If you want to listen to someone interesting who isn't just performing mental cartwheels to defend the indefensible, listen to Boaz Sobrado, Mario Gibney from Ledn, Lily Francus, Josh Cincinnati, etc.
Lyn is just rewarmed long-form talking points from r/Bitcoin presented uncritically. There’s interesting people in the space but Lyn is more of a millennial William DeVane shilling gold on Fox at 2am with a substack.
"What's to say? Lyn is a zealot and will go to any lengths to justify her positions. She's clearly intelligent and completely uninterested in objectivity. She's like if Saylor were intelligent."
You found my criticisms insufficient, so I gave you a long-form version along with a list of folks who actually do have something interesting to say in the space. Then it was too verbose.
I suppose there’s no pleasing some folks huh.
Yes, I literally said that. Glad we are in agreement.
> Lyn is a zealot and a shill, and her arguments on basically any topic are trivially wrong.
Yes, trust the guy on HN who is consistently negative about crypto about who to listen to. Sorry, but when people are so adamantly negative about something, I tend to run towards it because it often has a lot of interesting value. You have chosen the 'Chief Censor 451' role in life.
I didn't tell you who to read, I suggested you dug around and found someone else who isn't a zealot and a shill. There's good authors out there, this isn't one. I follow a number of pro-crypto authors too, ones who I disagree with but respect. They're out there.
Lyn is in my opinion only slightly above Pomp (who I know has retired to spend more time with his fiat) and Saylor (who was promoted to customer).
Early generations of tech might not be the best, but you have to start somewhere and iterate to a better future.
Given that energy use of Bitcoin is literally written into the protocol to decrease over a long period of time, I don't see the big deal of expending energy to get there. Ideally it produces methods of better power distribution, encourages the use of green energy, etc...
> Early generations of tech might not be the best, but you have to start somewhere and iterate to a better future.
Bitcoin is the most obstinate to change on purely ideological grounds. It hasn't materially changed in almost a decade except to move the deck chairs around. This is the time at which one would expect the most change and yet Bitcoin changes the least out of all its peers. This is an intentional decision by both the community and the core team.
Adding green energy simply to waste guessing random numbers instead of decarbonizing the grid just adds to the e-waste Bitcoin is responsible for. Power distribution is a solved problem (only 5% of power is wasted in distribution in the US) - the issue is just NIMBYs refusing to put transmission infrastructure down. Bitcoin does not fix this.
Oh come on, don't be absurd. Bitcoin is not setting oil fields on fire any more than the power usage of the whole internet has. How about games? That's pretty pointless expenditure of electricity... but you aren't screaming at the rooftops over that. This is seriously a case of old man yells at cloud meme.
> Bitcoin is the most obstinate to change on purely ideological grounds.
That's fine. ETH exists. It could mean that ETH wins in the end. Who knows.
> Adding green energy simply to waste guessing random numbers instead of decarbonizing the grid just adds to the e-waste Bitcoin is responsible for.
Blah blah blah... just as absurd as the above statement. Try a different trope, please.
I'm sorry you're trying to defend the indefensible: kilotons of e-waste per year and the energy consumption of a small country to achieve the work of a Raspberry Pi.
97% of all bitcoin mining ASICs will never mine a single block. Ever. Just straight from factory to landfill with a long sojourn warming up the planet.
Everything beyond those facts are mental gymanastics.
You stopped reading because you don't like what they had to say. Even mining groups who are incentivized to provide the rosiest picture are within the ballpark.
Current hash rate is 245.32M TH/s. An AntMiner S19 Pro consumes 29.7 J/TH, so assuming they're all S19s (a big if) we'd be consuming 7226MJ/s or 2007.5kWh/s. That's 64TWh/yr.
So your absolute best case is 1/2 of the Cambridge number. Which is exactly what they list as the "minimum" number.
As soon as we start factoring in things inefficiency and losses along the way - and the fact not everyone has an S19 Pro - we start to get closer and closer to that flagship number.
But let's make no mistake - even the minimum number is a staggering, mind-boggling disaster of unprecedented scale.
> At the end of the day, read this: https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/
Lyn is a zealot and a shill, and her arguments on basically any topic are trivially wrong. I would strongly recommend against trusting anything on that blog and instead look for different sources.