What feels illegal but isn't?
For me: Cancelling paid subscriptions should be as easy as subscribing. I hate the fact that they actively hide the unsubscribe option or that you sometimes should have to write an e-mail if you want to unsubscribe.
torrenting Wikipedia
oh and crypto mining, like ur actually printing money, how tf is that legal
It's because crypto isn't actually money. It's just something somebody might give you money for.
In theory, you can walk to your nearest forest and collect pine cones and then sell them to people.
That's about the same as crypto, only pine cones are actually useful.
Fiat currency like the US dollar is just as intrinsically worthless. It has value only because people accept that it does, they trade with it, and it has legal status as tender "for all debts, public and private".
People trade bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for goods all the time, without converting it to USD or anything first. I mean, yeah, usually the thing they're buying is drugs or something but it's the same as handing your local dealer a $20 bill.
Hey now. In harsh3466 land only I have the authority to mint pinecones!
Why would you torrent Wikipedia?
torrenting is faster than usual downloading, its actually an incredible technology. i dont know the exact percentage of how much faster, but it makes sense that it would be because it puts less load on the server with the file because everyone downloading it is also sending it to each other
Torrenting can be faster than normal downloads. A file server with a fast connection that's not overloaded can easily be faster than a P2P download that doesn't have very many peers, or the peers all have slow connections. There's no fixed percentage speed boost that you get, because sometimes you don't.
That said, for things like Linux ISOs or archives of stuff that people just keep seeding forever but aren't hosted on fast file servers (if at all), it's great and typically the bottleneck is your own connection.
You’re printing the promise of money using your actual money to pay an increased electric bill. Assuming you don’t get scammed, forget your pass, lose your key, etc.
Also destroying the planet for literally no reason (particularly PoW coins like Bitcoin) because difficulty is completely artificial. It’s what makes mining so absurd - the more miners, the more power/silicon wasted, but the output is exactly the same because the release rate is set. More adoption = less efficiency. It’s completely back asswards.
Also destroying the planet for literally no reason
Not necessarily.
Solar has a problem where, if you install enough capacity to meet demand during short, overcast winter days, you have twice the capacity you need in spring or autumn, and 4 times as much capacity as you need during long, clear summer days.
That excess production tanks the value of the power produced. Itnis already regularly driving power prices negative, making it impossible to recoup the value of your installation. Since it's cheaper for you to just buy electricity on the market than to install solar, you don't install solar. Nobody does. Solar installation never expands enough to meet winter demand.
Unless we can monetize that cheap summer power. If we have some way of profitably consuming that excess power, we have every reason to maximize solar rollout.
Crypto can do that just as well as anything else.
yeah well unfortunately techno bro fascists/crypto bros aren’t exactly the most progressive minds, and let me tell you: they are fucking hostile to renewables.
And before you start lecturing me about how it’s about the tech or whatever, let me also tell you: I was mining literally over a decade ago. I know what crypto is, I know what mining is, and I know how this shit works. It is concretely unsustainable and back asswards, as I said. It will not be what the evangelists tell you. It’s been 15 years. It’s a casino, it’s a desperate attempt at getting rich because people are losing faith in traditional economic mobility (rightfully so).
Remember when everyone was all about Argentina’s grand experiment? Fucking crickets now.
The issue is monetizing the excess power produced by adequately-sized solar facilities for 9 months out of the year. Getting enough people to point giant lasers into space would solve the overcapacity problem that comes with solar generation outside of the tropics. Crypto has a slightly higher ROI.
Desalination, fischer-tropsch synfuel production, hydrogen electrolysis, demand-shaping of conventional industries like steel production and aluminum smelting, widespread adoption of electrified parking garages are some other options. Even other maligned, power-hungry technologies like AI can address the overproduction problems of solar better than conventional grid-scale storage solutions.
Man it’s amazing how every 5 years there’s a new solution that doesn’t solve it.
You having a bad day? What can I do to make your life better?
Fair enough. I was flippant with you, turnabout is fair play.
Anyway, I just think ultimately this whole enterprise doesn’t make sense so long as the majority of cryptos depend on a system that requires more and more computing power the more people get involved. The math is simple here to me, you disagree.
Have a good one
I'm not trying to solve any problems with Crypto. I'm trying to use their purchasing of electricity to solve a different problem: seasonal variation in solar production.
Due to long, clear, summer days, and short, cloudy winter days, if you have enough solar panels to meet your demand in winter, you have about 400% of what you need to meet demand in the summer, even after accounting for air conditioning loads.
That excess power on the grid crashes the price of power. Unless you can find someone else to buy it, or some way tonuse it. To have enough solar generation capacity to meet your needs year round, you need something that can suck up excess power in the summer. If you can't monetize that excess, you'll never be able to get enough solar online to meet demand year-round.
Storage can conceivably address daily fluctuations, but it won't solve seasonal variation.
I mean, artisanal gold mining is still a huge thing in certain less-than-awesome areas. The basic way gold works is what inspired it in the first place.