In the short term, flexible power production like coal generation gets used to satisfy grid demand during situations with abnormally high power requirements. It has the benefit of being able to be turned on and off practically instantly. There is no economic incentive to build out sustainable generative capacity if it won't be running all the time, and balancing the load on renewable power is awkward (see power price rate inversions for examples of utilities paying people to use excess energy).
I remain unconvinced that cryptocurrency is long term detrimental to clean power generation infrastructure. Quite the contrary, the existence of cryptocurrency to mine acts as a 'productive' sink for power produced in excess of grid baselines. In practice, our entire grid could be renewables in excess of peak demand, and cryptocurrency mining a flexible network load. It could quite possibly get us off of non-clean energy entirely.
> What about the crops they destroy because they would be less profitable?
To clarify this point specifically, food self sufficiency is considered a national security issue.
Consider the situation where a hostile country floods your market with cheap food products (below cost) until your country's farms go bankrupt due to an inability to compete. Once you stop producing food of your own, you give significant power to whoever controls your food supply.
This is a large part of why agricultural subsidies exist. And yes, sometimes it means paying farmers to let crops rot on the vine in order to not cause market gluts. That is an entirely different situation from futures and hedging, which in any sane market match supply and demand (with the result of minimizing waste).
For moderators, the switch from being able to use third party clients to being forced to use the official reddit client would be like a programmer being told their favorite IDE/text editor can no longer be used for code, and you'll have to get used to notepad or something.
Existing code? Fine! No problems, you can run it like normal. Writing new code? I'm not so sure you will have nearly as many developers willing to work in that ecosystem. Third party applications are part of the core moderation loop of pretty much every subreddit that operates at scale, and depriving those moderators of the tools they use will be to the detriment of the quality of the site.
People saying this won't change much probably haven't tried to moderate at scale using only first party tools. It sucks.
Merkle trees! You (simplified) hash the data at the leaves of the tree, merge adjacent leaves (concatenation for example), and hash the new leaves, until you're left with just the Merkle Root, a single hash representing the entirety of your data. Verifying the root is easier than loading the data itself into memory and hashing it there since you can verify it piecemeal and without loading it all into memory at once.
Is residential water use really the problem? Relative to agricultural use of water in California, residential water use is a drop in the bucket. Agricultural use of water on its own exceeds the maximum use of water the state can support long run. I can understand the desire to make an impact as an individual, but even dropping residential water use to zero won't do much at all for the problem as it stands. It's a distraction.
Why use a mixer at all? The technology is fundamentally centralized/trust-based, and even assuming a perfectly trustworthy mixer, vulnerable to many forms of analysis (the list of which will only grow as time passes). If you want privacy, use something that actually gives it to you, like Monero.
I'm reminded of this scene from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In theory, the goal of the airdrop is to create new users, but in practice the airdrop receivers just cash out their chips and go home.
Solar and wind are nice, but they don't solve the base load problem. They aren't consistent enough to operate as base load on a power grid. They are certainly convenient for maintaining peak load, but without solving the energy storage issue in parallel to the added capacity, we need alternatives.
I've been hearing the same line about nuclear plants taking decades to be built for decades, as if its a valid dismissal. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was a decade ago, the second best time is now. We should be scaling up our nuclear capacity.
> "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic..."
The decision for the first quote you used was overturned afterward, over 50 years ago now. It's misrepresentative of the current state of the law and you shouldn't use it as an example.
Given that the 8.6% return is contingent on those funds being loaned out to third parties in a manner that involves risk (like margin trading), I am highly skeptical of their ability to not lose your money on the timeline of a decade. The trustworthiness of Blockfi doesn't matter if they mess up and end up loaning money to someone who ends up unable to pay the bill - and the person on the hook if the borrower does not pay is the lender of the capital. Not Blockfi. Why do you think the interest rates are so juicy?
If it was as safe as you seem to think it is, why didn't they just pony up their own money? 8.6% is far above any standard investment vehicle at the moment. For a safe investment, it's free money!
At 8.6% APY, would you say you believe you have a sub-8.6% chance of the funds disappearing in a given year? Considering that it would take over a decade to return the original capital in value, I feel that the compensation is low relative to the risk of loss. Ten years is a lot of time for a company to bungle your funds, especially in the cryptocurrency world.
With the amount of money printing being done globally, and interest rates breaking the zero bound, I am not surprised that investment goods have risen in price. Inflating the monetary supply has a habit of raising prices. The rest of the economy may just be lagging behind the investable goods in price.
The piece you are missing is called the Key Image. The key image can be thought of as a fingerprint/hash (one way function) of the true spender, and is always produced when the true spender signs the transaction. Signing the transaction with any of the decoy keys will not produce a valid key image, and therefore they are not able to spend the funds (or see their amount). This key image is also used to verify that transactions aren't being spent twice - despite not knowing which input in a ring is actually being spent, a transaction with a key image that has never been used before guarantees that it hasn't been spent in the past.
For context, that is nearly half of a billion dollars worth, it is hardly a small amount. Try selling half a billion dollars of anything on short notice and you'll observe similar market reactions. I think that the fact that the market swallowed up that kind of volume is indicative of Bitcoin becoming more mature in a market sense, not less.