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rriepe | 4 years ago

It only starts out inefficient. Eventually you have enough of them to capture most of the energy of the star.

discuss

order

_Microft|4 years ago

According to my definition, that's a Nakamoto Type II civilization, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435464

(Spoiler: it's just the Kardashev scale with the additional condition that all available energy has to be burned on crypto mining)

TeMPOraL|4 years ago

Yeah, we'll end up building a Dyson sphere just to secure a goddamn "financial network".

Been worried about this for a while (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21280454 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24309932).

EDIT: Merged pull request: quotes around "financial network" (usrusr)

EDIT 2: _Microft wins this day. I'm going to start using Nakamoto scale from now on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27368015

piva00|4 years ago

I've seen your comments throughout the years and it's been one of the sparks for me to learn more about Bitcoin's power consumption, it is truly bizarre how easily shoved aside the argument about the climate impact of PoW cryptocurrencies is by their proponents. Seems that some on the Bitcoin train didn't realise that the concept and technology have been coopted by miners, etc. since the rift about increasing block size or not, the miners and others with high stakes in maintaining the status quo have won. They won't ever allow their investments to become worthless (or at least non-profitable) and now all the other smaller agents have to fight a war against that to ever have a chance to change the massive ecological impact of Bitcoin.

Thanks for shaping a path to educate myself on this issue, I recognised the Dyson sphere analogy pretty quickly, haha.

usrusr|4 years ago

Heh, knowing humanity this is definitely the least unlikely scenario for a Dyson sphere to come into existence.

Pull request: quotes around "financial network"

vsareto|4 years ago

Here I was hoping we'd spend it on virtual environments where we could just set account balances to whatever we want