Looks like Bitcoin isn't so eco-friendly...

Discussion in 'Environment & Conservation' started by kazenatsu, Dec 8, 2017.

  1. ButterBalls

    ButterBalls Well-Known Member

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    Your welcome to throw it up brah! As a boss of mine use to say "Pitter-patter-git-atter boys!" :)
     
  2. Reiver

    Reiver Well-Known Member

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    It was merely revealing that I referred to scientific evidence and you didn't...
     
  3. ButterBalls

    ButterBalls Well-Known Member

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    This?

    Looks like opinion to me :)
     
  4. Reiver

    Reiver Well-Known Member

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    You forgot a rationale. Have another pop!
     
  5. mamooth

    mamooth Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Quite often, they do. Maybe not the greenhouse part, but many are set up in cold areas specifically to cut down on cooling costs.

    There are plenty of reasons to dislike Bitcoin beyond energy use, such as the blockchain being public. So, basically anyone in the world is able to see that drug deal you made on Silk Road, forever.

    ---
    In a new paper, a group of Qatari computer scientists show that they could easily trace 100 dark market accounts to real people. About 20 of those accounts had made purchases on the Silk Road, and some had gone on to divulge their legal names and addresses in other, linkable contexts.

    The researchers didn't do any blockchain magic to unmask these purchasers: they just crawled dark markets for the advertised Bitcoin wallet identifiers of buyers and sellers, then search public directories to see if the wallets were listed there, too.
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    That was just a few amateurs. Imagine what a government could do.

    Also, bitcoin will never become a real global currency. If any government wants to adopt a blockchain based currency, they'll invent their own damn blockchain, instead of buying out someone else's

    Bitcoin also has a problem in that it's currently limited by its structure to 7 transactions a second. That's for the whole planet -- across all of planet earth, only 7 transactions can be made per second. Not really what you need for a global currency.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem
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    In contrast to Visa's peak of 24,000 transactions per second,[5] the bitcoin network's theoretical maximum capacity with the 1MB block size limit sits between 3.3 and 7 transactions per second
    ---
     
    Last edited: Jan 28, 2018
  6. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    That's not a terrible limitation. 20 million seconds equates to roughly 230 days. It does depend on how often the currency is traded, but at the current going market price it's not likely to be exchanged that frequently. Even if every Bitcoin was traded every day, there would on average only be about a 4 minute wait time.

    The bigger impediment, one would think, would be the high unit cost. Imagine only having money denominated in $11,000 pieces.
     
    Last edited: Jan 28, 2018
  7. Old Man Fred

    Old Man Fred Well-Known Member

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    I enjoy flipping homes, as I come from a family of skilled craftsmen who have done it for generations, and have an eye for up and coming neighborhoods.

    I bought my first home at an absolute steal, and attempted to buy several others shortly thereafter, but the market had already driven up the price. Working a full time, 40-80 hour a week job, I can only get so much work done at home, which is why after 2 years of home ownership my home is only about 70% to perfection.

    Free markets work best, because I only have so much time, and had I purchased those two extra homes, I wouldn't have had the time to get them to a reasonable, livable standard, and would just be renting them out. Bitcoin works much the same way, as I know many amateur bitcoin miners. As the profit margin tightens, many of them will fall away, because that's how free markets work.
     
  8. Old Man Fred

    Old Man Fred Well-Known Member

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    You're missing the point.

    A transaction is someone spending it. A currency meant to only be spent 7 times a second across the globe is a serious problem
     

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