In 2011 I used bitcoin on the Silk Road and said, "Wow, I can buy drugs online and there are reviews? This is so easy. I hope this is the future." My friend, a shriveled monkey's paw, curled a finger in agreement.
No it's actually (10,000 word essay that explains why it's sophisticated, and making regular currency wastes energy too, even though Bitcoin is wasting more energy than whole nations)
making regular currency wastes energy too
broke: drone striking every libertarian (pedo)
woke: end the commodity form
Bitcoin is wasting more energy than whole nations
Someday I'll have a house with a basement and I'll build a screaming chamber below it for these occasions.
It wastes about as much energy as mining gold. It's equally as stupid as gold. No some small amount of gold being used for actual practical purposes doesn't matter that much.
Yes I will die on that hill.
Well people make pretty jewelry out of gold, even if it's not practical, it's a tangible thing people actually get to use.
Also this is a dumb argument that you only hear to appeal to libertarians because they all have gold bars buried in their yard because they think the federal reserve is going to collapse next week.
This reminded me of my libertarian econ prof who would claim that central planning under socialism was inferior to the free market because "otherwise how do you know it's a bad idea to not build streets out of gold?"
Yeah, I went to a pretty shitty college...
I genuinely should've just become some econ prof or something, you can honestly be the dumbest motherfucker on the planet just saying the most braindead shit that your mouth hole manages to enunciate and there's still people that treat is as anything else but capitalist theology
Like just imagine actually saying this and also thinking this is actually qualifies as a thought to anyone who isn't terminally brain damaged. Fucking rocks man, glad we structure our world around this shit in large parts
The Koch brothers fund a bunch of econ chairs at US universities. It's a good grift.
I'm not anyways, but yeah there is good economics, I'm talking about being like this high priest of capitalist type econ prof who just makes shit up all the time and people pretend it's some grand insight.
Like just coming up with convoluted takes as to how toilets could have existed in the soviet union with no incentive for anyone to make a profit of not shitting on your floor :thonk:
Obviously there would be no roads under socialism. Solid gold train tracks all the way :train-shining:
Cause it would be really difficult and probably wouldn't make for a good road.
Less important, but it's also super annoying because it's making it expensive to build gaming PCs, which was already pretty pricey before
The price inflation of video cards is scary to me. Not because video cards got expensive, but because if it can happen to video cards, it can happen to anything. Any resource could be turned into something that’s worth more as some weird financialized store of value than as a usable thing, and then libertarian nut jobs will drive up the price.
Similar things have happened, but crypto is different. Biofuel turns perfectly good plant material into ethanol in an extremely wasteful fashion, but at least the end result is still somewhat useful. Crypto is like if sacrificing animals to appease the gods came back into fashion, so huge parts of the food supply chain pivoted towards throwing livestock into volcanos.
in related news, they started letting investors trade water futures back in december
:agony-consuming:
And nothing drives up price faster than scarcity. Can't wait to hear about Nestle poisoning half their water supplies to justify tripling the price on the other half.
Well, thank you for yet another terrifying potential future problem to think about friend
Video cards are particularly difficult to manufacture. One factory that produces semiconductors might cost 10B+
We are about to see the clash of giants: cryptobros vs g*mers.
The winners get a RGB lighted wall
computer hardware shortages this year are all due to companies transitioning to WFH, which has lead to an unprecedented massive demand spike across every chip industry because instead of just, you know, sending workers their work computers, rational big brain companies just buy new computers and send them those
cryptohounds play a only a small part (which is no reason to stop ragging on them)
I'm not sure the evidence actually supports the notion that miners are the primary reason for graphics card prices. Linus McTechTits argues that while they've had some effect on prices, the main reason is that the industry mispredicted the effect of the pandemic on demand and spun down supply chains just as demand for consumer electronics in general skyrocketed. He also notes Trump's tariffs on Chinese electronics.
Yeah but we saw a spike back when the mining craze began, pre pandemic. The pandemic dialed it up to 11, but the trouble started a while ago
Lol and apparently SSDs are next to jump in price due to crypto bullshit: https://www.techspot.com/news/89489-chia-crypto-mining-spurs-500-jump-adata-ssd.html
lol i didn't have anywhere else to post this, but yesterday i was doing a job with a family friend who I don't talk to much. Anyways he started out this conversation randomly talking about crypto and said a few neutral things in the start, "it's sorta interesting" "a lot of people seem to think it's the new gold rush" etc... he wasn't fawning over it, so i was trying to gauge where he was going. Then he goes, "you know, the thing with crypto is, it uses a lot of long pause..." and in this moment i almost blurted out, "a fuckton of energy, resources and pollution" and i'm sorta glad i didn't because he finished it by saying "a lot of interesting technology. but this new coin
tetcha(it's called theta) has got to have to coolest tech." then he talked my ear off for a solid 20 minute drive and i was thinking about doing a barrel roll out of the truck on the freeway the rest of the time. god, genX boomers love to talk about shit they know nothing about like it's the second coming of jesus.genX boomers love to talk about shit they know nothing about like it’s the second coming of jesus.
This is Tesla's marketing strategy.
:geordi-yes: lol actually though. mfers hear "auto-pilot" and take it completely at face value and then go hop in the backseat going 65mph over a round-a-bout
genX boomers love to talk about shit they know nothing about like it’s the second coming of jesus
damn TIL I'm a genX boomer
So boomer just means anyone you don't like thats older than you now?
the way boomer gets used, it has become to mean a state mind not an age. But yes, most of the time they are people i don't like too
Really glad our civilized society has allowed us to do away with sacrificing virgins to the moon god every month and instead we make computers do sudokos that kill the planet
I can’t wait until people start buying shit with bitcoins and being mad about ledger fees and how slow it is. Bitcoin really is useless.
Also I assume at some point if it becomes a danger to the money, within a week there will be an attack on Bitcoin that ruins it. Such as a 51% attack or simply attacking major servers.
People abandoned the idea of using most cryptocurrency for everyday payment years ago. The big use cases right now are for ledger payments (think companies settling accounts) and "Decentralized Finance", which is a way for people to take loans and speculate with zero oversight or regulation, or basically for individuals to be margin lenders (lend people money to buy other crypto, stocks, etc.)
Distributed ledger is cool.
The rest is just capitalism approaching self-parody.
I’ve seen this used as a business case but it doesn’t seem like it’d actually be more efficient
No as i understand it they're like contracts but if the legal system didn't enforce them
The only good one I've seen is the digital yuan and that's because it's not cryptographic, is managed by a state run central bank, and is designed to do the opposite of crypto (reveal financial crimes instead of hide them).
I prefer to think of bitcoin as something like the worst path to the AI singularity, but instead of creating some super intelligent computer network, it just tracks ownership of bits
it's like an ego-incentivized death machine
skipping the creation of strong AI to get right to the part where we turn all matter into paperclips
- turn all matter into [ energy sucking network of 'virtual paperclip' factories ]
Also bitcoin has an issue in that miners do transaction validation so one day all the bitcoin will no longer be transferable. As in when the last bitcoin gets mined they will all be locked away.
inventing digital money but giving it the same scarcity as gold... capitalism truly fosters innovation
The scarcity is the entire point. Just randomly giving them out would be silly(er)
well I suppose it makes sense if you are trying to create a speculative commodity to buy and sell, but bitcoin ain't ever replacing fiat money if it isn't unlimited, that's why fiat money is so great
It's barely even a commodity tbh it's a number someone has essentially written down in a tamper resistant book.
someone (i think riley) on trashfuture made the point that crypto is such a waste of energy precisely because they're trying to enforce scarcity on data, something that usually requires an infinitesimal amount of energy to reproduce
An uncertain expiration day. The more they mine the closer it gets. It's like a bad movie where the desire for more in the end was what destroyed it all.
that specifically is a bitcoin issue though there are crypto currencies without THIS issue
Yeah it'll be great. A bunch of people on reddit will lose their entire mind
It will happen if anyone for any reason stops mining. Including logarithmic increases in cost for flat rate of gains
theoretically and in fortnite maybe it is after all a system that is going to have vulnerabilities
That just pushes the can down the road of eventually them getting the last bitcoin. Also the miners if they get to a small enough group could hold the entire system hostage
it's not even good at the "generating money" part anymore unless you got in early or have the computing power of a nation state
Trying to get these SHA256 chips for a hash cracking machine I’m working on but these jackasses trying to make quick cash make it 300x the price
Explain bitcoin mining. No jokey jokes, tell me forreal what happens in the computer's brain when it's "making" a bitcoin
Firstly: bitcoins waste so much energy because they rely on hash functions. A hash function is a function where an input will have a randomized output that cannot be used to determine the input. The same input always has the same output but you cannot tell what the input was based on the output alone. Cryptography shit.
Bitcoins are created when "blocks" are mined. Blocks are new additions to the decentralized ledger, the collective knowledge of where all the bitcoins currently are. Mining is the process of attempting to add a new block to the ledger.
To add a new block to the ledger, the miner needs to find the right pattern of hash, which involves finding the right input via random guessing - recall you can't discover an input from its output.
Once a miner finds the right input, everyone else on the network verifies it and goes "Yeah good work, you get the newly created coins". On top of that, miners control what transactions are included on the block as it's added to the ledger (thereby verifying they happened). They'll always pick the transactions with the highest fees for them since it's additional profit.
So the problems: there's a limited supply of bitcoins. Every new block hands out fewer than the one before it and eventually that goes to zero. So the mining reward gets lower and the miners seek to maintain profit by only selecting transactions with higher transaction fees.
Another problem is that as you keep going it becomes harder and harder to guess the right pattern of hash (e.g. a zero followed by 99 random characters is really easy to find by brute force, but fifty zeroes followed by 50 random chars is really, really, really hard). Bitcoin does this intentionally to prevent the 51% attack (i.e. if one person controls 51% of the network they can just say whatever about the bitcoin supply and force majority agreement).
The combination here is that every bitcoin transacted costs more in fees and wastes more energy every time and takes longer to transact, getting worse every single day as network difficulty goes up.
Okay I'm still not sure I understand fully but I think I'd have to have taken some cs classes in college to understand everything people are telling me here to a satisfying degree.
Encrypted transaction records that you get paid a tiny bit of money for your computer to encrypt other people's stuff, and no one has the key so it's a super inefficient encryption process. That close enough?
cryptography here doesn't refer to anything actually being encrypted, just that both applications share similar mathematical functions. This math youtuber has a thorough but accessible explanation here that you might find useful.
the computer spends that time dreaming of when there are no humans left and machines tend the earth's biome
Bad explanation, but it gets you in the right direction:
- A thousand computers are checking Bitcoin transactions
- The computers all agree on how many transactions will go in a finished "block"
- They also agree on how difficult it should be to finish a block
- While they add transactions to the block, they do a millions of "hashes" in the background. A hash is basically a math problem that returns random digits. As a sidenote it's used as a sort of one-way encryption.
- The difficulty is based on how many zeroes are at the beginning of your hash, first person to find a hash with, say, 12 zeroes at the beginning gets to make the block, which will be verified by all the other bitcoin miners and added to the "blockchain"
- The miner who created the block, gets some Bitcoin added to their account as a prize
it's not arbitrary because it is tangentially related to your capital investment in wasting electricity and specialized compute hardware - see totally merit-based wealth creation or something
oh ya, it's like super dumb brute force math
bitcoin consensus mechanism (proof of work) is like the million monkeys with typewriters, eventually one of the monkeys randomly types the first page of Tale of Two Cities ... and that node gets the block creation reward
this is why 'mining pools' are a huge aspect of the network, so the members agree to split the reward in some way
another analogy that works well is that operating a node is like buying a lotto ticket, and then about every ten minutes the network chooses a winner based on random number drawing (it's a bit more sophisticated, but functionally just barely)
so if you have capital to throw at the network, you can increase your chances of rewards, but it is still just a probability
the funniest part is that there is a low-level concern in the BTC world that over 51% of the network hashing power is in China, which means if those nodes were all pooled together under Xi, China would control the network
So blocks are just records of transactions between accounts? And instead of having a central server processing them, it's just a bunch of computers working in parallel. Why would the computers decide to make a block more difficult to process? Or is it just because the block contains more data?
it's part of the code all the nodes are running, trying to get the block creation time to be ~10 minutes or so. since the 'power' of the network is variable with the number of nodes, the difficulty of creating a block is tuned based on how long it took to create the last one.
I understand all of these words individually :very-smart:
Imma just not worry about it. Bitcoin bad, done, easy.
Updating fern gully for 2020s but instead of the oil guy singing a big band song its a cyber demon and he’s rapping hyperpop about all the gucci and off white clothes he’s anout to buy with Bitcoin
Just because something happens in China doesn't mean it's OK. Similarly to how just because it happens in China it isn't wrong. China doesn't have a morality distortion field
