I don't want to discourage you, because everything counts, but I think the real problem with climate change isn't in the West, it's in the rest of the world. The West had the luxury of using cheap carbon in the early 20th century to industrialize and build out infrastructure. India and countries in Africa haven't had that luxury, therefore they are going to use as much carbon as is necessary to industrialize. It would be hypocritical for Westerners to criticize them for it. The only way to change that is if Western countries governments actively exported low-carbon tech to help them leap-frog a centralized power distribution network and go straight to in-situ decentralized power generation without it affecting their rising quality of life. This is a societal, market economics and technological problem. Cutting out meat won't help nearly as much as developing lab grown meat will. Rather than attempt to change individual behaviors, we should strive to make low carbon technologies that align with existing behaviors.
In countries like the DRC or Nigeria, with large oil and natural gas reserves, who are we to tell them that they can no longer exploit those reserves for their benefit? If we don't want oil and gas to be extracted for wealth, then we need to force market dynamics in such a way as to make the exploitation of oil and gas unprofitable worldwide. We have zero moral authority on dictating what these countries can and cannot do with their own resources
Except bitcoin can't be manufactured on demand. I'm sorry, but this is a terrible analogy. There's a reason why people compare bitcoin to gold, because it makes for a better analogy, despite the fact that gold is actually ubiquitous throughout the solar system, and bitcoin is actually finite. For the record, I own zero bitcoin.
Analogy illustrates a point, it’s not meant to claim that two things are totally equivalent. It’s very hard to make an analogy on HN because someone will make a complaint about it like this one, and the overall effect just lowers the quality of discourse.
I don’t understand where you believe I am wrong; I said the gold, diamond and bitcoin all have the property that they cannot be manufactured on demand.
Corn can be, and regularly is; iron is abundant. Both are priced by their functionality (with a price floor set by the cost of manufacturing/extracting/growing if we ignore subsidies for a moment). If they become too expensive, they will be replaced by other cheap metals or crop in most uses.
Gold/bitcoins/diamonds just become more desirable when their price goes up.
As soon as blockchain is even mentioned on HN, everyone loses their freaking minds. For some people that tout themselves as intellectuals, they just seem to parrot that 'blockchains are useless' without even taking a cursory look into the technology. It seems to me that a lot of people here fall into the category of ultracrepidarianism.
If that were true, then they would come to a different conclusion. There are several examples of useful applications that are live today that would be otherwise impossible without a public programmable blockchain.
The last spike in 2017, $10k-$19k, is what this article refers to as „the rally. That was not caused by ICOs, but likely by a single entity (I was witnessing it in real-time back then on multiple exchanges and the price action definitely looked like one entity with ultra deep pockets was running a buying bot with no limits whatsoever - I had this theory back then already, although I got the exchange wrong, I thought the action originated from GDAX, but the paper here says Bitfinex).
However, the ascent from $500 upward, which mostly happened in the entirety of 2017, was clearly caused by free money on the streets in the early ICO craze. That drove people into cryptos, mostly Ethereum as an on-ramp to ICOs, but subsequently also Bitcoin and all the others.
Yes I remember this as well, but the real rally was from 1.2k to 10k from January to November. I do remember the spike from 10k to 20k in December, and it did seem very unnatural to me, but it could have also partly been due to euphoria.
ICO mania really started in April, and the ETH/BTC ratio rose to its ATH in June/July. This drove a ton of hype into cryptocurrencies, and naturally every single crypto rose spectacularly. BTC would have never gotten to 10k if it wasn't for the ICO mania of Summer 2017, IMO.
I work with planes and it's not at all uncommon to find lightning damage. In fact, there are generic repairs for particular locations prone to lightning strikes.
You can take a look at the eth2.0 specification here https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs. They have solved the nothing at stake problem, and they currently have 8 independent client implementations written in different languages that can 'talk' to each other on a multi-client testnet. They are much further along then people may realize.
