SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The excellent student run newspaper, The Michigan Daily, has an article about the necessity of regulating Bitcoin. "Mining" even a single Bitcoin now burns as much electricity as a family would use during about 50 days.
Local grids physically cannot withstand this outrageous consumption of electricity. In foreign countries — where mining farm clustering is more severe — local governments suspect Bitcoin mining farms as the cause of power outages and complete blackouts. Entire neighborhoods are facing power shortages or complete outages as a result of energy grid strain. So far, the reliance on domestic energy has not had adverse effects, but it is only a matter of time before these blackouts begin to take place in the United States, too.
Despite the fatal externality flaws in Bitcoin mining, the industry is left unchecked in the absence of federal or international regulation on its use. Unfortunately, without restrictions on the amount of mining that can occur, there is no clear plateau to the electricity consumption of these constantly updating hardware systems.
Previously:
(2025) Bitcoin Mining is Making People Sick
(2025) The Guy Who Accidentally Threw Away $700 Million in Bitcoin Wants to Buy the Landfill to Find It
(2024) How A 27-Year-Old Busted The Myth Of Bitcoin's Anonymity
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Monday December 01, @11:45AM (3 children)
Not sure about that. Wealth inequality has driven conflict for all of human history. The lower the inequality, the less conflict we tend to have. And I'm not advocating for communism panacea here, but actually something like 1960s western tax system that killed, or try to kill, generational wealth.
I personally do not care about Musk at all. I care that this resource is actually wasted in future generations instead of "up-cycled" into the economy. It should not be up to the ultra-rich to dictate their whims to us via political influence like they did during Roman Empire. It ended for same reasons: the rich fucked it up trying to hold onto their wealth and their power. By trying to save their influence and their money, they killed the empire.
It's up to society to decide what mega-projects they want to fund. It's not up to the ultra-wealthy. And having *few* example here, like SpaceX, is not really going to sway my thinking. It's bad for individuals to wield billions of dollars around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC [wikipedia.org] is perfect example how things are starting to fall apart and now with AI gaslighting next, well, good luck to us all I guess?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 01, @01:30PM (2 children)
Superficially, in this thread, it would appear that way. We have. for example. you and aafcac ranting about an arbitrary threshold of wealth accumulation. The problem with that though is that there is no reason for that threshold or to expect that to be the last we see of the policy. There aren't conflicts because Musk has hundreds of billions in wealth rather than $100 million. And implementing the policy would just create conflict since now we arbitrarily created winners and losers where there weren't before - with the policy set to rachet down even further.
What resource is being wasted? Consider my example. We had NASA wasting public funds - which we can consider to be a resource, right? - for 50 years and then SpaceX showing us how to launch rockets. That wouldn't have happened if we had been ruthlessly restricting Musk's wealth accumulation to $100 million.
Bullshit. Society is not capable of making those decisions. Proxies are. And here, SpaceX has proven to be about an order of magnitude better at funding its megaprojects than NASA is. And for me, the ultra-wealthy are a more than adequate proxy for society megaprojects.
I disagree of course. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act which was overturned in the above Supreme Court ruling was unconstitutional and bad law. It violated two parts of the First Amendment: the right to free speech and the right to petition the government for redress. Consider that the FEC used that law to block Citizens United from advertising their political movie in the 60 days before the November 2004 election. The law was already being heavily abused right out the gate.
And really, what adverse effects are there? My view is that we need campaign financial by businesses to counterweight both the government and the public. It's an informal separation of powers that has worked well for the US.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Wednesday December 03, @01:28PM (1 child)
Policies like this do not create winners and losers. They only limit the size and influence of the so called winners. Your statement is also premature regarding conflicts -- that one is more for historians to make. But let's say, Musk has left the reality-sphere sometime around 2010-2015.
Society elects representatives that then decide who's the decider for what. So yes, proxies decide. What's wrong with that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX#Funding [wikipedia.org]
So ... most of the funding of SpaceX is *NASA* directly or via other government launch contracts. It has always been *NASA*. Which makes your statement not quite what you wrote. Putting in 10% of the funds, is not self-funding it. Also, there were others in this race, like Armadillo Aerospace but well...
The problem NASA has with large programs is actually its oversight that decides technical details and forces them onto NASA for political reasons. That is the only reason why outsourcing this part to others like SpaceX is a big win. I'm looking at SLS, Space Shuttle and others.
You see, laws do not exist in vacuums. Most exist to reduce harm, as in the case above. You would notice that it's very common in most of the democratic world to block "free speech", ie. sock puppets, from flooding bullshit and allow some sort of civil debate in a run-up to elections. Yes, it's blocking "free speech". But sometimes blocking certain "free speed" is beneficial, like yelling "bomb" randomly or have politically motivated movie/advert/show/etc. outside of campaign financing caps, is beneficial.
Maybe you have not noticed, but in places like Canada or Germany, there are not so many political advertisements. These places are not flooded with them. There's sanity at election time, or months prior.
If you can have laws that prevent pranksters yelling "bomb" in a theater or whatever, you can have laws that limit campaign advertisements. And blocking a movie for few months because of such laws is tiny price to pay for sanity. But you know, each their own.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 04, @02:20AM
If you have more than $100 million in taxable assets right now, you would be a loser.
They aren't the only way nor should be.
Three things to note. This was a snap shot at a particular time. It doesn't accurately reflect the early development of Falcon 1 (which didn't get a lot of government funding) nor the much later efforts with a large private sector customer base where private sources ended up somewhat larger funding contributors than government sources. It's basically a point of maximal government involvement.
Nor does it distinguish between funding for services rendered and funding for development. The Space Launch System is pure funding for development, not a single service or serious expectation delivered. While most of SpaceX's funding was for launching NASA (and other US government) spacecraft - often cheaper than anyone else in the world.
Finally, NASA spends something like $20 billion a year over a 10 year period. Here, it managed to spend only $300-400 million on the game changing Falcon 9? Imagine if it could have spent the rest of the roughly $200 billion as well!
Or have laws that ban speech I don't like. The field is wide open now that we've found a completely irrelevant loophole!