Hearn: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment [LWN.net]

Hearn: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

Posted Jan 16, 2016 0:05 UTC (Sat) by teknohog (subscriber, #70891)
In reply to: Hearn: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment by zorro
Parent article: Hearn: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

Consider the fossil fuels expended to maintain fiat currencies. This would include practical operations such as armoured trucks for distributing coinage to banks and ATMs, and good old data centres. Also keep in mind the running of an entire (police)? state that ultimately guarantees the value of its currency.

The sooner centralized, proprietary systems disappear, the better.

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Hearn: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

Posted Jan 16, 2016 0:52 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Consider the fossil fuels expended to maintain fiat currencies. This would include practical operations such as armoured trucks for distributing coinage to banks and ATMs, and good old data centres.
We're solving the problem of armored trucks with electronic transactions. Data centers are a pretty much negligible expense.

All of the US banking transactions can be run from a single fairly small DC.

> Also keep in mind the running of an entire (police)? state that ultimately guarantees the value of its currency.
Will I be able to come to your home and cut off your fingers one by one until you give me all of your bitcoin wallets once the world sees the light and switches?

Hearn: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

Posted Jan 18, 2016 13:10 UTC (Mon) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (1 responses)

"Consider the fossil fuels expended to maintain fiat currencies."

You need to take into account manufacturing emissions when making this argument regardless if it's a car (electric or not) or the components that make up your data center wires etc since everything is only as green as the juice it's running or manufactured on.

To achieve "greener world" means that you need to move manufacturing plants to the nations that provide that "green energy" ( Iceland, Paraguay, Sweden, France etc ) at the expense of re-allocation cost for companies, higher manufacture prices ( which results in higher prices on the consumer market which is opposite to what that market demands/wants ) and the economy collapses of the nations that already host and run those manufacturing plants or invent or find alternative means to produce that green energy for those nations that currently cannot as well as to having to implement that solution nation wide ( implementation which is measured in decades, the larger the nation the longer it takes and as you know the world still have countries running on 110v ).

Instead of actually dealing with the issue "nations" came up with energy/carbon trading scheme to make it look like those nations are actually doing anything about when in fact they are not ( these are workaround means to circumvent ) and the end result remains the same.

If we put aside all the man made problems that affects the planet and man kind ( pollution, hunger, religions, wars etc ) and the steps which are required to solve those problems ( which is not something that people, nations and industry's are truly willing to due, heck people cannot even agree on standardization which just highlights the fact the people dont posses the mental capability at this point in time to deal with issues on much larger and global scale ) and focus only on the "emission" problem the fact is that a single volcanic eruption here in Iceland produced on average three times the amount of sulphur dioxide ( which for example is produced by burning fossil fuels and other industrial processes such as smelting ) emitted in the six-month period it was active to all of Europe's human-made sulphur dioxide for that same period of time [1]. ( we have roughly 1500 active volcano's world wide ) so it's debatable how much affect the human produced sulphur dioxide affects the planet's ecosystem on global scale rendering any "green" or rather "Let's pretend we are green and are doing anything about it" argument moot.

1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015JD023638/a...

Hearn: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

Posted Jan 18, 2016 22:45 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

If only sulphur dioxide were the only thing to worry about.

As for "green energy" countries, globalisation, the transfer of manufacturing and polluting industries, and the role of China, it pays to not have a static view of these and other matters. While politicians in certain countries seem to have a static view of renewable energy technologies, and arguably a decades old view at that, as they push lifespan-extension fossil fuel extraction programmes as their least-effort response to energy supply concerns (and leaving it to "the market" to figure the rest out), countries like China are actually investing substantially in renewables, and not merely the high-profile, controversial hydro-electric projects that make the television news. I totally expect a lot of European nations to get caught out by underinvesting in the technologies, all the time pointing the finger at a China that no longer exists.

But as for the point about electricity consumption and Bitcoin, I think we have to consider wider issues such as how much electricity gets used in needlessly centralised computing and in the extravagant bandwidth usage it demands. And just as we have seen with the evolution of the Web, it isn't unreasonable to question what all the different devices are actually doing, and whether they need to burn down their batteries all the time doing overengineered client-side stuff, just to keep everything "hyperactively connected".