Power Plants Become Bitcoin-Mining Operations. Are There Alternatives? (nysfocus.com) 223
The New York Focus site writes:
A decade ago, the bankrupt owner of the Greenidge power plant in Dresden, New York, sold the uncompetitive coal-fired relic for scrap and surrendered its operating permits. For the next seven years, the plant sat idle on the western shore of Seneca Lake, a monument to the apparent dead end reached by the state's fossil fuel infrastructure. But today, Greenidge is back up and running as a Bitcoin mining operation. The facility hums with energy-hungry computers that confirm and record Bitcoin transactions, drawing power from the plant's 106-megawatt generator now fueled by natural gas.
The mining activity is exceptionally profitable, thanks to an 800 percent rise in Bitcoin's price since last April. Seeking to ride the boom, the plant's new owners plan to quadruple the power used to process Bitcoin transactions by late next year. Environmental advocates view Greenidge's ambitions, if left unchecked, as an air emissions nightmare. And they fear that dozens of other retired or retiring fossil-fueled power plants across New York could follow Greenidge's example, gaining new life by repurposing as Bitcoin miners or other types of energy-intense data centers.
The New York Times recently touted an alternative to bitcoin mining: the "proof of stake" method, which "instead awards miners new blocks based on how much cryptocurrency they already own." The world's second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Ethereum, has said it is moving toward proof of stake (that switch is likely to take up to another year). Though some critics say Bitcoin will eventually need to follow, particularly if an environmental backlash grows, there are no current plans to do so and such a move is unpopular within the Bitcoin community.
"That reduces your emissions to almost nothing," said Joseph Pallant, Blockchain for Climate's founder and executive director. Cryptocurrency platforms like Tezos or Near Protocol already use proof of stake and have vastly lowered their energy use.
The mining activity is exceptionally profitable, thanks to an 800 percent rise in Bitcoin's price since last April. Seeking to ride the boom, the plant's new owners plan to quadruple the power used to process Bitcoin transactions by late next year. Environmental advocates view Greenidge's ambitions, if left unchecked, as an air emissions nightmare. And they fear that dozens of other retired or retiring fossil-fueled power plants across New York could follow Greenidge's example, gaining new life by repurposing as Bitcoin miners or other types of energy-intense data centers.
The New York Times recently touted an alternative to bitcoin mining: the "proof of stake" method, which "instead awards miners new blocks based on how much cryptocurrency they already own." The world's second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Ethereum, has said it is moving toward proof of stake (that switch is likely to take up to another year). Though some critics say Bitcoin will eventually need to follow, particularly if an environmental backlash grows, there are no current plans to do so and such a move is unpopular within the Bitcoin community.
"That reduces your emissions to almost nothing," said Joseph Pallant, Blockchain for Climate's founder and executive director. Cryptocurrency platforms like Tezos or Near Protocol already use proof of stake and have vastly lowered their energy use.
Climaticide is crime against humanity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Climaticide is crime against humanity (Score:5, Insightful)
Their rush to renewables isn't great either. The cheapest renewables in much of the world is hydropower. Including here in Iceland, where there's projects underway to dam up new river canyons (often containing stunningly beautiful waterfalls) to make up for the shortfall that bitcoin mining has caused on the grid in some regions. All to play an elaborate game of "Guess The Magic Number" so that this generation's equivalent of Gold Bugs*** can revel in how many fungible digital collectibles they own.
But by all means, cue the cryptovangelists to ignore that Bitcoin uses 6 orders of magnitude more energy per transaction than Visa (while not even doing everything that Visa does), who want to instead compare it to "all banking" (down to the footprint of the janitor cleaning out bathrooms at a derivatives trading office at Goldman-Sachs) and entirely omitting transaction rates.
** Gold Bugs - that peculiar mix of libertarians and preppers - were always generally disliked by the broader investment community for their willingness to throw the environment under the bus to collect shiny metal with limited fundamentals (jewelry, electronics) to make wild speculative bets, while being highly vocal about it. But they've got nothing on today's cryptovangelists and their giant game of Dunning-Kruger Economics....
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Re:Climaticide is crime against humanity (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't make sense. The problem with proof-of-work coins is the mining, not their use. That's what's inherently flawed with them. People buying bitcoin for investment makes sense, assuming that they don't understand how bad the infrastructure is. People mining, they should understand how bad the infrastructure is, and if they don't, they have their heads in the sand.
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The problem with proof-of-work coins is the mining, not their use.
I thought the *use* of Bitcoin (as in, transactions) *required* mining to work? Otherwise all you have is a static ledger, or not?
Re: Climaticide is crime against humanity (Score:2)
no there is a limited number of coin to mine on Bitcoin. the transactions can continue on even when mining is done. Transactions, or adding to the ledger, is done through a consensus protocol and the operation is far less computationally intensive than the mining. You can schedule quite elaborate payments with bitcoin, but rounding error (always down) is consumed by the network as sort of a transaction fee.
Re: Climaticide is crime against humanity (Score:3)
Adding transactions to the ledger IS mining. It will be exactly the same process after the block reward drops to zero.
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Adding transactions to the ledger IS mining.
sorry no. That's not how it works. Mining is different and more computationally intensive. A transaction (with inputs and outputs) uses some of the same fundamental operations on the Bitcoin network, but it is a different process because you don't know the inputs from the state.
Once you have successfully found a block, then you close it out in the ledge though that's the final step. The hard bit that you do before that isn't necessary if you already know everyone's address for a transaction. You can think o
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Transactions, or adding to the ledger, is done through a consensus protocol and the operation is far less computationally intensive than the mining.
No, that's exactly what mining is. Miners get transaction fees. However, in the beginning, there were not enough tx fees, so a block reward was added - the block reward halves every two years to limit the total supply of coins. Also, now there are enough tx fees to make mining profitable.
The idea for all PoW blockchains is that to double-spend your coins, you need to have more hashing power than the rest of the network combined (called a 51% attack).
So yeah, mining is a very important part of bitcoin.
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why not? Sounds like they are equally to blame. Both are trying to profit on the whole.
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Both are trying to profit on the whole.
Since someone is paying for the energy consumed, the process as a whole is negative-sum.
In a negative-sum game, it is impossible for everyone to profit.
So who's the patsy?
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Eh? What does that have to do with my comment?
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The late comers, same as any pyramid scheme.
Re: Climaticide is crime against humanity (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't blame the miners. Blame the lack of taxes and regulations that allows energy producers to ignore the external costs of energy production. We do it for nuclear waste but we don't do it for carbon emissions. Just let the full cost of energy use be paid by those who use it and no one needs to pontificate about which uses of energy are useful enough.
Re: Climaticide is crime against humanity (Score:4, Insightful)
Blame everyone involved. Adults aren't supposed to need Mommy and Daddy to tell them no in order to behave ethically.
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Blame them all. Everyone involved in this circle-jerk is responsible.
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Even hydro isn't very clean. Think of all the tons of co2 dumped into the air to create the cement that is used to make the dams. Or the pollution created when making the steel, and the copper. My point is: Nothing is totally clean -- hydro power is at best, break-even. And I say this as someone who uses and approves of hydro.
All the externalized costs are the reason why I consider Tesla to be a scam for those who don't think things through -- all they are doing is moving the pollution around, not changing
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don't forget the methane produced by the reservoir.
Thees sort of things do need to be evaluated quantitatively, though. The question is not whether hydroelectric dams are as pure as the driven snow, it's whether they provide a useful alternative to other forms of carbon intensive power.
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Hello, Agent Smith.
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Their rush to renewables isn't great either.
It's worse than that. Even if bitcoin was 100% renewables it would be no better than being 100% coal, because ever bit of renewable energy you waste is coal fired power plant remaining in operation for someone else.
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"Imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin" -- some wag on twitter.
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It isn't for nothing. It's a big bet that the environmentalist are wrong, and Earth won't spiral into a "climate" disaster. Imagine, the feeling of satisfaction when one ideological enemies are beaten into submission, forced to grovel and beg in the street for nanoSatoshis. Won't that be fun?
And if the climate predictions are correct, and billions of people die of heatstroke, and poverty, and famine, and war, at leat you'll have made some money in the process. Isn't that the most important thing in life?
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Congrats on a well Subjected comment that actually deserves the Insightful mod. I think you really get at the heart of the Bitcoin idiocy. Power wasted for exactly nothing and for no reason beyond the marketing ploy of artificially manufactured scarcity.
My current theory of the "solution approach" is that China is hording Bitcoins. Turning our "capitalist" greed and gold-rush mentality against us, but they still have to hold their fire until we "integrate" Bitcoin into our financial systems more deeply. Whe
Yes, make bitcoin illegal tender (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just treat Bitcoin as Iran. The reach of the US is world wide when it really wants to throw its weight around.
No exchange would be able to get reliable access to any kind of electronic transfer, not even indirectly. Only physical exchange would consistently work any more, which couldn't sustain the industry for obvious reasons.
Yes, make Ramen illegal tender (Score:2)
Stopping cryptocurrency as a unit of trade is as effective as stopping Ramen as a unit of trade in prisons. Besides the entire point of cryptocurrencies was to cut banks and government out of the loop. Why do people want to bring them back in? Because they can't get the latest and greatest GPUs? That's like giving up freedom for a feeling of security.
Re:Yes, make Ramen illegal tender (Score:5, Funny)
“They who give up cryptocurrencies to obtain a few GPUs, deserve neither.” — Benjamin Franklin
“Don't believe everything you read on the Internet” — Abraham Lincoln
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“Don't believe everything you read on the Internet” — Abraham Lincoln
Many sources attribute that to Socrates, not Lincoln, according to my internet research.
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Have a government run notary service and build a crypto without all that energy wasting proof-of-work. Or go a step further and introduce a real government run digital currency, so that you can transfer your dollar without going through an expensive third party.
This won't get rid of bitcoin by itself, but if there is a government run crypto that can actually be used to buy stuff, it might make it clear that bitcoin has no future and drop it in value enough to become useless.
Just plain outlawing it would of
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You could outlaw it the same way you outlaw pot houses.
Yeah, that approach worked so well that many states have legalized it.
Re:Yes, make bitcoin illegal tender (Score:5, Informative)
If people cannot use it to buy things, its value will crater, and people will stop mining it.
It's not like you can use and do use it to buy things today... as a currency, it's an utter failure: A currency should be a stable storage of value.
The magic of the cryptocurrencies is that purchasers will "invest" in it in hope that someone else will buy it later. These buyers again hope that someone else will buy it for a higher price... and repeat. At no point has it been a useful currency or an actual value producing asset, behind all the smoke(literally) and mirrors it's a pyramid scheme. Just a far more harmful one.
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The point of Bitcoin is that no government (or anyone else) can prevent you from making a payment to anyone else, for any reason you want.
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The point of Bitcoin is that no government (or anyone else) can prevent you from making a payment to anyone else, for any reason you want.
Yes, they can. They will come over to your house and kick your ass if you buy drugs/guns/girls etc.
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Shit... do RealDolls count?
That's right. More than one.
Re: Yes, make bitcoin illegal tender (Score:2)
governments can suppress free speech, deny you access to the open internet, and force you into military service.
BTC can make it easier to hide from your government, but it doesn't solve the problem of the many governments that have run amok. The world's most powerful governments have their fingers in the currencies and banks that drive the global economy. It's only a matter of time before the try to squash crypto like a bug, take control of it, or force it underground.
A few strokes of a pen in the US congre
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If people cannot use it to buy things, its value will crater, and people will stop mining it.
It's not like you can use and do use it to buy things today... as a currency, it's an utter failure: A currency should be a stable storage of value.
The magic of the cryptocurrencies is that purchasers will "invest" in it in hope that someone else will buy it later. These buyers again hope that someone else will buy it for a higher price... and repeat. At no point has it been a useful currency or an actual value producing asset, behind all the smoke(literally) and mirrors it's a pyramid scheme. Just a far more harmful one.
Eh, I wouldn't go that far. Yeah, I think they are stupid. But for now, anyway, people freely convert them back and forth with money.
I mean there aren't many places you can walk into and actually buy things with gold, but that doesn't mean that gold doesn't have value as an exchange medium.
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Yes, certificates from the stock market would also be a terrible form of currency. Currency needs to maintain an established stable value or it isn't a trustworthy means of exchange.
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So, like the stock market, right?
Stocks on the stock market have intrinsic value. They have assets, inventory, revenue streams, projected future revenue streams, and a customer base. If Amazon liquidated tomorrow, you would still have buildings, computers, land, intellectual property, etc...
Likewise with gold. If you have physical gold you can still use it to make things.
There are stocks on the stock market that as similar to bitcoin where they have basically no revenue or assets but even these companies you are usually buying for futur
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Bullshit.
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They can't. The way you purchase most things with bitcoin is to exchange it for some other currency, mostly US dollars, then use those. The US could cripple cryptocurrencies simply by making it illegal to exchange them for dollars, or vice versa.
Satoshi Nakamoto (Score:5, Interesting)
If he hasn't committed seppuku by now he surely will soon. I mean even the Chernobyl operators only fucked up the immediate area, Satoshi Nakamoto will no doubt go down in history as environmental enemy no 1 right up with the oil and coal industry.
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As he's kept his anonymity for so long, I don't think he has much to fear. The bad name only is on his once-used pseudonym. And contrary to those who succeeded him as Bitcoin advocates, he might never have had the illusion of doing something good for mankind with Bitcoin. The earliest players were the ones guaranteed to cash in the biggest, and that was exactly the plan. He long since has cashed in royally and lives his life in abundance, by whatever name he might go today, maybe not even caring much for wh
Re:Satoshi Nakamoto (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, most of the early accounts -- including Satoshi's -- remain untouched, with mark-to-market values in the billions.
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I don't think he has much to fear
Maybe you should google what seppuku is. Whether he is anonymous or not is irrelevant.
Why is that not illegal? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's illegal if I start lighting up fires in forests, causing environmental damage, for my profit/fun. Why is it not illegal to operate power plants for individuals' profits without providing common utility? Is there no association of running power plants to environmental damage? No liability whatsoever?
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Because every country in the world would have to make it illegal to stop it? And that's just not going to happen, absent WW3. And probably WW4....
And maybe WW5.
Re: Why is that not illegal? (Score:2)
nice thing about WW3 is there can't be a WW4.
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Well yeah I'm not naive, but it takes me by surprise when such a big prevalent "fuck the environment and YOU ALL, I wanna be rich" can go by like that. I'd expect at least a layer of facades, deception, etc.
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Regulators slow peddled regulation of Bitcoin because it was popular and they wanted to be hip.
Now there is immense buy in and lots of interests which would get wiped out, so it's much harder to step in. They are now stuck with an unproductive fire pit in which fossil fuel is thrown, which also fuels a massive amount of cybercrime, tax evasion and money laundering ... and they have no clue how to fix it.
Trump could have fixed it if Bitcoin randomly offended his senile brain, but that boat has sailed.
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I do see this trend of increasing buy-in, and it's outright scary and non-sensical. I don't believe the powers that be have no clue how to fix it, but as you say the effort required to fix this is too high and risky, and instead of doing that, they're trying to make some money on it while it still gains momentum, whereas at the same time they're building infrastructure for alternative forms of crypto that are more future-proof.
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I don't think this is hard to understand and I'm sure almost any argument you might make could similarly be made about people posting on
Until you bother to figure out what problems with existing methods BitCoin exists to solve you won't be able to stop it. It's like t
Conversion (Score:2)
Didn't it cost a lot of money to convert it to run on natural gas?
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Or expect to be able to turn around and sell the building/infrastructure when using it for grid generation becomes more profitable than using the NRG to mine coins.
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I'm sure it did, but the rapid increase in the value of bitcoin combined with cheap money for the conversion made it a viable investment. I'd wager the conversion itself made the plant a valuable asset on its own.
Plus natural gas has stayed cheap, maybe even cheaper with the pandemic over the last year, so I'm sure that helped with the costs of conversion long term.
Cryptocurrency is the wrong answer to society. (Score:3)
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Stop pretending mining currency makes sense? (Score:2)
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And "free tokens" encourage hyperinflation and devalued currency. See:
* https://www.tripsavvy.com/worl... [tripsavvy.com]
The Iranian rial is worth, at last look, roughly 1/42000 of a US dollar. The problem of rampant inflation is a recurring one when currencies are uncoupled from tangible token whatsoever.
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Fiat money allows countries to fight wars. Deflationary money causes countries to fight world wars.
Ironically (Score:3)
Environmentalists missing the bigger picture (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with proof of stake is that it undercuts the very problem that Bitcoin solves. Proof of Work is the way that we confederate the monopoly on money supply that is central banks. Without it then a government actor basically has a kill switch. If it ever truly threatens the money printing monopoly then all they need to do is print enough paper to buy majority stake then the currency is done. Now understanding this, the only defense against such an attack is principled stalwards that refuse to sell their stake for any price, but then that also defeats the threat that the crypto poses because if people are just HODLing and not using it as a medium of exchange then it is hardly undercutting the role of the fiat currency anymore. It is now neutered anyway.
The big picture matters here. The real problem matters too. Governments need to focus more on expanding renewable energy supplies and punishing willful polluters for the benefit of humanity and less on corporate handouts and oppressive surveillance of the citizenry. All of the FUD and mud slung against Bitcoin as a polluter is missing the forest for the trees. It is about our oil addicted governments failing us on the environment and failing to see that mining is so much more than "a game of guessing magic numbers". It is about the democratization of our markets from central corporate control.
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Go trade some Bitcoin in China without being rich enough to have and hide foreign bank accounts ... for the moment you can mine it and sell it to the foreigners, but any internal use forget about. You are very much underselling the power of governments, it will democratizes fucking shit in the future and obviously it's not doing so now either.
Decades down the line and all you have is these dreams and an utterly failed Lightning network.
Re: Environmentalists missing the bigger picture (Score:2)
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If government wants to kill bitcoin it simply makes it illegal. Bing-bang-bong, your advantage due to proof-of-work vanishes overnight. Actually it becomes a liability because mining operations have big footprints (maybe not physically, but in terms of power) and therefore they are easy to find in the same way they find illicit marijuana growing operations — just look for unexplained heat signatures with IR cameras.
Proof-of-work brainwashed (Score:2)
I'm amazed how people still believe that proof-of-work is more socially just than proof-of-stake. Quite the opposite. Proof-of-stake allows anyone to invest a bit of money through a staking pool and earn from that. That's like a normal investment. Sure, people with more money can make more money, but that's fine.
Proof-of-work, on the other hand, heavily leans towards rewarding geeks, those with connections at graphics cards companies or distributors, those with money to build a mining farm, etc.
The argument
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Nope. It did originally, yes, through obscurity. Now it rewards entrepreneurs with access to capital to set up large-scale mining operations. They just buy any geeks they need, and do so wherever in the world they're cheapest.
Re: Environmentalists missing the bigger picture (Score:2)
First sensible post.
It's so surprising that slashdot can have great enlightening discussions on almost any topic in the world but when it comes bitcoin, 90% of us keep finding the flimsiest excuses to be anti ! When we are not purposely misunderstanding it and acting like its useless that is.
It doesn't feel right even statistically. We have a lot of pro & con posts on the stupidest things or the most brilliant ones but on bitcoin the supporters are like 5 or 6 people here :(
Either subconsciously we are
Re: Environmentalists missing the bigger picture (Score:2)
Good rant though. I agree a lot with everything you are stating, however a couple of your drawbacks about BTC I would like to address.
I work at a large financial services firm as a principal architect of various payments systems that directly interface with the Fed and SWIFT payment networks, responsible for wiring money for corporate customers across the US and the rest of the world. Moving small, or massive amounts of money from anyone person to anyone else in the world can be incredibly complex. There ar
Re:Environmentalists missing the bigger picture (Score:5, Interesting)
Meh. Proof of stake gives the power to whoever has the most money. Proof of stake gives the power to whoever has the most processing power. Since processing power costs money, they're equivalent.
Bitcoin was founded on the naive idea that a billion Joe Randoms would be processing transactions using spare cycles on their PCs. It failed to consider the implications of success: giant operations with custom silicon dominating the system. This is a story about one of those.
Bitcoin today is just a super inefficient version of VISA or MasterCard with the dubious additional property that foreign governments and megacorps can fight for control over it.
Re:Environmentalists missing the bigger picture (Score:4, Informative)
Proof of Work is the way that we confederate the monopoly on money supply that is central banks. Without it then a government actor basically has a kill switch.
You're implying that this is actually a problem, rather than a fundamental component of our economy which keeps it stable. It's a usual anti-government propaganda run by the naive that have no concept of what a shitshow the world turns into without some form of government. Hell reducing the power of central banks has been tried by countries that returned to a gold standard from a fiat standard. When the depression hit, those countries lost completely control of their economy resulting in far worse effects on the people than for other developed nations on a fiat currency. They all pretty much came out and said "we made a mistake" and switched back to fiat currencies immediately after. You can live in whatever shithole your imagination dreams up. I'm perfectly happy with a monopoly by a central bank enacting government policy largely for the good of the people who essentially form the core of the economy.
All of the FUD and mud slung against Bitcoin as a polluter is missing the forest for the trees.
No it's not. If bitcoin were 100% renewable it would be no better at all than being 100% coal fired providing there is still a coal fired plant operating. Any energy you waste, regardless of how green it is, is energy that someone else can't use to supplant the dirty energy they are using. Bitcoin is a waste of energy. The world won't be saved by simply producing more green energy, a fundamental part is the *reduction* of energy use.
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Firstly its not price stable. Eg: try running a business with complex inventory of parts to manufacture ANYTHING when your currency yo'yo's up and down. Suddenly what was put on back order just sent you bankrupt, how do you do standard markup pricing for your product? Its so push-pull price volatile you cant. ;-). It ma
There has to be another alternative... right? (Score:4, Insightful)
The "mining" paradigm just ends up a ridiculous, planet-destroying Red Queen's Race - arbitrary "difficulty" shifts mean literal power plants are being stuffed full of computing hardware to serve the exact same purpose of a handful of personal desktops back in 2013. At what point can we finally, finally say "this is absolutely fucking ridiculous and completely unnecessary" and abolish the whole contrivance?
"Proof of stake" is obviously less directly immediately awful than that, but it takes "the rich get richer" and literally bakes it into the commerce system itself. I mean, it's better than Shitcoin wasting terawatts of energy finding magic numbers with a bunch of 0's and centralizing the whole transaction system around the whims of a handful of Chinese and American mega-miners, but still, it's a continuous bank bailout that gets stronger the less the banks actually need it.
There has to be a better way, no?
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Poorfags getting taxed fees for every transaction while richfags earn the fees. Poorfags getting some of their money inflated away over time while richfags earn interest. I fail to see how it makes much difference.
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Fees or interest, I still fail to see how it would make much of a difference. Either way, money flows from poorfags to richfags.
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The PoS interest is deliberately designed, the PoW fees are deliberately designed ... and they are both regressive.
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What? No, I think you have some wires crossed.
Bitcoin isn't mined with every transaction. Transactions are components of blocks, and when those are created, new Bitcoins (I refuse to use the singular-plural, it sounds dumb as hell) are spawned. The amount of Bitcoins spawned with each new block has decreased over time, but the difficulty of creating new blocks has increased - by design - so that every x minutes, one new block is created, no matter how much processing power is being thrown at the calculation
i would rather pan for gold (Score:2)
Yes! Stop using sodding Bitcoin (Score:2)
If the cryptocurrency was introduced today, nobody would touch it! Everything is wrong with it. Paltry limit of coins. really slow transaction times. Really crappy number of transactions per day. Proof of work based so crap for the environment.
It's a meme coin! If you want one of those then go for DOGE. At least it's honest about its intentions. And you can buy one for under a dollar.
Soooo many tulip bulbs. (Score:2)
An alternative (Score:2)
Internalize the externalities (Score:3)
So, assign an environmental cost to natural gas, add an excise tax, and move on. This is a stupid argument to be having about everything.
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Carbon taxes are hot topics. People, particularly many in the US, are rather opposed to them.
Ponzi schemers (Score:3)
"proof of stake" - What a load of crap (Score:4, Insightful)
The New York Times recently touted an alternative to bitcoin mining: the "proof of stake" method, which "instead awards miners new blocks based on how much cryptocurrency they already own."
Oh well that seems fair...not.
In other words the bigger players will wipe the floor with any late-comers. Just another way to boost the "get in on the ground floor!" hype.
Why would I even get involved if I know the game is rigged in favor of the heavyweights?
This hearkens back to the "only landowners can vote" shit.
In summary, fuck this and fuck anyone promoting this unfair-from-the-start horseshit.
Re:"proof of stake" - What a load of crap (Score:5, Interesting)
They get interest for keeping PoS secure, just like miners get interest and fees for keeping PoW secure. There are economies of scale which reward people who can make more investment either way. Both PoW and PoS are inherently regressive in a steady state, it's not unique to PoS.
Ignoring the merit of cryptocurrencies for a moment and supposing Bitcoin stabilizes and becomes digital gold, it will have made some people who got "in on the ground floor" rich and then become just another asset class to kick around for the big players as gold is now, with big mining companies shaving off a cut ... and it will become just as irrelevant to little players as gold is now.
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So in other words...pretty much what I said: the little guys get screwed while the heavy hitters laugh all the way to the bank.
If aliens ever arrive... (Score:3)
need incentives to convert coal plants (Score:3)
THis is just plain FOOLISH to allow the restart of coal plants. America has done a decent job of shutting these down and must continue down this path. Allowing ANY coal plant, in fact, any fossil fuel plant, to restart is just stupid.
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Well, except for getting laid or trade goods you're right. Gold jewelry really servers no purpose and we should ban it!
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Gold jewellery is pretty, it serves an aesthetic purpose.
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For cents per transaction it allows me to buy GPUs to play some games on. For 15 dollar per transaction Ethereum is making it impossible for me to buy GPUs to play some games on.
Fiat currencies raise most boats, cryptocurrency sinks most boats ... even with PoS their effects on crime would still be criminal.
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As a side benefit, the integral fast reactor could have democratized the use of nuclear weapons. Imagine a world in which "Iraq, Libya, et al" could go toe to toe not only with the US central bank, but with the US Department of Defense. Truly, a freer, richer world.
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