It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that Vitalik is part of the Ethereum Foundation which controls the trademark to Ethereum as well as all of the popular social media channels (r/ethereum, @ethereum twitter account, ethereum.org domain). Ethereum is the illusion of decentralization.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that the r/bitcoin sub, bitcointalk.org, and several other bitcoin communities are owned by one and the same person that have a history of censoring dissenting opinions. Just read up on the r/bitcoin history.
> It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that the r/bitcoin sub, bitcointalk.org, and several other bitcoin communities are owned by one and the same person that have a history of censoring dissenting opinions. Just read up on the r/bitcoin history.
Cryptocurrency discussions are notoriously filled with astroturfing. It’s a lot like what would happen if present-day nation states quite literally lived and died based on the market price of 24/7 globally traded bearer shares. The saying “well kept gardens die by pacifism” is resoundingly true here, to put it mildly.
Historically, the opponents to the now infamous “Bitcoin as digital gold” narrative were pushing things like gigablocks, nodes in datacenters, “Bitcoin as PayPal 2.0”, let’s replace all the core developers, etc based on populist appeals. There was no way to distinguish between those populist appeals and attempts to foil Bitcoin socially by all manner of biased attackers (and just plain ignorant people).
I think it’s rather telling that after these people forked to Bcash, they subsequently capped the block size of Bcash to 32MB and are now ironically scaling Bcash via sidechains — e.g. SmartBCH — against the backdrop of historically claiming BTC would never increase in price past $300 USD without a block size increase. To say their entire worldview has been invalidated would be an understatement.
Well, I’m not naive enough to expect something else. People are making money and protect their businesses. It is ok for me.
For some people (not for me) living in poor countries, mining was a chance to improve their lives. Now it's sold for the opportunity to give more money to those who have large amounts of money.
All these talks about the climate are so ridiculous in this context - nobody even tried to calculate how much of that energy was produced by the wind or sun.
> nobody even tried to calculate how much of that energy was produced by the wind or sun.
I've definitely seen some analysis that does? But I don't see how it matters. There's an opportunity cost there, where using solar or wind power for something like bitcoin could be better spend on something intrinsically (rather than abstractly) productive, like heating/cooling homes or whatever.
And like, if suddenly it was decided magically somehow that "all bitcoin must be produced with renewable energy" I don't think the world would be made better by the sudden rise in price of solar panels by 10x like has happened with video cards. There's an inherent price inflationary effect involved in anything that's capable of producing 'free money'.
Again, until the price of things needed to build solar panels or wind farms become outrageously expensive because they're generating 10x as much value. Then yes, actually, your choices affect me and everyone else on this planet.
