoin. And it's their loss.
What would you say to someone in el salvador who's happy accepting bitcoin because they no longer have to trek to ATM's and risk getting mugged?
In what way is crypto not anathema already? HN has basically been dumpstering it for over a decade now at every opportunity, the general public considers it some imaginary money ponzi scheme scam, over the last year people are laughing at the stupidity of things like NFTs and meme altcoins. It was only very recently that anyone in finance has even begun to consider it anything but a complete joke. Of the people that don't consider it an outright scam, probably 90% of those people are insufferable cryptobros or scammers who latch onto the buzzword, who make hating cryptocurrencies very easy.
I wouldn't be surprised if all of the media attention it gets is mostly because of how much most everyone hates it. It is the thing that tech inclined people love to hate watch.
It’s not that simple: the very large amount of money VCs and other speculators have pumped into it has ensured a steady stream of favorable coverage for years. The stories tend to get a hostile reaction from people who understand technology or economics but each round finds new people who think there might be a pony somewhere since they’ve been hearing about it for years.
It's currently being propped up by big, legitimate corporations: everything from sports organizations like the NBA, UFC, and WWE to food brands like Taco Bell and McDonalds are pumping out NFTs. The Lakers are now playing in the Crypto.com arena, even.
On HN it certainly gets a lot of hate, but there's not so much in the mainstream right now. I don't think the Lakers would have agreed to a sponsorship where they play in the BP Oil Fracking Arena, for instance.
That's utter bullshit. APMEX (precious metals) for instance allows BitPay, and that's actually how I buy bullion from them because it's the fastest way to clear payment without paying credit card fees. All the money I spent was legal income reported on a W-2.
There are crypto currencies by actual computer scientists, like Algorand by Silvio Micali, that seem to be much further ahead than others when it comes to low-emissions proof-of-stake implementations. In Algorand's case, they even offset the carbon emissions of the network and as such their blockchain is effectively carbon neutral. Or as carbon neutral you can be when you use offsetting.
At least to me, they look more intriguing than all the older crypto currencies. I always wondered why you would bother
with all these inefficiencies for some lofty idea of 'decentralisation' when we have run of the mill consensus algorithms and distributed systems that just work.
I've always tried to state the problems with crypto here every time it comes up, but there is such a huge incentive for the people invested in crypto to pump it, that every year the number of crypto pumpers grows more numerous than people like me.
There really is a place for a decentralized currency to replace paypal, but none of the cryptos live up to it. In fact I just tried using crypto again a few days ago and it was a terrible experience just like it was 10 years ago. My bitcoin transaction took over 30 minutes to verify so I tried changing to ethereum, and the transaction fee there is $8...
BTW, PayPal is absolutely terrible. That's a very low bar for crypto to clear. SEPA (=normal bank) money transfers or direct debit within Europe, TransferWise, etc. are much better options than PayPal (or crypto) for most purposes.
You're not going to get cheap transactions using Bitcoin or Ethereum directly.
There are two wallets that are using newer tech to make cheap + fast transactions happen (while still being decentralized + secure):
- Argent - Uses zkSync which is an L2 that compresses transactions and writes them to Ethereum - costs about 25c per transaction right now.
- Dharma - Uses Polygon which is it's own chain that posts a hash of everything that happened to Ethereum at regular intervals - costs < 1c per transaction right now .
USDC would make for a suitable candidate but of course, it's got $25 transaction fees on ETH. USDC-SPL maybe. The last time I tried to move some USDC-ETH, it was cheaper and more convenient to just have FTX wire me the money ($0) then wire it from my bank account to the recipient ($0).
In reality though, a CBDC is probably the best way forward.
To be fair neither Bitcoin nor Eth are aimed toward being a day-to-day currency. Regardless of the original intent Bitcoin is only really useful for hoarding like gold, and Eth in its current state is more about smart contracts than transactions.
If you're truly interested in a decentralized currency there are other projects focused on that.
Mozilla has been accepting it for years, 2017 at least. I imagine nobody donated anything of palpable value because they had to re-announce that they do in fact accept crypto. That's what kicked off the controversy.
Also, I haven't seen Mozilla associated with positive PR for a long time. Much as I love Firefox, it's dead on mobile.
And simultaneously flush what little good will remained with their users and existing donors. Patience is wearing thin for many when it comes to Firefox.
>Where it gets interesting is... what if crypto becomes anathema? What if accepting crypto or holding crypto starts become so closely associated with directly causing climate change, that no company is going to want to be openly associated with crypto, NFTs, etc due to the negative association?
I think this is going to increasingly become true, and I think it may lead to an interesting and divisive future. I suspect that if Ethereum actually does fully transition to Proof of Stake and the network doesn't suffer any serious issues for a year or two afterwards, its price may surpass Bitcoin's in a few years, and decisions to use/trade/hold Bitcoin vs. Ethereum will become exponentially more ethically, politically, culturally, and tribally charged than they are now.
If that turns out to be the case, I also predict Bitcoin will one day move to a different consensus system that consumes less energy - but it may take a decade, several hard forks, and the (metaphorically) bloodiest internet flamewars and in-fights ever seen before it actually happens.
Isn't it interesting that people who own Ethereum/crypto, are suddenly very ethical and concerned about Bitcoin's energy use? Everything else can consume energy ethically in this world, but using energy to run a decentralized monetary system? No, that must be very bad.
Actually, people wouldn't choose something that doesn't work, just to signal their irrational ethics. Ethereum is not designed to be money, and it has huge array of problems in addition to using weak PoS consensus in the future. It is not properly decentralized, and therefore it can't deliver the promise of money that is equal for all people in the world. In my opinion, it's highly unethical to push Ethereum or other corruptible systems using this environmental narrative.
Most people in Bitcoin, especially big investors, know the difference between these systems, and wouldn't use a PoS currency for any price.
Mark my words, when Ethereum switches to PoS, its price will crash.
It’s all moot. ETH 2.0 is coming June and it uses proof of stake which uses a tiny fraction of what proof of work uses. All things like this article should do is make you invest in proof of stake coins because they are the future.
Why is it taking so long for proof of stake to happen? They've been talking about it for many years and the fact that none of the mainstream coins have moved to proof of stake and there is no rising new coin that uses it, make me think there's a fundamental issue with it.
Even when or if this switch eventually finally happens, if the current inertia keeps going and the idea that "cryptocurrency causes climate change" continues to gain mainstream traction, it's going to be very hard to make people change their beliefs without a huge, concerted marketing campaign.
You'd think so, but it seems that people who have a problem with cryptocurrency in general are already laying the groundwork for the next assault. This is one of the tweets in the linked thread:
It basically claims that cryptocoins are "sound money", and that "sound money" is inherently racist. I tried to follow the logic in that thread, and, so far as I can tell, it boils down to something akin to "Hitler was a vegetarian, ergo, vegetarianism is bad".
You can still use cryptos to pay for unmentionables on the web, extract anonymous payments from crime victims, and most importantly gamble in a wholly unregulated casino.
I'd also note that the unregulated casinos can be (but aren't always) verifiable in how they function, so if you want high assurance that the odds and such are as stated, you can (in some cases) obtain such assurance, despite the lack of regulation.
(but, you'd have to be careful to check the claims and such, and, if you can't or don't have time to check the software yourself, you might have to trust a 3rd party evaluating the system, and possibly there wouldn't be any such organization that you would trust who has done such a check.)
> what if crypto becomes anathema? What if accepting crypto or holding crypto starts become so closely associated with directly causing climate change, that no company is going to want to be openly associated with crypto, NFTs, etc due to the negative association?
This is how the current wave of “web3” marketing started: everyone in cryptocurrency saw the bad reputation building and, being keenly aware that the only value was what you could find a buyer for, started hawking “web3 and pumping up things like NFTs trying to find new reasons for people to put real money into the system.
Do you have any evidence or even anecdotes indicating this is the case? From everything I’ve seen, Web3 hype is from the same people who are still excited about all crypto stuff.
Only Bitcoin and Eth1 (going away this year) could possibly have that association. You can't just discard an entire technology on this basis. The energy FUD won't stick beyond Bitcoin. Even that will go away when >90% of BTC mining is backed by clean energy. IIRC it's around 50% now.
A single Google Search: 1,080 J
A single Solana transaction: 1,837 J
One eth2 transaction: 126,000 J
Watching an hour of television on a 40 inch+ LCD TV: 540,000 J
> Only Bitcoin and Eth1 (going away this year) could possibly have that association. You can't just discard an entire technology on this basis.
Are you sure? It's easy to send your message anonymously on the Hand, but I (and many others I've met out there in the real world) have zero interest in acquiring cryptocurrency, regardless of price or potential payoff. It seems more like the biggest tulip trading ponzi scheme in history.
I do enjoy the entertainment it's provided me since I first encountered it in 2008.
I'm not even rich... just disinterested in accumulating wealth in such a stupid manner which contributes no tangible benefit back to society.
Solana is an unstable centralised blockchain, majority owned by insiders, the same insiders hyping Solana for the NFT / Web3 garbage by the usual venture capitalists [0]
Not good at all and looks mostly a pump and dump scam to me.
The question is when will the party be over for most late comers to the Solana ponzi scheme.
If this ends the Eternal September we have in crypto it would be awesome. Crypto has too much marketing and eyes on it nowadays. It wouldn't hurt to turn in down a notch and keep working on it.
The blocks use the same energy whether they are full of transactions or not.
So it has nothing to do with any organization encouraging transactions or not.
It wouldn’t stop demand when considering a competing theory that all the transactions are speculation, so nobody is missing anything if one place wont accept donations, or that place using their platform to reverse policy on accepting crypto.
> if the perception of crypto continues to be that it's a significant contributor to climate change -- regardless of how true that may be --
Therein lies a huge part of our societies problems : people base their beliefs on perceptions rather than digging into the truth of the claims they choose to follow. This creates division, strife, and carries huge social costs.
And, if their claim is objectively wrong---i.e., if bitcoin is less harmful to the climate that the legacy monetary system (with its unbridled government spending and profligate international wars---what's the petrodollar system's true cost if we include all the oil tankers, office buildings, Brinks trucks and The US 7th fleet sitting in the Indian Ocean?), then choosing to ignore the truth could actively harm the climate more than choosing the better money.
If you are banking on activism to stop/start anything, you are in for a huge disappointment.
Profits / Self benefits are the most powerful, natural forces of the world. If you want any positive changes, you should harness them rather than fight it.
It's crazy that it's 2022 and so many people on HN still think crypto is majority Proof of Work... Ethereum is transitioning to Proof of Stake this year and after that Bitcoin will be the ONLY major cryptocurrency still on PoW.
Crypto is such a unique and compelling idea that it's not going anywhere. There will definitely be bumps along the way, but those are because of implementation issues.
>Where it gets interesting is... what if crypto becomes anathema? What if accepting crypto or holding crypto starts become so closely associated with directly causing climate change, that no company is going to want to be openly associated with crypto, NFTs, etc due to the negative association?
Then somebody should make crypto coin which is exclusively run on renewable energy so it would be considered moral accepting it as donation.
That doesn't make it moral. Using all the available renewable energy to do useless computations, so that a very tiny minority of folks can use a "currency", means that energy isn't available for other uses. The prevalence of mining is causing energy providers to postpone the decommissioning of dirty plants to be able to meet peak load.
There is no ethical use of proof of work cryptocurrency.
Never underestimate the will of the masses to gamble their money on crypto. If anything we'll see a push to PoS blockchains or eth will actually switch to PoS.
> Hi, I'm sure that whoever runs this account has no idea who I am, but I founded @mozilla and I'm here to say fuck you and fuck this. Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters.
If someone wants to give you money, take it. They can mandate more environmentally conscious PoS cryptocurrencies if they want.
If I call Mozilla and offer to donate a million shares of the dirtiest Earth-polluting company, they should take them. Exit the position. Their mission is not to be picky about how legal money arrives.
The Mozilla Foundation's "mission," as a 501(c)3, is whatever they decide.
They're not beholden to any obligations to maximize donations (already a dubious claim, absent evidence that people were actually donating with cryptocurrencies) in manners they consider unacceptable.
Put another way: you wouldn't be surprised if the ASPCA refused donations in the form of shares in PuppyKicker Inc. Mozilla's decision here warrants a similar response.
Their mission is entirely to be picky about the impact of their decisions. You can’t sell Bitcoin without encouraging its use, which is exactly why people donate it trying to improve the reputation of their goods for sale. Remember when a few companies accepted it and the Bitcoin salespeople were crowing about how that proved it was the future of finance and you had to buy in now to avoid being left behind? Using Mozilla’s reputation for their marketing is an ethical choice and has consequences.
If I give you a million shares of a company, that act and your ensuing sale of the shares are not (particularly) polluting. But if I send you bitcoin and you then sell them, those transactions occur via a polluting process.
Perfect response from @jwz. "Planet-incinerating Ponzi grifter" is an excellent phrase. I suggest we turn "PIPG" into an acronym.
edit: For example: "Tesla used to accept Bitcoin as payment, but once Elon Musk realized that it was making him look like a PIPG, he had to reverse course."
>but once Elon Musk realized that it was making him look like a PIPG, he had to reverse course
It has nothing to do with having enough impact (twitter lol) and market analysts to buy very low, announce owning millions of BTC and accepting BTC for Tesla, then selling a month later around peaks. And then doing exactly the same with Doge. Then doing it again in 2021. Oh, yes, the first sentence was about the trading value peak in 2017-2018. Nope, must be a coincidence.
I don't love the characterization of it being a "ponzi scheme"; trying to be catchy is no excuse for being disingenuous and inaccurate.
At their core, Ponzi Schemes are investment funds which pay existing investors with funds collected from new investors [1]. There's really no way of looking at cryptocurrency where this is an accurate analysis.
Generally, existing cryptocurrency investors are not "paid" by the "fund" (currency) in any capacity. This is true for BTC & ETH, which represent the bulk of the crypto market.
The more common argument is that anyone can create a new currency, hype it up, drive market value higher, then exit at the expense of new investors. That's a totally legitimate concern, and it happens far too often; but its not a ponzi scheme. The accurate term would be "pump & dump".
There are many shades of gray between a pure pump & dump and something more legitimate. "Hype" (also known as "Marketing") is something every investment vehicle partakes in; from BTC (far beyond the "hype" phase) to DOGE (I'd label that one as "mass insanity") to TSLA (a fraction the revenue of many other auto manufacturers, but significantly higher value? how'd they get there?) to even PFE (this comment is Sponsored by Pfizer [2]). There are obvious examples of this behavior in the crypto community, but its simply not happening among major currencies; taking a pump & dump "scheme" to a billion dollar valuation is exceedingly rare, and there are currently ~90 coins with a market capitalization above $1B.
Where one does see it happening, in my opinion, is with (most) NFTs. Many holders won't admit this, but there's no reality where 99% of them will be worth anything after the initial purchase; their goal is to shill and liquidate. However, I'm cautious in extrapolating this concern to the "technology" of NFTs, and even further to all of crypto; its similar to asserting all of emerging med-tech is a scam because Theranos was. Ultimately, investment vehicles don't need to "make sense" to have marketable value; but that doesn't mean critical thinking is unnecessary when evaluating it.
There are some currencies, including ETH2, which stake and return an APY on investment. This could adequately, though somewhat inaccurately, be interpreted as being "paid out by the fund"; but the reward doesn't come from new investors. Where it comes from depends on the currency, but with ETH2 it is effectively minted from thin air. This is an inflationary action, which could (again, adequately but inaccurately) be interpreted as "taking money from new investors" (by lowering the value of each ETH they purchased). However, this concern is mitigated by the inflationary effect impacting all ETH holders, not just new investors, and the deflationary counter-effect from london hard-fork transaction fee burning.
ETH is currently still inflationary, but only through a delicate balance of PoW-style minting, PoS-style reward issuance, and london fee burning. The zeitgeist in the ETH community right now is to achieve deflation, for better or worse.
The statement that proof-of-stake APY represents "being paid out by the fund" in the context of evaluating cryptocurrency as a ponzi scheme, is very tenuous. Crypto is, at least in the US, not a currency; its a USD denominated investment vehicle. Being given more crypto does not "pay out" your USD investment, any more than a stock DRIP would be a "payout", because there is no "out". It does not allow you to exit the investment; on the contrary, it increases your investment.
Its totally fair to dislike crypto; I'm certainly in that camp. But its critically important to understand the mechanics, engineering, and economics of why its such a harm to society before one begins levying blind criticism.
He should be ashamed of displaying such a combination of ignorance and arrogance. Having alternative currencies is incredibly important for those living under corrupt regimes and/or hyperinflation and/or unbanked, and most cryptocurrencies don't use proof of work. They could just not accept Bitcoin and Eth1 then.
A single Google Search: 1,080 J
A single Solana transaction: 1,837 J
One eth2 transaction: 126,000 J
Watching an hour of television on a 40 inch+ LCD TV: 540,000 J
1779.11 kWh per single Bitcoin transaction would be
One Bitcoin Edit: Block Mined: 6,404,796,000 J
One Bitcoin Transaction on a Block: 2,287,427 J
One Credit Card Transaction: 5,351 J
Edit: Since the source isn't exactly clear if one transaction is a reference to one block mined or one transaction on that block, I'm going to assume it is for one block mined. I'm going to estimate one block contains 2800 transactions.
I really do sympathize with people living under corrupt regimes. And I sympathize with them having to use a metal pipe to whack someone in the head to survive. Does that mean that non-profits should start embracing head-whacking?
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not a fan of cryptocurrency, but I'm also less than impressed with jwz's maturity. If I didn't know he founded Mozilla, I would've taken him for an angry teenage kid trying to be edgy on the internet.
You want to talk about Ponzi? Crypto has nothing on the Fed. The global financial structure is a planet-incinerating Ponzi scheme, so the point of targeting one minuscule subset of it is suspect.
When I was a kid poking around around the early web and trying to learn how to code, I idolized him. It's sad to see he's turned into a bitter old pizza shop owner.
Anything to avoid working on the browser itself. Very sad to see the decline of Mozilla and Firefox.
I wonder if someone could fork it and take all the people from Mozilla who are actually contributing to the technical mission (a small group these days!). Brendan Eich would've been perfect for this, but he's got his own browser now and wisely chose to use chromium as the base.
If there was a serious financial effort that went into a fork of Firefox, I'd be all on board with it. The problem is these knockoffs that you know aren't going to keep up with development and will be relatively short-lived.
Say what you want about Brendon Eich, but I wish he forked Firefox for Brave. That's the kind of effort that Firefox deserves, because it's by no means a bad browser. Putting aside some relatively minor performance issues (that don't manifest with average use), it's a great browser and I hope it sticks around for the sake of still allowing a good level of ad-blocking and such.
And yes, Firefox pretty much still exists in this form because of Google. That relationship has also accelerated the decline of Mozilla.
>effort that went into a fork of Firefox, I'd be all on board with it.
Chrome was designed to be "forkable" and put in different wrapper UI. Firefox was at that time battling to get rid of XUL and add a basic sandbox. Then pwn2own decided not to include Firefox in another year hacks because Firefox made no improvements at all in previous 2 years. This hurt me to hear as a long time Firefox user, had to be hurtful to Firefox management and developers too, but that was the fact. Mozilla lost their way in 2010-2017 and can't recover from that, the gap was too wide. Mozilla thought that after defeating IE and Safari they can't lose the market.
Mozilla had an opportunity to make Firefox modular but burnt it with Servo.
Which browser developers do you propose paused these donations in order to "avoid working on the browser itself"? In what way would that even accomplish that end, given that those donations weren't even going to browser development in the first place?
Yes, I am aware that these donations don't fund browser development, and that hucksters laundered the reputation of Firefox to take donations to advance their social causes instead of the browser.
What exactly are you forking here? Your README implies that it's for iOS, where every browser is just a skin over Apple's WebKit engine.
(More generally, forking a browser is generally a doomed prospect: even Mozilla and Google struggle to keep up with vulnerabilities and standards churn. Most other forks of Firefox are laughably/irresponsibly stale, and most "forks" of Chrome are really just reskinned Chromium builds.)
Personally, I believe in Crypto, but I'm entirely against Bitcoin. I think Proof of Work is a massive waste of energy, and I would be happy if Bitcoin went to 0, quite frankly.
But nowadays, not all cryptos are proof of work based. Plenty of major crypto projects are based on proof of stake and offer fully fledged smart contract features to support Web 3 apps. I don't think proof of stake crypto is more energy intensive than the hundreds of thousands of servers and data centers needed for the traditional financial system.
I think a smarter move would be to only accept crypto currency donations from these greener chains.
Bitcoin's energy consumption is a feature, not a bug. The amount of energy consumed by the network will continue to increase, as it should, as it secures more wealth.
A currency that's based on energy has been speculated about for decades, such as by Buckminster Fuller, which he called the Kilowatt Dollar: http://roperld.com/science/CurrencySystems.htm
For what its worth, this is a difficult concept for most people to understand. I've held crypto since the early days, went to ethereum believing in POS, then crypto "3.0", and only now have I returned realizing what it all meant. Granted most people barely understand how the economy today works, many times out of denial.
> The amount of energy consumed by the network will continue to increase, as it should, as it secures more wealth.
this is very apt. after exhausting the worlds resources guarding our money from each other maybe we'll reflect that it was money that was the bad idea and bitcoin was just an implementation detail
I suggest this analysis because folks tend to state their preference for POS while only mentioning the energy costs as the only factor in their calculation. I do think it worth considering these other tradeoffs as well.
Besides the energy costs, what's the answer to PoW miners' effects on the GPU market? Especially as the supply chain is already strained by COVID-related increases in consumer demand. While I'm still concerned by mining energy costs, the optimal equipment needed should be separate from consumer-grade, e.g., how datacenters won't be hoarding Core i9 processors or RTX 3080s.
Any decentralized distributed ledger is by definition more energy intensive and wasteful.
All of the financial systems today may keep a dozen or so copies of a financial transaction for a limited time span. They do so using as cost-effective means as possible (they’re a for-profit business). They also do it under extremely well coordinated economies of scale.
From the get-go any reasonable distributed ledger application (regardless of PoW, PoS, etc) keeps many thousands of copies of that consensus ledger. In the case of Bitcoin it’s roughly 13,000 nodes so at least 1000x as many resources as the centralized financial systems we have today. Oh yeah - and it grows forever. As I’ve noted before if you buy a beer for $3 with Bitcoin there will end up being 13,000 or more records of that transaction FOREVER.
With 10 years since inception and an absolutely tiny transaction volume (compared to say, Visa) a full Ethereum node requires at least 6TB of storage space. Bitcoin is the big one and it has roughly 500K transactions/day. Visa alone has a billion. With any real traction these ledgers will end up at petabyte and exabyte size very quickly. Oh yeah - and you’ll still need tens of thousands of copies. Each of these nodes still needs gigabytes of RAM, fast CPUs, bandwidth, etc in addition to the insane storage requirements.
Note that I’m talking about the distribution and storage of the ledger itself. Mining and PoS have nothing to do with that - these 1000x inefficiencies persist even with PoS.
The nodes themselves are the massive resource and energy issue that are just hiding behind PoW right now.
Governments across the world have debased the currency over the past decade which has especially accelerated since Covid. The inflation has finally started to take off. Most people in HN who are among the wealthy end of spectrum have no idea how inflation is affecting most people lives. Most are desperately looking for opportunities to make enough returns. They don't give much thought about climate change when they can't pay for education or medical bills.
While most shitcoins and NFTs will tumble, the topcoin rallies are not going to stop until the economy gets roaring back and inflation is controlled.
People on HN probably understand inflation very well but have portfolios that are not impacted by it. If anything, the past 2 years have shown great stock gains.
It's hard for a person to understand a solution when its fortune depends on not understanding it. The Fed just mentioned they might raise rates for a blip on the stock market. Imagine what they do if they actually raise them. Oh, noes, the USD might actually hold some value! How will the economy recover if people's savings aren't stolen?!
Non-inflationary currencies cannot work as currencies. Period. People will buy them and hold them just because of their non-inflationary nature, distorting and destabilizing their value, making them useless for short-term holding and payments which are the point of a currency.
US history prior to World War 2 says otherwise. The gold-backed dollar was slowly deflationary for multiple periods, precisely because a hard money standard enables entrepreneurs' economic calculation and real growth.
HN readers generally understand inflation, but when I see questioning bitcoin's energy cost, I wonder if those questioning it really understand the high costs of manipulating the price system through inflation: that manipulation causes the boom and bust cycles due to malinvestments.
> Most people in HN who are among the wealthy end of spectrum have no idea how inflation is affecting most people lives.
There are numerous articles every week about the “great resignation” and staffing shortages in foodservice and other industries as everyone leaves for higher paying jobs.
Wages are going up. It’s not the end of the world.
> Most are desperately looking for opportunities to make enough returns.
Stock market has been outpacing inflation just fine. Classic investment advice still holds.
Those “returns” in crypto can only come from selling coins to someone else in the future. It relies on a constant stream of convincing new people to turn over their real money in exchange for virtual money.
> While most shitcoins and NFTs will tumble, the topcoin rallies are not going to stop until the economy gets roaring back
What a weird thing to say when the economy is roaring, unemployment is low, and top cryptos are steadily declining.
I feel like you shouldn't complain about bitcoin if you drive a car or have been on an airplane in the last year. Or if you have received goods manufactured overseas. Or live / work in a building that uses concrete. Or consume beef. Or consume factory farmed food. Or eat fish. Or...
For some reason, I always thought that people (well, mostly jwz) were exaggerating when they said that cryptocurrencies contributed to climate change. But 0.1% of global emissions is an insanely large amount for the value that cryptocurrencies provide.
What are you comparing against when you call it insanely large?
Do you know what is the carbon footprint of choosing an SUV when a compact car would suffice summed over everyone who did that? Frankly, I do not know, but I suspect it is more than 0.1%
I don't wish to improve society. I'm just highlighting people's hypocrisy. No one in the west can complain about climate change. Our entire lifestyle is so wasteful in every way.
> Just to add some numbers: bitcoin is responsible for 0.1% of global carbon emissions, and will decrease (as a %) as CO2 emissions of other sectors grow:
Just so you're aware, the link you've posted is pointing out that Bitcoin could grow from 0.1% to 0.9% of total CO₂ emissions.
Bitcoin may be one of the very few sectors that doesn't have any sort of plan for decreasing CO₂ emissions in the future.
My house protects me. Food feeds me. My iPhone from China does many many things that I find useful. Bitcoin hopefully allows me to accumulate wealth but otherwise adds no value to my life.
Food feeds you, but many people choose to eat food that is wasteful. Your home protects you, but many people live in large homes in climates that require heating and cooling. Your iPhone from China does things you like, which really is what this comes down to. You like iPhones. You don't like Bitcoin. There is nothing more to this argument other than preferences.
Permission-less transactions and wealth storage are an unprecedented technology, people living outside of authoritarian regimes struggle with this concept.
In this case, I'm not trying to impart wisdom. I'm just trying to show what a hypocritical position it is to criticize Bitcoin for being a waste of resources when the entire western lifestyle is predicated on waste. In many ways, it's a form of armchair activism. Like, "Hmm, how could we solve global warming? I know, let's start by banning this thing that doesn't impact me at all, even though my wasteful lifestyle is a much larger contributor to the problem by many orders of magnitude."
Digital money is still a good idea. I don't want to throw it out because current implementations are bad. No doubt, someone will invent a way to make it work. edit: in a sustainable way.
I have the Mozilla foundation in high regard but this decision is nowhere near the quality standards I’d expect from a technology foundation/company. Saying Crypto has a bad eco footprint is outright wrong, sure Bitcoin and ETH and a number of other cryptocurrencies are PoW and therefore energy intensive, but on the other side you have platforms like Cardano and Algorand showing how you can do it much much better!
That Mozilla statement is unjustly labelling a whole sector, they should know better than doing that!
You should reevaluate your opinion of Mozilla then. They did not say crypto has a bad eco footprint. They said they are going to pause accepting cryptos to investigate that question.
I was about to post a similar sentiment but I figured I'd see if someone else is posting about Cardano first. If I understand correctly, the Proof of Stake that Cardano (ADA) uses roughly 1% of the energy that a Proof of Work system does, and can still be secure and cool.
IIRC, didn't Ethereum say about a year ago that they're planning on moving to a Proof of Stake at some point?
Somehow Facebook and Twitter never get a pass on HN using similar reasoning:
"Sure social media can be harmful, but on the other hand there's Mastodon and Jane's Wholesome Baking Forum showing you can do better, so there's nothing to worry about."
Scale matters. Probably 99% of crypto trading takes place on destructive PoW platforms.
Besides paying for your drugs with it, what did crypto brought to this world that is effectively good? As I see it now it's only more fodder for speculators.
Readit News
The amount of money people actually donated or spent with crypto has always been minimal. (Wish I had harder numbers to back this up, but you can see second-order effects from e.g. Steam adding Bitcoin support but then taking it away. Or how Bitpay has stagnated heavily, while a purely investment/speculation platform like Coinbase is worth billions.) However, for a long time, the benefit of accepting Bitcoin as payment was the marketing. Accepting crypto signaled that you were a cool company, you could put out a press release and the news media would run articles about how X service is now accepting cryptocurrency for payments.
The same thing happened again years later with "blockchain." Remember Kodakcoin? Remember Long Island Blockchain? Nothing ever really surfaced from these initiatives, but again, it was all about that big marketing hype that came from saying your company was going to use blockchain for... something.
Where it gets interesting is... what if crypto becomes anathema? What if accepting crypto or holding crypto starts become so closely associated with directly causing climate change, that no company is going to want to be openly associated with crypto, NFTs, etc due to the negative association?
You have one side hyping up Web3 as the next evolution as the web, but if the perception of crypto continues to be that it's a significant contributor to climate change -- regardless of how true that may be -- we could see a major decline in mainstream support.
I'll explain: today our government forbids us from buying foreign currency such as the US dollar (200 tops for a really REALLY small portion of the population) so a black market has been at place since the prohibition started many years ago. In this market each dollar corresponds to 200 pesos while the government states each one costs around 100 pesos.
So, if you work for a company outside, and the pay you 1000 usd, you get 100,000 pesos when you could get 200,000 in reality. Not only that, you also are forbid from buying dollars, so if you want to get them to avoid our rampant inflation (50% average, around 100% for groceries) you only have the black market which is around 200 pesos.
I know about the damages to the cliamte of crypto mining but consider also that there are some beneficial uses of these currencies for people like me who don't live in the first world.
Anyway, yes, non-discriminating electronic money movement is a great product that improves the lives of many people. Blockchains are a very bad implementation of that concept and remove a lot of its potential value. If we are able to get some other one working, it's for the better.
The debt that was imposed on you is inhumane and you shouldn’t have to pay it. The resulting attempts to solve it by selling public infrastructure only makes it worse.
Throwing crypto into the mix is pure insanity. It’s just gambling at a crippling ecological cost.
China already did, what's to stop yours?
Incidentally, your defense of BTC is pretty much "it makes it possible to skirt laws and taxes" which seems to be the elephant in the crypto living room.
Governments do such things to try and paper over economy shortfalls, keeping everything running kinda-less-bad-ish than if they just let it fail and start over.
When you are in this situation where a USD only gets half as many pesos as the free market dictates, that means a peso is only worth half as much as the government is trying to pretend it is, and (this is the point of the currency controls) they are trying to allow only the 50% of most productive usages of USD to go ahead, possibly in the hopes of getting enough USD back into the country that they can get the free market value back up to where they think it should be, and then stop pretending.
Not to mention the energy currently used by traditional financial services and banks.
We are talking about a small small fraction of the worlds energy use. Its virtue signaling by wealthy 1st world people who simply dont get it.
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Also pos is being worked on. It will be an option soon.
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From your lips to God’s ears.
I’ve often wished there were a way to organize against crypto, since the incentives are so high for true believers to organize for it and find more people to buy into the ecosystem.
https://twitter.com/carsonturner/status/1477520574620606465
And I just saw this article on Barron's today which compared BTC to a tech stock rather than a store of value like gold.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/coinbase-marathon-digital-m...
What better way to make something stick then make peoples livelihoods depend on it?
How about we rally to completely ban crypto. Talking about this isn't going to solve anything.
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From my perspective, it's a peaceful revolution against a corrupt global status quo.
The only people hurt by this false perception (bitcoin makes renewables more profitable by acting as a buyer when nobody else will) are people who don't buy bitcoin. And it's their loss.
What would you say to someone in el salvador who's happy accepting bitcoin because they no longer have to trek to ATM's and risk getting mugged?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVVZXUFItZY
I wouldn't be surprised if all of the media attention it gets is mostly because of how much most everyone hates it. It is the thing that tech inclined people love to hate watch.
On HN it certainly gets a lot of hate, but there's not so much in the mainstream right now. I don't think the Lakers would have agreed to a sponsorship where they play in the BP Oil Fracking Arena, for instance.
Bitpay publishes their merchant mix and it's literally all money laundering and crime havens. 45% (!!) Gift Cards. 15% "Internet." 12.25% "VPN." 9% "Computer games." [1]
That's 81.25% the darkest shadiest industries out there.
[1] https://bitpay.com/stats/
At least to me, they look more intriguing than all the older crypto currencies. I always wondered why you would bother with all these inefficiencies for some lofty idea of 'decentralisation' when we have run of the mill consensus algorithms and distributed systems that just work.
There really is a place for a decentralized currency to replace paypal, but none of the cryptos live up to it. In fact I just tried using crypto again a few days ago and it was a terrible experience just like it was 10 years ago. My bitcoin transaction took over 30 minutes to verify so I tried changing to ethereum, and the transaction fee there is $8...
My lightning transfers take 1 second and cost less than 1 penny.
How can the cost of the transfer be less than the cost of the energy it is claimed it uses? I could never figure thst out.
There are two wallets that are using newer tech to make cheap + fast transactions happen (while still being decentralized + secure):
- Argent - Uses zkSync which is an L2 that compresses transactions and writes them to Ethereum - costs about 25c per transaction right now.
- Dharma - Uses Polygon which is it's own chain that posts a hash of everything that happened to Ethereum at regular intervals - costs < 1c per transaction right now .
USDC would make for a suitable candidate but of course, it's got $25 transaction fees on ETH. USDC-SPL maybe. The last time I tried to move some USDC-ETH, it was cheaper and more convenient to just have FTX wire me the money ($0) then wire it from my bank account to the recipient ($0).
In reality though, a CBDC is probably the best way forward.
If you're truly interested in a decentralized currency there are other projects focused on that.
2. Stop accepting crypto because you're green, get another PR bump
Also, I haven't seen Mozilla associated with positive PR for a long time. Much as I love Firefox, it's dead on mobile.
I think this is going to increasingly become true, and I think it may lead to an interesting and divisive future. I suspect that if Ethereum actually does fully transition to Proof of Stake and the network doesn't suffer any serious issues for a year or two afterwards, its price may surpass Bitcoin's in a few years, and decisions to use/trade/hold Bitcoin vs. Ethereum will become exponentially more ethically, politically, culturally, and tribally charged than they are now.
If that turns out to be the case, I also predict Bitcoin will one day move to a different consensus system that consumes less energy - but it may take a decade, several hard forks, and the (metaphorically) bloodiest internet flamewars and in-fights ever seen before it actually happens.
Actually, people wouldn't choose something that doesn't work, just to signal their irrational ethics. Ethereum is not designed to be money, and it has huge array of problems in addition to using weak PoS consensus in the future. It is not properly decentralized, and therefore it can't deliver the promise of money that is equal for all people in the world. In my opinion, it's highly unethical to push Ethereum or other corruptible systems using this environmental narrative.
Most people in Bitcoin, especially big investors, know the difference between these systems, and wouldn't use a PoS currency for any price.
Mark my words, when Ethereum switches to PoS, its price will crash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake
https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1478017698676228099
It basically claims that cryptocoins are "sound money", and that "sound money" is inherently racist. I tried to follow the logic in that thread, and, so far as I can tell, it boils down to something akin to "Hitler was a vegetarian, ergo, vegetarianism is bad".
(but, you'd have to be careful to check the claims and such, and, if you can't or don't have time to check the software yourself, you might have to trust a 3rd party evaluating the system, and possibly there wouldn't be any such organization that you would trust who has done such a check.)
This is how the current wave of “web3” marketing started: everyone in cryptocurrency saw the bad reputation building and, being keenly aware that the only value was what you could find a buyer for, started hawking “web3 and pumping up things like NFTs trying to find new reasons for people to put real money into the system.
I genuinely hope for the environment that other schemes work out, but we’re not there yet.
A single Google Search: 1,080 J
A single Solana transaction: 1,837 J
One eth2 transaction: 126,000 J
Watching an hour of television on a 40 inch+ LCD TV: 540,000 J
https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...
Are you sure? It's easy to send your message anonymously on the Hand, but I (and many others I've met out there in the real world) have zero interest in acquiring cryptocurrency, regardless of price or potential payoff. It seems more like the biggest tulip trading ponzi scheme in history.
I do enjoy the entertainment it's provided me since I first encountered it in 2008.
I'm not even rich... just disinterested in accumulating wealth in such a stupid manner which contributes no tangible benefit back to society.
What? There is no fucking way mining is using anywhere near 50% clean energy.
And using any energy for proof-of-waste is awful. That clean energy could've been used for something productive rather than a hashing lottery.
> on this basis
That's far from the only problem. The bigger problem is that this "technology" only works for crime and does not work as an actual regular currency.
DuckDuckGo claims to be carbon negative, btw:
https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-goes-carbon-negative/
Not good at all and looks mostly a pump and dump scam to me.
The question is when will the party be over for most late comers to the Solana ponzi scheme.
[0] https://cryptobriefing.com/how-decentralized-is-solana/
Depends on the definition of mainstream support.
I think that almost everyone that is vested/pro crypto hasc an interest in showing it here.
Normally opinions here are similar to what tweakers ( a popular dutch site for tech enthusiasts) has.
But with crypto there's a huge difference, eg. https://tweakers.net/nieuws/181606/tesla-stopt-met-bitcoin-a... people dislike crypto there, with mentioned reasons.
Even while the "investing" in crypto topic is pretty active: https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/2056096
https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_topics/129
Note: main site for tech enthusiasts in Belgium+Netherlands. So for 28 million people.
If that happens, I will be 100% sure what's in peoples heads!
So it has nothing to do with any organization encouraging transactions or not.
It wouldn’t stop demand when considering a competing theory that all the transactions are speculation, so nobody is missing anything if one place wont accept donations, or that place using their platform to reverse policy on accepting crypto.
Therein lies a huge part of our societies problems : people base their beliefs on perceptions rather than digging into the truth of the claims they choose to follow. This creates division, strife, and carries huge social costs.
And, if their claim is objectively wrong---i.e., if bitcoin is less harmful to the climate that the legacy monetary system (with its unbridled government spending and profligate international wars---what's the petrodollar system's true cost if we include all the oil tankers, office buildings, Brinks trucks and The US 7th fleet sitting in the Indian Ocean?), then choosing to ignore the truth could actively harm the climate more than choosing the better money.
Profits / Self benefits are the most powerful, natural forces of the world. If you want any positive changes, you should harness them rather than fight it.
You also have the rise of BTCPay Server and lightning.
The only thing that can kill it is legislation.
And even that ain't a silver bullet.
Then somebody should make crypto coin which is exclusively run on renewable energy so it would be considered moral accepting it as donation.
There is no ethical use of proof of work cryptocurrency.
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> Dabble in @dogecoin? HODLing some #Bitcoin & #Ethereum?
> We’re using @BitPay to accept donations in #cryptocurrency
The tweet prompted a strong reaction from Mozilla founder jwz: https://twitter.com/jwz/status/1478022085737803776
> Hi, I'm sure that whoever runs this account has no idea who I am, but I founded @mozilla and I'm here to say fuck you and fuck this. Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters.
If I call Mozilla and offer to donate a million shares of the dirtiest Earth-polluting company, they should take them. Exit the position. Their mission is not to be picky about how legal money arrives.
They're not beholden to any obligations to maximize donations (already a dubious claim, absent evidence that people were actually donating with cryptocurrencies) in manners they consider unacceptable.
Put another way: you wouldn't be surprised if the ASPCA refused donations in the form of shares in PuppyKicker Inc. Mozilla's decision here warrants a similar response.
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If Phillip Morris wanted to become a big donator to the Cochrane collaboration, they would refuse by policy.
Do you think they're wrong, and they should take the money?
edit: For example: "Tesla used to accept Bitcoin as payment, but once Elon Musk realized that it was making him look like a PIPG, he had to reverse course."
Why not just "Planet-Incinerating Grifter," or PIG. Then it also applies to Big Oil executives :)
It has nothing to do with having enough impact (twitter lol) and market analysts to buy very low, announce owning millions of BTC and accepting BTC for Tesla, then selling a month later around peaks. And then doing exactly the same with Doge. Then doing it again in 2021. Oh, yes, the first sentence was about the trading value peak in 2017-2018. Nope, must be a coincidence.
At their core, Ponzi Schemes are investment funds which pay existing investors with funds collected from new investors [1]. There's really no way of looking at cryptocurrency where this is an accurate analysis.
Generally, existing cryptocurrency investors are not "paid" by the "fund" (currency) in any capacity. This is true for BTC & ETH, which represent the bulk of the crypto market.
The more common argument is that anyone can create a new currency, hype it up, drive market value higher, then exit at the expense of new investors. That's a totally legitimate concern, and it happens far too often; but its not a ponzi scheme. The accurate term would be "pump & dump".
There are many shades of gray between a pure pump & dump and something more legitimate. "Hype" (also known as "Marketing") is something every investment vehicle partakes in; from BTC (far beyond the "hype" phase) to DOGE (I'd label that one as "mass insanity") to TSLA (a fraction the revenue of many other auto manufacturers, but significantly higher value? how'd they get there?) to even PFE (this comment is Sponsored by Pfizer [2]). There are obvious examples of this behavior in the crypto community, but its simply not happening among major currencies; taking a pump & dump "scheme" to a billion dollar valuation is exceedingly rare, and there are currently ~90 coins with a market capitalization above $1B.
Where one does see it happening, in my opinion, is with (most) NFTs. Many holders won't admit this, but there's no reality where 99% of them will be worth anything after the initial purchase; their goal is to shill and liquidate. However, I'm cautious in extrapolating this concern to the "technology" of NFTs, and even further to all of crypto; its similar to asserting all of emerging med-tech is a scam because Theranos was. Ultimately, investment vehicles don't need to "make sense" to have marketable value; but that doesn't mean critical thinking is unnecessary when evaluating it.
There are some currencies, including ETH2, which stake and return an APY on investment. This could adequately, though somewhat inaccurately, be interpreted as being "paid out by the fund"; but the reward doesn't come from new investors. Where it comes from depends on the currency, but with ETH2 it is effectively minted from thin air. This is an inflationary action, which could (again, adequately but inaccurately) be interpreted as "taking money from new investors" (by lowering the value of each ETH they purchased). However, this concern is mitigated by the inflationary effect impacting all ETH holders, not just new investors, and the deflationary counter-effect from london hard-fork transaction fee burning.
ETH is currently still inflationary, but only through a delicate balance of PoW-style minting, PoS-style reward issuance, and london fee burning. The zeitgeist in the ETH community right now is to achieve deflation, for better or worse.
The statement that proof-of-stake APY represents "being paid out by the fund" in the context of evaluating cryptocurrency as a ponzi scheme, is very tenuous. Crypto is, at least in the US, not a currency; its a USD denominated investment vehicle. Being given more crypto does not "pay out" your USD investment, any more than a stock DRIP would be a "payout", because there is no "out". It does not allow you to exit the investment; on the contrary, it increases your investment.
Its totally fair to dislike crypto; I'm certainly in that camp. But its critically important to understand the mechanics, engineering, and economics of why its such a harm to society before one begins levying blind criticism.
[1] https://www.investor.gov/protect-your-investments/fraud/type...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uexqgkyFmo
A single Google Search: 1,080 J
A single Solana transaction: 1,837 J
One eth2 transaction: 126,000 J
Watching an hour of television on a 40 inch+ LCD TV: 540,000 J
https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...
1779.11 kWh per single Bitcoin transaction would be
One Bitcoin Edit: Block Mined: 6,404,796,000 J
One Bitcoin Transaction on a Block: 2,287,427 J
One Credit Card Transaction: 5,351 J
Edit: Since the source isn't exactly clear if one transaction is a reference to one block mined or one transaction on that block, I'm going to assume it is for one block mined. I'm going to estimate one block contains 2800 transactions.
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not a fan of cryptocurrency, but I'm also less than impressed with jwz's maturity. If I didn't know he founded Mozilla, I would've taken him for an angry teenage kid trying to be edgy on the internet.
He still maintains XScreensaver, but now his day job is the ownership of a bar/pizza/venue establishment.
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https://brave.com/transparency/
You want to talk about Ponzi? Crypto has nothing on the Fed. The global financial structure is a planet-incinerating Ponzi scheme, so the point of targeting one minuscule subset of it is suspect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
Hey, let me check if he still checks the HN referer and insults us if we follow links from HN to his blog:
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/today-on-sick-sad-world-how...
Edit: Aw, nope, looks like he got rid of it
Project Code Rush - The Beginnings of Netscape / Mozilla Documentary [1]
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
wrong,
the tweet prompted a strong reaction from people, founder jwz then reacted too few days later
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I wonder if someone could fork it and take all the people from Mozilla who are actually contributing to the technical mission (a small group these days!). Brendan Eich would've been perfect for this, but he's got his own browser now and wisely chose to use chromium as the base.
Say what you want about Brendon Eich, but I wish he forked Firefox for Brave. That's the kind of effort that Firefox deserves, because it's by no means a bad browser. Putting aside some relatively minor performance issues (that don't manifest with average use), it's a great browser and I hope it sticks around for the sake of still allowing a good level of ad-blocking and such.
And yes, Firefox pretty much still exists in this form because of Google. That relationship has also accelerated the decline of Mozilla.
Chrome was designed to be "forkable" and put in different wrapper UI. Firefox was at that time battling to get rid of XUL and add a basic sandbox. Then pwn2own decided not to include Firefox in another year hacks because Firefox made no improvements at all in previous 2 years. This hurt me to hear as a long time Firefox user, had to be hurtful to Firefox management and developers too, but that was the fact. Mozilla lost their way in 2010-2017 and can't recover from that, the gap was too wide. Mozilla thought that after defeating IE and Safari they can't lose the market.
Mozilla had an opportunity to make Firefox modular but burnt it with Servo.
https://www.eweek.com/security/pwn2own-hacking-contest-retur...
join us!
(More generally, forking a browser is generally a doomed prospect: even Mozilla and Google struggle to keep up with vulnerabilities and standards churn. Most other forks of Firefox are laughably/irresponsibly stale, and most "forks" of Chrome are really just reskinned Chromium builds.)
But nowadays, not all cryptos are proof of work based. Plenty of major crypto projects are based on proof of stake and offer fully fledged smart contract features to support Web 3 apps. I don't think proof of stake crypto is more energy intensive than the hundreds of thousands of servers and data centers needed for the traditional financial system.
I think a smarter move would be to only accept crypto currency donations from these greener chains.
A currency that's based on energy has been speculated about for decades, such as by Buckminster Fuller, which he called the Kilowatt Dollar: http://roperld.com/science/CurrencySystems.htm
Bitcoin is the first attempt at such a money that might actually work. https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-1053/
If you're curious about the connection between Bitcoin and the energy sector these are worth looking at.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvtGQ-7O1Tw
* https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-energy-use-comp...
* https://youtu.be/b-7dMVcVWgc
* https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-is-humanitarian-...
this is very apt. after exhausting the worlds resources guarding our money from each other maybe we'll reflect that it was money that was the bad idea and bitcoin was just an implementation detail
https://www.lynalden.com/proof-of-stake/
I suggest this analysis because folks tend to state their preference for POS while only mentioning the energy costs as the only factor in their calculation. I do think it worth considering these other tradeoffs as well.
All of the financial systems today may keep a dozen or so copies of a financial transaction for a limited time span. They do so using as cost-effective means as possible (they’re a for-profit business). They also do it under extremely well coordinated economies of scale.
From the get-go any reasonable distributed ledger application (regardless of PoW, PoS, etc) keeps many thousands of copies of that consensus ledger. In the case of Bitcoin it’s roughly 13,000 nodes so at least 1000x as many resources as the centralized financial systems we have today. Oh yeah - and it grows forever. As I’ve noted before if you buy a beer for $3 with Bitcoin there will end up being 13,000 or more records of that transaction FOREVER.
With 10 years since inception and an absolutely tiny transaction volume (compared to say, Visa) a full Ethereum node requires at least 6TB of storage space. Bitcoin is the big one and it has roughly 500K transactions/day. Visa alone has a billion. With any real traction these ledgers will end up at petabyte and exabyte size very quickly. Oh yeah - and you’ll still need tens of thousands of copies. Each of these nodes still needs gigabytes of RAM, fast CPUs, bandwidth, etc in addition to the insane storage requirements.
Note that I’m talking about the distribution and storage of the ledger itself. Mining and PoS have nothing to do with that - these 1000x inefficiencies persist even with PoS.
The nodes themselves are the massive resource and energy issue that are just hiding behind PoW right now.
While most shitcoins and NFTs will tumble, the topcoin rallies are not going to stop until the economy gets roaring back and inflation is controlled.
It's hard for a person to understand a solution when its fortune depends on not understanding it. The Fed just mentioned they might raise rates for a blip on the stock market. Imagine what they do if they actually raise them. Oh, noes, the USD might actually hold some value! How will the economy recover if people's savings aren't stolen?!
HN readers generally understand inflation, but when I see questioning bitcoin's energy cost, I wonder if those questioning it really understand the high costs of manipulating the price system through inflation: that manipulation causes the boom and bust cycles due to malinvestments.
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There are numerous articles every week about the “great resignation” and staffing shortages in foodservice and other industries as everyone leaves for higher paying jobs.
Wages are going up. It’s not the end of the world.
> Most are desperately looking for opportunities to make enough returns.
Stock market has been outpacing inflation just fine. Classic investment advice still holds.
Those “returns” in crypto can only come from selling coins to someone else in the future. It relies on a constant stream of convincing new people to turn over their real money in exchange for virtual money.
> While most shitcoins and NFTs will tumble, the topcoin rallies are not going to stop until the economy gets roaring back
What a weird thing to say when the economy is roaring, unemployment is low, and top cryptos are steadily declining.
Just to add some numbers: bitcoin is responsible for 0.1% of global carbon emissions, and will decrease (as a %) as CO2 emissions of other sectors grow: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/bitcoin-...
Do you know what is the carbon footprint of choosing an SUV when a compact car would suffice summed over everyone who did that? Frankly, I do not know, but I suspect it is more than 0.1%
Just so you're aware, the link you've posted is pointing out that Bitcoin could grow from 0.1% to 0.9% of total CO₂ emissions.
Bitcoin may be one of the very few sectors that doesn't have any sort of plan for decreasing CO₂ emissions in the future.
Doesn’t seem like an appropriate comparison.
Proof of Stake (PoS) is the most popular, but there are others.
That Mozilla statement is unjustly labelling a whole sector, they should know better than doing that!
IIRC, didn't Ethereum say about a year ago that they're planning on moving to a Proof of Stake at some point?
"Sure social media can be harmful, but on the other hand there's Mastodon and Jane's Wholesome Baking Forum showing you can do better, so there's nothing to worry about."
Scale matters. Probably 99% of crypto trading takes place on destructive PoW platforms.
web3 solves the identity and privacy problems web2 created
dApps are actually a boon to open source by offering monetary incentives to create working open source solutions
NFTs are doing the same for art and expression by separating ownership of a piece and access to it