> No, this needs to have the plug pulled on it if we're to keep global warming to 2C.
Bitcoin accounts for <0.1% of global CO2e and has one of the highest shares of renewables in any industry (since it competes globally for the cheapest energy).
It incentivises renewables (by being a location agnostic buyer of first and last resort which buys all excess energy 24/7), reduces CO2e (by making it profitable to combust CH4 instead of venting it), stabilises energy grids (by providing flexible demand response, i.e. can be turned on and off at moment's notice), provides banking services for the global unbanked and financially discriminated, shields from gambling bankers and inflation of the money supply, ...
In comparison to all these use cases and benefits, mere "luxury" energy uses such as air-conditioning, tumble drying, video games, porn, ... all consume more energy and produce more CO2e (e.g. A/C ~100x more). Yet nobody calls to have the plug pulled on them.
Regulate the production of energy, not the consumption.
The reported frequency is with respect to A1, which in this case appears to be the major allele C. According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/snp/?term=rs114142727, the minor allele is G with MAF (ALFA) ~0.013, this would make C the major allele with frequency of ~0.987 which seem to be in line with the report.
Can somebody who knows statistics explain something for me?
They report (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01285-8/tables/1, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-022-01285-8) e.g. the C allele of rs114142727 to have an OR of 1.285, yet they also report the frequency of said allele to be similar in the case and control group (both ~0.988). Is this a rounding issue (i.e. frequency in the case group must always be higher to report an OR>1) and the frequency is only slightly higher in the case group and the OR becomes so large simply because of the large sampling size? (40K case, 200K controls)
When they report 1.285 OR with a standard error of 0.04 at N=38691, does this roughly translate to a 95% CI of [1.207,1.363]?
Just use Bitcoin. Don't trust anyone except yourself. You can store your coins in your phone, hardware wallet, paper wallet. You can encode it in steel and bury it in your backyard. You can "horcrux" them (e.g. via MultiSig or SSS) and store the parts (and copies of them) at different locations (friends, family, attorney, ...). Or put them in a safe deposit box if you like. Put a small amount on your phone and you can send them in seconds via the Lightning Network to anyone in the world at minimal fees, without relying on or needing permission from anybody else.
Few actual need custodial services and nobody needs the greedy shitcoin casino. Decentralize. Be your own bank.
> Using regular cryptocurrencies is incredibly simple and elegant. It's only when people started to believe propaganda about disk space and cpu time (that never made sense with the most basic examination) that somehow something that worked amazingly well is now a complete mess.
Bitcoin SV did not care about these things and is dead because of it. Its blocks are ~200MB spammed with mostly non-payment related data. Its blockchain has grown to over 6 TB, the global number of nodes verifying the chain is down to 20 and it has been delisted by many exchanges and block explorers.
Bitcoin and Lightning in comparison have ~25,000 nodes.
> lightning isn't on the bitcoin chain until it gets synchronized.
That is literally the purpose of building second layers. We don't need to keep on-chain records of every microtransaction and coffee purchase in an immutable, ever-growing blockchain synchronized across thousands of nodes across the globe.
> If I give you a bitcoin address, you can't send anything to me with the lightning network.
Since LN's inception, liquidity and transaction count on the LN have roughly doubled with every year.
In comparison, BCH has lost 80% of its transaction volume in the last year alone. Its blocksize is now 100KB on average and it now processes fewer transactions than LN. It also regularly hard-forks, either because of leadership cults (Ver, Wright, Sechet, ...) or because of scheduled hard-forks every 6 months which kick off all users who haven't updated. It's the opposite of stable and the market apparently does not share its determination in sacrificing decentralization for adoption.
Growth continued on second layers: Bitcoin's tx count on the Lightning Network has doubled over the last year. Forks of Bitcoin who attempted to scale by increasing the blocksize all failed and are practically dead (Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash, eCash, Bitcoin ABC, ...).
> wouldn't harnessing some more useful proveable activity tied to a lottery system be better
Yes, but such a puzzle needs to be
- easy to generate at a certain difficulty
- difficult to solve
- easy to verify and
- the solution needs to be dependent on previous solution (so you can't silently pre-solve them).
Solving (stupid) hashes so far is the only activity that checks these requirements.
Another option might be to design a certain hash function such that when the hardware miners dedicated to solve them become obsolete (i.e. too expensive to be used for crypto mining), they can be easily repurposed for another problem set.
> I say "the price people were willing to pay" instead of "value"
The price people are willing to pay is how you estimate the value of something.
> For Bitcoin, the most popular one, on the order of 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 of hashes get calculated to mine a single block, multiple trillion per second. Within ten minutes, only a single one of those 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 hashes is actually used, depending entirely on luck. The rest are thrown away entirely. They do not form part of the final hash or anything else, the energy spent on them is lost.
You need to dig through 1 million gram of ore to find 1 gram of gold, depending entirely on luck. The rest is thrown away entirely. The energy is of course not lost but was necessary to find something of value (which also creates a lower price boundary). In contrast to gold, Bitcoin mining ensures provably fair probability of winning, has a tremendously lower barrier of entry, provides incentives to be run on renewable energy and produces far less waste.
The culprit here is likely that you don't consider Bitcoin to be something of value. Particularly for those with less financial privilege, Bitcoin can provide uncensored access to financial services and a long-term hedge against inflation.
> But even if all code was without mistakes, blockchains can’t do anything against threats like scams, fraud, hacking of devices with keys for the blochain or just plain old typos in a coin transfer.
Nirvana fallacy. Bitcoin allows people to control their own money, if they decide to give it to scammers, it's not Bitcoins fault.
> The absolutely perverted energy usage in times of climate change is only one of those (this is mainly caused by proof-of-work, still used by all relevant public blockchains, and general inefficiency). [8]
Bitcoin provides truly self-custodial, borderless money to the world and only causes <0.1% of CO2. Crypto donations to Ukraine worked flawlessly in the current time of war in which national banks are not fully operational. Refugees are able to travel with their funds simply by remembering a few words.
I would not call that "perverted energy usage".
Video streaming, video games, porn, dryers are causing similar or higher CO2 emissions. Wasted foods alone cause 6% of CO2. Calling these emissions useful but at the same time denying unbanked people access to financial services reeks of financial privilege.
Also the cited source [8] is an employee of the dutch central bank which is probably as opposed to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as you can possibly get.
The rest of the article cites several projects which use the blockchain label to generate publicity. While this criticism is warranted, it should be directed at the projects, not at blockchain tech in general.
Misleading title. "Printer driver" suggests a piece of software which makes the printer accessible for other programs. The software in this article merely converts an image into a different format.