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Most of mined Gold is used as an investment vehicle or to make jewelry.

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...

Gold mining consumes 240.61 TWh per year, which is comparable to the electrical energy consumed by a country like Australia.

Source: https://globalenergyprize.org/en/2021/11/24/the-bitcoin-gold...

What does it take to register a new TLD?

If I meant COVID I'd say COVID. When I say flu I mean flu.

Why should spreading "flu" not be considered violence? Not deadly enough? Then who is going to decide where is the line drawn?

The libertarian answer to protecting yourself from viruses is private discrimination, not redefining NAP however you see fit.

NAP is about physical violence. The problem with your way of thinking is that it lets you interpret whatever you feel like as "violence".

Should infecting others with a flu also be considered violence? What about blasphemy? What about just being mean?

People have very varying opinions on whether spreading COVID should be considered violence, hence contractual jurisdictions.

No, NAP is pretty clear. It's just some people treat it as a silver bullet, when it's only a fundamental building block. Libertarians are not against having contractual jurisdictions which would mandate being vaccinated on a certain territory, as long as you can quit that jurisdiction at any time.

It's not clear that getting vaccinated would stop you from spreading the virus though.

Violating NAP requires taking some action, you can't just "aggress" by not doing anything.

Going over your main points:

1. Payment for LN per "hop" costs about 1 sat. It's hilariously small, so no, it doesn't disencentivize anyone from using it. And best of all, the privacy doesn't depend on large anonymity sets, so you don't need everyone to use large multi hop payments to make yours private.

2. There are plenty of no KYC exchanges and there is Monero, if you care about privacy so much. I'm okay with law enforcement tracking down my transactions and requesting info from exchanges though. What I'm not okay is when I trust my CC info to companies (because there is no other option) and then that data gets leaked. Wouldn't have happened if I used crypto and all they got was some wallet address with inflows from an exchange.

3. Number of active Steam users is 120 million [0]. Number of Bitcoin owners is 106 million and total number of crypto owners is estimated to be 300+ million. 5% of Europeans own Bitcoins. [1]. Looks comparable to me.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/308330/number-stream-use...

[1] https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/cryptocurrency-statistic...

Transactions on LN are almost as secure as regular transactions onchain. There is no centralized party involved that you have to trust, to use LN. The funds just get locked on a multisig UTXO and can be unlocked at any moment by broadcasting an onchain transaction. This is more than enough, considering that LN is only needed for small purchases.

The privacy is also better with LN, since nobody but the recipient of the funds knows that you sent them money - LN routing is similar to onion routing that is used in TOR. The node that you are connected to, knows that you're sending money, but doesn't know the recipient. The last but one node knows who is the recipient but doesn't know the sender.

Despite the public ledger, I find blockchain much better for privacy than having to trust my credit card details with actual PII to various companies.

>And maybe that is subjectively valuable to you, but it's not serving as a currency for most people, and maybe it's not good for a tiny subgroup to argue that their interests should be given equal resource budgets to activities that are accessible and useful to the majority of the world?

I don't think that it matters, but it's not a tiny subgroup of people anymore. I think it would even be comparable to the amount of PC gamers worldwide.

The fact is that crypto miners are paying for the energy that they are consuming on the free market, but for some reason, they are criticized for that, unlike other industries.

Gold is quite similar to crypto. It is used as a financial asset (Bitcoin) and as a luxury item (NFTs) which makes up most of the usage of Gold. Gold mining also consumes much more energy than Bitcoin mining, but nobody seems to be upset about it or really care.

Same goes for various entertainment industries, including videogames. Does anyone care that gamers consume X amount of energy for their entertainment? No, because that's not what people normally do. But when it comes to crypto, it's all double standards.

Bitcoin is a decentralized monetary system. Nobody controls it, nobody can print new bitcoins out of thin air, nobody can confiscate your bitcoins as they could from a bank account. The fees are quite low, considering that you can securely transact hundreds of millions of dollars of value for the cost of about $1.

And I don't understand how does LN centralize the chain. Who gets more control and what exactly can they do with that control? Can they print more bitcoin? Can they seize funds? Can they censor your transactions? No.

>Far from being a general-purpose asset, NFTs commonly have double-digit transaction fees to work with or mint, making them unsuitable for the vast majority of artists who are interested in them

So they are beneficial only to a subset of artists, not all of them. I can live with that.

upd:

>There isn't really a version of this world where coins become tremendously valuable or renewable electricity becomes cheap and widely available, and we don't have any new miners entering the system. In fact, quite the opposite, the system relies on that not happening -- if electricity and GPUs get too cheap, the network has to scale or it becomes vulnerable to attacks from rich actors.

This can be said about any industry that has to consume energy to create profit. All the actors compete for energy and try to outbid each other, eventually finding an equilibrium. The solution is to get more energy, so that there is enough both for mining and for videogames.

>If proof-of-work chains are putting out the same amount of energy as the total energy expenditure of gaming, then proof-of-work chains are not an environmentally feasible solution at scale.

Chain capacity does not scale as new miners are added. Bitcoin/Ethereum does not consume more energy as more people use it.

>Looking at total energy expenditure and ignoring the actual amount of usage that energy expenditure allows is just a flawed way of thinking about these comparisons.

Not really, you're trying to include subjective value into the simple issue of wasting energy. From my point of view, videogames are less important than having a decentralized monetary system. Now what?

Energy usage of ETH would've been exactly the same whether those artists or anyone else created NFTs.

So the comparison with gaming is not really correct. Playing PS5 consumes energy in a direct way. Creating an ETH transaction doesn't consume much more energy than vising a website.

I was not talking about better or worse, I was pointing out the flawed way to compare crypto mining energy usage with other industries.

>In which case... yeah, a person who's invested into video games is unquestionably doing something better for the environment than someone who's invested into NFTs on a proof-of-work chain, because the person playing video games has the ability to turn their console off when they stop playing.

The issue is energy consumption, not the moral feel goods of the gamer. It doesn't matter if you can turn off the gaming console if all the consoles as a whole consume more energy than mining.

Transactions don't consume energy. If everyone suddenly stopped making transactions, miners would still be there, running their machines to mine empty blocks.

So thinking in terms of "energy per transaction" is wrong, you should look at total consumed energy by mining industry as a whole and compare it to other industries energy usage also as a whole.

What do you mean by "social consensus chain"?

Any UTXO that you create now, when the mining difficulty is quite high, is going to have a very high security, even if the mining difficulty goes down afterwards.

That's like saying that cab drivers are incentivized to maximize their gas consumption.

No, miners are actually incentivized to minimize their energy consumption while maximizing output.

I think if the value drops then the security requirements would also drop. And all the existing UTXO's that were already mined when the difficulty was high would also stay secure, so they'd be comparable to Gold bars that could be stored for thousands of years without spending any energy.

The abstract reads more like some emotional comment on social media rather than part of a scientific paper.

Blockchain itself cannot be carbon negative or neutral. Miners choose what energy source they use for mining, which can be anything from fossil fuels to geothermal energy from volcanoes.

That's not really fair, software security is better than ever.

My criteria for forced labor is being criminally charged for refusing to work.

People in USSR were kept inside against their will and were used as a forced labor. They absolutely earned their wealth, not the nomenklatura.

The APR is paid in the coin itself, not dollars, so they just inflate the supply to pay the "yield".

If the value of Bitcoin stops going up, sooner or later your debt grows larger than the amount you were allowed to borrow and your collateral gets liquidated by someone who implemented the fastest liquidator bot.

https://docs.aave.com/developers/guides/liquidations

This is the actual issue with DeFi's "decentralization", not what the article talks about.

Bitcoin remains the only decentralized cryptocurrency that keeps living without governance.

If you believe that the value of Bitcoin is going to go up, it makes sense to lock is as a collateral and spend the borrowed fiat instead of selling the Bitcoins.