"Convincing people to buy homes" is literally an example of misallocation of capital, in the sense that monetary policy is meant to be an intervention in a free market.
The 2% inflation target is for price inflation (the cost of a basket of goods), not monetary inflation (the amount of money). Only monetary inflation is needed to support a growing population, so this does not explain having a target of price inflation.
And the law of unintended consequences gives a huge unintended consequence here.... Rather than worker harder forever, which people really want to try to avoid, things other than money will be used as a store of value, since money is by definition leaking value. Housing, stocks, gold, crypto, etc.
Spam Blocking = you can't say X more than Y (>> 1) times
While technically censorship, there is a big difference, I think. Obviously in practice spam blocking could maliciously or accidentally be used for censorship.
Why would Y==1 for email spam? In spam, the same message is sent many times. Entropy to try to make spam messages different is generally merely meant to. circumvent spam blockers.
Spam is not illegal. Blocking non-illegal speech is censorship. End of story. There is no argument around this. Any conditions you place on it are arbitrary and are just you saying certain things are acceptable and others are not -- which is the definition of censorship.
Genuinely trying to understand your beliefs here. When you say "Any conditions you place on it are arbitrary" does that also apply to the laws around speech themselves? For example if spam was made illegal, would it then (according to you) not be censorship to block spam?
My belief is that illegal speech is also still a form of censorship, just one that we are OK with. And that spam is more like a denial of service attack. Blocking spam is not about blocking the expression of an idea, but making sure that a communication channel is not abused as to make the channel ineffective.
I am making a point that people who decry 'free speech / no censorship' have not thought it through to its logical conclusion. By telling a private entity such as twitter to 'remove all forms of censorship' then you are asking them to open the floodgates to every form of non-illegal speech. (I note illegal for obvious reasons because you have no discretion on removing illegal speech such as CSAM, you are obligated to do it).
'Remove all censorship' means not just 'free speech I want other people to have to deal with regardless of context' but also 'free speech that annoys the fuck out of me regardless of context', which very much includes spam.
By 'any conditions you place on it are arbitrary' I am referring specifically to 'if y is greater than x then spam else not spam'. That is arbitrary; you made that up. There is no 'if repeated more than once' appended to the end of "to suppress or delete as objectionable" in merriam webster under 'censor'. If you make up a rule to suite your convenience it is arbitrary.
Got it. I agree my proposed rule is arbitrary. I also think twitter must have some form of spam prevention-- any kind of API rate limit would be by your definition be censorship also. I think you might be assuming I think twitter could or should strive to be censorship free, I don't think this is desirable or possible.
Fine, I disagree but even if I were to concede surely there’s a better solution we can think of than looking up a big resistor.
The question is how much so called stranded power is there, what percent of Bitcoin energy usage does this account for and is there really nothing useful we could do with it? Finally with “stranded coal” is it better to just not use it?
This is just a talking point used to distract from the actual issues. In reality the percentage of renewables wasted on bitcoin mining is at an all time low. The question at issue was whether all this is carbon neutral, and no, it’s definitely not.
The original comment that bitcoin is carbon negative is ridiculous, I agree. But you are posting empty/wrong rebuttals as well.
In the case of flare gas, it is a byproduct of gathering oil that is unavoidable. The oil is economically worth collecting, but the extra gas is not. I think this can be more finely split into natural gas vs methane-- sometimes the natural gas is worth collecting, but the methane never is.
You could argue that there should be laws to force the methane to be collected and used elsewhere as a condition of accessing the oil. That might be overall better. But prior to bitcoin, that perfect solution was not really implemented. In this sense, bitcoin mining of flare gas is a step forward.
Note that the argument is not just that economic value is created by mining bitcoin, but that running the gas through a generator leads to cleaner combustion and thus less greenhouse gas emission than simply lighting the gas on fire. In this sense, the bitcoin flare gas mining operation by itself could be considered carbon negative (again, surely all bitcoin mining is not). The bitcoin mining pays for the generator. So bitcoin mining is giving the industry a subsidy that enables reduction of environmental harm. It is not perfect, but it is an improvement.
> But prior to bitcoin, that perfect solution was not really implemented. In this sense, bitcoin mining of flare gas is a step forward.
Prior to bitcoin they flared it - or didn't. Now there's an economic incentive not to find another solution. Now the oil and gas companies are incentivized to prevent that better solution because there's something in it for them not to. So we make it harder to solve 100% of the problem because this gets us 5% of the way there and pays us not to.
Cool, so you moved the goal posts from saying "there is no such thing as stranded energy", to saying "yes, bitcoin is reducing the environmental impact of flare gas burning, but we should be doing something else instead (no concrete ideas) that can solve this problem even better". I have explained to you how bitcoin can have a net positive impact on the environment, given existing practices. You now say that since this is not a perfect solution, we should go back to harming the environment more, presumably since you have already made up your mind that bitcoin is evil?
> 97% of all Bitcoin mining hardware will never successfully produce a single block in its entire useful life, going from factory, to space heater, to garbage can
This is a really disengenuous point. Mining works probabilistically, and mining pools payout based on smaller units of work that probably have some probability of finding a block for the pool. The fact that a block itself is a large parcel does not make the system less efficient.
The point is a centralized equivalent of bitcoin could run on a raspberry pi. Heck a proof of stake bitcoin could run on a raspberry pi. It’s a ridiculous system even Hal Finney thought was unsustainable 10 years ago.
Value judgement aside the question was “is it carbon neutral” and the answer is a resounding no.
That's an entirely different topic/point. I was responding to your ridiculous point that 97% of bitcoin miners never find a block. You didn't even try to defend that point.
What is your source around Hal Finney? I have not heard that.
The fact we have a system where 97% of all the equipment isn't used to ever do anything useful and instead "increase security" is an insanely wasteful system. Nobody has quantified what level of "security" is required. There's no feedback mechanism to pull back based on need because the need is fundamentally unquantified. It's a grey goo style uncontrolled positive feedback loop.
Each time more miners come online it's lauded as "more security is better" - but how much security do you need! The answer isn't "as much as you can afford period no follow-up questions."
You don't have 75 seatbelts in your car because "security." You don't use a dump truck to take your kids to school because "security." And you don't use a global army of computers consuming 100+TWh/yr to process 2-3 tx/sec because "security."
Ultimately it's a half-baked security model, and Bitcoin is a half-baked proof of concept that escaped the lab and gained a cult following.
> What is your source around Hal Finney? I have not heard that.
You didn't understand my point. If bitcoin had 1 minute blocks instead of 10 minute blocks, more than 3% of miners would find a block in their life time. But that change alone would not change any meaningful properties of bitcoin. You think bitcoin is a total waste, I get it. But that statistic doesn't help your argument.
> The answer isn't "as much as you can afford period no follow-up questions."
You are right, and this isn't how bitcoin works. The amount of mining should be determined by the block reward, market price, and fees per block. Mining in excess of this is not economically rational, and shouldn't happen. So it is not "unlimited security" at any cost"
Where in that tweet does Hal characterize bitcoin as ridiculous or unsustainable?
> But that change alone would not change any meaningful properties of bitcoin.
Sure it would, it would change that resource cost per transaction.
> You think bitcoin is a total waste, I get it. But that statistic doesn't help your argument.
I disagree, if 97% of servers at AWS were there for some hand-wavey notion of 'providing security' without quantification I think Amazon would be roundly mocked.
> You are right, and this isn't how bitcoin works.
Yes it is. You just re-stated my position with slightly different wording.
I said the security model was "as much as you can afford." You can afford block reward plus fees times price. The security model is "spend as much of that as you can without regard for what you need to achieve security." The issue is that block reward plus fees times price is not a function of how much security is required.
> Where in that tweet does Hal characterize bitcoin as ridiculous or unsustainable?
I never said 'ridiculous' - obviously I don't think Hal would make that claim, so let's stick to what I did say :) I think it is not unreasonable to extrapolate from his tweet that he believe that at the limit CO2 would be an issue. CO2 itself is an issue of sustainability. You can disagree with that interpretation, but I do not think that an average unbiased observer would find my reading unreasonable.
You seem to be trying to win an argument at all costs, putting words into my mouth, running with uncharitable interpretations and arguing in bad faith - in this thread and the other. If you read carefully you'll find I paid close attention not to move goalposts. I'm going to cut it off here. It's particularly silly because you've already admitted you agree to my premise that it is not carbon neutral.
> I disagree, if 97% of servers at AWS were there for some hand-wavey notion of 'providing security' without quantification I think Amazon would be roundly mocked.
Again, you fail to understand that the number of a machines that find a block could be changed by making the blocks smaller. You could do that by also reducing block size to keep the total number of transactions the same. But the larger point is that mining pools make it so that mining machines are paid for partial work, even without finding a block. This enables the utility of mining to be measured by hash rate, rather than by number of blocks solved.
You called it a gray goo style positive feedback loop. It is not, there is a upper bound on how much will be spent. There is no feedback loop as well, if the price goes up, more will be spent on mining, but that does not feedback to make the price go higher as required for a loop. Moreover, the block reward is exponentially decaying.
Your reading of the tweet is that a person saying a system should use less CO2 implies that person believes the system is unsustainable. I don't think that is reasonable, e.g. an Airline CEO launching an initiative to reduce the airlines CO2 usage would not believe that the airline is unsustainable. I did misread the other part of your statement-- you said bitcoin is ridiculous, not that Hal said that.
There are literally hundreds of currencies that were demanded for tax payments that have ended up with zero value eventually. That is not sufficient to make a valuable currency. What is necessary (in my opinion) is using the currency broadly for payments (not only taxes), and having a monetary policy that does not use excessive debt or inflation.
The cognitive dissonance here is amazing. Here is an actual application of crypto that is downvoted, while empty talking points around how crypto has zero use cases are always the top comments.
Title is grossly incorrect and leading to inflammatory comments. Proof of work has not been made illegal, new proof of work operations that use fossil fuel energy are blocked. Existing proof of work operations, and new operations using non fossil fuel energy are not banned at all.
