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A comment on It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency. Parent comment

Re:It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cry... by mettamage on Sunday May 30, 2021 @05:28PM (#27337009)
It’s not on tech people to evaluate business impact or societal impact or economic impact. Sure, tech people could do that but most of our time is spent on designing or implementing software.

Let other people (non-tech or hybrid) comment on the idea. They have time to think about this.

Tech people can only help by explaining in understandable ways how blockchain/cryptocurrencies work. 3Blue1Brown has a good video on it.

Let’s keep the culture of not deriding ideas. We can’t predict human behavior or the future of it. Maybe something beautiful comes out of it, or maybe it accelerates global warming. I trust other disciplines to comment on that.

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Re:It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cry... by mondoveneziano on Sunday May 30, 2021 @05:43PM (#27337140)
Understanding proof-of-work down to the very details, I can make some evaluations based on simple technical properties. For example, Bitcoin can never become "more efficient": If efficiency of computing hashes goes up, difficulty goes up to counteract this, and the energy usage remains the same.

This is different from almost everything else, where advances in technology that increase efficiency are usually a direct benefit.

All this energy goes into what is essentially a lottery for miners. Except for 6 hashes per hour, all of the literally 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 hashes per second get thrown away entirely, not even advancing the same miner, the same ASIC, towards one of the qualifying 6 hashes per hour.

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Re:It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cry... by baby on Sunday May 30, 2021 @09:58PM (#27339165)
You’d be surprised to learn that there are other cryptocurrencies that aren’t based on proof of work.
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Re:It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cry... by zzzeek on Sunday May 30, 2021 @05:34PM (#27337051)
are you seriously advocating for a complete lack of ethical awareness on the part of engineers? Pretty sure Volkswagen engineers went to prison for interfering with emissions software so precedent is kind of not with you here.
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Re:It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cry... by mettamage on Monday May 31, 2021 @01:47AM (#27340603)
Based on the replies, I stand corrected, my bad. I am happy I voiced my opinion, because the replies convinced me that I was off base with my thinking.
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