<story><title>Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It&apos;s time to ban cryptocurrencies</title><url>https://thehill.com/opinion/cybersecurity/564696-bye-bye-bitcoin-time-to-ban-crypto-currencies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nscalf</author><text>This is some of the worst junk writing I&amp;#x27;ve seen on the hill.  Some pretty wrong things in here, like insinuating that the only value of crypto is to criminals, and all but saying that the reason there are hackings to things like critical infrastructure is because crypto exists, which is just silly.  Then it flags bitcoin as an environmental hazard, though estimates seem to be ~50-70% of BTC energy use is from renewables.  I would label that as a bad faith argument because there isn&amp;#x27;t really a standardized basis of measuring things by energy consumption (what&amp;#x27;s the energy consumption to mine for gold?  Create plastics?  Etc.).  All of this coupled with support for a government cryptocurrency?  By a person who says they don&amp;#x27;t understand crypto or its value prop in the first sentence.  That probably means they should go learn more before having an opinion...&lt;p&gt;For people not in this world, cryptocurrency does NOT mean digital money.  It needs to be rebranding.  It&amp;#x27;s a wave of projects building (mostly) decentralized tools or things secured by a blockchain secured through some protocol, such as finance exchanges, art minting and exchanging for digital scarcity, video games, real world supply chain tracking, music creation + tracking (hard to determine who is in every song and what sampling they used to pay artists), general contract writing with built in logic to be able to have trust in an interaction without having to involve a third party.  There are many more examples, but it&amp;#x27;s more apt to call it Web 3.0 than cryptocurrency at this point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Jasper_</author><text>&amp;gt; though estimates seem to be ~50-70% of BTC energy use is from renewables&lt;p&gt;Bullshit. When &lt;i&gt;one&lt;/i&gt; coal mine in a remote region of China flooded, the Bitcoin hash rate measurably dropped by 30%. Keep in mind this was just one coal mine. Not all of China&amp;#x27;s production.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fortune.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;20&amp;#x2F;bitcoin-mining-coal-china-environment-pollution&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fortune.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;20&amp;#x2F;bitcoin-mining-coal-china-env...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; it&amp;#x27;s more apt to call it Web 3.0 than cryptocurrency at this point.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve said this so many times: But what does it doooooo??? Name one project that isn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;speculation&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;loans&amp;quot; built on cryptocurrency that has seen any uptick or utility. NFTs sure ain&amp;#x27;t it. DAOs sure ain&amp;#x27;t it. Supply chain tracking sure ain&amp;#x27;t it.&lt;p&gt;I haven&amp;#x27;t seen one work. Don&amp;#x27;t say it&amp;#x27;s the early internet and we&amp;#x27;ll find one eventually, because it&amp;#x27;s been 12 years since Bitcoin&amp;#x27;s launch in 2009, and the ideas are all still junk. Widespread broadband to the home was in strong demand in the early 90s, and Amazon was already selling books while dwellings with connectivity were in the single-digit numbers. The 80s saw university lines saturated by BBSes, newsgroups and MUDs. There was far more demand than supply, and it was very immediately clear what the utility was.</text></comment>
<story><title>Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It&apos;s time to ban cryptocurrencies</title><url>https://thehill.com/opinion/cybersecurity/564696-bye-bye-bitcoin-time-to-ban-crypto-currencies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nscalf</author><text>This is some of the worst junk writing I&amp;#x27;ve seen on the hill.  Some pretty wrong things in here, like insinuating that the only value of crypto is to criminals, and all but saying that the reason there are hackings to things like critical infrastructure is because crypto exists, which is just silly.  Then it flags bitcoin as an environmental hazard, though estimates seem to be ~50-70% of BTC energy use is from renewables.  I would label that as a bad faith argument because there isn&amp;#x27;t really a standardized basis of measuring things by energy consumption (what&amp;#x27;s the energy consumption to mine for gold?  Create plastics?  Etc.).  All of this coupled with support for a government cryptocurrency?  By a person who says they don&amp;#x27;t understand crypto or its value prop in the first sentence.  That probably means they should go learn more before having an opinion...&lt;p&gt;For people not in this world, cryptocurrency does NOT mean digital money.  It needs to be rebranding.  It&amp;#x27;s a wave of projects building (mostly) decentralized tools or things secured by a blockchain secured through some protocol, such as finance exchanges, art minting and exchanging for digital scarcity, video games, real world supply chain tracking, music creation + tracking (hard to determine who is in every song and what sampling they used to pay artists), general contract writing with built in logic to be able to have trust in an interaction without having to involve a third party.  There are many more examples, but it&amp;#x27;s more apt to call it Web 3.0 than cryptocurrency at this point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jandrese</author><text>&amp;gt;  Then it flags bitcoin as an environmental hazard, though estimates seem to be ~50-70% of BTC energy use is from renewables.&lt;p&gt;Is Bitcoin offsetting other uses that those renewables would have gone for or are people building solar farms out of their Bitcoin gains to fund more Bitcoin?</text></comment>