majinuub

I disagree that America was intended to be a melting pot. That idea came later. It was intended to be a federation of Christian, culturally English states.

If you release the CO2 into the atmosphere, it doesn't really reduce emissions. However, because miners can harness the energy in a profitable way, they could afford to sequester or scrub the CO2. That would make oil and gas companies look a little greener, which is even more of an incentive. I believe some miners are doing this already.

The only purpose of a blockchain is to decentralize the storage and validation of data. It only makes sense if the decentralization is worth the loss in efficiency. Using a blockchain just to store data and perform computations when you have no reason to decentralize will only result in a crappy, slow database.

> Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in electricity. That is a monumentally stupid amount to pay. It's $125 per kB.

Its incredibly fallacious to measure the cost of electricity per transaction on Bitcoin. Blocks can be completely full or utterly empty and still use the amount of power. You're also missing the point of the power consumption. Its not used to move capital from one person to another, its used to secure the network from attacks and preserve its integrity. Measuring the cost of electricity per transaction is like measuring the amount of energy bank vaults and the US army use per dollar transaction. Stats like the one you quoted don't take into account the number of Lightning network transactions happening off-chain but is secured by a past on-chain transaction.

> No, it is not. Projects like that may be branded with bitcoin, but bitcoin miners are buying the same electricity as everyone else. The rising cost of electricity is causing new sources of power to be exploited.

> Instead of being used for something useful, that electricity is being turned into waste heat.

One, value and usefulness is subjective. Because something is "useless" for someone like you doesn't mean its useless to others. I, and many people around the world, find Bitcoin to be incredibly useful and worth the electricity. Secondly, if oil and gas companies could profitably monetize flared methane, they would have already. They don't because trapping and transporting the methane would lose them money. Its an industry standard to simply release or burn the methane instead. So Bitcoin IS useful in that respect.

They should stop using computers too because hackers use them.

Europe and Asia have been doing instant bank transfers for a while now.

Bitcoin has been doing 24/7 payments since 2009 and instant payments since at least 2018. Not to mention Bitcoin is decentralized and not reliant on government and bank bureaucracy to function.

The Fed is a little late on this one.

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” - Milton Friedman

> Project direction controlled entirely by core devs and the centralised exchanges that bless their output as "bitcoin" regardless of the fact it directly contradicts the original consensus mechanism for the project and the changes implemented by said devs fundamentally broke the utility of the project.

Core devs and exchanges do not entirely control the project direction. Non-backwards compatible changes cannot be made to Bitcoin without the miners AND node operators adopting the new client. It takes the cooperation of the devs, miners, and node operators to make a hard fork. "The Blocksize War" by Jonathan Bier documents a bunch of failed hard fork attempts that were backed by a good number of devs, large miners, and large exchanges. They failed because the node operators were not on board.

Its disturbing how many people on HN are okay with this.

Doxxing everyone by government mandate isn't the answer, nor should it ever be the answer.

Privacy and anonymity are essential for people who want to speak out against powerful or potentially violent groups or individuals. Anonymity is really the only way to protect freedom of speech imo. Privacy is also extremely important for any sensitive info you want to selectively share. Tools, services, and platforms need to take that into consideration. It's not just a meme.

>Advertisers and crooks already have under-the-counter access to our private data (via Equifax, etc.), but we don't get to benefit from it.

We shouldn't throw away the concept just because we haven't executed it well.

The actual problem is our obsession with free stuff and knowing who to trust. Trust should be with family, friends, and the people you know. Then the trust reduces the further someone is from you in the socal graph. That's why I'm big on Web of Trust. You can't (and shouldn't) make people trust those you think they ought to trust. People should choose for themselves.

Posting comments and content should have skin in the game, you're absolutely right about that. Being able to post things consequence free is what leads to more trolling and spam. It shouldn't be contingent on your identity though. Micropayments are a great for this. If you had to stake a tiny amount of money for each comment, I think it would reduce spam and trolling.

I'm thinking that its because many HN users live in or close to medium to large sized cities. So they have no perspective when it comes to a place that's truly rural. They just see that some small city has no high rises or large companies and just assume "that must be a rural town."

What could possibly go wrong?