Quote from: soullyG on November 09, 2017, 10:40:48 AM

Ms Kaminska writing lovely things about the Honey Badger as usual

https://www.ft.com/content/c166aa1e-c303-11e7-a1d2-6786f39ef675

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And even if all that were possible, none of it changes the fact that if bitcoins primary use is for speculation rather than transaction, the energy wastage serves very little constructive social purpose at all.

Actually I am less and less inclined to educate people on the facts and prefer to let market do its work, i.e. redistribute wealth from those who are ignorant or got it wrong and yet refused to admit their mistakes.

If she knows anything about mining, those Chinese mining cartels actually ship their Antminers to remote corners of China during rainy season to take advantage of "free" electricity provided by hydro dams. Due to lack of power grid and long distance power transmission network, those electricity are wasted anyway. They shipped back their Antminers during dry season to coal producing region such as Inner Mongolia to take advantage of cheap electricity from coal-fired power plant.

As for why bitcoin even has value or social purpose (and no, it's not about payment utility), I won't bother with a TL;DR discussion of ideas such as social scalability for inherently non-scalable human as per Szabo. Because that would reveal our hidden agenda of trying to recreate the institutions that give fiat money value or reach consensus on something such as gold, but done via a value transfer protocol over internet, a process that would take places over years, rather than millenniums as per human history.