[HN Gopher] Mozilla Foundation pausing cryptocurrency donations
___________________________________________________________________
Mozilla Foundation pausing cryptocurrency donations
Author : cpeterso
Score : 282 points
Date : 2022-01-06 17:46 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| mrfinn wrote:
| Just accept Nano, guys. You are welcome.
| [deleted]
| rvz wrote:
| > So, starting today we are reviewing if and how our current
| policy on crypto donations fits with our climate goals. And as we
| conduct our review, we will pause the ability to donate
| cryptocurrency
|
| You mean Bitcoin, Ethereum? Since they are the biggest ones
| currently 'destroying' the planet? I'm sure there exist eco-
| friendly cryptocurrencies that are suitable for donations?
|
| But never-mind though, Bitcoin and Ethereum = ALL
| cryptocurrencies somehow.
|
| So back to receiving Google's money.
| kunagi7 wrote:
| Just a friendly remainder that donations to the Foundation
| don't pay for Firefox development. Google's money pays for
| Corporation stuff (Firefox), donations pay for other things
| they do around the world [1].
|
| [1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/
| throw10920 wrote:
| Wow, I didn't know that. This is perverse in several ways:
|
| Funding for Firefox development comes from Google, which is
| pushing Chrome in such a way that is destroying the web.
|
| Funding for Mozilla's non-Firefox projects probably comes
| mostly from Firefox users.
|
| I want to donate to Mozilla exclusively for Firefox
| development - yet the only thing that my money will _not_ be
| used for is Firefox, and I strongly disapprove of many of
| their other projects that my money would actually go to.
|
| This is just a mess.
| anonymousab wrote:
| IIRC their mullvad resell vpn is run through the corp, so
| if you want to donate just to the product side of things,
| buying that service may be the clearest way.
|
| But even then, there's no guarantees on how the money gets
| shuffled around.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| If you want to support Firefox development financially, you
| can subscribe to Mozilla's commercial services: their VPN,
| and Pocket.
| mort96 wrote:
| Am I literally the only person on earth who remembers
| that Mozilla promised to open-source Pocket when they
| acquired it? Why is nobody talking about that? Why aren't
| the usually-angry mob of mozilla haters up in arms about
| it?
| Arnavion wrote:
| I assume anyone who hasn't already disabled Pocket
| doesn't care about it being open-sourced.
| solarkraft wrote:
| But the VPN is worse than the service it rebrands. And I
| don't want to support the way they integrate or run
| Pocket (even though I mostly _like_ Pocket).
| rvz wrote:
| That is even worse then. No wonder Mozilla is in decline and
| perhaps that is why several developers were let go two years
| ago when Google threatened to take away their lunch money. So
| Mozilla had to quickly relinquish their _' mission
| statement'_ and submit to the mercy of Google.
|
| So as long as Google is funding Mozilla, and Firefox, their
| mission statement is beyond destroyed.
|
| Mission failed successfully.
| kunagi7 wrote:
| Oddly enough Mozilla has started to hire some developers
| for browser positions again (the job offers appear every
| now and then at pages like indeed).
| [deleted]
| zamadatix wrote:
| The current crypto donation policy is not "we accept any crypto
| directly including eco friendly ones" it is "we do crypto
| donations via BitPay" which doesn't support said eco-friendly
| crypto options so it has been paused.
|
| The announcement also does not say no better crypto policy
| could be put in place it just says they are reviewing the
| policy. In all likelyhood though yes, they aren't going to
| accept crypto as hardly anyone uses eco-friendly forms of
| crypto to the point it's worthwhile to try to push for
| donations via that means.
| csbartus wrote:
| Finally an impartial institution goes after the crypto/climate
| question and will disclose the results in an open source fashion.
| That will be a milestone.
|
| Perhaps the question is: do banks / fiat money institutions cause
| more damage to climate, or crypto mines. My gut feeling is a
| close tie.
| koonsolo wrote:
| And when you talk about PoS, it's not even a contest.
| gojomo wrote:
| It's OK - tech nonprofits that rely more heavily on individual
| donations, like the EFF, Internet Archive, or Wikipedia, will
| still take your dirty crypto.
|
| Less than 2% of Mozilla's revenues are from contributions, so
| it's cheap for them to symbolically thumb-their-noses at
| something.
| mrdoops wrote:
| In a backwards way this validates the general decentralization
| movement crypto is a part of even more in that a mob attack on
| social media can get an organization like Mozilla to limit their
| own capacity to accept donations.
| ethanhunt_ wrote:
| Anything to avoid working on the browser itself. Very sad to see
| the decline of Mozilla and Firefox.
|
| I wonder if someone could fork it and take all the people from
| Mozilla who are actually contributing to the technical mission (a
| small group these days!). Brendan Eich would've been perfect for
| this, but he's got his own browser now and wisely chose to use
| chromium as the base.
| Taywee wrote:
| Which browser developers do you propose paused these donations
| in order to "avoid working on the browser itself"? In what way
| would that even accomplish that end, given that those donations
| weren't even going to browser development in the first place?
| ethanhunt_ wrote:
| Yes, I am aware that these donations don't fund browser
| development, and that hucksters laundered the reputation of
| Firefox to take donations to advance their social causes
| instead of the browser.
| zionic wrote:
| Awesome comment. I went from using Firefox (back when it
| was still called Mozilla) to Brave, mostly because of the
| Firefox/Mozilla org.
| daenney wrote:
| Donations to the foundation don't pay for Fx development.
| That's under the Mozilla Corporation.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I was completely not aware of this didn't even imagine
| something like that, but apparently it's so
| https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-
| fund/fellowships-a...
| emerged wrote:
| You and probably the majority of donators. You'd think at
| some point that might be considered fraudulent on the part
| of Mozilla.
| estebank wrote:
| It is a legal requirement by US government that they
| can't.
| reitzensteinm wrote:
| I don't know if I agree with parent comment's concern.
| The what we do/what we fund pages are full of where the
| actual money goes. At worst, there's no disclaimer
| warning off people that arrived with a misconception.
|
| But if we were to buy the premise, whether Mozilla can't
| or chooses not to use the money for browser development
| doesn't matter in the slightest.
|
| And I think there's a pretty big citation needed on "they
| can't". Sure, they can't divert non profit funds in to
| the for profit corporation. But they could use it to
| build open source software with strategic alignment -
| like funding Rust.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Yeah but who would have the guts the sue a company that
| has worked so much to improve the world? You should be
| one of those people who hoarded toilet paper to resell it
| overpriced during the start of the pandemic to do
| something like that
| emerged wrote:
| The ends justify the means? If they hold me up at
| gunpoint for donations should I just not complain because
| they do other things that inxg33k1 believes improve the
| world?
|
| I stopped using Firefox years ago because of such
| "improvements" they obsess over instead of stewarding one
| of the very few web browsers which could have helped keep
| the web open but is instead borderline controlled
| opposition.
| ca98am79 wrote:
| we are working on a fork for Handshake:
| https://github.com/imperviousinc/beacon-ios
|
| join us!
| woodruffw wrote:
| What exactly are you forking here? Your README implies that
| it's for iOS, where every browser is just a skin over Apple's
| WebKit engine.
|
| (More generally, forking a browser is generally a doomed
| prospect: even Mozilla and Google struggle to keep up with
| vulnerabilities and standards churn. Most other forks of
| Firefox are laughably/irresponsibly stale, and most "forks"
| of Chrome are really just reskinned Chromium builds.)
| jefftk wrote:
| Edge has serious development effort behind it, and isn't
| just a skin
| woodruffw wrote:
| Edge represents the best possible case for browser
| forking: a company approximately the same size as Google,
| with approximately the same technical resources, _and_ a
| history of in-house browser development to boot. Most
| forks are a far cry from that.
| jefftk wrote:
| Yes, very similar to when Google started using WebKit for
| Chrome (which eventually ended in a full fork)
| woodruffw wrote:
| Right. But I don't see how either of these successes by
| large, cash-rich companies bode well for a random fork of
| Firefox.
| ravenstine wrote:
| If there was a serious financial effort that went into a fork
| of Firefox, I'd be all on board with it. The problem is these
| knockoffs that you _know_ aren 't going to keep up with
| development and will be relatively short-lived.
|
| Say what you want about Brendon Eich, but I wish he forked
| Firefox for Brave. That's the kind of effort that Firefox
| deserves, because it's by no means a bad browser. Putting aside
| some relatively minor performance issues (that don't manifest
| with average use), it's a great browser and I hope it sticks
| around for the sake of still allowing a good level of ad-
| blocking and such.
|
| And yes, Firefox pretty much still exists in this form because
| of Google. That relationship has also accelerated the decline
| of Mozilla.
| agilob wrote:
| >effort that went into a fork of Firefox, I'd be all on board
| with it.
|
| Chrome was designed to be "forkable" and put in different
| wrapper UI. Firefox was at that time battling to get rid of
| XUL and add a basic sandbox. Then pwn2own decided not to
| include Firefox in another year hacks because Firefox made no
| improvements at all in previous 2 years. This hurt me to hear
| as a long time Firefox user, had to be hurtful to Firefox
| management and developers too, but that was the fact. Mozilla
| lost their way in 2010-2017 and can't recover from that, the
| gap was too wide. Mozilla thought that after defeating IE and
| Safari they can't lose the market.
|
| Mozilla had an opportunity to make Firefox modular but burnt
| it with Servo.
|
| https://www.eweek.com/security/pwn2own-hacking-contest-
| retur...
| IainIreland wrote:
| > Then pwn2own decided not to include Firefox in another
| year hacks because Firefox made no improvements at all in
| previous 2 years.
|
| Uh, [citation needed]?
|
| Firefox was a valid target in Pwn2Own 2021: https://www.zer
| odayinitiative.com/blog/2021/1/25/announcing-...
|
| Nobody attacked Firefox successfully, but that's hardly a
| point against it. I don't know what "made no improvements
| at all in previous 2 years is supposed to mean", either,
| since we had just released a major overhaul of the
| optimizing compiler a few months before Pwn2Own:
| https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/11/warp-improved-js-
| performan....
| ksherlock wrote:
| 2016.
|
| > One change in the 2016 event is that the Mozilla
| Firefox Web browser is no longer part of the contest.
|
| > "We wanted to focus on the browsers that have made
| serious security improvements in the last year," Gorenc
| said.
|
| https://www.eweek.com/security/pwn2own-hacking-contest-
| retur...
| boringg wrote:
| Hot take: rise of crypto not too dissimilar from the rise of
| Trump in that there's clearly something there but it isn't what
| everyone thinks and it also will have more staying power than
| expected (already showing this).
|
| I recognize that use Trump is risky as he is very polarizing -
| however there is something uncannily similar on the rise of both
| of these events. Both in that neither had an agenda but caught on
| like wildfire - I hope that crypto somehow ends up benefiting the
| world. I don't see it at this point but remain open to seeing
| successful projects.
| skarz wrote:
| MrPatan wrote:
| Just buy some.
|
| I know you don't really think climate change is a problem. You
| drive a car, fly, the whole thing. So just buy crypto and be done
| with it, please.
|
| We're early, but it's getting kinda late, just do it.
| minimaxir wrote:
| For context, here's the original tweet (still up):
| https://twitter.com/mozilla/status/1476951030638260225
|
| > Dabble in @dogecoin? HODLing some #Bitcoin & #Ethereum?
|
| > We're using @BitPay to accept donations in #cryptocurrency
|
| The tweet prompted a strong reaction from Mozilla founder jwz:
| https://twitter.com/jwz/status/1478022085737803776
|
| > Hi, I'm sure that whoever runs this account has no idea who I
| am, but I founded @mozilla and I'm here to say fuck you and fuck
| this. Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly
| ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating
| Ponzi grifters.
| tejohnso wrote:
| > Ponzi grifters
|
| You want to talk about Ponzi? Crypto has nothing on the Fed.
| The global financial structure is a planet-incinerating Ponzi
| scheme, so the point of targeting one minuscule subset of it is
| suspect.
| cowpig wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
| slices wrote:
| not whataboutism, as US dollars would be the obvious
| alternative to accepting crypto
| kyleee wrote:
| Ironcially backed by an ungodly amount of violence and
| emissions
| pygy_ wrote:
| That's crypto's weak point. Blockchains are effective as
| long as gun toting folks let the miners mine.
|
| I'd be surprised if Uncle Sam decided to drop the dollar
| and lose the influence it provides.
| phatfish wrote:
| The US will never "drop the dollar" while it continues to
| exist as a nation. Why would the US government allow a
| system they don't control to run their economy?
|
| A blockchain based "e-dollar" is certainly possible, but
| Bitcoin will forever be a hugely wasteful online casino.
| input_sh wrote:
| I mean, sure, but replacing it with another ponzi scheme with
| even less checks and balances isn't really gonna solve
| anything, but make things worse.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Perfect response from @jwz. "Planet-incinerating Ponzi grifter"
| is an excellent phrase. I suggest we turn "PIPG" into an
| acronym.
|
| edit: For example: "Tesla used to accept Bitcoin as payment,
| but once Elon Musk realized that it was making him look like a
| PIPG, he had to reverse course."
| salt-thrower wrote:
| The only catch is it doesn't have intuitive pronunciation.
| "Pip gee?"
|
| Why not just "Planet-Incinerating Grifter," or PIG. Then it
| also applies to Big Oil executives :)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| definitely direct all rage at crypto people and ignore Big
| Oil at YNews, where people have a say with crypto but not
| at all with Big Oil. makes sense when viewed that way
| rchaud wrote:
| This is a software forum, and crypto is software. Perhaps
| a message board for geological engineers might be better
| for finding criticisms of Big Oil.
| throwaway946513 wrote:
| I thought by the nature of the forum submissions that it
| was essentially any STEM-related links or posts would be
| applicable. Geological Engineers are still considered
| STEM.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| Easier to make fun of crypto because at least oil has
| obvious real-world utility, and (unfortunately) still
| props up our economy. Crypto is like a sideshow. It's
| also a hot new topic which makes it fun to argue about.
|
| That's not to defend Big Oil or its shills. That industry
| should've been hamstrung years ago like the poison market
| it is. But it might be why HN gets extra riled up about
| crypto while letting other things slide.
| boringg wrote:
| Problem with that is it dilutes the intended audience.
| 015a wrote:
| I don't love the characterization of it being a "ponzi
| scheme"; trying to be catchy is no excuse for being
| disingenuous and inaccurate.
|
| At their core, Ponzi Schemes are investment funds which pay
| existing investors with funds collected from new investors
| [1]. There's really no way of looking at cryptocurrency where
| this is an accurate analysis.
|
| Generally, existing cryptocurrency investors are not "paid"
| by the "fund" (currency) in any capacity. This is true for
| BTC & ETH, which represent the bulk of the crypto market.
|
| The more common argument is that anyone can create a new
| currency, hype it up, drive market value higher, then exit at
| the expense of new investors. That's a totally legitimate
| concern, and it happens far too often; but its _not_ a ponzi
| scheme. The accurate term would be "pump & dump".
|
| There are many shades of gray between a pure pump & dump and
| something more legitimate. "Hype" (also known as "Marketing")
| is something every investment vehicle partakes in; from BTC
| (far beyond the "hype" phase) to DOGE (I'd label that one as
| "mass insanity") to TSLA (a fraction the revenue of many
| other auto manufacturers, but significantly higher value?
| how'd they get there?) to even PFE (this comment is Sponsored
| by Pfizer [2]). There are obvious examples of this behavior
| in the crypto community, but its simply not happening among
| major currencies; taking a pump & dump "scheme" to a billion
| dollar valuation is exceedingly rare, and there are currently
| ~90 coins with a market capitalization above $1B.
|
| Where one does see it happening, in my opinion, is with
| (most) NFTs. Many holders won't admit this, but there's no
| reality where 99% of them will be worth anything after the
| initial purchase; their goal is to shill and liquidate.
| However, I'm cautious in extrapolating this concern to the
| "technology" of NFTs, and even further to all of crypto; its
| similar to asserting all of emerging med-tech is a scam
| because Theranos was. Ultimately, investment vehicles don't
| need to "make sense" to have marketable value; but that
| doesn't mean critical thinking is unnecessary when evaluating
| it.
|
| There are some currencies, including ETH2, which stake and
| return an APY on investment. This could adequately, though
| somewhat inaccurately, be interpreted as being "paid out by
| the fund"; but the reward doesn't come from new investors.
| Where it comes from depends on the currency, but with ETH2 it
| is effectively minted from thin air. This is an inflationary
| action, which could (again, adequately but inaccurately) be
| interpreted as "taking money from new investors" (by lowering
| the value of each ETH they purchased). However, this concern
| is mitigated by the inflationary effect impacting all ETH
| holders, not just new investors, and the deflationary
| counter-effect from london hard-fork transaction fee burning.
|
| ETH is currently still inflationary, but only through a
| delicate balance of PoW-style minting, PoS-style reward
| issuance, and london fee burning. The zeitgeist in the ETH
| community right now is to achieve deflation, for better or
| worse.
|
| The statement that proof-of-stake APY represents "being paid
| out by the fund" in the context of evaluating cryptocurrency
| as a ponzi scheme, is very tenuous. Crypto is, at least in
| the US, not a currency; its a USD denominated investment
| vehicle. Being given more crypto does not "pay out" your USD
| investment, any more than a stock DRIP would be a "payout",
| because there is no "out". It does not allow you to exit the
| investment; on the contrary, it increases your investment.
|
| Its totally fair to dislike crypto; I'm certainly in that
| camp. But its critically important to understand the
| mechanics, engineering, and economics of why its such a harm
| to society before one begins levying blind criticism.
|
| [1] https://www.investor.gov/protect-your-
| investments/fraud/type...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uexqgkyFmo
| immibis wrote:
| Fine then, a _decentralized_ Ponzi scheme.
| zionic wrote:
| How drunk was he when he posted this? I'm thinking like a 9.
| nitrogen wrote:
| I don't know jwz personally, but given that his own website
| redirects all requests with an HN referrer to something
| NSFW, he probably doesn't have to be drunk to express
| disdain for something.
| agilob wrote:
| >but once Elon Musk realized that it was making him look like
| a PIPG, he had to reverse course
|
| It has nothing to do with having enough impact (twitter lol)
| and market analysts to buy very low, announce owning millions
| of BTC and accepting BTC for Tesla, then selling a month
| later around peaks. And then doing exactly the same with
| Doge. Then doing it again in 2021. Oh, yes, the first
| sentence was about the trading value peak in 2017-2018. Nope,
| must be a coincidence.
| riffic wrote:
| jwz, for context, is Jamie Zawinski.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
| partomniscient wrote:
| Even more context:
|
| Project Code Rush - The Beginnings of Netscape / Mozilla
| Documentary [1]
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
| jordigh wrote:
| Seeing the other replies here, kids these days got no respect
| for their elders.
|
| Hey, let me check if he still checks the HN referer and
| insults us if we follow links from HN to his blog:
|
| https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/today-on-sick-sad-world-
| how...
|
| Edit: Aw, nope, looks like he got rid of it
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| It insulted me (correction: it redirected me to the image
| meant to insult), seems like your browser could be blocking
| referers by default (maybe they block it if it's an
| external link?)
| jnwatson wrote:
| Hilarious. Some people just don't mature past 15 years old.
| twic wrote:
| I confirm i also saw the Egg.
| steelstraw wrote:
| He should be ashamed of displaying such a combination of
| ignorance and arrogance. Having alternative currencies is
| incredibly important for those living under corrupt regimes
| and/or hyperinflation and/or unbanked, and most
| cryptocurrencies don't use proof of work. They could just not
| accept Bitcoin and Eth1 then.
|
| A single Google Search: 1,080 J
|
| A single Solana transaction: 1,837 J
|
| One eth2 transaction: 126,000 J
|
| Watching an hour of television on a 40 inch+ LCD TV: 540,000 J
|
| https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...
| jasonhansel wrote:
| And what could be better for "those living under corrupt
| regimes" than a system widely used for money laundering?
| jnwatson wrote:
| That's the point. Money laundering is the main feature. It
| is great for traditional criminals, but also helpful for
| folks for which money laundering is a weekly part of just
| surviving, because they don't have a local reliable
| currency.
| acdha wrote:
| Do you think that ordinary people are more or less likely
| to take advantage of a system with such high transaction
| fees and personal risk exposure than the corrupt elites
| looting their countries?
| peterholcomb wrote:
| I don't think it's unrealistic to think that at some
| point in the near future that ordinary people in the
| third-world will be using crypto for their every day
| transactions. Crypto is going through a massive maturity
| phase right now. I'm certainly not blind to the massive
| problems with crypto right now, but seeing chains such as
| Algo that are actively seeking to be both low cost and
| carbon neutral gives me great hope.
| steelstraw wrote:
| Illicit activities like cybercrime, money laundering and
| terrorist financing made up only 0.15% of all crypto
| transactions conducted in 2021
|
| https://www.axios.com/cryptocurrency-scam-crime-
| popularity-r...
| camdat wrote:
| The source for this _article_ is a "study" from
| Chainanlysis which only tracks a handful of the possible
| illicit activities crypto can be used for. They are
| tracking scams and rugpulls, adding them together, and
| using that as the "illicit transactions" metric, then
| dividing that by a ballooned marked cap to get 0.15%.
|
| Considering _40%_ of all of Bitpay 's transactions are
| for "Gift Cards" [0] (a la money laundering), it seems to
| be that this blog is being as charitable as possible to
| CC to get their numbers.
|
| [0]: https://bitpay.com/stats/
| MBCook wrote:
| A blockchain company said that blockchains weren't evil?
| You don't say.
|
| You know there is this company I heard of that has a long
| history saying some nice things about cigarettes. Maybe I
| should buy some.
| gspr wrote:
| I really do sympathize with people living under corrupt
| regimes. And I sympathize with them having to use a metal
| pipe to whack someone in the head to survive. Does that mean
| that non-profits should start embracing head-whacking?
| RC_ITR wrote:
| I think the poster isn't actually living under a corrupt
| regime because (and I always come back to this), you can't
| really buy crypto with currencies outside of
| USD/EUR/JPY/KRW/sometimes RMB and if you have access to
| those, then you already have hyper-inflation protection
| taht has historically preformed much better than any crypto
| has.
| mey wrote:
| I notice you are avoiding listing Bitcoin and PoW Eth here.
| If https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-
| co... is to be believed
|
| 1779.11 kWh per single Bitcoin transaction would be
|
| One Bitcoin Edit: Block Mined: 6,404,796,000 J
|
| One Bitcoin Transaction on a Block: 2,287,427 J
|
| One Credit Card Transaction: 5,351 J
|
| Edit: Since the source isn't exactly clear if one transaction
| is a reference to one block mined or one transaction on that
| block, I'm going to assume it is for one block mined. I'm
| going to estimate one block contains 2800 transactions.
| zionic wrote:
| ETH PoW is almost dead. We're in the multi-client test net
| stage now. We're rehearsing the switch multiple times on
| test nets to make sure it goes perfectly since there's no
| takebacks on prod.
|
| The bellow comment calling it "vapor ware" is ignorant.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| > ETH PoW is almost dead.
|
| I've been reading variations of the line "Ethereum is
| only weeks/months away from Proof of Stake" since
| probably early 2019.
|
| Also doesn't Proof of Stake introduce another set of
| problems?
| zionic wrote:
| > Ethereum is only weeks/months away from Proof of Stake"
| since probably early 2019.
|
| No, you haven't. POS was, at best, a year plus away in
| 2019. No one credible was suggesting "weeks" back then...
| the beacon chain wasn't even close to live yet.
|
| ETH2's beacon chain launched in Dec 2020 successfully,
| and has been running over a year in parallel with tens of
| billions in staked currency protecting it. This launched
| _on time_. The plan was originally:
|
| 1) beacon chain
|
| 2) sharding
|
| 3) the merge
|
| The merge is when PoS takes over for PoW. The roadmap was
| changed in mid 2021 to push #3 before #2. That's what's
| about to happen, and I would even now put it in "months"
| . It won't be "weeks" until a merge block # is announced,
| which will itself be weeks after the announcement of a
| successful testnet campaign (often multiple).
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| > No one credible
|
| That's the main problem when it comes to this topic,
| isn't it?
| kingo55 wrote:
| I wonder whether the credit card transaction energy
| includes the energy spent by thousands of bankers traveling
| to work each day in petrol powered cars to issue the fiat
| loans that fuel our modern currencies.
| mey wrote:
| Oh there is plenty more in pure energy costs not
| represented here, but banks do more than just store and
| move money. Just like crypto currencies being powered by
| renewable energy, nothing preventing banker cars and data
| centers from being powered by renewable energy either.
| pb7 wrote:
| I wonder if the Bitcoin energy includes all the countless
| people shilling online and traveling by plane to
| conventions to talk about it and otherwise wasting
| energy.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Also citing Eth2, which is vaporware.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I mean the beacon chain is online, but the "merge" is
| always 6 months away. I think it's crazy to see so many
| billions locked up in a contract for software that hasn't
| been written yet, but hey, its all funny money anyway.
| donkarma wrote:
| Dude must have an ego the size of a planet to say something
| like that
| tasha0663 wrote:
| He's one of the more entertaining figures of that generation.
| IIRC there were some huge flamewars between him and rms
| during the Xemacs fork.
|
| He still maintains XScreensaver, but now his day job is the
| ownership of a bar/pizza/venue establishment.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > his day job is the ownership of a bar/pizza/venue
| establishment
|
| Probably a better fit for him.
| iqanq wrote:
| One of the most histrionic characters in the tech scene, and
| that's a lot to say.
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| Brave is on track to destroy his legacy.
|
| https://brave.com/transparency/
| woodruffw wrote:
| Why would this be the case? Chrome's rise didn't destroy
| Firefox or Mozilla's legacy, so it's not clear why a fork
| would.
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| The past doesn't always define the future. Younger folks
| are more interested in privacy.
|
| And Brave is more than just a "fork."
| woodruffw wrote:
| > Younger folks are more interested in privacy.
|
| I believe this.
|
| I'd like to understand how, exactly, moving from a non-
| profit foundation's browser to a for-profit corporation's
| fork of that browser _with a built in ad marketplace_ is
| a net win for my privacy. That seems like a net loss: the
| incentive is now to make money off of me, and the browser
| is actually running non-website code with that goal in
| mind.
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| * Brave ads are optin
|
| * Machine learning for ads is done locally; can't be evil
|
| * Trackers and third party ads are blocked.
|
| When is FireFox going to block third party ads and
| trackers?
| oauea wrote:
| Have you not heard of addons? Specifically ublock origin?
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| I like the idea of being paid to view ads and then
| donating to YouTubers or Wikipedia. It's pretty cool.
| woodruffw wrote:
| My understanding is that Firefox has supported in-browser
| blocking of third-party ads, trackers, fingerprinters,
| &c., for a while now[1].
|
| > * Machine learning for ads is done locally; can't be
| evil
|
| There are too many moving pieces to this to dissect in a
| single comment. But to roughly sum them up: just about
| every adtech company that promises "privacy preserving
| targeted advertising" via ML uses _some_ information-
| theoretical definition of privacy that doesn 't align
| with normal user's intuitions about the word "private."
| We saw this with k-anonymity schemes, and we'll see it
| again when these schemes attract more scrutiny.
|
| And on top of that: Brave's own site implies that local
| ad ML is currently opt-in only[2].
|
| [1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-
| tracking-prote...
|
| [2]: https://brave.com/intro-to-brave-ads/
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| > My understanding is that Firefox has supported in-
| browser blocking of third-party ads, trackers,
| fingerprinters, &c., for a while now
|
| I see the part about trackers. What about ads? Does it
| also block YouTube ads? That's a really nice feature
| built into Brave.
|
| > just about every adtech company that promises "privacy
| preserving targeted advertising" via ML
|
| The difference here is it happens in the browser. Does ML
| happen in Chrome?
|
| > Brave's own site implies that local ad ML is currently
| opt-in only
|
| Your reading of that isn't correct. The opt in is for
| ads. And local machine learning comes along with opting
| in.
| mort96 wrote:
| What's the connection between jwz and Brave? The only
| connection I can see is just that both jwz and Brendan Eich
| worked at Mozilla and now Eich has gone on to start Brave,
| but presumably there's more than that?
| fragmede wrote:
| Saying "jwz worked at Mozilla" totally understates his
| role in writing one of the original web browsers,
| Netscape Navigator, and his part in the creation of
| Mozilla.org, among other things. It's like saying Bill
| Gates worked at Microsoft, or that Larry Page and Sergey
| Brin worked at Google. Thus Brave supplanting Firefox
| could metaphorically be seen as Mr Eich supplanting jwz.
| (That's a huge "if", mind you)
| [deleted]
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Thought I recognized the name, check out what his website
| shows when linked from HN:
| https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2016/hn.png
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not a fan of
| cryptocurrency, but I'm also less than impressed with jwz's
| maturity. If I didn't know he founded Mozilla, I would've
| taken him for an angry teenage kid trying to be edgy on the
| internet.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| If he left out "fuck you and fuck this," the rest of the
| tweet is still incendiary enough to send the message
| without the edginess. Might have come across better that
| way.
|
| Regardless, it's sad to watch Mozilla debase themselves,
| not only by supporting crypto at this stage of the game,
| but with cringeworthy meme language like "HODL." That was
| funny for about a week during the Gamestop fiasco; a year
| later it's another "how do you do, fellow kids" moment.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Okay tone police.
| rchaud wrote:
| You have to meet the customer where they are.
|
| Dogecoin IS a meme and has/had a multi-billion dollar
| cap. Can't blame Mozilla for openly scraping the bottom
| of the barrel with their marketing.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| > Can't blame Mozilla for openly scraping the bottom of
| the barrel with their marketing.
|
| Yes I can. It makes them look cheap and corny, and
| weakens their credibility.
|
| > Dogecoin IS a meme and has/had a multi-billion dollar
| cap
|
| Sure, for about a month, a year ago. It's old news.
| Anyone still "HODLing" Doge is just a speculator who
| missed the last wave and is desperately hoping it'll come
| back so they can sell out.
|
| Point is, Mozilla is wasting their time by marketing to
| that crowd. Scraping the bottom of the barrel is a bad
| look.
| ralph84 wrote:
| The "finance-obsessed" shot is especially rich coming from
| a guy who was able to FIRE in his early 30s and spend his
| time running a nightclub as a hobby.
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not a fan of HN, but I'm
| also less than impressed with jwz's maturity.
| [deleted]
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Well said :)
| donkarma wrote:
| thank you for reminding me to disable referrers in Firefox
| :)
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| Ahem, I believe the correct term may be referers :)
| xvector wrote:
| Yikes, well that eliminates any respect I had for the "founder
| of Mozilla."
| gspr wrote:
| It elevates mine.
| [deleted]
| buildbuildbuild wrote:
| If someone wants to give you money, take it. They can mandate
| more environmentally conscious PoS cryptocurrencies if they
| want.
|
| If I call Mozilla and offer to donate a million shares of the
| dirtiest Earth-polluting company, they should take them. Exit
| the position. Their mission is not to be picky about how legal
| money arrives.
| woodruffw wrote:
| The Mozilla Foundation's "mission," as a 501(c)3, is whatever
| they decide.
|
| They're not beholden to any obligations to maximize donations
| (already a dubious claim, absent evidence that people were
| actually donating with cryptocurrencies) in manners they
| consider unacceptable.
|
| Put another way: you wouldn't be surprised if the ASPCA
| refused donations in the form of shares in PuppyKicker Inc.
| Mozilla's decision here warrants a similar response.
| [deleted]
| Imnimo wrote:
| If I give you a million shares of a company, that act and
| your ensuing sale of the shares are not (particularly)
| polluting. But if I send you bitcoin and you then sell them,
| those transactions occur via a polluting process.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > those transactions occur via a polluting process.
|
| How much CO2 pollution is each transaction responsible for,
| and how much would it cost to offset that CO2?
|
| It seems like there should be some threshold above which
| the donation will include within it the funds needed to
| compensate for its externalities, but I don't know if it's
| possible to create a smart contract that only allows
| donations above a threshold amount.
| Imnimo wrote:
| It costs about $20 to buy the carbon offsets for a single
| bitcoin transaction (at least according to the first
| article I found on Google), so double that for the two
| transactions to receive and then sell. Carbon offsets in
| practice are often not as much as what you're paying for,
| so you would probably need to buy more of them to truly
| offset.
|
| You would also have to factor in the pollution from
| e-waste generated by miners buying and replacing ASICs,
| although that's harder to quantify.
|
| But we should also consider whether engaging in such a
| transaction is worthwhile as a matter of principle. If
| the organization's goals include environmentalism, does
| legitimizing Bitcoin by advertising their acceptance of
| it run counter to those goals?
| sodality2 wrote:
| > How much CO2 pollution is each transaction responsible
| for, and how much would it cost to offset that CO2?
|
| 369.49 kgCO2eq. https://www.forbes.com/sites/philippsandn
| er/2021/11/19/bitco...
|
| > An average Bitcoin transaction has a size of 670 bytes
| on the Bitcoin blockchain, representing an estimated
| carbon footprint of 369.49 kgCO2eq. Given a price of USD
| 50 per metric tonne of CO2eq, the compensation of one
| average Bitcoin transaction costs USD 18.47.
| gilrain wrote:
| Not surprisingly, "the ends justify the means" isn't a widely
| held tenant of humanistic non-profits.
| acdha wrote:
| Their mission is entirely to be picky about the impact of
| their decisions. You can't sell Bitcoin without encouraging
| its use, which is exactly why people donate it trying to
| improve the reputation of their goods for sale. Remember when
| a few companies accepted it and the Bitcoin salespeople were
| crowing about how that proved it was the future of finance
| and you had to buy in now to avoid being left behind? Using
| Mozilla's reputation for their marketing is an ethical choice
| and has consequences.
| tux3 wrote:
| That's an awfully broad statement.
|
| If Phillip Morris wanted to become a big donator to the
| Cochrane collaboration, they would refuse by policy.
|
| Do you think they're wrong, and they should take the money?
| wanderingmind wrote:
| Governments across the world have debased the currency over the
| past decade which has especially accelerated since Covid. The
| inflation has finally started to take off. Most people in HN who
| are among the wealthy end of spectrum have no idea how inflation
| is affecting most people lives. Most are desperately looking for
| opportunities to make enough returns. They don't give much
| thought about climate change when they can't pay for education or
| medical bills.
|
| While most shitcoins and NFTs will tumble, the topcoin rallies
| are not going to stop until the economy gets roaring back and
| inflation is controlled.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Most people in HN who are among the wealthy end of spectrum
| have no idea how inflation is affecting most people lives.
|
| There are numerous articles every week about the "great
| resignation" and staffing shortages in foodservice and other
| industries as everyone leaves for higher paying jobs.
|
| Wages are going up. It's not the end of the world.
|
| > Most are desperately looking for opportunities to make enough
| returns.
|
| Stock market has been outpacing inflation just fine. Classic
| investment advice still holds.
|
| Those "returns" in crypto can only come from selling coins to
| someone else in the future. It relies on a constant stream of
| convincing new people to turn over their real money in exchange
| for virtual money.
|
| > While most shitcoins and NFTs will tumble, the topcoin
| rallies are not going to stop until the economy gets roaring
| back
|
| What a weird thing to say when the economy is roaring,
| unemployment is low, and top cryptos are steadily declining.
| xunn0026 wrote:
| People on HN probably understand inflation very well but have
| portfolios that are not impacted by it. If anything, the past 2
| years have shown great stock gains.
|
| It's hard for a person to understand a solution when its
| fortune depends on not understanding it. The Fed just mentioned
| they _might_ raise rates for a blip on the stock market.
| Imagine what they do if they actually raise them. Oh, noes, the
| USD might actually hold some value! How will the economy
| recover if people 's savings aren't stolen?!
| solarkraft wrote:
| I don't even care about the crypto currencies that much. Please
| just stop ruining everything.
| halpert wrote:
| I feel like you shouldn't complain about bitcoin if you drive a
| car or have been on an airplane in the last year. Or if you have
| received goods manufactured overseas. Or live / work in a
| building that uses concrete. Or consume beef. Or consume factory
| farmed food. Or eat fish. Or...
|
| Just to add some numbers: bitcoin is responsible for 0.1% of
| global carbon emissions, and will decrease (as a %) as CO2
| emissions of other sectors grow:
| https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/bitcoin-...
| alphabettsy wrote:
| My house protects me. Food feeds me. My iPhone from China does
| many many things that I find useful. Bitcoin hopefully allows
| me to accumulate wealth but otherwise adds no value to my life.
|
| Doesn't seem like an appropriate comparison.
| halpert wrote:
| Food feeds you, but many people choose to eat food that is
| wasteful. Your home protects you, but many people live in
| large homes in climates that require heating and cooling.
| Your iPhone from China does things you like, which really is
| what this comes down to. You like iPhones. You don't like
| Bitcoin. There is nothing more to this argument other than
| preferences.
| detritus wrote:
| Seems more like your initial point slipped quite a bit into
| farce since you made it.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| There's no argument that people do things and use things
| that are wasteful, but what does Bitcoin do? What utility
| does it currently provide?
|
| And yea, I'll keep my bitcoin holdings under one percent of
| my overall investments if I continue to hold it at all. At
| this point I only have it because of FoMo.
| creata wrote:
| For some reason, I always thought that people (well, mostly
| jwz) were exaggerating when they said that cryptocurrencies
| contributed to climate change. But 0.1% of global emissions is
| an _insanely_ large amount for the value that cryptocurrencies
| provide.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Announcing that your tire-burning scheme produces "only" 0.1%
| of global carbon emissions is not the win that you seem to
| think it is.
| halpert wrote:
| I'm not pro Bitcoin. I'm just pointing out that your tire
| burning scheme is the other 99.9%. You like those tires, but
| not these ones.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Maybe it isn't obvious, but even the most egregious
| excesses in our current economy produce material and
| economically advantageous (if far from optimal) outcomes: a
| jet flying from NYC to London physically moves a human
| being and their possessions between two continents.
|
| It's not clear what bitcoin is providing, other that a
| self-sustaining speculative market. As such, even 0.1% of
| global emissions is _particularly_ egregious.
| young_unixer wrote:
| > It's not clear what bitcoin is providing
|
| It's pretty clear:
|
| 1. A way to store value without it being stolen by
| governments.
|
| 2. A secure way to pay without the fees and limitations
| that banks and governments impose on us.
|
| 3. A way to freely speculate
|
| In summary: It's providing financial freedom. If you
| prefer financial slavery, that's fine, you can still have
| your fiat money.
|
| If emissions are too high, then let's increase emission
| taxes.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > 1. A way to store value without it being stolen by
| governments.
|
| I've never understood this. You're still living
| somewhere; the government can knock down your door and
| gently rubber hose[1] you into handing over your
| supposedly state-proof cryptocurrency. Indeed, there's
| probably a strong positive correlation between
| "legitimately afraid of the government taking my money"
| and "my government wouldn't bat an eye at torturing me to
| get my bitcoins." But for the average bitcoin user, it's
| more of a LARP than a reality.
|
| I think there's ample real-world data against (2), and
| (3) is, well, the problem.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-
| hose_cryptanalysis
| easrng wrote:
| "You wish to improve society, and yet you participate in
| society. Curious! I am very intelligent."
| halpert wrote:
| I don't wish to improve society. I'm just highlighting
| people's hypocrisy. No one in the west can complain about
| climate change. Our entire lifestyle is so wasteful in every
| way.
| easrng wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/gPllQYY.png
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Just to add some numbers: bitcoin is responsible for 0.1% of
| global carbon emissions, and will decrease (as a %) as CO2
| emissions of other sectors grow:
|
| Just so you're aware, the link you've posted is pointing out
| that Bitcoin could _grow_ from 0.1% to 0.9% of total CO2
| emissions.
|
| Bitcoin may be one of the very few sectors that _doesn 't_ have
| any sort of plan for decreasing CO2 emissions in the future.
| kingcharles wrote:
| There is a lot of cryptocurrency out there to be spent, and
| Mozilla needs it. The pragmatic solution would be to take the
| money and use X% to offset the environmental damage the donation
| created.
| idkyall wrote:
| Personally, I believe in Crypto, but I'm entirely against
| Bitcoin. I think Proof of Work is a massive waste of energy, and
| I would be happy if Bitcoin went to 0, quite frankly.
|
| But nowadays, not all cryptos are proof of work based. Plenty of
| major crypto projects are based on proof of stake and offer fully
| fledged smart contract features to support Web 3 apps. I don't
| think proof of stake crypto is more energy intensive than the
| hundreds of thousands of servers and data centers needed for the
| traditional financial system.
|
| I think a smarter move would be to only accept crypto currency
| donations from these greener chains.
| oraphalous wrote:
| There are significant political and economic tradeoffs between
| POW and POS... I highly recommend this article for an analysis
| of these.
|
| https://www.lynalden.com/proof-of-stake/
|
| I suggest this analysis because folks tend to state their
| preference for POS while only mentioning the energy costs as
| the only factor in their calculation. I do think it worth
| considering these other tradeoffs as well.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Any decentralized distributed ledger is by definition more
| energy intensive and wasteful.
|
| All of the financial systems today may keep a dozen or so
| copies of a financial transaction for a limited time span. They
| do so using as cost-effective means as possible (they're a for-
| profit business). They also do it under extremely well
| coordinated economies of scale.
|
| From the get-go any reasonable distributed ledger application
| (regardless of PoW, PoS, etc) keeps many thousands of copies of
| that consensus ledger. In the case of Bitcoin it's roughly
| 13,000 nodes so at least 1000x as many resources as the
| centralized financial systems we have today. Oh yeah - and it
| grows forever. As I've noted before if you buy a beer for $3
| with Bitcoin there will end up being 13,000 or more records of
| that transaction FOREVER.
|
| With 10 years since inception and an absolutely tiny
| transaction volume (compared to say, Visa) a full Ethereum node
| requires at least 6TB of storage space. Bitcoin is the big one
| and it has roughly 500K transactions/day. Visa alone has a
| billion. With any real traction these ledgers will end up at
| petabyte and exabyte size very quickly. Oh yeah - and you'll
| still need tens of thousands of copies. Each of these nodes
| still needs gigabytes of RAM, fast CPUs, bandwidth, etc in
| addition to the insane storage requirements.
|
| Note that I'm talking about the distribution and storage of the
| ledger itself. Mining and PoS have nothing to do with that -
| these 1000x inefficiencies persist even with PoS.
|
| The nodes themselves are the massive resource and energy issue
| that are just hiding behind PoW right now.
| woah wrote:
| Kind of silly to vehemently argue against the redundant
| storage of important financial information
| almost wrote:
| Good! Nice to see they've done the right thing even if it was a
| little late. I'm sure they got a lot of pressure both from users
| and from their own employees.
| rvba wrote:
| I think the Mozilla Foundation people just want to kill Firefox.
| One bad decision, after another.
| practice9 wrote:
| Dumb PR move from dying company
| RedBeetDeadpool wrote:
| koof wrote:
| As opposed to you, who is definitely not virtue signaling.
| RedBeetDeadpool wrote:
| Nope definitely not.
| uncomputation wrote:
| > more ecological damage and pollution
|
| Source please?
| dnautics wrote:
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Actually, doesn't the US government tax "gains" from
| Bitcoin "appreciation"?
| dnautics wrote:
| fine. Marginally paid for by bitcoin.
| [deleted]
| agilob wrote:
| My counter question is: how much energy US banks consume?
|
| Every now and then a new article comes out about how BTC is
| wasting energy, it consumes X amount of energy comparable to
| <insert small country>. I email or tweet authors of such
| study/article if they have any estimates on how much energy
| and materials US bank offices consume: including AC or
| heating, computers left on over night, lights left over
| night, TVs playing ads. I asked that more than 5 times and
| not once got a response. I believe that running traditional
| banks in US and CA consume more energy than Bitcoin. Sure,
| bank produce billions times more transaction per day, but BTC
| will either be replaced by more efficient networks or will
| evolve into such. US banks used to send letters and cash in
| coal powered trains. Anyone got source on that?
| tomas wrote:
| So basically you are saying that right now traditional
| banks are billions of times more efficient than Bitcoin,
| but you believe that Bitcoin will improve its efficiency in
| the future?
|
| That's quite some improvement that would be needed..
| agilob wrote:
| >but you believe that Bitcoin will improve its efficiency
| in the future?
|
| No, not at all. I'm quite sure Bitcoin will go down
| because of its inefficiencies and it only holds trading
| value because of "cryptocurrency whales" and sentiment.
| Every time it goes up I'm surprised that people still go
| this route while there are dozens of better solutions for
| whatever BTC was promised to be.
| liamwestray wrote:
| https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/bank_branches/
|
| You can go estimate it yourself pretty easily based on
| number of branches and some average energy use per square
| foot (pick the US's commercial average as a upper bound to
| be conservative)
|
| Bitcoin consumes 'more electricity than Argentina'
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56012952
|
| But to summarize as someone who works in energy related
| research:
|
| All the banks in the world combined do not use as much
| energy as bitcoin alone now.
|
| Cryptocurrencies are inherently non-productive work as
| their algorithms are designed to solely be computationally
| expensive to create a means of artificial scarcity.
|
| Block chain isn't the problem, non-productive hashing
| algorithms are.
| broast wrote:
| I would love some proof that all the computers that power
| all the bank and credit transactions, and all the
| financial derivatives they produce, don't add up to the
| power consumption of crypto.
|
| Then I would take into account how PoS would affect this
| in the future, as crypto is a technology that is meant to
| be built on, evolved, upgraded, and replaced by something
| better. Like money.
|
| Then probably ask which system is more democratic in its
| distribution and transparency of the money, and I would
| bet that system would finance less legacy climate
| destroying industries
| liamwestray wrote:
| I would like people to be able to do basic math and
| estimation using publicly available datasets themselves.
|
| Get list of 10 largest banks and major credit card
| companies.
|
| Get their ESG reports.
|
| Add annual energy and emissions summaries together.
|
| Multiply by 2.
|
| Stand in awe that it's still a fraction of Bitcoin.
|
| You can then go find some other incredibly ignorant
| tangent to argue about to promote your belief in a crypto
| Ponzi scheme.
| agilob wrote:
| >Bitcoin consumes 'more electricity than Argentina'
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56012952
|
| I don't know much about energy network and power
| consumption of average Joe in
| Argentina/Slovenia/Greenland, so this article doesn't
| tell me much. Is that because 25% of a country doesn't
| have access to stable electricity, so energy requirements
| to run a country are small? Are their electric and
| electronic devices are mostly power efficient? Do they
| use a lot of geothermal heating without using electricity
| and gas to produce heat or cold, so energy use of a
| country isn't the same of another country in a different
| location? Are their energy providers close to cities, so
| less energy is lost in transit? Do they have home-based
| wind/solar power generators skipped from equation due to
| relaxed regulations?
|
| Energy consumption in the UK dropped by 12.9% during
| COVID pandemic[1]. Is that enough to stop people blaming
| BTC for everything bad on energy market and pollution?
| That was _easy_ to fix.
|
| I agree hashing and PoW protocols are crap and I even
| think they should be banned, but let's start adding to
| this discussion other things, like how bad USD and
| traditional banking systems are. We talk even less often
| about international banks money laundering with ISIS, Al-
| Qaeda and Mexican drug cartels, hello all HSBC and
| Deutsche bank employees! I'm sure we have a lot of easier
| targets (still talking about ecological damage and
| pollution) to fix than networks like Bitcoin [2].
|
| [1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/u
| ploads/...
|
| [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/qeoyak/jeff_be
| zos_sup...
| astoor wrote:
| There was an article[0] which estimated that the entire
| global banking system (down to lamps on desks in offices)
| used 100Twh a year, whereas Bitcoin used around 30Twh a
| year (for a relatively insignificant volume of
| transactions). I don't know how accurate that is, but
| despite the unfavourable statistics, the article was still
| from some pro-Bitcoin person concluding that we should
| "stop complaining about Bitcoin and start complaining about
| Xmas lights". Also note that Bitcoin's energy use has since
| risen to 110Twh a year[1].
|
| [0] https://hackernoon.com/the-bitcoin-vs-visa-electricity-
| consu...
|
| [1] https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-
| actuall...
| mmstan wrote:
| BTC uses 50% energy the banking industry uses, source:
| https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/research%3A-bitcoin-
| consumes...
|
| BTC daily transactions, below 500k, soruce:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-
| of-b...
|
| Cash and card (made available by banks) daily transactions
| are just on another level, more than 1 per person in EU for
| instance, and the number of people is easy to find, source:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/893459/average-number-
| of...
| agilob wrote:
| nasdaq is a kind of a biased source for this. I checked
| the linked article and it still doesn't answer the
| question. Energy usage was only for green house gases
| emissions and it was an estimate, and it doesn't include
| drilling or expanding new mines, like the one that's 4km
| deep under the surface.
|
| The article still says:
|
| >Galaxy Digital also showed that a significant part of
| the world's energy production is wasted -- about 2,205
| TWh per year which is 19.4 times that of the Bitcoin
| network.
|
| >Cash and card (made available by banks) daily
| transactions are just on another level, more than 1 per
| person in EU for instance
|
| Totally agree, like I said in another comment, I think
| BTC holds trading value and sentimental value, but should
| be replaced by any other from dozens of better adapted
| networks.
| liamwestray wrote:
| That "study" is comparing an entire industry including
| pension plans, atm and card networks, payroll systems,
| mutual funds, iras/401ks, sarbanes-oxley data retention,
| etc. etc. to just bitcoin's network.
|
| These systems aren't replaceable by bitcoin.
|
| Bitcoin is a debit banking transaction system equivalent
| only. It uses several times the energy of the equivalent
| portions of the banking industry.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| > Sure, bank produce billions times more transaction per
| day, but BTC will either be replaced by more efficient
| networks or will evolve into such.
|
| But it hasn't yet and I fail to see how using it makes it
| more likely to happen.
|
| Bitcoin doesn't have the ability as it exists to handle the
| volume that banks do now.
|
| I have some crypto that I bought long ago, but I'm feeling
| much less enthusiastic about it lately.
|
| I love to see the big banks go away and lose the
| stranglehold they have, but replacing the players with new
| players doesn't do that.
| rvs-ie wrote:
| Even banks use more energy than bitcoin (which I highly
| doubt and there are comments here suggesting it's nowhere
| close), you'd still need banks or analogues of even if the
| whole humanity suddenly moves to crypto.
|
| Crypto energy consumption is just unnecessary waste.
| agilob wrote:
| >Crypto energy consumption is just unnecessary waste.
|
| Not all, but never said otherwise!
| RedBeetDeadpool wrote:
| I obviously put that statement out because I _knew_ it would
| enrage about the majority of people reading it, yourself
| included, blame me for being contrarian. But, let me
| continue.
|
| How do you store $100 million worth of value for 100 years in
| the current economy?
|
| You can't store it in dollars, it degrades exponentially with
| inflation. 100 years ago, a dollar was worth the equivalent
| of $13.90 today[1]. If that trend continues for the next 100
| years that $100 million will be worth the equivalent of $10
| million today roughly losing 90% of its value (wait that's
| almost 100%!). This is even before we factor in the fact that
| we only left the gold standard in 1971, and that the federal
| reserve have "discovered" new monetary stimulus strategies
| that promote inflationary practice. If you park your $100
| million in dollars, you can almost expect the entirety of it
| will disappear in 100 years.
|
| So if putting your wealth in dollars doesn't maintain it,
| where are the smart people putting their wealth? Simple you
| can park it in a stable asset.
|
| I'll give you a good example of one of the most stable assets
| you can currently buy, which is real estate[2]. Which if you
| have ever bought a house or if you look at the markets you'll
| realize, this is where a lot of people park their wealth.
| Ever wonder why we could have so many homeless people when we
| have so much unoccupied real estate? Its not just because
| rich people are a-holes[3].
|
| But to store $100 million in real estate, you need to
| construct that much market value in real estate. That's going
| to produce a lot of concrete, plaster, steel, glass, fiber
| glass, polysterene, polyisocyanurate, polyurethane, list goes
| on. Its going to burn a lot oil, a lot of coal, use up a ton
| of electricity. You think bitcoin is bad? Look at what the
| waste the construction process produces. If you want to see a
| climate catastrophe in the making, check out the ghost cities
| in china[4].
|
| Now let's factor in the fact that even real estate value
| degrades. That is to say the house itself will have required
| repairs and the full economy will have added more houses so
| its value to the whole real estate economy has been
| diminished. And keep in mind most constructions are only
| built to last a set number of years.
|
| Keep in mind this is one of the best alternative stores of
| wealth that exists. You're not going to find very many asset
| classes that can keep its real value as well as real estate
| either[5]. And even if you do, they aren't going to be that
| much less polluting. Stocks in coca-cola is a production of
| corn to corn syrup to canned corn syrup. Stocks in nike is a
| production of nylon, rubber, and polyurethane. Gold has to
| mined and that has even more problems associated with it[6].
|
| So people blame bitcoin for its energy expenditure because
| they want to point fingers, but you have to realize that when
| you start considering everything in the system, it is a far
| more efficient system overall than anything we're currently
| working with _because its such a direct translation of energy
| into wealth_. And if we 're worried about pollution, we are
| free to swap out the energy creation for more sustainable
| alternatives as our society evolves, unlike concrete which is
| much harder to replace. People want to look at only a small
| section of things and point fingers because its easier, but
| when you start really pulling the thread to see what it looks
| like you start to realize how much of a hairball the whole
| thing has become.
|
| This post is already getting way to long so I'm going to stop
| it here. There isn't a single source to any of these, its
| just theories to how I see this world that has evolved over
| time. Sources provided, however, are true to the reality of
| the world we live in, which will not be changing from its
| capitalistic nature any time soon. Pretty sure I'm on my own
| island so please disagree with this post all you want. I'm
| just presenting why I believe other capitalist avenues for
| wealth acquisition and storage create significantly more
| inefficient systems.
|
| [1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1920?amount=1
|
| [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/01/real-estate-is-still-the-
| bes...
|
| [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/america
| n-h...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-
| occupied_developments_in...
|
| [5] https://www.millionacres.com/real-estate-
| investing/articles/...
|
| [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_mining#Adverse_effects
| _an...
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| His bank account
| achalkley wrote:
| The USD derives it's value from the US's military's ability to
| exercise force over oil.
|
| If Mozilla was concerned with energy consumption they'd stop USD
| donations.
| pc86 wrote:
| Does anyone else practically get RSI from rolling their eyes so
| hard when they see a corporate account tweet something like
| "We're listening, and taking action."
|
| Human beings don't speak like that. Just say what you're doing.
| It will be enough for people, and not enough for others. But for
| the love of god knock it off with the super-polished robotic
| corporate PR nonsense.
| ca98am79 wrote:
| gexla wrote:
| I assume they would be converting the crypto to USD.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Meh, yet another PR-laden series of tweets. Gotta love that "we
| were mocked and insults were hurled at us" in PR-English is "this
| led to an important discussion", and "we wanted to jump on the
| bandwagon and thought no one would criticize us" turns to "a lot
| has changed since we started accepting crypto donations"...
| [deleted]
| mwattsun wrote:
| Digital money is still a good idea. I don't want to throw it out
| because current implementations are bad. No doubt, someone will
| invent a way to make it work. edit: in a sustainable way.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Alternate consensus algorithms have been invented, implemented,
| and proven in practice for almost a decade.
|
| Proof of Stake (PoS) is the most popular, but there are others.
| mwattsun wrote:
| All that's left to do then is ruin Bitcoin with a 51% attack
| by the combined forces of nation states who are working on
| climate change
| mjr00 wrote:
| Between this and Tesla citing climate change as a reason for
| dropping crypto, this is actually a very interesting shift, and
| one that might be very bad for crypto.
|
| The amount of money people actually donated or spent with crypto
| has always been minimal. (Wish I had harder numbers to back this
| up, but you can see second-order effects from e.g. Steam adding
| Bitcoin support but then taking it away. Or how Bitpay has
| stagnated heavily, while a purely investment/speculation platform
| like Coinbase is worth billions.) However, for a long time, the
| benefit of accepting Bitcoin as payment was the _marketing_.
| Accepting crypto signaled that you were a cool company, you could
| put out a press release and the news media would run articles
| about how X service is now accepting cryptocurrency for payments.
|
| The same thing happened again years later with "blockchain."
| Remember Kodakcoin? Remember Long Island Blockchain? Nothing ever
| really surfaced from these initiatives, but again, it was all
| about that big marketing hype that came from saying your company
| was going to use blockchain for... something.
|
| Where it gets interesting is... what if crypto becomes anathema?
| What if accepting crypto or holding crypto starts become so
| closely associated with directly causing climate change, that no
| company is going to want to be openly associated with crypto,
| NFTs, etc due to the negative association?
|
| You have one side hyping up Web3 as the next evolution as the
| web, but if the perception of crypto continues to be that it's a
| significant contributor to climate change -- regardless of how
| true that may be -- we could see a major decline in mainstream
| support.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| It's all moot. ETH 2.0 is coming June and it uses proof of
| stake which uses a tiny fraction of what proof of work uses.
| All things like this article should do is make you invest in
| proof of stake coins because they are the future.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake
| babyshake wrote:
| Why June? Isn't that just the difficulty bomb date? I haven't
| heard anything about the merge happening in June.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Why not June? He didn't specify the year after all. :)
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/merge/
|
| The difficulty bomb will effectively be the end of proof of
| work as far as I know. I apologize if that is wrong. I used
| to be an Ethereum miner long ago but haven't done it for
| some time.
| rcxdude wrote:
| The difficulty bomb exists to make evolving the protocol
| by forking it smoother, since there's no practical way to
| keep using the 'original chain' indefinitely (TBH I think
| this is one of the better ideas in etherium after seeing
| all the drama around bitcoin hardforks). It can be
| effectively put off indefinitely while still staying on
| PoW by just forking to a version of the protocol which
| the same but with a later difficulty bomb, and indeed
| this has already been done multiple times. The current
| plan as stated by the foundation is to not extend it
| again (at least officially: miners could start their own
| fork if they wanted but it would be up to the market to
| decide which one is worth anything), but they can
| postpone it again.
| ognarb wrote:
| I'm hearing about eth moving to PoS since years now. It won't
| happen.
| eli wrote:
| Hasn't that been a few months from launch since 2019?
| viraptor wrote:
| People were a bit eager with the announcements, but the
| real progress is there. A few steps big steps were finished
| last year and now the big merge is scheduled for 22.
| https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/
| codexon wrote:
| Why is it taking so long for proof of stake to happen?
| They've been talking about it for many years and the fact
| that none of the mainstream coins have moved to proof of
| stake and there is no rising new coin that uses it, make me
| think there's a fundamental issue with it.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Doing it in a truly decentralized way with consensus from
| the community on how to do that on a chain already in
| motion is no easy task I guess. Vitalik has showed a slide
| from many years ago with his way too optimistic dates for
| when proof of stake would be here.
| iskander wrote:
| It's comically complicated once you get into the details of
| moving an existing chain over from PoW; the Ethereum
| developers have really been working on it for years and
| only now have it in a shape that works for multiple
| Ethereum clients on a shared test network.
|
| If PoW weren't a climate disaster it would have very
| obvious appeal due to its orders of magnitude simpler
| implementation.
|
| Edit: You can learn more here --
| https://consensys.net/blog/news/the-state-of-the-merge-an-
| up...
| packetlost wrote:
| So why hasn't there been any new POS coins? If the
| complexity is in maintaining the history, new coins
| wouldn't have that problem.
|
| Even outside of any hypothetical technical complexity, a
| system that explicitly pushes all the power to those with
| the most _money_ seems antithetical to the point.
| iskander wrote:
| There are tons of them, looking at the top 20 coins here:
| https://coinmarketcap.com/
|
| - Solana - Cardano - XRP - Terra - Polkadot - Avalanche -
| Polygon
|
| That's the majority of actual chains in the top 20, since
| many of the rest are tokens running on top of other
| chains (USDT, USDC, SHIB, BUSD, &c)
|
| In general, starting a clone of proof-of-stake Ethereum
| is a very popular way to make a new chain.
|
| As for the philosophical point, PoW isn't really
| different. It takes tremendous capital investment to
| produce enough hash rate to ever mine a BTC. These are
| all more or less systems in which the rich get richer and
| the not-rich get to gamble.
| mjr00 wrote:
| Even when or if this switch eventually finally happens, if
| the current inertia keeps going and the idea that
| "cryptocurrency causes climate change" continues to gain
| mainstream traction, it's going to be _very_ hard to make
| people change their beliefs without a huge, concerted
| marketing campaign.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Geez give humans some credit. A grade school child can
| understand what 99.95% less energy consumption means.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > Or how Bitpay has stagnated heavily...
|
| Bitpay publishes their merchant mix and it's literally all
| money laundering and crime havens. 45% (!!) Gift Cards. 15%
| "Internet." 12.25% "VPN." 9% "Computer games." [1]
|
| That's 81.25% the darkest shadiest industries out there.
|
| [1] https://bitpay.com/stats/
| phasnox wrote:
| Bitpay stagnated because it is a known bad service.
|
| You also have the rise of BTCPay Server and lightning.
| acdha wrote:
| > what if crypto becomes anathema? What if accepting crypto or
| holding crypto starts become so closely associated with
| directly causing climate change, that no company is going to
| want to be openly associated with crypto, NFTs, etc due to the
| negative association?
|
| This is how the current wave of "web3" marketing started:
| everyone in cryptocurrency saw the bad reputation building and,
| being keenly aware that the only value was what you could find
| a buyer for, started hawking "web3 and pumping up things like
| NFTs trying to find new reasons for people to put real money
| into the system.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Do you have any evidence or even anecdotes indicating this is
| the case? From everything I've seen, Web3 hype is from the
| same people who are still excited about all crypto stuff.
| kitsune_ wrote:
| There are crypto currencies by actual computer scientists, like
| Algorand by Silvio Micali, that seem to be much further ahead
| than others when it comes to low-emissions proof-of-stake
| implementations. In Algorand's case, they even offset the
| carbon emissions of the network and as such their blockchain is
| effectively carbon neutral. Or as carbon neutral you can be
| when you use offsetting.
|
| At least to me, they look more intriguing than all the older
| crypto currencies. I always wondered why you would bother with
| all these inefficiencies for some lofty idea of
| 'decentralisation' when we have run of the mill consensus
| algorithms and distributed systems that just work.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| Algorand relies completely on centralized relay nodes. You
| might as well just use a centralized service which will be
| more efficient and cheaper.
| wmf wrote:
| When people don't adopt superior tech that's a sign that
| crypto is about something else.
| [deleted]
| gjs278 wrote:
| nikanj wrote:
| You can still use cryptos to pay for unmentionables on the web,
| extract anonymous payments from crime victims, and most
| importantly gamble in a wholly unregulated casino.
| eqmvii wrote:
| > what if crypto becomes anathema?
|
| From your lips to God's ears.
|
| I've often wished there were a way to organize against crypto,
| since the incentives are so high for true believers to organize
| for it and find more people to buy into the ecosystem.
| MarkPNeyer wrote:
| > I've often wished there were a way to organize against
| crypto,
|
| From my perspective, it's a peaceful revolution against a
| corrupt global status quo.
|
| The only people hurt by this false perception (bitcoin makes
| renewables more profitable by acting as a buyer when nobody
| else will) are people who don't buy bitcoin. And it's their
| loss.
|
| What would you say to someone in el salvador who's happy
| accepting bitcoin because they no longer have to trek to
| ATM's and risk getting mugged?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVVZXUFItZY
| lezojeda wrote:
| Thank you for this response. I think this whole issue is
| always addressed from the point of view of people from well
| developed first world countries, such as aynthing related
| to climate change. Sometimes I wished they lived just one
| year in my country with 50% of inflation and see how they
| deal with that...
| nikanj wrote:
| Not sure how to put this in a non-blunt way, but the
| hardcore crypto bros are not from your country either.
| lezojeda wrote:
| And? I don't have to agree with the """ hardcore crypto
| bros """ either. Both extremes can be harmful.
| shagie wrote:
| In using crypto, you are exporting the wealth of your
| country to those miners in other countries through
| transaction fees. The more you use it, the more of your
| country's wealth is exported (which in turn means that
| the country's currency is worth less and accelerates the
| inflation that is experienced).
| streamofdigits wrote:
| I feel the despair in your comment
|
| but you can not fix a broken thing with another, even
| more broken thing (which is this greedy cryptomania)
|
| it is broken government that is the problem and it causes
| far more ills than monetary inflation
|
| what needs fixing is government. you cannot have a stable
| meaningful life, society, economy without a semi-decent
| government that is accountable, democratic and somewhat
| competent
|
| if the financial system still needs fixing after you fix
| government it would probably be a marginal patch and not
| starting from zero
| lezojeda wrote:
| I understand your argument, but while we try to change
| our government we still need a way to save money and get
| paid without being robbed, cryptos are a way to avoid
| that, it's as simple as that.
|
| Please understand that people like me who live in third
| world countries have third world problems, worrying about
| the climate change is sometimes not in the top of our
| priorities when we don't even now if we'll have 50, 100
| or 30% of anual inflation. And I find unfair how
| sometimes we are told and scolded by the first world when
| they didn't get there via green policies, really.
| notch656a wrote:
| The climate change thing is overspoken, most of these
| people are fine with someone using 10 graphics cards to
| do AI training or whatever other task that is resource
| intensive. It's just that climate change is a big
| political and cultural point for a certain segment of US
| and Europe so those against crypto have found a
| convenient propaganda point by making people feel guilty
| for using computation cycles in an unapproved manner.
| munificent wrote:
| _> bitcoin makes renewables more profitable by acting as a
| buyer when nobody else will_
|
| Yes, and landmines make blood donation more profitable, but
| that doesn't make them a net moral good.
| immibis wrote:
| The crypto status quo is no different from the global
| status quo. The only difference is the set of people at the
| top is somewhat permuted by the set of people who were
| lucky enough to be interested in magic internet money back
| in 2009.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > From my perspective, it's a peaceful revolution against a
| corrupt global status quo.
|
| It's not though. It's broadly a combination of ignorance of
| how the present system actually works, tinfoil hat
| economics and anarcocapitalist libertarian ideology.
|
| It replaces one set of corruption (accountable to the
| people) with a whole new set of corruption. Money
| laundering, crime, wash trading, tape painting, spoof
| orders - an Inspector Gadget run shadow bank in the Bahamas
| printing ersatz dollars - the whole shebang. Out with the
| old criminals technically accountable, in with new
| criminals definitely unaccountable. This is strictly worse
| by all metrics. And that's before we even broach how
| terrible deflationary money actually is in practice.
|
| > The only people hurt by this false perception (bitcoin
| incentives clean energy production and makes renewables
| more profitable) are people who don't buy bitcoin. And it's
| their loss.
|
| If you build a bunch of green energy then waste it all, you
| haven't incentivized anything. You've just wasted a bunch
| of green energy - without that benefit accruing to the
| actual grid. Any time the price goes up so does the budget
| for waste. It's everyone's loss.
|
| > What would you say to someone in el salvador who's happy
| accepting bitcoin because they no longer have to trek to
| ATM's and risk getting mugged?
|
| I would say if they're happy with digital money they can
| open a Wise Multicurrency account.
|
| But they're not happy accepting bitcoin. [1, 2] They're
| being forced by an authoritarian dictator to accept it, at
| gunpoint.
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/majority-
| salvadorans-do-n...
|
| [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-58579415
| lezojeda wrote:
| Freelancers in my country (Argentina) will happily accept
| crypto instead of dollars so they aren't robbed by our
| government, it is really an alternative for us.
|
| Not only that, is another way for us to save money in
| cash since we have an extremely limited to other
| currencies (we have 50% annual inflation so saving in our
| national currency isn't an option)
| [deleted]
| nikanj wrote:
| Bluecollar people have happily accepted cash to avoid
| taxes since forever. Calling taxes "Being robbed by your
| government" is such a cliche
| lezojeda wrote:
| >Calling taxes "Being robbed by your government" is such
| a cliche
|
| Tell me, where are you from? Do you have free access to
| other currencies where you live? Because I don't, and
| where I live we have 50% inflation (even 100% for
| groceries). It's not taxes when we don't get anything in
| return and we can't even save in the currency we are
| paid.
|
| I'd like to see how you live here for a year.
| immibis wrote:
| If you manage to get the full value of your money, other
| people will lose the full value of theirs. The value that
| supposedly backs your local currency simply does not
| exist. Is it not fairer that everyone gets 50%?
| arcticbull wrote:
| To be clear nobody is supposed to save in the currency
| they are paid, ever, anywhere on earth. I'm not saying
| that makes 50% inflation ok just that this not the
| argument. Not least because bitcoin has once again seen
| 50% inflation in the last 60 days.
|
| Again though, why not USDC?
| scottiebarnes wrote:
| > To be clear nobody is supposed to save in the currency
| they are paid, ever, anywhere on earth.
|
| That's right. Store of value is a function of good money,
| and society does not need good money. Long term bonds are
| a scam and have no function in any society whatsoever.
| The real yield on bonds should be zero or negative, and
| that's the way we like it!
| lezojeda wrote:
| One of the parent comments above said "I've often wished
| there were a way to organize against crypto", I believe
| USDC is another crypto isn't it?
|
| But yes, is another way many freelancers are paid here,
| it's not just bitcoin and ETH, many use stablecoins.
|
| I only find kinda selfish the comfortable position to be
| against ALL cryptocurrencies (which don't do such a
| damage to the climate like bitcoin.) while living in the
| first world, even those
| [deleted]
| MarkPNeyer wrote:
| Would you say you're at all surprised at how long bitcoin
| has lasted, or how high the price is now?
|
| What kind of data would change your mind?
| arcticbull wrote:
| The price started getting pumped up by Tether, and now
| it's managed by Alameda and Cumberland in cooperation
| with Tether. USDT volume is 50% higher than the sum of
| BTC and ETH volume. The price you see, $42500 or
| whatever, that's not USD. That's USDT. If you control the
| printing of the currency, and you buy shit with it, you
| can absolutely set it to whatever you want. [1]
|
| To quote Bitfinex right before they fired up the Tether
| printer: BTC could tank to below 1k if we
| don't act quickly
|
| So no, I'm not surprised by the price. The action dragged
| in a few profiteering hedge funds.
|
| [1] https://cryptonews.com/news/how-merlin-lost-patience-
| trying-...
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Does anyone know what that does to inflation?
|
| Iirc the btc/eth market caps are more than the amount of
| "printed" USD throughout the pandemic.
|
| Does tether printed act the same on inflation as USD
| printed?
| amluto wrote:
| > The only people hurt by this false perception (bitcoin
| makes renewables more profitable by acting as a buyer when
| nobody else will) are people who don't buy bitcoin. And
| it's their loss.
|
| And everyone harmed by the rather sizable ecosystem of
| outright crime that takes advantage of cryptocurrency.
| shafyy wrote:
| > bitcoin makes renewables more profitable by acting as a
| buyer when nobody else will
|
| You don't really believe this, do you?
| twic wrote:
| > What would you say to someone in el salvador who's happy
| accepting bitcoin
|
| They aren't:
|
| https://cointelegraph.com/news/some-salvadorans-claim-
| funds-...
| [deleted]
| IAmEveryone wrote:
| Is " making renewables profitable" the new talking point?
| I'm glad for the change because I got tired reading about
| all these dams China had apparently built in areas not
| connected to their grid.
| colesantiago wrote:
| > I've often wished there were a way to organize against
| crypto
|
| How about we rally to completely ban crypto. Talking about
| this isn't going to solve anything.
| steelstraw wrote:
| Since when has banning new technology been a good idea? I
| can't believe how many "technologists" want to take the
| same policy stance as the CCP on decentralization.
| gfody wrote:
| you could only drive it into the underground where it
| sprouted from in the first place, it would inevitably
| return. the only way to stop this form of crypto is to
| invent a better one
| malermeister wrote:
| If punishments for being discovered were severe enough, I
| think we could pretty much kill it off.
|
| Would you risk life in prison?
| gfody wrote:
| that's an escalation - I would risk my life to fight
| against a state that threatens life in prison to control
| something like crypto
| malermeister wrote:
| I feel like people sometimes say things like that, but it
| always ends up sounding naive.
|
| The state has tanks and drones that rain death and
| destruction from the sky. What could the crypto people
| possibly do to counter that?
| haswell wrote:
| While certain implementations of crypto are certainly a
| problem, rallying to ban it seems to imply there are no
| redeeming qualities and no path forward that addresses the
| downsides.
|
| Is that your position on this, or am I missing something?
| IAmEveryone wrote:
| It's had, what, 13 years? And it's still a solution in
| search of a problem.
| haswell wrote:
| It's not fair to say that crypto is not solving any
| problems, or isn't likely to solve any problems.
|
| Thinking specifically about the identity space for a
| moment, it certainly brings a new approach to solving a
| set of problems that still has yet to be solved well.
|
| Should something be banned on the grounds that it's not
| ready yet, or hasn't evolved fast enough?
|
| Plenty of tech on the cutting edge will appear this way
| before it has matured.
| mvindahl wrote:
| Asbestos solved an actual problem, as did freon. Both
| also created larger problems and were eventually banned.
| We could have given them some more time, I guess. Maybe,
| if given another fifty years, the freon industry might
| have (waves hands) fixed its issues with the ozone layer.
| Or maybe not. That wasn't the trajectory, anyway.
|
| Back in 2022, we're now looking at a technology that has
| not, for all its promises of a glorious future, has not
| produced anything but centralized Ponzi-as-a-Service
| platforms, a way for organized crime to move money, and
| smokestacks. At least asbestos and freon had some
| _utility_.
| IAmEveryone wrote:
| It also took 13 years from the first splitting of the
| atom to Hiroshima.
| haswell wrote:
| Should Nuclear power be banned? I'm not sure what point
| you're trying to make.
| bb88 wrote:
| To me they're destroying themselves. NFTs are the worst so
| far and seemed to be prepped for a huge backlash.
|
| https://twitter.com/carsonturner/status/1477520574620606465
|
| And I just saw this article on Barron's today which compared
| BTC to a tech stock rather than a store of value like gold.
|
| https://www.barrons.com/articles/coinbase-marathon-
| digital-m...
| rcxdude wrote:
| NFTs have provoked a huge backlash amongst artists. I think
| often it is a little underinformed (though the conclusion
| is usually pretty sound) but you're not going to win hearts
| and minds when the first most of them hear about the tech
| is other people making lots of money off stolen or mass-
| produced art.
| [deleted]
| boringg wrote:
| Yeah the incentive system is stacked for people to invest in
| crypto - everyone in the ecosystem is pulling for it to make
| money off their investments - and thats what this is at this
| point. There are for sure some cool projects but the lions
| share is to make money (hence the big push from VCs - see
| A16z investments) and they are taking a lot of talent to if
| Chris Dixon's comment's are accurate.
|
| What better way to make something stick then make peoples
| livelihoods depend on it?
| pkulak wrote:
| Just here to point out, once again, that there's lots of
| "crypto" stuff that doesn't use proof of work.
| advrs wrote:
| Where? Can you share a link / description?
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Iota, nano, algorand kinda cardano.
| jnwatson wrote:
| The non-proof-of-work schemes are all either small
| experiments or World of Warcraft gold with signatures.
|
| I genuinely hope for the environment that other schemes work
| out, but we're not there yet.
| pkulak wrote:
| Denigrate how you will, but they work to transfer value
| securely, which is what's needed here.
| vmception wrote:
| The blocks use the same energy whether they are full of
| transactions or not.
|
| So it has nothing to do with any organization encouraging
| transactions or not.
|
| It wouldn't stop demand when considering a competing theory
| that all the transactions are speculation, so nobody is missing
| anything if one place wont accept donations, or that place
| using their platform to reverse policy on accepting crypto.
| steelstraw wrote:
| Only Bitcoin and Eth1 (going away this year) could possibly
| have that association. You can't just discard an entire
| technology on this basis. The energy FUD won't stick beyond
| Bitcoin. Even that will go away when >90% of BTC mining is
| backed by clean energy. IIRC it's around 50% now.
|
| A single Google Search: 1,080 J
|
| A single Solana transaction: 1,837 J
|
| One eth2 transaction: 126,000 J
|
| Watching an hour of television on a 40 inch+ LCD TV: 540,000 J
|
| https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...
| codexon wrote:
| I've always tried to state the problems with crypto here every
| time it comes up, but there is such a huge incentive for the
| people invested in crypto to pump it, that every year the
| number of crypto pumpers grows more numerous than people like
| me.
|
| There really is a place for a decentralized currency to replace
| paypal, but none of the cryptos live up to it. In fact I just
| tried using crypto again a few days ago and it was a terrible
| experience just like it was 10 years ago. My bitcoin
| transaction took over 30 minutes to verify so I tried changing
| to ethereum, and the transaction fee there is $8...
| arcticbull wrote:
| Tell me about it.
|
| USDC would make for a suitable candidate but of course, it's
| got $25 transaction fees on ETH. USDC-SPL maybe. The last
| time I tried to move some USDC-ETH, it was cheaper and more
| convenient to just have FTX wire me the money ($0) then wire
| it from my bank account to the recipient ($0).
|
| In reality though, a CBDC is probably the best way forward.
| plebianRube wrote:
| My email transfers regularly take 30-45 minutes and cost 1.00
|
| My lightning transfers take 1 second and cost less than 1
| penny.
|
| How can the cost of the transfer be less than the cost of the
| energy it is claimed it uses? I could never figure thst out.
| Kaytaro wrote:
| To be fair neither Bitcoin nor Eth are aimed toward being a
| day-to-day currency. Regardless of the original intent
| Bitcoin is only really useful for hoarding like gold, and Eth
| in its current state is more about smart contracts than
| transactions.
|
| If you're truly interested in a decentralized currency there
| are other projects focused on that.
| lezojeda wrote:
| I wonder how those who work from a third world country like
| Argentina with a hard fiat currency control from our government
| will achieve to get paid without being robbed by it.
|
| I'll explain: today our government forbids us from buying
| foreign currency such as the US dollar (200 tops for a really
| REALLY small portion of the population) so a black market has
| been at place since the prohibition started many years ago. In
| this market each dollar corresponds to 200 pesos while the
| government states each one costs around 100 pesos.
|
| So, if you work for a company outside, and the pay you 1000
| usd, you get 100,000 pesos when you could get 200,000 in
| reality. Not only that, you also are forbid from buying
| dollars, so if you want to get them to avoid our rampant
| inflation (50% average, around 100% for groceries) you only
| have the black market which is around 200 pesos.
|
| I know about the damages to the cliamte of crypto mining but
| consider also that there are some beneficial uses of these
| currencies for people like me who don't live in the first
| world.
| gspr wrote:
| I sympathize, but your problems won't be solved by
| cryptocurrencies. Sure, those might patch things over, but
| systemic change is needed, or it'll be a never-ending series
| of such patches.
| [deleted]
| ipaddr wrote:
| Cryto is that systemic change.
| lezojeda wrote:
| I completely agree. Just wanted to point out our situation
| (which may be repeated across the globe in some other
| countries with corrupt governments as ours). I get the
| feeling that sometimes people from the first world believe
| bitcoin & ethereum and other currencies are only used for
| financial speculation but we've found a pragmatic use for
| them due to our conditions.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| If you're forbidden to do that, what happens when your
| government forbids you to use crypto for the reasons you just
| stated?
|
| China already did, what's to stop yours?
| tshaddox wrote:
| The commenter already says that there's a black market for
| converting pesos to USD, which is forbidden . I'm guessing
| a lot of that happens in person with cash? I can't imagine
| the government could enforce a ban on cryptocurrencies any
| more effectively than it currently can with cash.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| China may have banned crypto 'publicly' but by design they
| would have a hard time truly banning it given that wallet
| addresses aren't associated with personal identity and
| blockchains which don't make transactions easily browsable
| exist too.
|
| Their ban has the effect of preventing centralized
| exchanges from providing services in China. But there's no
| practical way for them to crack down on decentralized
| exchanges and/or people trading them in-person.
|
| In the above hypothetical case, if his government were to
| ban use of crypto, he'd still be better off in the sense
| that the government isn't going to be able to just find the
| coins hidden in a mattress the way they might with physical
| money. It'd be illegal either way, but one way would be
| much harder to trace.
|
| This is of course ignoring the volatility involved in
| holding crypto.
| lezojeda wrote:
| Cryptos are being used as a way of payment and then via a
| series of conversions and exchanges (to the point that it
| is ridiculous what we have to do to avoid being robbed by
| our government) we get our national currency for our daily
| groceries, bitcoin acceptance is still extremely rare here
| afaik.
|
| And it's mainly freelancers, IT workers, designers, etc.
| But the number of people who work this way is increasing
| every year since we are running out of options as well (no
| jobs besides delivery apps, working for the state doing
| basically nothing, etc.).
|
| Kinda related: IT companies from our country are already
| complaining that there is an "unfair" competition because
| we get paid, for example 2000 USD, which is a very low sum
| for IT workers abroad but is a huge number for us while
| these companies can't even compete with that number for the
| same employee.
|
| So I believe sooner or later the government will take
| advantage of their complains to try, somehow, to control
| the money inflow from people who work for companies abroad.
| twblalock wrote:
| This is exactly what would happen if Argentinians started
| using cryptocurrency in large numbers, and the government
| found out about it.
|
| A government that wants tight control over currency
| exchange will treat crypto the same way it treats other
| foreign currency: limit exchange, or ban it, etc.
| notch656a wrote:
| Governments haven't been able to stop the flow of
| tangible drugs and you think they can successfully ban
| crypto?
| leifg wrote:
| While "banning crypto" is a challenging task, making
| cryptocurrency useless in your jurisdiction is extremely
| easy.
|
| prohibit any business to accept crypto as payment, ban
| crypto exchanges from operating in your country, ban
| banks of your country to accept transaction that they
| suspect coming from cryptocurrency exchanges
|
| You can still have your crypto wallet, but what use is it
| if you can't exchange it in your local currency? You can
| always meet someone in an ally or travel outside the
| country and bring cash back in but these are solutions
| that don't scale.
| notch656a wrote:
| They do scale and you merely have to witness the insane
| amount of black-market trade between relatively low tax
| Paraguay and Brazil/Argentina to see that. The border
| between Argentina and Paraguay doesn't even have passport
| controls most the time, let alone customs.
|
| Also just because crypto can't be spent by most local
| vendors doesn't mean it's not valuable. Stocks can't be
| spent either but if you had a traditional bearer
| certificate like in the old days (paper stock with no
| owner except by merely holding the paper) it was just
| fine for trade and people did just that in the Weimar
| Republic when they had hyperinflation.
|
| Worst case you can just spend the crypto in foreign
| location, import the goods and sell them locally.
| mvindahl wrote:
| If you need to cross a border to fetch your hard currency
| (or equivalent amount of goods) then what is the value
| add of using crypto compared to, say, opening a bank
| account in Montevideo and making a bank transfer?
| notch656a wrote:
| The presumption absolutely no one will trade you crypto
| in your own country and you can't just mail out or in
| cash somehow seems like a pretty steep one (particularly
| in Argentina where black market trade of USD and all
| array of other stuff is rampant); but you must surely see
| the different between having your cash stored in a
| private wallet vs a bank account with a country that
| quite likely has tax and other legal treaties with your
| own.
|
| I can't imagine it would be a warm feeling for someone
| with tax liabilities in Argentina to have a white-market
| bank account in a friendly country nearby.
| leifg wrote:
| Aren't Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina in the same trade
| union? I don't know the details of Mercosur but in the EU
| you can buy whatever you want in any other EU country and
| take it back home without the need for customs. Where is
| the black market part of that trade?
|
| As for your trade example I would like to see the details
| of that. There are not a lot of vendors that accept
| crypto and those who do, use 3rd parties which then
| usually require some amount of KYC (even if it's is
| minimal). Combine that with how many vendors are actually
| able/willing to ship to the country in question and you
| are left with a very small set of online stores. Add
| shipping costs and custom fees that will eat in your
| margin. So yes in theory you can setup an import/export
| company empire in order to exchange your crypto into
| local currency but that is pretty much the definition of
| "not scaling".
|
| My point is: if a country wants to make cryptocurrency
| useless they can totally do it.
| notch656a wrote:
| I'm not aware of all the customs details in Mercosur but
| if it is like EU then I would just spend all crypto in
| Paraguay and then bring gold or whatever back through
| without customs on other side. Lots of commodities that
| are high density you can carry on your person and fit a
| decade of Argentina wages on your person in a single
| <$100 bus ride.
| geofft wrote:
| Tangible drugs have inherent value: once you have the
| physical object, you can get high in the privacy of your
| own home with no further interaction with anyone.
|
| Cryptocurrency, fiat currencies, and _arguably_ even
| metal coins derive their value from the existence of a
| market which will take them. Bring a bitcoin (as in a
| wallet private key, not the concept) to 1990 and nobody
| will pay you for it. Therefore, a government doesn 't
| need to ban you owning cryptocurrency - it just needs to
| crack down on the businesses you would spend it at
| accepting your cryptocurrency. And it doesn't really even
| need to ban that, it just needs to crack down on their
| suppliers, and so forth.
|
| Your local pizza place that takes Bitcoin only accepts it
| because that money is in turn spendable by them to buy
| flour and oil and cheese - either directly, or by giving
| it to someone who will give them local currency with
| which they can buy flour and oil and cheese. If the
| government presses hard enough on those links, your local
| pizza place will stop taking Bitcoin, and then they won't
| have to ban you from owning Bitcoin at all, you won't be
| able to do anything with it.
| soperj wrote:
| Why oil in the pizza? That doesn't make sense to me (as
| someone who makes pizza regularly)
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Last time I checked, blocking ports, domains, IP ranges,
| et al was trivial in China.
|
| A ban doesn't mean that something stops, a ban means that
| it becomes extremely difficult, a punishable crime, and
| the risk-to-reward ratio becomes significantly
| diminished.
|
| Likewise, the inverse is also true. CB radio was illegal
| in the UK, but it was hugely popular, then, overnight,
| upon it being made legal, it died. Most people lost
| interest because it was no longer exciting. You see the
| same thing with legalizing cannabis. Sure, you'll get
| hardcore consumers and enthusiasts, and people using it
| for medical reasons, but it's no longer
| cool/edgy/interesting, and when it is so accessible.
|
| Could really go either way, but when it comes to money,
| people don't tend to fuck around.
| notch656a wrote:
| If you think crypto is gone from China, I tihnk you may
| be mistaken.
|
| Argentina isn't the US or UK. There was a video an
| Argentinian pointed out to me of a vendor selling black-
| market goods right in front of the tax office. No one
| gives a fuck. Violating Argentina's insane tax code is
| sport for their populace. Once you become big enough
| corruption and ol boy network with the tax authorities
| will negotiate what percent of your income you lie about,
| usually you keep like 70% off the books by the account of
| one accountant from a large construction company I
| interacted with.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| I never said it was gone. Did you read the comment
| properly?
|
| "A ban doesn't mean that something stops, a ban means
| that it becomes extremely difficult, a punishable crime,
| and the risk-to-reward ratio becomes significantly
| diminished."
|
| I think I was crystal clear.
| notch656a wrote:
| Ok glad you agree it can't be stopped.
|
| It definitely is not extremely difficult. Even tangible
| stuff like pot that doesn't have nearly the value density
| (you can fit billions of USD crypto on a wallet stored on
| memory smaller than 1/8th bag of pot) was extraordinarily
| easy to obtain for me as a kid in a place where it was
| illegal both by state and federal government's law. And
| there's no drug dog to sniff it out.
|
| A chinese citizen could laughably easily obtain crypto.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Packet sniffing is absolutely a thing that cryptocurrency
| is susceptible to, and can be automated.
| https://exploitbyte.com/sniffing-cryptocurrency-traffic/
| notch656a wrote:
| I'm no security expert but I'm nearly certain that is
| defeated by using a VPN or tor or some other way of
| obfuscating your traffic.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Sure, but this all starts to become far too complex for
| the average citizen. The average citizen that just about
| managed to wrap their brain around crypto in a semi-OK UX
| is going to get caught out.
|
| I know ex-military folks that can survive in the
| wilderness just fine, but your average person wouldn't,
| and this is about the 99%, not the 1%.
|
| What next? The phones available in the country have a
| specific ROM that doesn't offer VPNs? Already happening.
| Not even accounting for leaks in VPNs, and whether
| someone can trust a VPN provider. We already know that
| the major providers sell netflow data.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Yeah, crypto is still China's best way of exporting coal
| through the atmosphere.
| nikanj wrote:
| Does anyone local actually accept BTC? That is, do you need
| to sell your BTC for either USD or pesos before using your
| money for rent / groceries / phone bill / etc?
|
| Incidentally, your defense of BTC is pretty much "it makes it
| possible to skirt laws and taxes" which seems to be the
| elephant in the crypto living room.
| notch656a wrote:
| In Argentina taxes total taxes on employee income if you
| pay all taxes can be above 100%. This is not hyperbole, I
| spoke with an accountant at a construction company there.
| They basically had to put 70% of their labor off the books.
|
| Skirting the law is required in Argentina. I can see the
| appeal for Argentinians.
| sanp wrote:
| The Argentinian govt. could just as easily put the same
| restrictions as it does on USD today. They can (if they
| want to) also ensure that no commercial establishment
| accepts BTC.
| jollybean wrote:
| Argentinians who want to avoid their own currency would be
| 10x better served by USD than BTC.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Crypto won't fix political and economic problems but only
| worsen them.
|
| The debt that was imposed on you is inhumane and you
| shouldn't have to pay it. The resulting attempts to solve it
| by selling public infrastructure only makes it worse.
|
| Throwing crypto into the mix is pure insanity. It's just
| gambling at a crippling ecological cost.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Crippling ecological cost? Think of the crippling cost of
| printing actual money from cut trees. Pressing daily
| newspapers can be considered insanity.
|
| Cryto is fixing economic structural problems for the parent
| poster.
| onion2k wrote:
| A lot of "paper" money is made from either cotton (eg
| USD) or plastic (eg GBP and Euro). Trees aren't cut down
| to make money.
| mastazi wrote:
| Sounds like you should get more informed about the
| environmental impact of cotton and plastic?
|
| Cotton: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
| news/2019/feb/18/the-d...
|
| Plastic: do you really need a link for this one?
| onion2k wrote:
| _Sounds like you should get more informed about the
| environmental impact of cotton and plastic?_
|
| I posted to point out that money isn't made out of paper.
| That's not _really_ the same as condoning the impact of
| the cotton and oil industries.
| mastazi wrote:
| OK, I see what you mean now, sorry I misinterpreted your
| comment.
| runarberg wrote:
| I think the environmental impact calculations are way
| more complicated then this. Paper money can be used for
| many more transactions then crypto so even if the
| environmental impact of every minted dollar is greater
| then that of bitcoin (which I'm not sure it is) then the
| dollar might still be more environmental by the nature if
| it being reusable for more transactions.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| And what about the environmental impact of all those GPUs
| full of precious metals and rare earth elements getting
| dumped in landfills thanks to cryptocurrencies?
| mastazi wrote:
| oh I'm not a crypto proponent to be honest with you, GPUs
| should be in gaming PCs where they rightfully belong.
|
| What I'm saying is: why replacing a bad solution with a
| slightly less bad solution when you could instead adopt a
| good solution[1]? Reminds me of those power plants being
| converted from coal to natural gas "because gas is
| clean".
|
| [1] e.g. an electronic currency not based on proof of
| work or, you know, just print on paper, a renewable
| resource that is not as resource intensive as cotton and
| certainly better than petroleum based plastics. Hell,
| I'll even bring compostable bioplastics in the mix of
| possible solutions. These are all better than cotton and
| plastic.
|
| Edit: made the comment slightly less snarky in tone.
| Forgive me it's been a long morning.
| FabHK wrote:
| At any rate, the ecological problems caused by making
| banknotes are obviously minuscule compared to those
| caused by fashion, crypto mining, and many other
| industries.
| mastazi wrote:
| That's true, still, we can find a more sustainable way of
| making banknotes I'm sure.
| notch656a wrote:
| OK so you have a economic problem where capital controls on
| dollars are untenable to you and you can't move them
| through the traditional banking system without some
| mandatory and seriously depreciating exchanges. Instead you
| switch to crypto and hold the USD funds for safe keeping
| until transferring back out the country. That may not fix
| structural issues but if it fixes things for you personally
| it sounds like some sort of win and better than nothing.
| immibis wrote:
| Well, you will get the full value of your pay, but you'll
| also be screwed by the collapse of the local currency until
| the local economy rebuilds itself using crypto.
|
| Governments do such things to try and paper over economy
| shortfalls, keeping everything running kinda-less-bad-ish
| than if they just let it fail and start over.
|
| When you are in this situation where a USD only gets half as
| many pesos as the free market dictates, that means a peso is
| only worth half as much as the government is trying to
| pretend it is, and (this is the point of the currency
| controls) they are trying to allow only the 50% of most
| productive usages of USD to go ahead, possibly in the hopes
| of getting enough USD back into the country that they can get
| the free market value back up to where they think it should
| be, and then stop pretending.
| allturtles wrote:
| This is a governance problem, not a technology problem. Your
| government could just add easily forbid you from buying or
| using crypto. What then?
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't understand your point. The government already
| forbids buying USD and there is already a black market for
| that.
| notch656a wrote:
| The government could ban drugs. What then? Guess you won't
| find them anymore. Definitely no illegal drugs in
| Argentina.
|
| Breaking the law is a requirement for survival there.
| Basically all the big employers have to do it, no one
| seriously pays all their taxes as they can be non-
| hyperbolically over 100%.
| labcomputer wrote:
| Ok, so then why not just use USD? After all, breaking the
| law is a requirement for survival, so why concern
| yourself about breaking one more law (using USD)?
| notch656a wrote:
| Well you can use USD representation like tether or GUSD.
|
| You may want to acquaint yourself with taxation in
| Argentina. There is a tax just to put money in your bank
| account. To deposit your money. I recall it being small
| but above 1% but I can't remember the amount off hand
| (Edit: 0.6% for business account transaction) [0]. I'm
| not sure if there's any mandatory exchanging to pesos
| when depositing, but that may be the case. I'm not
| Argentinian. If that is the case it makes things way
| worse.
|
| You have to bring the USD into the country somehow. I
| think crypto is a convenient way to do that which avoids
| capital controls imposed when entering the banking
| system. I guess you can bring in gobs of cash on your
| person and that works as well, although there's the
| tradeoff of being robbed or whatever. But bringing in USD
| sounds OK too for some people and it is very easy to
| smuggle in border with Paraguay as there is basically no
| control at the border. For some it may be a personal
| preference.
|
| [0] https://www.doingbusiness.org/content/dam/doingBusine
| ss/coun...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| People have always used dollars on countries that prohibit
| it. On Brazil we used to have even official black market
| prices, that were announced nationwide on TV every day.
|
| Anyway, yes, non-discriminating electronic money movement is
| a great product that improves the lives of many people.
| Blockchains are a very bad implementation of that concept and
| remove a lot of its potential value. If we are able to get
| some other one working, it's for the better.
| ayngg wrote:
| In what way is crypto not anathema already? HN has basically
| been dumpstering it for over a decade now at every opportunity,
| the general public considers it some imaginary money ponzi
| scheme scam, over the last year people are laughing at the
| stupidity of things like NFTs and meme altcoins. It was only
| very recently that anyone in finance has even begun to consider
| it anything but a complete joke. Of the people that don't
| consider it an outright scam, probably 90% of those people are
| insufferable cryptobros or scammers who latch onto the
| buzzword, who make hating cryptocurrencies very easy.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if all of the media attention it gets
| is mostly because of how much most everyone hates it. It is the
| thing that tech inclined people love to hate watch.
| acdha wrote:
| It's not that simple: the very large amount of money VCs and
| other speculators have pumped into it has ensured a steady
| stream of favorable coverage for years. The stories tend to
| get a hostile reaction from people who understand technology
| or economics but each round finds new people who think there
| might be a pony somewhere since they've been hearing about it
| for years.
| mjr00 wrote:
| It's currently being propped up by big, legitimate
| corporations: everything from sports organizations like the
| NBA, UFC, and WWE to food brands like Taco Bell and McDonalds
| are pumping out NFTs. The Lakers are now playing in the
| Crypto.com arena, even.
|
| On HN it certainly gets a lot of hate, but there's not so
| much in the mainstream right now. I don't think the Lakers
| would have agreed to a sponsorship where they play in the BP
| Oil Fracking Arena, for instance.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| How about the Sneaker Brand Sweat Shop Arena though? Where
| do people draw their line with ethics and caring about the
| impact of what they support?
| mjr00 wrote:
| You're absolutely right and that's what I mean about
| marketing having such a huge impact. Nike spends a ton of
| money making sure you associate the Nike brand more
| closely with LeBron, Jordan, and the general pursuit of
| superstardom than with their use of SEA sweatshops.
| Similarly, the average layperson currently sees crypto
| and associates it with making a lot of money very
| quickly. If that perception changes so that the initial
| reaction to crypto is "this is reckless gamblers killing
| the planet," that's a potentially existential crisis for
| cryptocurrency -- you'll have (more) politicians calling
| for cryptocurrency bans and much lower levels of public
| support.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Eloquent! Thanks for putting into words what a lot of us
| really struggle to.
| xunn0026 wrote:
| If this ends the Eternal September we have in crypto it would
| be awesome. Crypto has too much marketing and eyes on it
| nowadays. It wouldn't hurt to turn in down a notch and keep
| working on it.
| wmf wrote:
| 1. Start accepting crypto, get a PR bump
|
| 2. Stop accepting crypto because you're green, get another PR
| bump
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| And simultaneously flush what little good will remained with
| their users and existing donors. Patience is wearing thin for
| many when it comes to Firefox.
| rchaud wrote:
| Mozilla has been accepting it for years, 2017 at least. I
| imagine nobody donated anything of palpable value because
| they had to re-announce that they do in fact accept crypto.
| That's what kicked off the controversy.
|
| Also, I haven't seen Mozilla associated with positive PR for
| a long time. Much as I love Firefox, it's dead on mobile.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Much as I love Firefox, it 's dead on mobile._
|
| What's wrong with Firefox for Android?
|
| (Firefox for iOS is just reskinned WebKit, like all other
| iOS browsers, but hopefully Apple has to open this up soon)
| suprfsat wrote:
| They had a perfectly working browser and replaced it with
| a broken one with no support for extensions,
| printing/PDF, and WebAuthn.
|
| about:config is currently disabled, so for instance
| setting proxies no longer work. Ah, I see one of the ...
| 18 supported extensions is a proxy setter.
|
| Basically they shipped premature beta software and
| abandoned the stable working version.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| They rewrote it recently, and not only a lot of features
| didn't make it through, but it also lost most of the
| extensions.
|
| Still beats Chrome hands down. But it used to be better.
| voltagedivider wrote:
| > Much as I love Firefox, it's dead on mobile.
|
| It's my primary browser on mobile and always has been. What
| am I missing?
| phatfish wrote:
| I don't think you are missing anything. It is far more
| attractive on mobile due the the extension support and
| hence ad-blockers. That alone makes up for any (small)
| performance difference Firefox has.
|
| Chrome on mobile without uBlock is as bad as you would
| expect.
| jwblackwell wrote:
| At this point, Mozilla is basically irrelevant anyway
| nathias wrote:
| I'm sure now everyone that was so ethically repulsed by the
| crimes of crypto will donate twice as much.
| uncomputation wrote:
| That's implying that half of Mozilla's donations were via
| crypto which I doubt.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Reading it literally no I don't think it implies that. GP may
| just be suggesting (sarcastically) that people will be so
| appreciative that they will donate twice as much in
| appreciation.
| uncomputation wrote:
| Maybe I misread the tone of GP but I interpreted it as a
| sarcastic defense of crypto ("ethically repulsed by the
| crimes of crypto" being the hyperbole here that mocks the
| repulsed (similar to how "in his infinite wisdom" is a
| sarcastic criticism)) which basically argues that the
| crypto critics need to put their money where their mouth is
| and "make up" for the lost crypto donations if they are so
| insistent Mozilla doesn't accept them. But this doesn't
| make sense if the crypto donations are small.
| nathias wrote:
| I meant that critics will give twice as much as they
| first intended before they were prevented by this
| apalling breach of Ethics. Technically correct because
| that's almost certainly zero. It's never a smart move to
| cave in to twitter mobs.
| emerged wrote:
| The grifters pushing to pay in units of planetary damage
| mob on Twitter too.
| nathias wrote:
| yea, I hate fiat pushers too
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Only if you assume what you are implying: That everyone who
| donated in fiat disliked the crypto option.
| shon wrote:
| 1. The crypto market is moving to Poof of Stake, rather than
| Proof of Work. It is already rapidly getting more energy
| efficient because of this. Most new solutions like Polkadot and
| Ada are PoS, ETH will be there soon. BTC is energy inefficient
| because it's old.
|
| 2. Retail payments are an abstraction above currency. When I pay
| with a Visa card, I may be spending cash, "credit", crypto,
| etc... Visa/MC is probably the most pervasive non-Fiat/cash
| retail payment method in the world and it currently works with
| crypto thanks to Coinbase and others. Then you have Venmo, PayPal
| and the many others that work well in retail. There are / will be
| lots of great retail solutions that are abstracted from the base
| value store.
|
| 3. Crypto is very useful for P2P and B2B payments without
| approval from gov, banks, etc.
|
| 4. I lived in Argentina for a while and it's true about the taxes
| and corruption. When I lived there I had to pay rent in cash but
| often the banks would just close or stop withdrawals. Crypto is
| better for this application (P2P payment, not super time
| sensitive).
| theK wrote:
| I have the Mozilla foundation in high regard but this decision is
| nowhere near the quality standards I'd expect from a technology
| foundation/company. Saying Crypto has a bad eco footprint is
| outright wrong, sure Bitcoin and ETH and a number of other
| cryptocurrencies are PoW and therefore energy intensive, but on
| the other side you have platforms like Cardano and Algorand
| showing how you can do it much much better!
|
| That Mozilla statement is unjustly labelling a whole sector, they
| should know better than doing that!
| pavlov wrote:
| Somehow Facebook and Twitter never get a pass on HN using
| similar reasoning:
|
| "Sure social media can be harmful, but on the other hand
| there's Mastodon and Jane's Wholesome Baking Forum showing you
| can do better, so there's nothing to worry about."
|
| Scale matters. Probably 99% of crypto trading takes place on
| destructive PoW platforms.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Eth's plan to move to PoS is pretty concrete, and then your
| claim holds no value anymore.
| pavlov wrote:
| We'll see. It's been 6-12 months away for how many years
| now?
|
| PoS has a political problem, as it's plainly a plutocracy.
| It makes it harder to pretend that magic cryptomath has
| solved society's issues.
| tombert wrote:
| I was about to post a similar sentiment but I figured I'd see
| if someone else is posting about Cardano first. If I understand
| correctly, the Proof of Stake that Cardano (ADA) uses roughly
| 1% of the energy that a Proof of Work system does, and can
| still be secure and cool.
|
| IIRC, didn't Ethereum say about a year ago that they're
| planning on moving to a Proof of Stake at some point?
| Hendrikto wrote:
| The Ethereum PoS beacon chain is already active, and you can
| participate in staking. The full transition will happen
| soon(tm).
| speedgoose wrote:
| Can they actually do it ? I would like to buy a new GPU at
| a decent price before I die.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| The transition has been successfully tested on the
| testnet, afaik.
|
| It should be said though, that while crypto mining surely
| contributes to the GPU shortage, it is only one of many
| factors.
| dikaio wrote:
| I think you'll start seeing more and more mining operations move
| over into renewable energy, similar to what Tera Wulf (WULF) has
| done.
| bbqmaster999 wrote:
| Wow! Mozilla just jumped the shark.
| uncomputation wrote:
| IMO the public backlash against anyone accepting cryptocurrency
| donations speaks to the fact that people today - despite VC
| insistence that "Gen Z gets Web3" and it's only Baby Boomers that
| don't - views climate change as a more significant issue than
| centralized financial institutions. (Please don't respond talking
| about some "$ECO coin" or such business.)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > IMO the public backlash against anyone accepting
| cryptocurrency donations speaks to the fact that people today -
| despite VC insistence that "Gen Z gets Web3" and it's only Baby
| Boomers that don't - views climate change as a more significant
| issue than centralized financial institutions.
|
| That seems...consistent with VC insistence that "Gen Z gets
| Web3".
|
| It's not consistent with what Web3-invested VCs want people to
| take from that, though.
| pxc wrote:
| > That seems...consistent with VC insistence that "Gen Z gets
| Web3".
|
| In an ironic sense, definitely. It shows that they have
| better sense of the real value of web3 than the people
| pushing it
| uncomputation wrote:
| Gen Z hates crypto and web3[1]. They are also partaking in
| the backlash.
|
| [1]: From my experience a lot of the crypto "community"
| online is Gen Z, but most of Gen Z is not pro-crypto. All
| thumbs are fingers sort of logic.
| raunak wrote:
| You are very right. Tiktok loves NFTs, but only NFTTok,
| which is a very tiny subsection of Gen Z.
|
| On the other hand, the other 99% of gen z regularly
| comments about how they've "stolen" your NFT after
| screenshotting it.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| and in so far as gen-z is 'pro-crypto' at least from my
| experience it's large nihilistic attitude towards economic
| progress and having adopted a casino-capitalism style mentality
| where gambling on the newest crypto-asset is just a means to
| get rich quick. Which to be fair isn't much different from the
| general attitude towards it in any other generation.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Even if it had nothing to do with climate change I find the
| entire space to be deplorable. I see it as a heavy negative in
| terms of things it enables (mostly scams and crime), it creates
| other issues (like significantly contributing to GPU
| shortages), people involved in it are like some cult similar to
| other MLM schemes.
|
| I've been interested in it around the time ETH came into
| picture, smart contracts sounded interesting. Seeing how it
| played out in practice convinces me the tech is fundamentally
| inferior to status quo for the things they propose it solves,
| and at this point I think it's been long enough to judge.
|
| The only people I know using crypto in personal circles use it
| to dodge income taxes, order drugs or gamble (not particularly
| judgemental towards either, just super annoyed how it keeps
| polluting public discourse).
| MarkPNeyer wrote:
| > the tech is fundamentally inferior to status quo for the
| things they propose it solves, and at this point I think it's
| been long enough to judge.
|
| What do you know about bitcoin's lightning network?
|
| How would you respond to people in el salvador who are very
| happy with it?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVVZXUFItZY
| rekoil wrote:
| Or Loopring, Arbitrum, Polygon, Optimism. Complete Ethereum
| L1s move to Proof of Stake, and use one of the above for
| actual transactions and you have a super fast decentralised
| way of making transactions that's orders of magnitude more
| energy efficient than Bitcoin.
| acdha wrote:
| Those would be the same people in El Salvador who protested
| in the streets over being asked to use Bitcoin? They know a
| corrupt elite when they see one:
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/9/8/salvador-
| protest-...
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Agreed. Making money off crypto is a lot like making money
| from running a casino or offering payday loans...there's
| plenty of demand, and you can get rich doing it, but the
| societal costs seem to outweigh the potential benefits.
| runarberg wrote:
| When one observes technological solutions failing to address
| societal problems time and time again, one has to wonder if
| societal solutions might be better suited.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Cost/benefit and proof of stake. Pull your head out of the
| sand.
| mattdesl wrote:
| also may be an indicator that the average person doesn't
| realize crypto need not be tied to high energy use. it is like
| saying trains are a bad idea because they burn coal - but now
| years later, we have far more energy efficient trains.
| rvs-ie wrote:
| Bad analogue.
|
| When trains ran on coal there was pretty much no alternative.
| Also more economical trains generally were in preference.
|
| There is alternative to crypto _today_ which does not require
| unreasonable amounts of energy. Cryptobros don't care just
| like they don't care that crypto energy consumption only
| seems to go up.
| [deleted]
| mattdesl wrote:
| Look at railway electrification: this has been happening
| since the late 1800s; in 2012 electric railways only
| accounted for 1/3 of the world's tracks. Point being:
| decarbonisation typically does not happen overnight, and
| this shouldn't stop us from decrying an entire technology.
|
| The scale of ETH's decarbonisation feels slow by our
| typical software standards (although it is not a single
| piece of versioned software nor owned by a single company)
| - but shorter relative to some other global-scale
| decarbonisation efforts; it is slated to merge this year.
|
| No matter... there is no need to engage with PoW if this is
| your primary concern. If desired, Mozilla could have led a
| stronger force toward PoS chains by only accepting crypto
| donations in (say) Tezos, rather than just closing the
| possibility of donations entirely.
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