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posted by
janrinok
on Wednesday June 27 2018, @12:22AM
from the my-bubble-is-bigger-than-yours dept.
from the my-bubble-is-bigger-than-yours dept.
As reported in the Evening Standard, the Bank of International Settlements published an annual report with four criteria to continue economic growth. However, it was rather overshadowed by a statement in the appendix (reported here, here, here, here, here and elsewhere) where cryptographic currency was described as a "combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster".
I agree and so does a Canadian electricity company.
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Bank of International Settlements: Bitcoin is a Bubble, a Ponzi Scheme and an Environmental Disaster
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There will be big changes for you but you will be happy.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 27 2018, @12:36PM (7 children)
The simple solution is to simply fix the system so that transaction costs aren't so high. Bitcoin developers already have massive incentive to do that due to the present high costs of transactions.
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 27 2018, @01:00PM (3 children)
If you think that spending as much electricity as Austria and Iceland combined is "o.k." for entertainment, then sure, we haven't had the disaster yet.
If a super-hero story "rift to another dimension" opened up outside Berlin and our crack scientists had to devote that much electrical power to keeping it from destroying the world, people would be screaming bloody murder about the disaster, how many billions of tons of CO2 are being released into the atmosphere to keep it from growing, etc.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 27 2018, @02:32PM
Have you done any research or do you just blindly consume what the media tells you? It costs about 5 kWh per GB, a movie is about 3 GB and lasts about an hr[1], so assume a streaming rate of ~3 gb/hr. One billion hours of content is streamed per week just on netflix. [2]
Here is another one claiming 24 million TB streamed by netflix in 4 months[3]:
Its claimed bitcoin mining uses ~ 71 TWh/yr [4], which is ~1/10th of that used for entertainment via netflix alone. Netflix is about 40% of total streaming viewership [4], so the total is going to be ~ 1200-2000 TWh/year. And that is just entertainment via streaming.
[1] https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-000409.pdf [aceee.org]
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/11/netflix-users-collectively-watched-1-billion-hours-of-content-per-week-in-2017/ [techcrunch.com]
[3] https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/netflix-streamed-over-24021900-terabytes-of-data-in-the-4th-quarter-of-2014/ [cordcuttersnews.com]
[4] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [digiconomist.net]
[5] https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/05/u-s-cord-cutters-watch-more-netflix-than-amazon-video-hulu-and-youtube-combined/ [techcrunch.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 28 2018, @04:13AM (1 child)
As has been noted, entertainment consumes a lot more than that - which indicates the importance of entertainment.
Well, I wouldn't be one of those people complaining about the mild side effects of saving the world.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 28 2018, @11:45AM
At the moment, Cryptocurrencies appear to be consuming perhaps one order of magnitude less energy than streaming video entertainment... but the prime difference I see there is: streaming video entertainment has more or less reached market saturation, whereas cryptocurrency transactions are 5+ orders of magnitude short of current financial transactional volumes.
There's also the "comparable alternative" view, where people sitting home streaming video are, on average, consuming less energy / emitting less CO2 than they would otherwise be if they were, for example, driving motorcars into the city for a night on the town. Here again, POW cryptocurrencies falls many orders of magnitude on the undesirable side of "comparable alternative" forms of transaction processing.
In 2013, it was a trivial thing, experimental, investigational, interesting, worth exploring. At this point it needs serious examination before it grows another order of magnitude larger, and if past performance is any indication of future growth, that might not take more than a year or two.
Freedom of choice: yes. Freedom to suffocate the biosphere because people enjoy speculation/gambling? A line needs to be drawn.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 27 2018, @01:11PM (2 children)
What the hell are you talking about [politico.com]? Maybe you're a fan of the technology, but that doesn't justify trying to hand-waive away the amount of energy it takes and sweep it under a magic "secondary transaction" carpet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 27 2018, @02:33PM
Proper secondary markets won't happen with buttcoin because of the lack of trust in the sender not to double spend, and the inability to make change.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 28 2018, @04:23AM
What does justify it is that energy is incredibly cheap and plentiful and we have better things to do with that energy than conserve it. I really don't care that Bitcoin consumes as much as a few small countries. If energy were truly a thing of great expense and/or value, bitcoin miners would consume less of it.
Second, the secondary markets are not magic. They're just facets of the bitcoin system that have been around almost as long as Bitcoin has.