Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
by panarky on Thursday May 20, 2021 @01:20AM
(#27217683)
> Why do HN comment threads always end up as Pedantry Pageants where all ye who dare comment must address all the fucking edge cases
Gold mining isn't a fucking edge case if it uses more energy and produces far more environmental damage.
According to the principle you described, Bitcoin is the edge case we should ignore until we solve the gold mining problem.
Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
by WorldMaker on Thursday May 20, 2021 @12:37PM
(#27223430)
Gold mining isn't even an edge case in that specific example when the class of problem is explicitly defined as "What digital services use too much energy?" as it had been in the above conversation. Is Gold a digital service? No. Is Gold Mining wasteful? Perhaps. (Though again, as an aside, the better question with specific respect to Gold is: Is Copper Mining wasteful? Most gold is mined as a by product of copper mining.)
It's not an edge case of the "electric waste of Digital Services", because it is an entirely different problem. So not only do we have "pedantry pageants" of edge cases, but we get to address the "pedantry pageants" of all the unrelated but seemingly related problems too?
The "other endeavors" category above was "digital endeavours" and specifically "Bitcoin versus Facebook", which is an order of magnitude difference.
You've introduced an entirely different category from the above discussion. It's maybe an interesting category [1] to discuss elsewhere, but is off topic from the fallacy we were discussing. Thanks for the non-sequitur, though.
[1] Personally, I'm not so sure it's a useful counter-comparison to Bitcoin: Gold is used in electronics and other industrial needs, beyond its service as a value store/commodity of interest to collectors. Gold is also increasingly rarely the "primary" focus of mines. Most of our Gold today comes from Copper mines and very few would argue we are mining Copper as a value store/solely for greed.