It’s the long date concept, promoted by the Long Now foundation [1] which promotes long-term thinking and gives a nod to this by writing years in 5-digit format.
The irony with the GP’s post is that I can’t see using Bitcoin, with its current incredibly-high power usage and associated environmental destruction, as long-term thinking in any way, shape or form.
Bitcoin doesn't have associated environmental destruction right now that I know of. I assume you're referring to its energy consumption, but at the moment it's a subsidy to renewable energy, because nuclear energy and fossil fuels (except for flare gas) are too expensive to compete with super-cheap wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, and photovoltaic energy.
Now, at some point in the future, Bitcoin might become an environmental problem; the cheapest ways to get energy have been environmentally destructive in the past, and they may be so again. Maybe in 50 years we'll have to campaign against Bitcoin miners who want to convert the mass of Jupiter into energy with their fusion reactors or black-hole clusters. But right now the only places that Bitcoin is causing environmental damage are places where some government has unwisely subsidized fossil-fuel consumption, and Bitcoin itself is what puts an end to those subsidies.
It is simply not true that if governments removed all fossil-fuel subsidies today then electricity production would become 100% carbon-free overnight. There are massive issues around supplying base load (requiring cheap energy storage tech that doesn't exist yet), construction lead time, limited materials, workforce, and so on and so on. Then the non-fossil-fuel energy sources have their own environmental costs, e.g. we aren't able to recycle grid-scale batteries or turbine blades yet and those produced today may never be recycled.
For the forseeable future energy production cannot be carbon-free. All uses of energy, including Bitcoin mining, will continue to impose an environmental cost. For those of us who believe Bitcoin achieves nothing useful that can't be done better some other way, that cost translates into a pure negative.
> The Harvard Business Review article I linked above goes into some detail about how this happens.
It doesn't make the argument you have just elucidated, which is an interesting one. I'll think about it.
> Because you judge our lives useless, you engage in motivated reasoning to find excuses to sweep us away,
"Bitcoin not useful" != "your life is useless". I think you have invested rather too much of your identity into Bitcoin.
Regarding "Roca", please check my HN bio. My real name is "Robert O'Callahan" and 'roca' is a handle I've used online since 1990. I have never heard of your "Roca" before.
I explained that for years I've been making a living by getting paid in Bitcoin, and that there isn't a better alternative. To argue that Bitcoin's uses are unimportant, you must argue that it is unimportant for me to make a living, much as Roca did with the Native Americans he murdered and enslaved.
1) You could just as fucking well be paid in something that doesn't use as much electricity as Switzerland.
2) Electricity is one of the few things that are about as fungible as money. All your blithering about how "crypto uses only the most environmentally friendly energy!" is bullpucky, since that only means that some actually useful stuff must now run on other, less environmentally friendly energy.
3) You misspelled "I sincerely apologise for my unfounded and calumnious accusation". Please stop being such an egregious arsehole.
① actually there isn't an alternative, except for working for Argentines, who are desperately competing for the available jobs.
② electricity is fungible, but not portable or storable, and is almost all generated within 200km of its point of use (and well under 10 milliseconds). Also, the supply of electrical power is not fixed; it is rapidly expanding in response to demand. So one use of electricity does not imply less electrical power available even for other things in the same location. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27449443 has a much deeper dive on the issues.
WRT "roca", I guess the Author of my story has quite a sense of humor. You clearly didn't create the account or choose the name to argue against measures that limit the powers of the Argentine government to abuse fiat currencies, since you've been using the name on HN since 02014, and I believe you when you say you've been using it online since 01990.
Yet imagine my perception when I find that someone has popped up here to argue against such safeguards, and he's using the name of the guy whose face is on the $100 bill, whose fame primarily derives from commanding genocidal Argentine government abuses against the peoples in Argentina who didn't use the Argentine currency, and who is also the most famous person in the world by that name. The Roca $100 bills are gradually being replaced—all the ones I have here have Eva Perón instead of Roca on them—but it's only been, I think, a couple of days since the last portrait of that white-supremacist rapist visage has been inflicted upon me, when I got my change at the supermarket on Monday.
So, I hope you can forgive my error of assuming that the astounding degree of relevance of your chosen name to the topic at hand, which I take to be the social value of alternatives to the state-imposed currency system in Argentina, was intentional partisan trolling on your part, rather than a sort of absurd coincidence of cosmic proportions. I should have at least checked your HN bio, as you say, before assuming ill intent.
I continue to maintain that your dismissal of the utility of Bitcoin bespeaks either an astonishing degree of willingness to prioritize your own interests, and the interests of people like yourself, over the interests of people like me; or an astonishing degree of confidence in your own judgment of what causal relations obtain in Argentina over the judgment of those of us who live here.
After this exchange, though, I don't blame you if you don't think much of my judgment!
There are cases of Bitcoin mines stealing electricity and fossil fuel powerplants being retrofitted for Bitcoin mining there is no way miners care about the source of their energy.
Patently false. Bitcoin put a dollar value on under-utlized energy. That can be coal, hydro, whatever. If you believe that Bitcoin is just a more wasteful version of Paypal or ACH, then it matters a lot that this subsidized energy is being converted into waste heat by a bunch of special-purpose ASICs that have no use outside of *coins, and take a lot of metals and energy to create and ship, on limited-capacity fabs.
I ctrl-F "subsid" in your link and don't see any source for your claim. Bitcoin puts a dollar value on (subsidizes) -ALL- energy. If there's a dirty coal plant you can run in your backyard without the government shutting you down, Bitcoin wants to know about it.
Your claim is (1) bitcoin takes energy (2) renewable is cheaper than nonrenewable (3) bitcoin is causing tons of new renewable capacity.
If that were true, why isn't every power plant in the US renewable? How on earth did Bitcoin manage to get this capacity that nobody else has? Money talks, right? Why aren't the mayors of San Francisco, New York, Chicago etc. trumpeting their new 100% renewable grids?
Then you might say that Bitcoin is tech-enabled and decentralized, you can run a mining rig near any energy+internet source. But that's equally true of a cloud compute farm. The fact that bitcoin is pointless hashes and not cloud compute is a historical quirk. Any Bitcoin node/farm could be replaced with an identical-power-usage server farm and do more good for society.
I'd like a source on your Bitcoin only uses renewable claim. I think if I run a miner on my home PC, which I believe has some natural gas in the energy mix, that argument fails.
> But right now the only places that Bitcoin is causing environmental damage are places where some government has unwisely subsidized fossil-fuel consumption, and Bitcoin itself is what puts an end to those subsidies.
I wrote this whole comment without getting to the end of your inane post. We agree that implicit subsidies are bad (burning fossil fuels creates externalities, failing to tax them is a subsidy). But your wordsmithing here is bad faith. Your argument is basically "governments thought people wouldn't be complete jerks, and Bitcoin sure proved them wrong!" Yeah it's human nature and perhaps inevitable, but 50+ years for some of these hydro dams without a problem until Bitcoin came in and ruined everything.
Bitcoin is an ongoing real time climate catastrophe. Get back to me when China and the US ban all forms of carbon-emitting energy production. Until then, those "subsidies" continue, and it matters quite a lot what use for the subsidized energy we find. I suggest cloud computing as a baseline. "environmental destruction right now" is exactly the current state of things.
It's disappointing that you felt the need to post such an aggressive and poorly informed comment, without, as you admit, even bothering to read the comment you were ostensibly responding to. There is a great deal more information about most of the points you touch on in my comments from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27449443
I don't think bitcoin is "causing tons of new renewable capacity", if by that you mean inducing people to bring up many new power plants; its overall power usage is estimated at only about 12 GW. By comparison, PRC installed 71.7 GW of new wind power in 02020; at China's historical wind capacity factor of 22% that'll be 15.8 GW, more than the entire bitcoin network. Including the parts that are running off hydropower and the parts that are outside China.
> We agree that implicit subsidies are bad (burning fossil fuels creates externalities, failing to tax them is a subsidy)
I wasn't talking about implicit subsidies, which aren't enough to make fossil-fuel power price-competitive with renewables. I was talking about explicit subsidies. Like when I was in Venezuela you could fill up the 20-gallon gas tank on an old car for 19¢, because the gasoline was subsidized. That's the kind of subsidy that can make fossil fuels cheaper than renewables: you can run your bitcoin farm off a gas generator. It's not just "failing to tax them".
> 50+ years for some of these hydro dams without a problem until Bitcoin came in and ruined everything.
Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about.
> those "subsidies" continue, and it matters quite a lot what use for the subsidized energy we find.
Not really. I mean, a little? That 01967 Buick swilling that 1¢ per gallon gasoline is producing almost exactly the same amount of CO₂ as if the gasoline were getting burned by a nice new Honda motorcycle (or generator), and it's also producing a fair amount of unburned hydrocarbons and even methane. That matters a lot to the kids with asthma who live next door, and the global warming potential of the total horrific exhaust cocktail is a bit higher than if it were cleanly burned to CO₂ and H₂O. But, from a climate-change point of view, the high-order bit of the problem is that the government was subsidizing the burning of fossil fuels, which results in a lot more fossil fuels getting burned.
So the real problem is not what the energy is getting used for, but that the subsidies make it attractive to get that energy from fossil fuels instead of solar, because you pay for solar but the government pays for gasoline. If bitcoin mining could bring those subsidies to an end by making them suddenly much more costly, which I doubt, then so much the better.
But really, zooming out a bit, Venezuela is not the main culprit in climate change. Whatever happens there isn't going to have a big effect on climate change, one way or the other, until things chang a lot. Europe and the US are the main culprits.
> Bitcoin is an ongoing real time climate catastrophe.
12 GW is about 0.07% of total world marketed energy consumption. There's an ongoing real-time climate catastrophe, but at the moment Bitcoin is almost as much of a distraction as plastic straws. Not that it couldn't get bigger.
The irony with the GP’s post is that I can’t see using Bitcoin, with its current incredibly-high power usage and associated environmental destruction, as long-term thinking in any way, shape or form.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation