Europe Must Ban Bitcoin Mining To Hit the 1.5C Paris Climate Goal, Say Swedish Regulators (euronews.com) 222
Faced with a sharp rise in energy consumption, Swedish authorities are calling on the European Union to ban "energy intensive" crypto mining. From a report: Erik Thedeen, director of the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, and Bjorn Risinger, director of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, said cryptocurrency's rising energy usage is threatening Sweden's ability to meet its obligations under the Paris Climate Agreement. Between April and August this year, the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining in the Nordic country rose "several hundred per cent," and now consumes the equivalent electricity of 200,000 households, Thedeen and Risinger said.
In an open letter, the directors of Sweden's top financial and environmental regulators called for an EU-wide ban on "proof of work" cryptocurrency mining, for Sweden to "halt the establishment" of new crypto mining operations and for companies that trade and invest in crypto assets to be prohibited from describing their business activities as environmentally sustainable.
In an open letter, the directors of Sweden's top financial and environmental regulators called for an EU-wide ban on "proof of work" cryptocurrency mining, for Sweden to "halt the establishment" of new crypto mining operations and for companies that trade and invest in crypto assets to be prohibited from describing their business activities as environmentally sustainable.
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Good (Score:2, Funny)
Re: Good (Score:5, Funny)
Username Verified.
Re: Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Regardless, the article and the subject are biased and misleading: "Erik Thedeen, director of the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority" A fiat currency supervisor suggests banning currency he has no business regulating. Surely he isnt biased, and is only concerned about the environment, right?
Crypto 'currency' is a Ponzi scheme. He has ample reason to regulate that.
Re: Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Crypto is called a Ponzi scheme because the only money that it is possible to make is money that other "investors" put into the system.
Stocks generate wealth because businesses make things and do things and therefore pay dividends. Precious metals can be made into useful products. Bitcoin does none of that.
Re: Good (Score:3)
First: Bitcoin isn't currency anymore than the buttons of my shirt are, or a pack of downtown cocaine, because you're just as likely to be able to ever buy a pack of cigarettes at the bus stop using either. But less like the buttons, more like the typical downtown cocaine, it's a scam.
Second: yes, in fact states have, and typically do, ban made-up currency simply because it undermines the economical underpinnings of the system - and thus by definition, also the political ones. Just try to print and issue yo
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You can produce your own paper money all you like, you just have to give it a unique name and not try to pass it off as someone else's already existing form of paper money.
Companies do this all the time in the form of gift vouchers, tokens etc.
All currency is made up, the only difference between them is how they are backed. Many government backed currencies have failed catastrophically (see the zimbabwe dollar)
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Just try to print and issue your own, actual paper money, and see how far that gets you.
Many people have done that:
List of local currencies in the United States [wikipedia.org]
Respectively how many years in jail...
It is not illegal to issue your own currency.
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It is not illegal to issue your own currency.
Even for the US there's a law restricting it. [cornell.edu] Other countries have different laws restricting it differently, so it's not like existence of local currencies is a blanket permission.
In the end, it's true that there's no conviction where nobody bothers to persecute -- be it because it's being explicitly permitted under specific circumstances, or simply just tolerated (e.g. cigarettes as fiat currency after WW2).
Re: Good (Score:4, Informative)
...and Bjorn Risinger, director of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency...
You are really quite new at this, aren't you?
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At least finish the sentence.
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A fiat currency supervisor suggests banning currency
Bitcoin isn't a "currency." There is virtually nothing you can use it for, other than to pay off ransoms to criminals or fund Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).
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Regardless, the article and the subject are biased and misleading: "Erik Thedeen, director of the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority" A fiat currency supervisor suggests banning currency he has no business regulating. Surely he isnt biased, and is only concerned about the environment, right?
Besides - wanna bet that regulation they propose will *just so happen, tooootally by accident* to outlaw any cryptocurrencies, not just the proof-of-work ones, which are the only ones problematic for climate? Any takers? Yeah, didn't think so.
Well its what the people in the article said they wanted.
In an open letter, the directors of Sweden's top financial and environmental regulators called for an EU-wide ban on "proof of work" cryptocurrency mining,
Personally, I don't think that they will ban e-gift cards.
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The people who get their information from reputable news outlets aren't hip with the nuance that not all crypto currency is Bitcoin. You can definitely be productive with ETH using an RX 580 or RTX 3060 Ti. And I guess if manage to mine one crypto you could have some capital to trade into other crypto, perhaps ride trades up onto more volatile crypto.
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Isn't Eth moving to proof of stake rather than proof of work? Which would remove the need for GPUs.
Re: Good (Score:2)
While it reduces the need for GPUs, how does the energy demand of the overall calculations compare?
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They use videocards for mining, just not for Bitcoin. I don't think Bitcoin mining is a thing in Europe. You need access to the latest specialized hardware from China, but they won't really sell it to you unless it becomes obsolite.
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Bullshit. They aren't fabbing those ASICs on TSMC N7 or N6. Or Samsung 8LPP.
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I want Bitcoin banned for environmental reasons as much as anyone, but you have not quite got the video card thing right. Bitcoin is mined with ASICs, not video cards. Video cards are used for other cryptocurrencies that were intentionally designed not to be amenable to ASIC implementation. These are responsible for you paying extra for your favorite card, plus they also contribute to global warming so you could say they are even worse than Bitcoin. But they don't have anywhere near the scale and environmen
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No one sane does like the growth of cryptocurrency. It's the modern equivalent of the "tulip mania" of the 1600's.
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Can you imagine what it would be like if we had a 2008 style market crash but instead of houses and mortgages backing the flimsy securities it was virtual tulips?
Yes. The Fed would purchase cryptocurrencies to 'stabilize' the economy. This would allow time for all the banks to get out of their worst positions, by selling to the Fed. When that process was sufficiently complete, the Fed might let the market crash, but it is probably more likely to regulate the currencies and maintain their notional value using QE money.
Basically just get used to being poorer and never owning anything. But you're supposed to be happy because the only alternative to stealing your future
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Well you're about to find out.
Have fun!
not fuel (Score:3)
When used for material, petroleum is fossil but not fuel. The poster your seemingly replied to was talking about banning fossil fuels. Most of your reply was about the non-fuel usage of petroleum.
Re: not fuel (Score:2)
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Plastic isn't a fossil fuel though. Emissions depend on what you do with it, with plastic the bigger issue is landfill and pollution.
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Slashdot is less laden with bloated javascript bullshit and advertising than other similar websites, so it likely uses a lot less energy just because it sucks less.
It was probably also written by better programmers.
The fastest loading and cleanest website on the internet is the Jargon File. There's a reason for that.
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You just compared Apples to butt plugs there. (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly gaming is as much of a waste as mining, it's just more socially accepted than mining is much like we have a country full of caffeine addicts who want to make all the other drugs illegal.
I am baffled as to how you can make that analogy, the 2 are nothing alike. Mining rigs run continuously and most operations run MANY of them. Gaming machines do neither...it's like comparing Apples to I don't fucking even know what could be more random...butt plugs?
I love my gaming PC. It gets 2h of use on a good day. The rest of the time, it consumes the same amount of electricity as a normal desktop.
If I were unemployed and 18, I could game for 8h, tops. I'd only be doing it on one machine. Once I am done, the machine goes into power-saving mode. Even when I am gaming, I am not maxing out the hardware except in certain areas. A gaming machine is trying to use as few resources as it can to create a great experience....while you are gaming...primarily to keep the noise down and prevent the machine from overheating.
Mining rigs run continuously. Their goal is to get as many computations as possible.
The two are really nothing alike.
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The terrible analogy is easy enough to explain. I translate that post into:
"I'm not a gamer, and therefore I only see gaming as a waste of time and resources. Let's ignore my own time-and-resource-wasting hobby of choice here as I pan YOUR hobby."
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But isn't that the point?
Everything not absolutely needed to survive is a "waste". Living in a larger house or apartment than absolutely necessary (the USSR defined 6m^2 for one person as "acceptable", so, I guess having separate rooms for each person is a waste), traveling for vacation, anything really.
The government trying to define what a "waste of energy" is results in stupid situations. For example - I can use all the power I want (as long as wires do not melt) for running an AC, a bunch of servers (no
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I am baffled as to how you can make that analogy, the 2 are nothing alike. Mining rigs run continuously and most operations run MANY of them.
It does not matter how little your gaming PC is running a game if there is enough gamers to compensate. If the reason for banning bitcoin is CO2 then only the overall consumption matters. Lets do some very rough estimate.
Bitcoin mining consumed about 67 TWh in 2020. There is about 1.4e9 PC gamers worldwide and an average gamer spends about 8 hours a week gaming (this sounds much to me but that is what google claims). Let's assume the average power consumption of a PC is 200 W. That leads to PC gaming consum
happiness (Score:2)
Tourism and gaming generate happiness in orders of magnitude higher number of people than all "crypto"s put together.
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The point is largely arbitrary anyway. The idea of banning PoW Crypto mining is pretty laughable in the first place, good luck trying to police that and dealing with the bunch of kids you end up pulling in for mining €2 of some token or other. Secondly, if you are against w
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...it's like comparing Apples to I don't fucking even know what could be more random...butt plugs?
Almost anything can be a butt plug if you're brave enough
In that case you should try a cactus.
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The key difference is maybe that the gaming rig wouldn't be burning electricity 24/7. At least not with most gamers.
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Well, considering that it was quite possible to get graphics cards and they have become rather scarce commodities when bitcoin mining picked up, even before the chip crunch hit last year, I dare say that yes, all the mining rigs probably employ far more high end graphics cards with the associated power hunger than all the gamers combined.
Re: Good (Score:2)
Not even close (Score:5, Insightful)
This will work a lot better than outlawing drugs, as it'll shut them out of the financial markets. Also, it's painfully obvious when you're running an illegal crypto mining operations because, well, you need to connect to the grid. They're welcome to try doing it off grid, but without cheap, subsidized (and dirty) power it's not likely to be profitable.
Finally, I don't want them in my financial system, for the reasons I outlined above. Securities with zero value (beyond money laundering and buying illegal goods/services) are a recipe for disaster. You don't even get any real freedom out of crypto. It's child's play for big boys to use currency manipulation tactics to control the market.
There is literally no upside to crypto and tons of downsides.
ecosystem consumes power (Score:2)
And all that presumably makes you happy / rich. Good for you.
But would you do that if thousands of other people were not mining, using, trading those "currencies" ? Most of the others using grid power, a lot of which is dirty or consumes clean power compensated by higher consumption of clean power elsewhere ?
Even if you would, most people wouldn't. So even while using "clean" power for your mining, you are increasing usage of dirty power.
Re: Good (Score:2)
Gaming and entertainment have some purpose as a sublimation mechanism, removing them would probably cause more idiots to commit violence that they wouldn't commit if they were glued to the screen.
Is the same teue for mining?
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So while gaming can lead to an addiction that makes people dysfunctional, out of the usual other options to escape reality that are well accepted by older generations, it seems to be one of the more benign choices.
I do see more societal value in mental health than creat
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> Well, that was meant to say 'invest' not 'incest',
Just don't be like the man who didn't know the difference between 'incest' and 'arson', and set fire to his sister.
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Well yes and no... gaming never ran 24/7 but yes it is also a waste given the sheer mass of people doing it.
Re: Good (Score:2)
Yeah, but gaming is not the only thing graphics cards are used for. Even Quadros in my country are unavailable, or expensive beyond belief. Many an old PC could have been upgraded to support 2k or 4k monitors at a "simple" upgrade of a simple graphics card, but that simple upgrade is now comically expensive.
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Miners run overclocked cards 24/7
Some might but most under-clock with minimal voltage. This results in more work done per unit energy.
Re: Good (Score:2)
Instead of banning mining, they need to have a large surcharge if you use more than a certain amount of power
That would prevent me from running a factory producing millions of trinkets that save power for millions of people worldwide . Even if my factory used less power than I saved for them.
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No offense to Sen. Cruz, but if he wants to get in on the crypto craze, the last thing he should do is attract BTC miners. Talk about old, dated tech.
Wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
Europe must build a lot more nuclear reactors, and stop Germany from shutting down theirs.
That is what is needed to meet the goal regardless of Bitcoin, Bitcoin is not even really a factor.
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Not sure why you are being modded down. Perhaps the answer is for the EU to cede their sovereignty to Russia, and the soul of Germany to Gazprom?
The EU has to decide... do they want Russian and Chinese troops marching in Berlin or Paris, or are they going to build nukes and have some energy independence. Even with NiFe batteries, solar isn't going to provide base load power, especially as Europe warms up, or cools down due to the Atlantic warm currents fading.
Hope they make a decision before Russia, Iran
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Iron-air batteries are looking promising for fixed installations. They're built with cheap, ubiquitous, trivially recyclable materials.
They are right (Score:3)
Governments impose minimal efficiency on goods to market (remember the Energy Star [wikipedia.org] sticker on your monitor?), so it seems sensible to ban something that is a million times less efficient [statista.com] than other electronic transfer systems.
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Are you banning the factoring of numbers?
What would the law be, specifically? No citizen of this great land shall
Re: They are right (Score:2)
There are ways to identify the real source of problems, and "regulate" that. Which would be colloquially called "banning" because it would be a governmental action resulting in greatly reducing an activity.
E.g. if each smallest fraction of currencies (other than identified currencies) e.g. satoshi attracts a high sales tax (or equivalent for the jurisdiction) , it may reduce the enthusiasm quite a bit.
Many jurisdictions need an environmental clearance before setting up of any business, especially once it st
Exactly. (Score:2)
Why should everyone else tighten their belts while these cock suckers spew carbon and produce nothing?
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Can't we just ban that, too? I mean, we haven't played with it for quite a while now, we can as well get rid of it.
Deceptive (Score:5, Interesting)
Foolish (Score:2)
Wish we would require all large cryptominers in the states to use 90+% clean energy. Nuclear could cut deals with them.
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crypto currencies need to be destroyed (Score:5, Interesting)
If I had the ability to corrupt all their blockchains and render all cryptocurrencies worthless today I would do it without hesitation. The amount of waste generated by cryptocurrency is truly staggering. I would support it being illegal to mine or trade them.
This quote from the article really makes the point
"It is currently possible to drive a mid-size electric car 1.8 million kilometres using the same energy it takes to mine one single Bitcoin,” they said. “This is the equivalent of forty-four laps around the globe"
That is insane. It doesn't even count all the energy that goes into the hardware to do this stuff. There are so many wasted resources here and wasted in a truly pointless way.
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Corrupting a blockchain shouldn't be hard. You just need to have more VMs connected to a given blockchain than there are regular users. The underlying protection blockchain has against corruption is the Byzantine General's Problem, and that means the blockchain is decided by majority vote. Which can be sabotaged.
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Actually, because blockchains are verified, what you need is more miners than currently are on the blockchain.
Which means you are back to square one: to many miners.
Don't stop there ... (Score:2)
Crypto currencies have become a massive scam on top of the wasted energy. There might have been some legitimacy is to proof of work was actually useful (e.g. Protein folding) but it is not.
They need to be heavily regulated to the same extent as other tradeable instruments/investments to prevent scams.
Why not carbon tax (Score:2)
Rather than ban an energy-intensive practice, why not carbon tax it? That incentivizes miners to use and invest in low-carbon/green power sources. If they choose to still use carbon-based energy sources, then the resulting tax can be used to invest in low-carbon/green sources. Both scenarios result in a increase in green energy production.
That also doesn't single out Bitcoin, which is currently only one of many cryptocurrencies being mined.
other industries ? (Score:2)
As much as I consider crypto currencies borderline scam and proof-of-work ones an utterly braindead idea, I don't think mining would even show up on a list of top 20 or top 50 energy consuming industries. There's probably a couple more (and likewise questionable) others far ahead of it.
Why not slap a carbon tax on transactions? (Score:3)
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In real life though I don't know the ratio of electric heaters to heat pumps. Certainly any sort of computation makes more sense than just running a heater.
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Do heat pumps work well in below freezing temperatures? I bought a heat pump for my place's A/C, and found it is next to useless when the weather gets around 5 degrees (C), and I wind up using a space heater instead.
Going forward, especially as nuclear power plants are researched that can handle the "green" aspect, it might be the best heater might be a plain old electrical resistance heater, especially if the main power sources are solar, nuclear, wind, hydro, and others.
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Consumer grade heat-pumps are designed for low level use only, and performance drops off as the differential increases, in either direction. Commercial grade gear can perform much better but is more expensive simply because it gets sized correctly.
So, yes a heat-pump can do the job but it's far cheaper in the long run to insulate the shit out of the building so then any heating, or cooling, solution is only a minor input.
I'm constantly amazed at how poorly done is home insulation. Something that doesn't h
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Where I live, when it comes to insulation, it is just pretty much woefully inadequate. Newer homes seem to be a bit better, but unless you have a custom home builder and don't just have another tract home built, the insulation of that will barely be to code and little else. It would be nice to see some relevant R-values, as well as things like proper attic ventilation to get rid of heat buildup, but it is almost impossible to get that, especially when all but the most expensive builders will immediately r
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If your pump can't heat your place when it's +5C outside you have 2 problems:
1. The pump you bought is too small.
2. Your place has no insulation worth a damn.
At +5C a heatpump of the correct size should have no problems at all to be efficient, at those temperatures you should have about an 1:5 factor where if the pump uses 1 kW of electricity you should get the equivalent of 5 kW of heat out of it
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Do heat pumps work well in below freezing temperatures? I bought a heat pump for my place's A/C, and found it is next to useless when the weather gets around 5 degrees (C), and I wind up using a space heater instead.
Absolutely. My heat pumps are very efficient at that temperature - the COP (Coefficient of Performance) is almost 6 at 2 degrees C. They are useful down to about -30 C, which we don't get. At -20 C it's still a factor of about 2.5. For cooling, the COP is given as 9 or so - but we don't that very much.
The efficiency comes down to what you're buying, and how much you're willing to pay. For something that is primarily a heat source in e.g. Norway, the performance at these temperatures (and the price, I'm gues
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Re: Transparent lies (Score:2)
Outside temperature doesn't determine heatpumps efficiency, delta between evaporator and condenser do.
A good split using forced air heating if large enough can have COP >2 at -15. If it's undersized or it needs to heat up water to 60 degrees for old radiators of course it's useless. In your case I assume it's either undersized or just crappy and not well designed for heating.
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They work if you do a ground-loop heat pump instead of an air-based heat pump.
If you have the land, you dig down 4-5 feet, lay a bunch of pipes down there, bury them, and then connect them to the heat pump. It ill be about 50 F/10 C down there year-round, which lets you sink heat but also extract heat as needed.
https://www.energyhomes.org/renewable-technology/groundloops.html [energyhomes.org]
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Heat pumps are pretty common here in Europe, also city wide centralized distance heating.
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The main problem with heat pumps is that they need access to both inside and outside of the area they are heating. That means they are somewhat expensive to retrofit to existing buildings, unlike a low efficiency resistive heater that you can simply plug in.
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The bottom line is that for a given amount of heating, resistive heating typically uses 5-6x as much energy as a heat pump. It's just cheap and convenient.
Heat pumps aren't perfect, they need some nasty chemicals, but overall they are the way to go.
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Re: Transparent lies (Score:2)
Heat pumps do have a lower limit, but what it is depends on a bunch of factors, but some are able to run at -25C mark, but at reduced efficiency.
See: https://www.renewableenergyhub... [renewableenergyhub.co.uk]
The real solution for homes are passive designs or ones that are closer to that ideal.
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Doesn’t Europe need to heat it’s homes? If you need waste heat and would be paying a premium for it anyhow then mining starts to make sense.
In Sweden the trash that isn't recycled is burnt and literally waste heat.
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That is Buddhism, invented 2500 years ago. (Score:2)
Still going strong in 2021.
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What exactly do you "own" with bitcoins?
Lemme guess, you bought some NFT, too, right?
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Tomeeeto, tomaaato...
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The entire point of bitcoin was to prevent inflation, with the halving events to somewhat simulate a "natural resource" running out - something like oil does not run out at once, it just keeps getting more and more expensive to extract.
Also, high inflation encourages waste. If my hard earned money is going to be worth less and less, it means that I cannot really save up to anything, might as well buy a new phone twice a year and throw the old one in the trash.
atrocious... (Score:2)
No what is atrocious it trying to justify the indefensible with false claims.
Sweden actually has an enviable record of shifting to renewable energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]