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What a waste of power!

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@tarazkp
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4 min read

From one of my friends today, I got a message into a group chat about the electricity that Bitcoin uses and she asked if "I was okay" with that, since it was said that it uses the same power as the country of Norway to mine Bitcoin. I am not sure that they were calculating it right or not -but I think that even if it did, I still think it is energy well spent, even if it is inefficient.

The reason I think this is that every new industry is going to have inefficiencies in it and like anything, the unit cost of production for the first units are astronomically expensive, until innovation advances the processes and tools and economies of scale are reached. For example, how much electricity does it take to mine HIVE? Well, that requires the nodes that process the transactions and the people using their computers and phones to interact with it, which because it is done on the surface at the second-layer, is effectively the same as the cost of surfing the internet.

I don't know what the electricity costs of running a HIVE node are, but maybe @blocktrades or @gtg have run the numbers.

I assume though, that is is just like running any other server with the same specs - and they don't need banks of servers in warehouses. The cost is in what type of server is required, the hard-drives and RAM etc. My point is, from a energy perspective, Hive is very efficient and even if you combine all activity on Hive that requires user-side electricity, most are doing things that they would do elsewhere anyway - such as posting to social media and gaming.

But all of this aside, I think that people miss the value of developing new technologies, remembering that this person is still a skeptic of the entire value of crypto and blockchain. What they miss is that everything they use today has gone through a litany of testing and development to bring it to the current level, whatever that may be. The same person wouldn't want the development of electric vehicles to stop and stay using fossil fuels, because the battery tech isn't efficient yet, so why is replacing the economy any different?

I think this is part of the legacy mindset, which I find interesting when it is held by people who are generally forward thinking in other aspects of life, including social development. People seem to want change, but only if that change is convenient, comes at no cost and never makes a mistake. Most people have never known anything other than the economy we have, or at least, haven't recognized alternative economies in their every day world, like that of trading cards and stamp collecting. Because of this, most people can't imagine different.

As I said to my friend, I think that a large part of the problem people have with accepting something like Bitcoin or digital assets is, they try to understand the theory of it, even though they haven't interacted directly with it. This means that they compare it to what they know with analogy, without actually knowing if this the analogy is suitable. With their understanding and example analogies all being connected to the legacy economy processes, it is hard to see how anything else could be better or fill the gaps.

As I said to her - if she is truly interested in learning, it would be far more practical to start participating and learning "on the job" so to speak. This way, she will be able to start to open up a world that has been hidden to her and interact with a large and highly diverse ecosystem with a range of economic tools to use, whether it be the PoW of Bitcoin or dPoS of Hive, the social frontends or the publishing platforms, the gaming and gambling applications, or the staking pools of DeFi. Taking part is really the only way to understand the flavors.

The problem with going from he perspective of theory is that a person tries to define what it is, without getting the sense that what it is, is completely dependent on how it is used. If people want to use Bitcoin as a store of value, it will serve the purpose - and if they want to use it as a currency, it will serve the purpose - albeit inefficiently. It is because of these inefficiencies though, that there is space for all kinds of tokenization and asset creation and how they are developed and more importantly, applied, will determine what they are and ultimately, the value they hold.

We waste electricity on billions of activities daily - I do not consider the the electricity used on innovating the economy so that it is more inclusive and valuable for all participants, a waste. What is a waste of power is us as people not using our potential to improve the world in which we live.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]

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