Oh, hey, I agree! Minting pennies is stupid, and we should stop doing it! Paper money is also pretty limited in its utility, and we should try to find ways to minimize it! We could probably find lots of ways to make fiat currency more energy efficient overall, and we should!

We can find and implement these efficiencies this without causing the collapse of the entire currency. We can find ways to make classical fiat money more energy efficient. Energy costs are not intrinsic to the value of fiat currency. All it takes is political will--tough, sure, but far from impossible.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, is defined by energy cost. We literally can not make Bitcoin more energy efficient.

Bitcoin is designed to require maximal energy usage. So long as the energy cost of mining a block is lower than the value of that block, it's worth it to spend the energy. So long as the number of nodes increases, the energy cost per transaction will increase. So long as the length of the blockchain increases, the energy cost per transaction will increase.

In other words: so long as Bitcoin continues to be a viable currency, its energy costs will only increase.

The only way to make Bitcoin more energy efficient is to fork it to a model that doesn't tie value to energy costs. Good luck convincing the world of Bitcoin to do that. You'd have an easier time killing the quarter, let alone the penny.

Lots of people care, sexconker. There's every reason to not want to spend huge amounts of power generation on something that is, for all intents and purposes, an intangible speculative investment used by a very small number of people.

Generating all this energy has real-world consequences. It create huge amounts of real-world physical waste. It creates huge amounts of real-world air pollution. Worse, it does all this by design: there's no way to make Bitcoin more energy efficient, as every gain in energy efficiency increases the total value of a mining operation.

* Every time a block is found, both the real-world energy cost and the value of finding the next block increase.
* So long as the real-world energy cost can be made lower than the expected value of finding that next block, an extant Bitcoin mining operation will burn as hard as it can.
* Take mining out of the equation, and you're still burning an increasing amount of energy with each new transaction, as it needs to be added to the ever-growing blockchain and verified on an ever-growing number of nodes. Yes, this can be fixed with changes to how Bitcoin works, but good luck making that fork happen.
* So long as Bitcoin remains as valuable and popular as it is, its real-world energy costs will continue to grow--exponentially. If it keeps getting more popular, that energy cost curve steepens.

The only way that energy use drops is if the value of Bitcoin drops sufficiently that major-scale mining operations shut down. When that happens, the whole stupid game comes to a crashing halt, because let's be honest: the only reason the substantial majority of Bitcoin users are still into Bitcoin is because they got digital-gold-rush rich. Full stop.

So just waiting for energy costs to adjust is really a bad way to deal with this situation. That could take two, five, ten years. How much bona-fide, real-world damage could Bitcoin do in that time?

That a nifty thought experiment from 2008 now uses a measurable and rapidly increasing percentage of global energy output should be cause enough for geekdom to feel ashamed of itself.

That the end result of this energy use is ensuring we can maintain FSM-knows-how-many simultaneous copies of a rapidly-growing 167 GB file for the purposes of maintaining a fraud-rife, impractical-to-use, and highly volatile digital currency should have us cowering in our basements and refusing to ever show our faces in polite society again.

wait

This is a perfect example the classic Prisoner's Dilemma problem, except instead of two prisoners there's only one prisoner, and if the prisoner chooses to delete the offensive joke nothing happens to him, and if he chooses to restore the offensive joke he's being an ass because he doesn't like the kind of person who finds it offensive

This isn't about Amazon's business practices. This is about Donald Trump attacking the Washington Post, a news outlet that reports true but unflattering things about the President.

I mean, come on. There is literally no question why Trump has chosen Amazon as one of his favorite bugbears. Trump's well-known "disdain" for Jeff Bezos and WaPo is the lede, not an aside buried under the fold.

Trump is going after an entire corporation simply because a part of it has the sheer temerity to say things about him that he doesn't like.

Look, I'm unconvinced that Guccifer 2.0 is a GRU agent, and it's going to take a lot more than two-bit analysis of easily forged logs to convince me of this.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have work to do. Apparently some people out there still don't believe that Hillary Clinton was running a child-sex-slave ring in the basements of multiple pizza parlours nationwide, and I've got to set them straight.

We're hiring the best and brightest to come join the best team ever assembled in the history of teams. Benefits include:

• health/dental/vision life insurance
• pension
• meetings in the Oval Office
• you will be fired publicly and without warning when your time comes
• gym membership

Stop pretending the President has plans beyond self-enrichment. He doesn't.

This chin-stroking, head-scratching credulity was tired a year ago.

So I read the linked article, and I couldn't help but notice that the only thing joining the tax law and Apple's bonuses was temporal proximity. The author conspicuously chooses to use words like "after" and "following the introduction of," assiduously avoiding the more concrete "because of." The author also doesn't attribute anything the company actually stated to the tax law, citing instead some phoney-baloney hogwash about "confidence in Apple’s future."

In fact, if you read the text of the email sent by Tim Cook to Apple employees, you don't see mention of tax policy anywhere--which is weird, seeing as Bloomberg puts "New Tax Law" right in the headline.

It's almost as if Bloomberg.com were blowing smoke up our collective asses and calling it an invigorating Goop.com vapor colonic.

The first rule of Bitcoin is: never trust anyone anywhere ever

The second rule of Bitcoin is: keep telling yourself you're not the mark

"Blame" is the wrong word; you're looking for "succeed."

This is exactly the outcome our President has stated he's after: America First.

Our President is succeeding at keeping America for Americans by keeping foreigners out. This is just one of many facets of that success.

I happen to think it's a terrible way to run a county, but it's exactly what he told us all he wanted to do, so it's kind of silly to "blame" him for making good on his promise.

And as we close the door ever tighter against the rest of the world, they'll discover that they don't really need us, anyhow. They'll walk right past us and wonder how it ever was that people used to risk their lives to come here.

When cryptocurrency ultimately gains traction, it'll be because some major institution or government decides to implement it on scale. The world is never going to trust their money to the good folks who brought us Magic The Gathering The Online Currency Exchange, Dogecoin, and "oh, that's bad--well let's just try to get everyone to agree to fork the entire danged currency." They just won't. There's a fundamental, irreparable lack of gravity, responsibility, and accountability in the cryptocurrency world today.

People on the outside see cryptocurrency as one part hobby, one part religion, one part social experiment, one part speculation, and one part black market. Frankly, they're right--and they're right not to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

sez the guy who has twice brought extramarital sex into this conversation about nuclear deterrence

but hey, keep bringing that A-game--Im'ma go make a kale and quinoa smoothie to cry into just in case you keep saying 'cuck', which is immensely hurtful and not the least bit silly