Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin: If Musk's Twitter flops, it's not such a bad thing Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin told an audience at Singapore's FinTech Festival on Thursday he believes a social media platform to replace Twitter – one that avoids many of the bird-brand's existing problems – is already on the way somewhere. "Elon is a high variance actor, right? Minimum there is a chance that he's going …
The founder revealed that before the switch, Ethereum was consuming the same amount of electricity as an average wealthy country of three million people."Now Ethereum consumes less energy than most mainstream – even centralized – web services that everyone uses today." ®
Still too much...
And the CO2 from that "country" is still floating around the atmosphere heating the earth...
Freedom is pointless when the safety of everyone is at risk from environmental catastrophes, driven by capitalism.
Two points amongst all the hysteria.
Climate change isn't caused by capitalism. Climate change is caused by people's natural desire to make their lives better for themselves and their families. Capitalism is just part of the way that the most successful states in history organise their economies. With a few changes of incentives free market capitalism can be (and in fact is being) harnessed to make technology that is less harmful to the environment.
Other types of societies, from hunter-gatherers to communist empires, like the Soviet Union have done devastating enviromental damage to themselves - basically because people want stuff.
Also destroying peoples' freedom now is incredibly dangerous to those people right now. Whereas climate change is dangerous to them in the future. Which also changes priorities to, for example, defending that freedom now and worrying about future stuff later.
Addressing climate change is important. And, it should be pointed out, is happening. Lots of improvements are being made. But it won't be solved tomorrow, or the next day. And it will be harder to do if people think the ones suggesting it needs dealing with are dangerous lunatics who want to lock up the people who disagree with them.
The problem isn't the capitalism or the people who want to make their lives better, it is that externalities like CO2 emissions, coal ash going out smokestacks or future issues like long term storage of nuclear waste aren't properly accounted for in energy prices.
This is the one thing you need to do, to change the incentives of the capitalists, so they'll do what you want.
Tax carbon emissions. Then money will flow to making alternatives cheaper. Also applications that we think are important, but can't be done well in a low carbon way will become more expensive. Incentivising us not to do them, or if we must, to at least pay for the damage we are causing.
The best thing is that we have to raise taxes anyway. So this way we can move our already unpopular taxation to do something useful, and reduce taxes on other things.
It's not really simple at all of course. Because you push emissions-heavy industry to foreign countries where you can't tax them. So short of global agreement we may end up with carbon pricing at the border. Which is going to be very hard to distinguish from protectionism.
But we've at least made a start.
The problem is those taxes need to be universal. Otherwise companies who operate in countries with the taxes will rightly complain that they are at a disadvantage to companies operating in countries that don't.
We've seen stuff like that for years e.g. companies complaining that China has lax environmental regulations (though that's been changing over the past decade) and encouraging tariffs or other measures to level the playing field.
Climate change deniers are in the same group as Nazi sympathisers as their support facilitated the holocaust. Climate change deniers, by promoting a denial of science and do nothing stance are condemming billions of people to death, because once things become visible it will be too late...
If we assume climate change deniers are correct, we fall off the cliff in a few decades because of our unconstrained consumption of resources...
While the Nazis are obviously worse on a moral level, on a practical level, the climate catastrophe deniers will cause even more suffering if they're believed. I'm amazed that anyone can consider any method proposed to combat the deniers as extreme.
For some reason, they think that their right to own a car, eat meat, buy Ponzi currency, use plastics, etc is more important than the rights of everyone to live.
Nazi: If you're not Aryan, I don't care if you live or die. If you get in my way, I'll kill you.
Climate change denier: I don't care if you live or die. If you stop me and my mates getting richer, I'll take away your means of survival. Either I'll buy it so I can survive, or help entropy destroy it.
Worse?
One, what projections say billions of people will die from climate change? Unless we just lump every human issue and link it to climate change. How many lives have been saved by modern technology and fuels? You know that currently there are an estimated 2million deaths a year from indoor cooking with combustion due to the fumes and particulates? What would that number be if not for the industrial revolution? How many people would be starving without nitrates used for fertilizer?
It will be people like you who bring about a world of mass starvation, death from winter cold because heating is too expensive, all while you run around with your tin pot locking people up because they don't think that in 2100 the world is ending.
Ethereum's switch to proof of stake only removed the cost of creating their Dunning-Krugerands. They still use the blockchain and that still wastes energy.
How much credit would you give someone if they told you they used to have to drown six kittens to get an erection and now they only need to drown one?
Apple and Android are a different kettle of fish. It's only a personal thing.
The micro blogging thing is far different as it revolves around the followers and getting them to also move and that's not so easy, it's one of reasons that the "influencers" stay.. It's also one of the reasons that the other services are not so popular..
PS - "Followers" : Doesn't that sound like a religious thing....
I suppose this is their equivalent of Glastonbury, except you sit in a hall in the hope of gaining some wise insights, as someone tells you that some thing might be successful or it might not be successful, new things can replace unsuccessful things, and problems with things can be solved if someone thinks of a way to make things better, and then you leave and go and become fantastically rich because you've listened to this trivial bullshit but think it must be valuable because it involved a cryptobro talking about Twitter.
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