Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Good interview all the way through, but this part is the best:

Sanrith Descartes said:

We are but slaves to the machines. It doesn't matter what we think. What matters is how the algos are programmed.

Click to expand...

ah fuck. this makes sense.

Dunno what 'faulty armor farming' is but in regards to Bitcoin mining, dropped hash rate only causes a very temporary drop in the rate of produced blocks because the difficulty of the 'puzzle' (the media likes this word) is adjusted every 2 weeks in order to keep the block rate at a 10 minute average. So the rate at which new coins are produced will return to a 10 minute average every two weeks regardless of how much hash rate joins or leaves the network. This is how the network scaled from 1 CPU mining it to warehouses of ASICs while maintaining a predictable rate of increasing supply. This is how the network could lose half its hash power overnight (i.e. by China kicking miners out) without significant service disruption. This is also why it's dumb to say that a single transaction causes X amount of pollution/power use: because the hash rate would remain virtually the same whether or not the blocks had 200 transactions in them or 2000 (at least until TX fees become the primary source of miner revenue) and the network could lose 99% of its hash power and still process the same TX rate in two weeks. (probably 4 weeks in that extreme case if it happened instantly)

Lol. "The study's authors, for the first time, quantify the share of Bitcoin's emissions attributable to Tesla" -- they literally just multiplied an estimate of Bitcoin's carbon emissions (with ZERO discussion of energy mix which is the single most important factor) with the percentage of coins Tesla posses relative to the total circulating supply. Bitcoin's energy use is extremely transparent and easily estimated and has been for years, which is why it is easy to attack in the press, because it's hard to estimate how much carbon pollution banks put out for example.

It's also silly because using that methodology, the energy use estimate would change dramatically in any given year. Is somebody who bought 100,000 bitcoins in 2011 for like $30,000 or whatever responsible for 586,000 metric tons of carbon emissions annually? After all they own 0.65% of the supply. (I'm sure their carbon estimate is equally bullshit)

All this concern over the environment but I still see Christmas lights every year. Only bitcoiners are required to make sacrifices I guess. America's Christmas lights use about 5% of BTC's yearly energy use. (OMG more than countries!) So at Christmas time, inside those 5 or whatever weeks in the USA alone, the energy use from those lights is something like half Bitcoin's energy use. And that's how you can know the press is full of shit.

woo my red numbers keep getting bigger