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A comment on Bitcoin and carbon dioxide emissions: Evidence from daily production decisions. Parent comment

Re:Bitcoin and carbon dioxide emissions: Evidence from daily... by pixelpoet on Friday October 27, 2023 @06:05PM (#38044601)
The shady nature of what often goes on in crypto has a lot more to do with human nature than the technology of trustless distributed ledgers. It's still a wild west out there, and we weren't exactly model citizens during the literal wild west either.

There's no fundamental law that says a technology must be abused, that's human choice.

BTW another choice is Bitcoin choosing to stay with extremely wasteful proof of work consensus mechanism, when proof of stake by all indications seems to work too. Again that's not something fundamentally flawed with crypto, that's people making greedy decisions because they're balls deep invested in it.

I find it extremely disappointing how even the HN crowd struggle to distinguish ubiquitous human greed from the problem crypto solves and its potential uses.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Bitcoin and carbon dioxide emissions: Evidence from daily... by dmbche on Friday October 27, 2023 @07:05PM (#38045122)
But crypto serve no purpose that isn't best served by an existing solution. Feel free to keep writing novels about scams.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Bitcoin and carbon dioxide emissions: Evidence from daily... by pixelpoet on Friday October 27, 2023 @07:17PM (#38045199)
Thanks for proving my point so vividly.

Maybe my hope regarding HN being one of the last places for civilised and nuanced discussion is misplaced, and it sure seems to be changing in recent years.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Bitcoin and carbon dioxide emissions: Evidence from daily... by tfourb on Saturday October 28, 2023 @03:40AM (#38047957)
You still don’t give an obvious use case for cryptocurrencies (beyond the math being interesting). You are right that most technologies are not inherently evil but the same holds for „traditional“ banking including credit. There are plenty of customer-owned banks and there is no reason a transparent, fair and secure alternative to visa couldn’t exist if someone bothered to build it instead of some power hungry crypto scam.
[ Parent | on HN ]