• 4 Posts
  • 112 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 30th, 2023

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  • Some good news:

    • emission rates have plateaued; we are still destroying the planet, but no longer accelerating the rate at which we do it
    • Solar panels (unsubsidized) are the cheapest method of electricity generation as of 2022
    • there is a fundamentally limited amount of fossil fuels, so as long as we don’t turn to Venus 2.0 by 2100 we will deplete most coal and oil and it will be possible for our ancestors to repair the planet over the following centuries.

    Yeah I know even this “good news” is bleak, but it’s worth celebrating. There is some hope.





  • An infinitely growing blockchain will inevitably fail by centralizing. Crypto-currencies as they exist today are doomed, but the protocols and tech created now may hopefully inform the design of something that is useful as a currency.

    Also, high transaction fees make it useless for small (normal, everyday) amounts, so it can only be used as a store of value. It’s really more analogous to gold or a stock, with the one significant benefit that it’s harder to steal than gold and can’t be lost stolen institutionally.


  • horse_battery_staple has a more comprehensive comment than this one:

    Yeah bitcoin is public, but anonymous (until the very first time you interact with some account in your name). Monero, in short, is like bitcoin but with washing is built into every transaction. It’s far, far from perfect (like all current crypto-currencies), but is a meaningful improvement over Bitcoin (it also supports higher transactions/second).

    In my opinion, Bitcoin and Monero are the only crypto-currencies worth engaging with at this time. I haven’t looked into Etherium or Solana, mostly because the idea of ‘decentralized apps running on the chain’ seems like beyond ludicrous scope creep for the problem of ‘minimal trust currency’. The one thing they do right is the Proof of Stake transaction confirmation algorithm, which is much more energy (and CO2) efficient than Proof of Work as used by Bitcoin and Monero.










  • I’m always wondering is how I became an independent thinker. I have a hard time understanding how so many people are so gullible

    You may not think this way, but I’ll comment just in case: Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you are too smart to fall for a lie. The smartest people in the world have blind spots, and only the blind think they have none.