The energy comment is so naive. Move to renewable nuclear and who cares. Most people that complain can't even calc the marginal increase in net energy usage for their country.
2) Reddit arguably produces value by facilitating information exchange and dialog. (The quality of that value varies highly by community and it's fair to argue about whether Reddit as a whole is a net negative or net positive.)
3) Bitcoin produces nothing. It's a place for rich people to gamble, and for poorer people to get screwed trying to gamble. If people want to gamble, they can play poker and it costs zero energy.
We need to stop pretending energy is limitless. It's not. And we need to start factoring that in to our decisions about what technologies/businesses/activities are affordable/worthwhile and what aren't.
Human ingenuity applied to the abundant energy available from both short and long term effects of the sun give me great hope. The barrier is basically politics.
Energy is limited and production of energy has costs and side effects. Sure, over time we can increase our production of energy, but again - with costs and side effects depending on how we choose to do it. And at any point in time our access to energy is limited and we need to make choices about how that access is distributed.
Right now we use markets to do that. But we've clearly seen that markets, with out intentional, ethical and moral guidance will often make insane choices.
And note, I say this as someone who believes post-scarcity (with in wise limits) for many of the basics is more or less with in our technological reach. IE. We can reach a point of post-scarcity for food, housing, clothing, energy where everyone has what they need and a good chunk of what they want as long as we don't let anyone hoard and insane amount of these resources or burn them away in frivilous uses.
Beyond that, I'm not sure.
Yes. Entertainment value aside, it's a place for some remarkably useful discussions on niche topics.
> Move to renewable nuclear and who cares.
Renewable Nuclear? I haven't heard of that. If you mean renewables and nuclear, aside from the fact that it requires real money and a lot of time to do - there's still an absurd amount of energy being wasted for a single transaction. Recording transactions is a well explored space, and requiring energy on the same magnitude as homes or countries to do so is absurd.
And the cost to our climate is absurdly higher than the individual $2-3 with all the previously closed coal plants being spun back up to facilitate all the transactions.
Maybe you would be supportive of environmental parity tariffs to price the environmental problems created by manufacturing in locations which spew pollution. A few dollars extra on price of an iPhone or solar panels could even become a status symbol.
Who cares? Any society which could use that energy to actually produce some value instead of cracking a hash. Wasted energy is just that, wasted.
The "network" is still useless, it still creates no value and it still consumes energy that could be used to actually create something valuable instead.
>renewable nuclear
Was that a misprint or intentional? That's a real question. I've never heard nuclear be referred to as renewable. That's an interesting take.
If your argument is “it’s a waste because we’re destroying the environment for no gain” all entertainment falls in that bucket as well.
I'm not, but yes theoretically they could track me down. Practically they're not going to expend the effort to prosecute some nobody buying personal quantities of recreational drugs.
that should tell you enough about that form of argument