'I Made Doge In Like Two Hours': Dogecoin Creator Says He 'Didn't Consider' Environmental Impact (independent.co.uk) 83
One of the creators of dogecoin has noted that he "didn't consider" the environmental impact of the cryptocurrency, which was initially created as a joke. The Independent reports: The comments from Billy Markus, one of the people who helped create dogecoin in the first place, when it was intended partly as a joke, came in response to a tweet from Elon Musk. Mr Musk had been attempting to clarify his position on cryptocurrency generally, in the wake of his statement about Tesla. "To be clear, I strongly believe in crypto, but it can't drive a massive increase in fossil fuel use, especially coal," Mr Musk had written. In response, Mr Markus sent a crying face emoji, which he later clarified he had meant to indicate "aw man, you right, environment stuff." In reply to that, Mr Markus was asked whether he had considered energy usage when creating the cryptocurrency. "i made doge in like 2 hours i didn't consider anything," he wrote.
Dogecoin was created in 2013, in reference to the meme and to poke fun at the vast numbers of cryptocurrencies that had been launched. But Mr Markus helped build the technical foundations that allow it to practically work, too. Like bitcoin, dogecoin requires miners to undertake complex cryptographical puzzles to create new bitcoins. That system, known as proof-of-work, relies on large amounts of computing power that use considerable amounts of energy, much of which is generated from fossil fuels.
Dogecoin was created in 2013, in reference to the meme and to poke fun at the vast numbers of cryptocurrencies that had been launched. But Mr Markus helped build the technical foundations that allow it to practically work, too. Like bitcoin, dogecoin requires miners to undertake complex cryptographical puzzles to create new bitcoins. That system, known as proof-of-work, relies on large amounts of computing power that use considerable amounts of energy, much of which is generated from fossil fuels.
Yet people make babies all the time (Score:1)
Just another eater/consumer...
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https://twitter.com/TimDraper/... [twitter.com]
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The energy use of bitcoin was well known long before tesla started getting involved...
Musk is simply trying to manipulate the price for his own gains. If he was actually concerned about the energy use of bitcoin he would never have got involved with it in the first place.
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The problem is not that Bitcoin uses energy; it's that the miners are choosing Fossil fuel sources to supply the energy.
Bitcoin network doesn't require so much mining in order to function -- the problem is greed lead to the development of ASICs and then large-scale mining facilities, essentially large scale factories which are able to turn Kilowatts into more dollars than they spent to obtain them, even fossils.
Solution is for the Government to regulate mining operations -- just like the government regula
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Taxing and regulation is not a solution unless it happens everywhere. Otherwise the operations will simply move to countries where there aren't such taxes and continue from there.
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Taxing and regulation is not a solution unless it happens everywhere. ....
This is the same for every manufacturing industry: it's not an issue only for those manufacturing virtual goods like bitcoins. If there is a jurisdiction not regulating their factories, then companies are bound to move there, and the problem gets worse.
Solution again is international agreements such as the Paris accords, And creating a system of economic sanctions for countries that don't take steps to adequately regulate.
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Yes, Dogecoin is removing central banks.
. . .
oh wait, no it isn't.
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The article is about Doge you idiot.
Re: Even if energy was free and didn't emit CO2... (Score:5, Insightful)
If energy was free, âoeproof of workâ would not be a very useful trick, would it?
Bitcoin is neither efficient nor inefficient. It produces a one megabyte block of transactions every ten minutes (or something like that). The randomized guesswork is to determine who gets the prize, and the more people trying, the harder it becomes.
If energy was free, you would need other tricks. The whole point is to hook it to something in the real world that has real cost.
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If energy was free, you would need other tricks. The whole point is to hook it to something in the real world that has real cost.
It's called "proof of stake", and it's being used by Cardano, among others. But Cardano is the most well-researched crypto network in existence and the future of the decentralized web.
Trust me on this.
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No, proof of stake is not it.
I explicitly stated "The whole point is to hook it to something in the real world that has real cost"
You cannot then immediately tie it back to the fake digital world, where you have a million shitcoins and use proof of shitcoin ownership as if it were work.
This is not to say that proof of stake will fail- it appeals directly to the richest people, so the odds of bitcoin being replaced with a proof of stake ethereum (they claimed they are moving to that, and that's probably part
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That's not entirely true.
Proof of Work was designed to assure distribution (and therefore decentralization) of consensus. Anyone can attempt to mine a block. Your limitations are 1). hardware and 2). power. Eliminate power (and assume that "free" power means you can generate it locally, eliminating most delivery concerns) and you are still limited by the availability and performance of mining hardware.
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People would still complain.
Well, yeah. Humans be humaning.
In fact, I'm pretty certain we'll eventually discover an ancient hieroglyph, that roughly translates to "fucking Karen"
Re:Timing (Score:4, Insightful)
You realize that Dogecoin is basically a copy/paste of the Litecoin Git repo with some minor tweaks to the logo, naming, and coin generation variables, right? It was a parody coin, and was NEVER meant to be taken seriously. If Elon Musk had tweeted about something else, it would probably still be worth less than a penny each right now.
A joke ruined by greed (Score:2)
Dogecoin was supposed to bring back the fun of Bitcoin's earliest days. It was intended as a coin anyone could mine with the GPU they already had, and not feel bad about just giving some of it away to people online, just for the heck of it. It didn't take long, though, for the coin to start being traded just like every other alt-coin - in exchange for Bitcoin in proportional quantity to how much electricity it required to produce X amount of coins.
Crypto stupidity (Score:1)
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dApps? Decentralized Applications that have zero downtime and cannot(easily) be hacked? If you think all crypto is useless then you just aren't using your imagination.
I can "decentralize" with pieces of gold and silver too, which are still universally recognizable today regarding their value. That concept is thousands of years old. Perhaps we stop letting hipsters pretend they invented it with cryptocoin.
As far as imagination, we're here talking about money named "Doge" that was created as a joke, which the creator actually now feels bad about due to the impact of imagination. Between $50K Bitcoins and $400+ pandemic meme stocks, I really don't think you need to drive
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dApps? Decentralized Applications that have zero downtime and cannot(easily) be hacked? If you think all crypto is useless then you just aren't using your imagination.
Newbies are missing that Ethereum is not decentralized at all. Ethereum is the old centralized world written with new buzzwords.
https://twitter.com/dergigi/st... [twitter.com]
https://twitter.com/Croesus_BT... [twitter.com]
"The general approach of the Ethereum crowd is, they put something out, it gets shot down because it doesn't work. So, rather than go back and fix the problems, they make it more complex.
And if you keep repeating this, eventually...
"you appear to be secure. not because you've actually created something secure, but r
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When it comes to decentralization, it's black and white. There are no shades of gray. That becomes crystal clear when something goes wrong.
A decentralized coin made from bits, hyped to several times the value of gold within just a few years, has seen hacked/crashed exchanges. Becomes rather crystal clear on that side too when something goes wrong. My house. My stuff. Even my life. All insured. If my bank gets knocked over tomorrow, I'm reimbursed. If it happens again next week and someone steals my credit card, I'm protected.
Your PhunCoin wallet gets hacked, and you better hope Mom is paying cash for tears, because you not going find a
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I will watch the videos, but I do still feel you're grabbing on to the concept of decentralization without recognizing the obvious weaknesses of it.
Anything, is only valued at what others will pay for it. Bitcoin is no different. No matter how unique it is, you must find and prove value in society, and the volatility of Bitcoin unfortunately plays against its stability (it was worth less than 1/5th current value only a year ago.) One could argue that the USD is rather unique, but that alone doesn't just
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Google it if you want sources and far more details backing up why it's true.
Uh... no.
It'll be like searching Google asking if Amway is a pyramid scheme.
Re:Proof of Work using fossil fuels (Score:4, Insightful)
Just for the sake of comparison, could someone produce a comparison of the energy and sources of energies used to power the following: :)
* electric cars
* banks, PayPal, mortgage companies, stock market and forex trading infrastructure, and other finance related institutions
* data centers that support social media websites and Big Tech
* state government IT systems
* federal government IT systems
If one of these uses more power than DOGE and BTC, then we should be objective and seek the removal/reduction of whomever is using the most power
Except all of those things are using energy to produce useful work, to forgo that energy we need to give up the work it produces.
Cryptocurrency is using energy as a way to impose costs for the allocation of new currency. But imposing costs of mining is not an essential feature of currency. Most modern currencies use central banks to manage the creation of money so they don't have this energy cost that shoots up with the value of the currency.
Come to think of it, mining shouldn't be an essential feature of cryptocurrency either, one could imagine a blockchain based currency managed by a central bank. The fact that no such cryptocurrency has caught on makes me suspect that the essential feature isn't the blockchain but the lottery aspect around mining and coin allocations. This actually makes me a bit more skeptical than I was of cryptocurrencies.
Re:Proof of Work using fossil fuels (Score:4, Interesting)
You spew nothing but irrelevant fallacies. Bitcoin is not the global reserve currency so is not doing the job of the USD, it is not even money at all but a gambing token for speculation. Its energy use is unnecessary. The U.S. military has other purposes than enforcing use of dollar, the dollar is the global reserve currency for other reasons. Business that "take bitcoin" immediately exchange to dollars so the dollar is what is being used anyway.
Proof of Work vs Something for nothing (Score:1)
You missed the point: Gold was the best money for 5000+ years because Gold has the right properties to be the best money. Gold was successfully attacked by the state (Executive Order 6102...) and the niche of sound money
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That is false, gold is still used as money. Learn more about your world, not everything is the land of fast food, reality TV and woke bullshit.
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He's a copy/paste troll shill. He's doing nothing but trying to scare people off altcoins and buy more BTC. Arguing with him won't produce results.
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This story is not about Ethereum. Why are you even bringing that up?
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I don't want to "pump" anything. I haven't endorsed anything in particular. Buyer beware, etc.
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Your understanding of history is flawed. Other things than gold were used. Paper money is over a thousand years old, and worked fine for the civilization that created it.
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You seriously compared useful things with energy consumption of a gaming and gambling token that is bitcoin and similar?
Get your head examined, you have malfunction between your ears.
Re:Proof of Work using fossil fuels (Score:5, Insightful)
The Banking/Financial sector possibly consume around 130TWh a year [medium.com] (this is just some random article though, who knows if the numbers are accurate).
Currently Bitcoin consumes around 116TWh [digiconomist.net] a year.
Before anyone runs off and goes "Ha! See, BTC is more energy efficient than Old Finance." stop and think about it a second. Actually, let me give one more data point which is some back of the napkin math.
In 2020, ~452,000 BTC were mined. We know how much each block awards. For the first part of 2020, till May 13, each block mined gave 12.5BTC and there were 240k BTC rewarded, doing the division we find that 19,200 blocks were mined. Then after the halving 212k BTC was rewarded meaning at 6.3BTC per reward, we find that 33,650 blocks were mined. The number of transactions in each block is somewhat dynamic but averages around 1700 to 1800 transactions per block over 2020. Combining our blocks and multiplying by 1800 we find that 2020 had around 95 million transactions added to the ledger. There isn't a direct comparison that can be made between transactions and energy consumption but transactions are part of the mining process and sort of get immortalized when a block is mined and accepted by the network. I had a link but lost it, but mining in 2020 consumed ~85TWh (the figure earlier is calculated on recent rises in mining). 85TWh / 95 million gives you 894KWh per transaction for 2020.
"Didn't you say transactions don't equate to [much] energy consumed?" Yep, but if the network had less transactions moving across it, then it would also have less miners because it would indicate that no one was actually interested in BTC -- irregardless of whether the activity is just gambling activity or legit exchange of goods. So the number of transactions is tied in part to how much energy is being consumed. So having 894KWh being somewhat closely related to each transaction is quite a bit, especially when some people calculate that 100,000 transactions on the Visa network [digiconomist.net] only consumes ~150KWh (the 754k number per 1120KWh, half way down the page. 1120 divided by 754k * 100k gets you the ~150KWh figure).
So back to the difference between Banking and Bitcoin. BTC consumes ~100TWh annually right now, what does that get you? More bitcoin mined and your transactions added to the ledger. That's it.
Banking and Finance consume ~130TWh annually. What does that get you? Your credit swipes approved and goods exchanged, funds removed from your bank, millions of people employed to help customers with their accounts, to manage the servers that keep the system ticking, to help expand where you can use your Visa/Mastercard/AmEx cards at, and on and on.
Sure Bitcoin might have people employed to manage server farms that are mining, but the mining margins are probably not great, so you're probably looking at skeleton crews. Exchange markets? Irrelevant -- that'd be like saying the casino or a money exchanger at the airport is critically relevant to Visa and it isn't. It's only relevant to BTC at the moment because almost no one pays their workers in Bitcoin, so if you want to play in Bitcoin you have to buy in on those markets.
tl;dr: While banking and finance might consume more than Bitcoin right now, you get way more "bang for your buck" in energy consumption from using your Visa debit card than you do from buying some LSD on the dark web with BTC.
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The "The Banking/Financial sector" is a lot more than just money creation and transactional services. Most of it would still exist if we switched from USD/EUR/whatever to bitcoin.
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BTC isn't even that good for money laundering anymore, except maybe as an entry point to another token.
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Bitcoin was designed so only a certain number of coins could exist. But nothing stops you from making a new coin. Dogecoin is the example... You can make a new coin in a few hours. So that means the actual number of tokens is potentially infinite, so they really have no intrinsic value. Sure, for a while they're like tulips, but it's a bubble. You want to buy something with intrinsic value! Even Fiat currency has some intrinsic value because people owe debts valued in Fiat currency and the law says the debts can be settled in legal tender. No law says anyone has to accept Bitcoin or any other digital coin.
The US Dollar was designed so only a certain number could exist (that number being adjustable by the Government). But nothing stops you from making another currency, and persuading people that it has value. Walmart, for example, will sell you a little piece of worthless plastic for 25 US Dollars, and you can later redeem that at a different Walmart for goods and services, just as if it were US Currency. You can even give it to someone else, anonymously, and they can redeem it in the same way. Yet it has
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... and it gets worse, rumor has it that Walmart will also sell you a series of 60-some bits of completely arbitrary data, which can ALSO be be transferred or exchanged for goods and services. In fact, some folks believe that the aforementioned worthless piece of plastic is, in reality, nothing but a physical token representing this data. Eep!
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I think you can get Walmart gift cards? Asda, which is Walmart's UK division, certainly sell them. Their value comes from all the stores full of stock that you can obtain in exchange for those cards.
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There used to be a time where gift-cards could expire...or they could begin to deduct value off the gift-card for sitting idle. They did this because they considered it "their currency".
But the government did not like that...and they outright banned the practice. So if Walmart wanted to decide their gift cards had no value...they would be facing some legal issues since gift cards are just considered a way of storing currency.
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No it only has value because of the US Laws regarding gift cards. It's value is still that of a US Dollar, in no way has Walmart created it's own currency, nor is it legally allowed to.
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" Yet it has value only because Walmart says it has value,"
No it only has value because of the US Laws regarding gift cards. It's value is still that of a US Dollar, in no way has Walmart created it's own currency, nor is it legally allowed to.
This and the previous post are both good points -- yes, gift cards and similar things are more regulated than cryptos (perhaps I should have substituted "while Walmart exists" for "because Walmart says so"). I'm not super familiar with US law, being only a part-time subject of that regime, but I was attempting a sort of reductio ad absurdum, against the claim that Cryptocurrency X is worthless because Cryptocurrency Y exists or Cryptocurrency Z can be created in two hours.
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What's the value of a crypotocurrency? (Score:3)
Anyway, the whole concept should be abolished as soon as possible. The value coming from the cost of creating new coins means that the value is linked to the cost of electricity wasted on this currency. The whole concept of a currency is an utter waste.
The need to waste large amounts of resources to give currency a value is old and wasteful. It was already abolished with the end of the gold-backing of the dollar. Cryptocurrencies bring it back in a worse form.
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What is the point of investing in one cryptocurrency when another one can be created by a guy in just two hours?
What's the point of investing in a Vermeer painting, when something else that looks like one can be produced by a guy in some amount of time? What's the point of investing in ANYTHING that doesn't have some immediate, concrete purpose? People invest in crypto because they believe it will increase in value, and the existence of Doge does nothing to devalue Bitcoin or ETH or anything else. It might actually INCREASE the value of other cryptos, by competing for mining power.
Anyway, the whole concept should be abolished as soon as possible. The value coming from the cost of creating new coins means that the value is linked to the cost of electricity wasted on this currency. The whole concept of a currency is an utter waste.
The need to waste large amounts of resources to give currency a value is old and wasteful. It was already abolished with the end of the gold-backing of the dollar. Cryptocurrencies bring it back in a worse form.
For anything to be useful as a cu
Because don't use your brain... (Score:1)
Summary indicates that the stratosphere will shrink (get lower), and this will negatively impact satellites. But a reduction in atmospheric friction means satellites will be able to remain in orbit longer, that the energy reserves they have to maintain a low orbit will last longer, and less friction also means less physical wear and tear. Summary doesn't pass the basic smell test. In any case this hysteria is all based on a belief in the fixed pie fallacy. Higher demand for energy means greater rewards
Just.. Stop.. (Score:2)