• Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

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

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

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

        • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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          9 months ago

          >it’s been in steady decline since the meme blew up.

          it got a pretty big bump from elon a couple years back, but dogecoin is nearly perfect money. it isn’t deflationary, it’s cheap to transact, and the on-ramps are ubiquitous.

        • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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          9 months ago

          the entire Bitcoin block chain could be run on the phone I’m using to write this. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.

          and dogecoin merge mines with all the other script coins so how can you even calculate its independent usage?

          • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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            9 months ago

            there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates such massive power use.

            Yes there is, massive power use is the entire point of proof-of-work. If Bitcoin blocks could be produced without massive power use then the blockchain’s system of validation would fail and 51% attacks would be trivial.

            • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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              9 months ago

              the hash rate for the first blocks was achievable with a pentium 3. the protocol functioned then. there is nothing inherent to the protocol that dictates more hashpower is used. a 51% attack is the protocol functioning properly.

              • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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                9 months ago

                That’s because there were just a handful of people mining the first blocks and there was no demand, so the price was basically zero.

                The protocol is meant to promote decentralization, so I have no idea how a 51% attack would be an example of the protocol functioning properly. A 51% attack is a demonstration that the protocol is controlled by a single entity.

              • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                then there’s no reason to believe they got it wrong.

                also they’re vague estimates, even bitcoin has a huge margin for error.

                • HACKthePRISONS@kolektiva.social
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                  9 months ago

                  there is every reason to not believe them. they clearly have a motivation to paint power consumption as worse than is true, and the complexity of extracting the use of dogecoin mining from the rest of the mergedmine is, personally, unfathomable. maybe i’m dumb and there is a simple calculation that can be done, but without evidence of their methodology, i’m not going to believe them, and no one should.

    • SuckMyWang@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Isn’t it strange no one gave a shit about this a year and a half ago when the price was lower? It appears everyone’s concern for the environment and energy consumption only increases when the price goes up. Interesting correlation or may be causation.

      • Nilz@sopuli.xyz
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        9 months ago

        Everyone already gave a shit about this a long time ago. It’s also one of the reasons Ethereum switched from proof of work to proof of stake.

        • SuckMyWang@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Yes but only when the price was high did anyone care and ethereum switch. Barely a peep for the last 2 and a half years

      • fidodo@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I’ve been hearing about the stupid amount of energy usage for years and years. You just created a straw man that isn’t based on reality.

        • SuckMyWang@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I’ve been keeping a close eye on the news about crypto and there has been virtually no stories about any crypto for the last 2 years, prior to that when the price was high there were a lot of stories about it which is my point. They only started to come back into circulation about 6 months ago. If you remember otherwise you are wrong.

    • Jeknilah@monero.town
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      9 months ago

      Proof of stake work is one of the reasons why bitcoin is so valuable in the first place. I’ve seen estimates that the electricity costs combined with the equipment cost makes each bitcoin approximately $20k to mine. Not a bad thing. Anyways, energy is somewhat artificially scarce- can always just pump up more oil out of the ground.

      • Skua@kbin.social
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        9 months ago

        can always just pump up more oil out of the ground.

        No, this is actually exactly the fucking problem

        • Jeknilah@monero.town
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          9 months ago

          No it’s not? The fact that the energy supply can adjust to demand is a good thing rather than a problem. At least in the US. Looked into it, and it seems that there’s an estimated to be over 300 billion barrels of recoverable oil that is mostly economically viable. Compare that to a current annual consumption of 7 billion barrels a year. There’s enough to maintain current consumption for another 40 years. That is most of my remaining lifetime from domestic production alone.

          • Skua@kbin.social
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            9 months ago

            I have some bad news for you about the environmental effects of burning lots of oil

            • nadir@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              They’re a crypto bro. They probably think they’ll live on a swimming libertarian island by then.

          • matjoeman@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            As long as there’s enough for your remaining lifetime that’s fine. We don’t have to worry about anyone else’s lifetime after that.

            • Jeknilah@monero.town
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              9 months ago

              You really only have to seriously worry if you’re a parent responsible for new people. Sound like you? It doesn’t sound like me.

              Here’s something I saved from Reddit a while back; it’s a bit cynical, but worth keeping in mind nonetheless.

              It’s been a strange realization to slowly understand that a lot of our parents and grandparents hate us. They don’t hate us by name, mind you. The tell us they love us and they’re even empathetic to us to a degree. But if you removed the familial relationship–if you told your parents or grandparents your exact life story but with a different name and from a different family, they’d hate that person before you got through the first sentence. They’d break out all the cliches–bootstraps, lazy millennial, entitled, all the classics. Their empathy and love is purely genealogical, an expectation placed upon them under threat of social stigmas against being a “bad parent,” which they may well abandon too if that particular tradition is broken by some political figure famous enough and depraved enough to normalize it.

              Collectively, the young who will outlive you are but labor and taxpayers. Caring about anyone else’s lifetime past your death largely doesn’t exist past kin and close friends.

                • Jeknilah@monero.town
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                  9 months ago

                  Not really. You still don’t know much.

                  Anyways, having the wrong opinion and looking stupid by “telling on myself” here barely affects me at all.

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        You mean proof of work? And I disagree, Ethereum moved from PoW to PoS and gained market cap since then. The high costs are just a consequence of the consensus mechanism in use.

      • adrian783@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        bitcoin has got to be invented by an alien or something so that we would terraform for them…

        • Alex@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Probably just a fool thinking free fusion energy was just around the corner

          • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            9 months ago

            It’s more that it was originally a theoretical white paper meant to present a potential solution for a very specific problem space. Energy use wasn’t a consideration in the design, because that wasn’t part of what it was meant to address. Likewise, anonymity in the sense of hiding transactions wasn’t part of the design either, besides avoiding centralized banking’s requirement that every “wallet” is associated with a government ID.

            It was a fun toy meant as a proof of concept solution to centralized banking.

            Eventually market speculators saw what the nerds were getting up to, got some ideas, and everything freaking exploded. It wasn’t meant to drive speculative markets.