Comparing the energy used for Visa transactions to Bitcoin is a false comparison. Bitcoin not only handles transactions, but more importantly, it maintains current wealth and the entire history of every transaction that took place, including the rules that manage it.
You should compare the energy bitcoin uses to all energy used by traditional banks, their corporate headquarters, the government regulators responsible for managing the system, lawyers / judges / institutions managing conflicts, mobile apps and servers powering it, etc.
Bitcoin is doing all of these things without formal institutions, employees, governance, and official regulation.
> Bitcoin is doing all of these things without formal institutions, employees, governance, and official regulation.
All at a whopping pace of 4 transactions per second... Which means that if the entire population of Denver used Bitcoin, they'd only get to make a single transaction once every 2 days.
I don't care what you say or what you compare it to, Bitcoin is very inefficient at what it does. And worse, its energy consumption is not a function of its transaction volume, but of its price in fiat. The higher the price, the more energy miners will throw at it as they attempt to win the next block reward.
And it is this way by design. Take all that inefficiency away and you give up all that makes Bitcoin what it is....
That's fair, but if you were to say, American Express and count its entire energy usage across all sections of the company and its entire business, it'd still surely use orders of magnitude less than BTC while processing orders of magnitude more transactions.
I can write anything i want into the bitcoin chain for $1 and all the computing power in the world wouldnt be able to undo it after a few days.
Even quantum computing can't touch it (though can trivially work out my private keys).
Many people throughout history can and have been censored, don't see that changing soon.
The bitcoin blockchain is a modern technological wonder without anyone really appreciating the power at their disposal.
Using it only for transactions now is like hiring a tank so you can go get money out from an atm. Predict eventually use cases will come into their own.
It's not nearly that bad, because it makes more sense to compare these numbers to gold. Gold is economically similar, since most of its value comes from speculation on the notion that it is deflationary.
If we assume that 85% of total global gold production comes from primary gold mining only, then the 88 million oz (Moz) produced in 2016 consumed the energy value of an estimated 123.2 million barrels of oil equivalent versus 6.6 million barrels of oil equivalent for all Bitcoin production.
The speculative power of gold comes from a kind of "Proof of Work" very much like Bitcoin, by a different mechanism (with different economic properties, of course).
If Bitcoin partially replaces gold (in market cap), and we don't find alternatives for Proof-Of-Work, it seems reasonable to assume that it will also partially replace gold's energy consumption as well.
I really don't understand how people can relate gold to bitcoin - other than the fact they both seem to trade at prices unrelated to fundamental underpinnings.
In my opinion, bitcoin is not digital gold, and quite the opposite. Both require a large amount of energy to be mined, however, once gold is produced (i.e. found), there is no more energy required to keep that nugget of gold in existence. Bitcoin, on the contrary, requires a constantly increasing amount of energy to maintain it's utility.
If today we stopped mining gold, all the mined gold in the world will still be there and will probaly increase in value due to scarcity.
If today we stopped mining bitcoin, all the bitcoin in the world will be worthless.
Nobody is forcing anyone to build mining rigs and pay to power them. To the extent that there are environmental externalities to Bitcoin mining, they are the result of improper pricing on these externalities - such as a lack of a carbon tax in many places.
If the energy required to mine BTC costs more than the value generated, miners stop mining. Tax the externalities properly and there is no environmental problem here.
You are correct, but does that change the conclusion? The externalities on energy production have never been appropriately priced, and recent political history of the world has convinced me that won't change any time soon.
The only real hope is technological change, for example battery technology being more economic than gas powered vehicles. The current implementation of Bitcoin is a technology that takes us in the other direction.
Well, they are not and rarely have been in most polluting industries. “Improper pricing” is a rather disarmingly technocratic way of characterizing global warming. Bottom line we’ve got to curb greenhouse gas emissions, now.
>Tax the externalities properly and there is no environmental problem here.
If the people who always say "tax the externalities" were ever actually leading the political charge to do so, I'd be much more sympathetic. Instead it always seems to be a gas lighting move in bad faith, where on one hand it's "easy problem, it's all externalities!" and with the other hand they're the people fighting tooth and nail against the environmental regulations and taxes we so desperately need.
I don’t like the power consumption but it seems interesting what we value. A distributed currency is bad. But Google consuming something like 26 TWh per year (by my back of napkin math) to serve Youtube videos of cats is fine? How much do Facebook and all the other social networks consume?
The reality is we produce power and price it for a reason. Because the modern world runs on it for all kinds of things. What we really have a problem with, that all these articles are upset about, is that we DO NOT price power correctly and allow it to externalize all environmental cost. Let’s be intellectually honest and rather than attacking Google, or Facebook, or Bitcoin for existing, let’s make sure we price in the environmental cost correctly through carbon taxes.
I understand your argument, but specifically with Google, they now claim:
"100% renewable energy for our global operations — including both our data centers and offices." [1]
I'm not here to debate the merits of cat videos vs bitcoin mining, but to point out that the youtube cat videos are hosted on environmentally friendly data centers.
Etherium’s proof of stake should solve this problem. But I agree, the incentives aren’t aligned to help the environment and that should be a major concern for anyone who cares about future generations livelihood.
This author has no vision. Within five years, we will have big energy crisis: we will produce more energy than what we can consume! Solar farm in Dubai is built for only 3¢/kWh this year. Solar energy is crushing fossil fuels. We will become type 1 civilization faster than you can imagine.
Legendary Satoshi foresees this energy crisis and invented bitcoin to save energy companies from bankruptcy and accelerate the progress we become type 1 civilization.
Thinking bitcoin just as a digital currency? Think it again!
A friend recently pointed out that all these projections are based on a single source: Digiconomics. A source that has an interest in touting the technologies it “reports” on, which have a perennial credibility problem.
So I wouldn’t take all these discussions of bitcoin-powered ecological doom too seriously yet.
I am sending this message from the year 2025. Things are looking bleak here, and some of you will carry blood on your hands. If you don't believe me, please move on, as I have no way of proving to you I'm really who I claim to be.
I don't want to waste any of your time, so I'm merely going to explain what happened. On average, every year so far, the value of Bitcoin has increased by about a factor ten. From 0.1 dollar in 2010, to 1 dollar in 2011, to 10 dollar in 2012, to 100 dollar in 2013. From now on, there's a slight slowdown, as the value increased by a factor ten every two years, to 1,000 dollar in 2015, to 10,000 in 2017, 100,000 in 2019, and 1,000,000 in 2021. From here onwards, there's no good way of expressing its value in dollars, as the dollar is no longer used, nor is any central bank issued currency for that matter. There are two main forms of wealth in today's world. Land and cryptocurrency.
There are just over 19 million Bitcoin known to be used in the world today, as well as a few hundred thousand that were permanently lost, and we're still dealing with a population of just over 7 billion people today. On average, this means the average person owns just under 0.003 bitcoin. However, due to the unequal distribution of wealth in my world, the mean person owns just 0.001 bitcoin. That's right, most of you reading this today are rich. I personally live next to an annoying young man who logged into his old Reddit account two years ago and discovered that he received a tip of 0.01 Bitcoin back in 2013 for calling someone a "faggot" when he was a 16 year old boy. Upon making this discovery he bought an airline ticket, left his house without telling anyone anything and went to a Citadel.
"What is a Citadel?" you might wonder. Well, by the time Bitcoin became worth 1,000 dollar, services began to emerge for the "Bitcoin rich" to protect themselves as well as their wealth. It started with expensive safes, then began to include bodyguards, and today, "earlies" (our term for early adapters), as well as those rich whose wealth survived the "transition" live in isolated gated cities called Citadels, where most work is automated. Most such Citadels are born out of the fortification used to protect places where Bitcoin mining machines are located. The company known as Coinbase to you is known to me as a city where Mr. Armstrong rules as a king.
In my world, soon to be your world, most governments no longer exist, as Bitcoin transactions are done anonymously and thus most governments can enforce no taxation on their citizens. Most of the success of Bitcoin is due to the fact that Bitcoin turned out to be an effective method to hide your wealth from the government. Whereas people entering "rogue states" like Luxemberg, Monaco and Liechtenstein were followed by unmanned drones to ensure that governments know who is hiding wealth, no such option was available to stop people from hiding their money in Bitcoin. Governments tried to stay relevant in my society by buying Bitcoin, which just made the problem worse, by increasing the value of Bitcoin. Governments did so in secret of course, but my generation's "Snowdens" are in fact greedy government employees who transferred Bitcoin to their own private account, and escaped to anarchic places where no questions are asked as long as you can cough up some money.
The four institutions with the largest still accessible Bitcoin balance are believed to be as following:
- Coinbase - 50,000 Bitcoin
- The IMF's "currency stabilization fund" - 70,000 Bitcoin
- Government of Saudi Arabia - 110,000 Bitcoin
- The North Korean government - 180,000 Bitcoin
Economic growth today is about -2% per year. Why is this? If you own more than 0.01 Bitcoin, chances are you don't do anything with your money. There is no inflation, and thus no incentive to invest your money. Just like the medieval ages had no significant economic growth, as wealth was measured in gold, our society has no economic growth either, as people know their 0.01 Bitcoin will be enough to last them a lifetime. The fact that there are still new Bitcoin released is what prevents our world from collapse so far it seems, but people fear that the decline in inflation that will occur during the next block halving may further wreck our economy. What happened to the Winklevoss twins? The Winklevoss twins were among the first to die. After seeing the enormous damage done to the fabric of society, terrorist movements emerged that sought to hunt down and murder anyone known to have a large balance of Bitcoin, or believed to be responsible in any way for the development of cryptocurrency. Ironically, these terrorist movements use Bitcoin to anonymously fund their operations.
Most people who own any significant amount of Bitcoin no longer speak to their families and lost their friends, because they had to change their identities. There have been also been a few suicides of people who could not handle the guilt after seeing what happened to the bag-holders, the type of skeptical people who continued to believe it would eventually collapse, even after hearing the rumors of governments buying Bitcoin. Many people were taken hostage, and thus, it is suspected that 25% percent of "Bitcoin rich" actually physically tortured someone to get him to spill his password. Why didn't we abandon Bitcoin, and move to another system? Well, we tried of course. We tried to step over to an inflationary cryptocurrency, but nobody with an IQ above 70 was willing to step up first and volunteer. After all, why would you voluntarily invest a lot of your money into a currency where you know your wealth will continually decline? The thing that made Bitcoin so dangerous to society was also what made it so successful. Bitcoin allows us to give into our greed. In Africa, surveys show that an estimated 70% of people believe that Bitcoin was invented by the devil himself. There's a reason for this. It's a very sensitive issue that today is generally referred to as "the tragedy". The African Union had ambitious plans to help its citizens be ready to step over to Bitcoin. Governments gave their own citizens cell phones for free, tied to their government ID, and thus government sought to integrate Bitcoin into their economy. All went well, until "the tragedy" that is. A criminal organization, believed to be located in Russia, exploited a hardware fault in the government issued cell phones. It's believed that the entire continent of Africa lost an estimated 60% of its wealth in a period of 48 hours. What followed was a period of chaos and civil war, until the Saudi Arabian and North Korean governments, two of the world's major superpowers due to their authoritarian political system's unique ability to adapt to the "Bitcoin challenge", divided most African land between themselves and were praised as heroes by the local African population for it.
You might wonder, what is our plan now? It's clear that the current situation can not be sustained, without ending in a nuclear holocaust. I am part of an underground network, who seek to launch a coordinated attack against the very infrastructure of the Internet itself. We have at our disposal about 20 nuclear submarines, which we will use to cut all underwater cables between different continents. After this has been successfully achieved, we will launch a simultaneous nuclear pulse attack on every densely population area of the world. We believe that the resulting chaos will allow the world's population to rise up in revolt, and destroy as many computers out there as possible, until we reach the point where Bitcoin loses any relevance. Of course, this outcome will likely lead to billions of deaths. This is a price we are forced to pay, to avoid the eternal enslavement of humanity to a tiny elite. This is also the reason we contacted you. It doesn't have to be like this. You do not have to share our fate. I don't know how, but you must find a way to destroy this godforsaken project in its infancy. I know this is a difficult thing to ask of you. You believed you were helping the world by eliminating the central banking cartel that governs your economies.
Here is something funny: as irrational as it might sound, I genuinly feel like this may be the kind of comment that we need to ban people for; this kind of lack of self-awareness is one of the biggest indictments of your personality and intellect possible.
The difficulty automatically adjusts every 2016 blocks based on the amount of time it took to mine them, so a breakthrough in mining efficiency would increase the difficulty until it reached the 1 block/10 minutes target again.
From a strictly environmental perspective, mining in China in general is going to be worse for the global environment than in the US due to restrictions on pollution from energy generation in the states, at least for now.
> Bitcoin boom may be a disaster for the environment
Probably the most important implication of this undeniable truth is that it's a ready-made justification for liberal governments to ban Bitcoin if it becomes sufficiently disagreeable to them. (It's a great justification for despotic governments as well, but they don't really need one -- one of the perks of being despotic!)
EDIT: I meant "liberal" in the classical, pro-freedom sense (as opposed to despotic), not trying to place governments on the liberal/conservative spectrum of contemporary American politics. I thought that was clear from the context.
Why do you use the term liberal as opposed to something more general? I think the descriptor 'tax-collecting' might capture some of the reasons why a government might want to ban Bitcoin (if they could).
[+] [-] seibelj|8 years ago|reply
You should compare the energy bitcoin uses to all energy used by traditional banks, their corporate headquarters, the government regulators responsible for managing the system, lawyers / judges / institutions managing conflicts, mobile apps and servers powering it, etc.
Bitcoin is doing all of these things without formal institutions, employees, governance, and official regulation.
[+] [-] spookthesunset|8 years ago|reply
All at a whopping pace of 4 transactions per second... Which means that if the entire population of Denver used Bitcoin, they'd only get to make a single transaction once every 2 days.
I don't care what you say or what you compare it to, Bitcoin is very inefficient at what it does. And worse, its energy consumption is not a function of its transaction volume, but of its price in fiat. The higher the price, the more energy miners will throw at it as they attempt to win the next block reward.
And it is this way by design. Take all that inefficiency away and you give up all that makes Bitcoin what it is....
source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(population+of+denver)...
[+] [-] abalone|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeoxyS|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simooooo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mitchellberry|8 years ago|reply
Even quantum computing can't touch it (though can trivially work out my private keys).
Many people throughout history can and have been censored, don't see that changing soon.
The bitcoin blockchain is a modern technological wonder without anyone really appreciating the power at their disposal.
Using it only for transactions now is like hiring a tank so you can go get money out from an atm. Predict eventually use cases will come into their own.
[+] [-] fragsworth|8 years ago|reply
If we assume that 85% of total global gold production comes from primary gold mining only, then the 88 million oz (Moz) produced in 2016 consumed the energy value of an estimated 123.2 million barrels of oil equivalent versus 6.6 million barrels of oil equivalent for all Bitcoin production.
https://srsroccoreport.com/bitcoin-vs-gold-which-ones-a-bubb...
The speculative power of gold comes from a kind of "Proof of Work" very much like Bitcoin, by a different mechanism (with different economic properties, of course).
If Bitcoin partially replaces gold (in market cap), and we don't find alternatives for Proof-Of-Work, it seems reasonable to assume that it will also partially replace gold's energy consumption as well.
[+] [-] scottnyc|8 years ago|reply
In my opinion, bitcoin is not digital gold, and quite the opposite. Both require a large amount of energy to be mined, however, once gold is produced (i.e. found), there is no more energy required to keep that nugget of gold in existence. Bitcoin, on the contrary, requires a constantly increasing amount of energy to maintain it's utility.
If today we stopped mining gold, all the mined gold in the world will still be there and will probaly increase in value due to scarcity.
If today we stopped mining bitcoin, all the bitcoin in the world will be worthless.
That sounds pretty bad to me.
[+] [-] sametmax|8 years ago|reply
Or compare to banks. How many people do you need to provide an office for with all the associated cost so that the structure can create $15000 ?
[+] [-] acc71340123|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ttul|8 years ago|reply
If the energy required to mine BTC costs more than the value generated, miners stop mining. Tax the externalities properly and there is no environmental problem here.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|8 years ago|reply
The only real hope is technological change, for example battery technology being more economic than gas powered vehicles. The current implementation of Bitcoin is a technology that takes us in the other direction.
[+] [-] abalone|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tstactplsignore|8 years ago|reply
If the people who always say "tax the externalities" were ever actually leading the political charge to do so, I'd be much more sympathetic. Instead it always seems to be a gas lighting move in bad faith, where on one hand it's "easy problem, it's all externalities!" and with the other hand they're the people fighting tooth and nail against the environmental regulations and taxes we so desperately need.
[+] [-] jsmthrowaway|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erentz|8 years ago|reply
The reality is we produce power and price it for a reason. Because the modern world runs on it for all kinds of things. What we really have a problem with, that all these articles are upset about, is that we DO NOT price power correctly and allow it to externalize all environmental cost. Let’s be intellectually honest and rather than attacking Google, or Facebook, or Bitcoin for existing, let’s make sure we price in the environmental cost correctly through carbon taxes.
[+] [-] filereaper|8 years ago|reply
"100% renewable energy for our global operations — including both our data centers and offices." [1]
I'm not here to debate the merits of cat videos vs bitcoin mining, but to point out that the youtube cat videos are hosted on environmentally friendly data centers.
[1] https://environment.google/projects/announcement-100/
[+] [-] thisacctforreal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrowley|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sir_Substance|8 years ago|reply
https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf (skip ahead to costless simulation)
[+] [-] whataretensors|8 years ago|reply
They are all a bunch of agenda-pushing hacks.
[+] [-] FreeRadical|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sysout|8 years ago|reply
Legendary Satoshi foresees this energy crisis and invented bitcoin to save energy companies from bankruptcy and accelerate the progress we become type 1 civilization.
Thinking bitcoin just as a digital currency? Think it again!
[+] [-] blurbleblurble|8 years ago|reply
https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyBlockchain/videos/200606982...
[+] [-] toyg|8 years ago|reply
So I wouldn’t take all these discussions of bitcoin-powered ecological doom too seriously yet.
[+] [-] _Marak_|8 years ago|reply
I don't want to waste any of your time, so I'm merely going to explain what happened. On average, every year so far, the value of Bitcoin has increased by about a factor ten. From 0.1 dollar in 2010, to 1 dollar in 2011, to 10 dollar in 2012, to 100 dollar in 2013. From now on, there's a slight slowdown, as the value increased by a factor ten every two years, to 1,000 dollar in 2015, to 10,000 in 2017, 100,000 in 2019, and 1,000,000 in 2021. From here onwards, there's no good way of expressing its value in dollars, as the dollar is no longer used, nor is any central bank issued currency for that matter. There are two main forms of wealth in today's world. Land and cryptocurrency. There are just over 19 million Bitcoin known to be used in the world today, as well as a few hundred thousand that were permanently lost, and we're still dealing with a population of just over 7 billion people today. On average, this means the average person owns just under 0.003 bitcoin. However, due to the unequal distribution of wealth in my world, the mean person owns just 0.001 bitcoin. That's right, most of you reading this today are rich. I personally live next to an annoying young man who logged into his old Reddit account two years ago and discovered that he received a tip of 0.01 Bitcoin back in 2013 for calling someone a "faggot" when he was a 16 year old boy. Upon making this discovery he bought an airline ticket, left his house without telling anyone anything and went to a Citadel.
"What is a Citadel?" you might wonder. Well, by the time Bitcoin became worth 1,000 dollar, services began to emerge for the "Bitcoin rich" to protect themselves as well as their wealth. It started with expensive safes, then began to include bodyguards, and today, "earlies" (our term for early adapters), as well as those rich whose wealth survived the "transition" live in isolated gated cities called Citadels, where most work is automated. Most such Citadels are born out of the fortification used to protect places where Bitcoin mining machines are located. The company known as Coinbase to you is known to me as a city where Mr. Armstrong rules as a king.
In my world, soon to be your world, most governments no longer exist, as Bitcoin transactions are done anonymously and thus most governments can enforce no taxation on their citizens. Most of the success of Bitcoin is due to the fact that Bitcoin turned out to be an effective method to hide your wealth from the government. Whereas people entering "rogue states" like Luxemberg, Monaco and Liechtenstein were followed by unmanned drones to ensure that governments know who is hiding wealth, no such option was available to stop people from hiding their money in Bitcoin. Governments tried to stay relevant in my society by buying Bitcoin, which just made the problem worse, by increasing the value of Bitcoin. Governments did so in secret of course, but my generation's "Snowdens" are in fact greedy government employees who transferred Bitcoin to their own private account, and escaped to anarchic places where no questions are asked as long as you can cough up some money.
The four institutions with the largest still accessible Bitcoin balance are believed to be as following:
Economic growth today is about -2% per year. Why is this? If you own more than 0.01 Bitcoin, chances are you don't do anything with your money. There is no inflation, and thus no incentive to invest your money. Just like the medieval ages had no significant economic growth, as wealth was measured in gold, our society has no economic growth either, as people know their 0.01 Bitcoin will be enough to last them a lifetime. The fact that there are still new Bitcoin released is what prevents our world from collapse so far it seems, but people fear that the decline in inflation that will occur during the next block halving may further wreck our economy. What happened to the Winklevoss twins? The Winklevoss twins were among the first to die. After seeing the enormous damage done to the fabric of society, terrorist movements emerged that sought to hunt down and murder anyone known to have a large balance of Bitcoin, or believed to be responsible in any way for the development of cryptocurrency. Ironically, these terrorist movements use Bitcoin to anonymously fund their operations.Most people who own any significant amount of Bitcoin no longer speak to their families and lost their friends, because they had to change their identities. There have been also been a few suicides of people who could not handle the guilt after seeing what happened to the bag-holders, the type of skeptical people who continued to believe it would eventually collapse, even after hearing the rumors of governments buying Bitcoin. Many people were taken hostage, and thus, it is suspected that 25% percent of "Bitcoin rich" actually physically tortured someone to get him to spill his password. Why didn't we abandon Bitcoin, and move to another system? Well, we tried of course. We tried to step over to an inflationary cryptocurrency, but nobody with an IQ above 70 was willing to step up first and volunteer. After all, why would you voluntarily invest a lot of your money into a currency where you know your wealth will continually decline? The thing that made Bitcoin so dangerous to society was also what made it so successful. Bitcoin allows us to give into our greed. In Africa, surveys show that an estimated 70% of people believe that Bitcoin was invented by the devil himself. There's a reason for this. It's a very sensitive issue that today is generally referred to as "the tragedy". The African Union had ambitious plans to help its citizens be ready to step over to Bitcoin. Governments gave their own citizens cell phones for free, tied to their government ID, and thus government sought to integrate Bitcoin into their economy. All went well, until "the tragedy" that is. A criminal organization, believed to be located in Russia, exploited a hardware fault in the government issued cell phones. It's believed that the entire continent of Africa lost an estimated 60% of its wealth in a period of 48 hours. What followed was a period of chaos and civil war, until the Saudi Arabian and North Korean governments, two of the world's major superpowers due to their authoritarian political system's unique ability to adapt to the "Bitcoin challenge", divided most African land between themselves and were praised as heroes by the local African population for it.
You might wonder, what is our plan now? It's clear that the current situation can not be sustained, without ending in a nuclear holocaust. I am part of an underground network, who seek to launch a coordinated attack against the very infrastructure of the Internet itself. We have at our disposal about 20 nuclear submarines, which we will use to cut all underwater cables between different continents. After this has been successfully achieved, we will launch a simultaneous nuclear pulse attack on every densely population area of the world. We believe that the resulting chaos will allow the world's population to rise up in revolt, and destroy as many computers out there as possible, until we reach the point where Bitcoin loses any relevance. Of course, this outcome will likely lead to billions of deaths. This is a price we are forced to pay, to avoid the eternal enslavement of humanity to a tiny elite. This is also the reason we contacted you. It doesn't have to be like this. You do not have to share our fate. I don't know how, but you must find a way to destroy this godforsaken project in its infancy. I know this is a difficult thing to ask of you. You believed you were helping the world by eliminating the central banking cartel that governs your economies.
[+] [-] rabidrat|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Casseres|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nk1tz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzxxddere333|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sctb|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] Fraterkes|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] geophile|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eat_veggies|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktta|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikhil9865|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffwass|8 years ago|reply
From CNN last month : http://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/10/world/wonder-list-bill-wei...
Another six months ago : http://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/12/africa/uganda-mining-corru...
[+] [-] sandworm101|8 years ago|reply
When identity politics and environmentalism ride in the same cart, the whirlwind follows.
[+] [-] jrowley|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kcorbitt|8 years ago|reply
Probably the most important implication of this undeniable truth is that it's a ready-made justification for liberal governments to ban Bitcoin if it becomes sufficiently disagreeable to them. (It's a great justification for despotic governments as well, but they don't really need one -- one of the perks of being despotic!)
EDIT: I meant "liberal" in the classical, pro-freedom sense (as opposed to despotic), not trying to place governments on the liberal/conservative spectrum of contemporary American politics. I thought that was clear from the context.
[+] [-] castle-bravo|8 years ago|reply