Do you have any suggestions for an effective way to bring them down?

Perhaps building alternatives that can replace them on run in parallel is the best way to do that?

My approach for bringing them down is working on better systems/UX than what the closed-silos currently offer...And we have a long way to go.

But...Nostr (and other decentralised social media protocols) can offer things the existing platforms can not do: interoperability.

Imagine the people you follow to be the same from FB, to strava, to spotify... Imagine the content (signed notes) you make are available on different clients/platforms

That UX, perhaps for use-cases and projects we can't imagine today will be so much better than what we have today. I've tasted a little bit of just that switching between my Nostr twitter-like client (Primal/Yakihonne) and the Podcast app (foundtain.fm). It blew my mind.

This opens use cases the existing platforms can only dream about.

Pushing for strict regulation that forces them to have disclaimers like cigarettes, and treating them officially like the public health disaster they are. The free market, despite what the capitalistic religion leads you to think, is still not the only option.

Damus was one of the first apps and is pretty good.

Lots of people also like Primal. It's well polished and replicates Twitter/X reasonably well.

It's still pretty niche. Built mostly for and by bitcoiners, but has potential as a new way of doing social media that isn't reliant on major tech companies.

I really hope this is satire.

Without being an expert on the topic I'm going hazard a guess that it's due to regulatory moats that keep challengers out of the arena, and banks endlessly lobby to maintain that regulatory capture.

In the UK there's no significant regulatory advantage to big banks outside of the mortgage market, yet the same dynamics occur. The biggest issue for new digital banks is customer acquisition cost. Most consumers won't change bank accounts unless you spend hundreds of pounds on adverts and incentives.

What's wrong with energy consumption?

I think you might be confusing it with greenhouse gas emissions.

How's the electricity you're using produced? ;)

are we talking about people doing bitcoin mining or hash cracking?

bitcoin mining is an extremely competitive business of finding the cheapest sources of energy and mining hardware; because the cheapest energy sources are all renewable, mining bitcoin with fossil-fuel-produced power is unprofitable. so the electricity we're using to mine bitcoin is mostly solar, wind, and hydroelectric

as for the cracking, i don't think we know anything about where it was done or how much energy was needed, but if the energy cost was significant, i'd expect the solver to have done it somewhere where energy was cheap

electricity is basically fungible (minus a distance factor). So if you're using up the cheap, renewable electricity for mining, guess what you're using for everyone else's day-to-day electricity? Yep, fossil fuels. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...)

One major exception to this is geothermal electricity in places like iceland where there's abundant green electricity, but you can't transport it to any neighbors.

So just using renewable sources for electricity doesn't actually make mining renewable until we're in a society that's 100% renewable.

the distance factor is a primary consideration when it comes to electricity; most electricity is consumed within hundreds of kilometers from where it's produced, because only in china is there uhvdc transmission, and even inside china there isn't nearly enough uhvdc and hvdc transmission capacity to meet demand

consequently, there are lots of places where there's abundant green electricity that can't be economically transported to any neighbors, which is why green electricity is cheaper than coal, nuclear, and gas energy. if it could be economically transported, it would be; instead, it is sold locally at much lower prices. only rarely is this seen by residential end-users, but in much of the world the 15-minute prices paid on the wholesale market by electric utilities are public information, so you can easily verify this

as a result of that, just using renewable sources for electricity does actually make mining renewable

as for the grauniad article, there are a lot of people doing unprofitable business things in lots of businesses, but they tend to be self-limiting, because those people run out of money before long

correction, since 02017, there's also uhvdc transmission in brazil from the belo monte dam. 66% of electrical generation in brazil is hydroelectric

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xingu-Estreito_HVDC_transmissi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xingu-Rio_HVDC_transmission_li...

Finding the “cheapest” energy to do useless work, is still wasteful pollution.

'pollution'? actually no. why would you even think that?

They provide a legitimate demand response service i.e. when the grid is generating excess energy that there's no other demand for, Bitcoin miners buy what no one else wants/needs.

Buyers of first and last resort.

Texas has a lot of gas plants (51%) that we want to idle when possible. Just because it's cheaper power doesn't mean we should be generating it when the only customer is cryptocoins.

If the cost of gas isn’t covering the actual impact then the cost should be higher, doesn’t matter if the kWh is used by a bitcoin miner or someone with their AC at 70, it’s still the same externality.

I'd argue that burning energy for bitcoin is far more frivolous than for air conditioning.

That's because you don't know enough to understand why bitcoin is far more useful to humanity than air conditioning. In fact it's not even comparable.

I think it’s pretty easy to understand that what amounts to a game isn’t even vaguely comparable to something that provides an immediate and quantifiable impact for someone. Perhaps you don’t understand that bitcoin is a leech on society with no real benefit.

You have no idea what money really is.

The reality is that fiat is the leech on society. It's a cancer on the world, slowly destroying it. Bitcoin is the cure. It's one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind and it's positive effects on the world will be profound. I'd go as far as saying that it's more important than the internet itself.

Watch some Michael Saylor/Robert Breedlove interviews and educate yourself. Read "The Creature From Jekyll Island".

Thus people will spend less on bitcoin than aircon

Or is the market broken? In which case in which way? And why not tackle that brokenness directly.

Thank God Texas generates power from unlimited resources. In my place, the more we generate and consume, the less we have left for the future. In Texas, the plants have to generate as much as possible for some reason !

This is the first time I've come into a crypto thread on HN and the pro-crypto people seem to outnumber the anti-crypto people.

Is there a vibe shift happening on HN?

People who hold cryptocurrency have a significant financial incentive to talk it up: their investment is valued solely on social perception.

Everyone else is generally tired of hearing about it in the second decade of not delivering the marketing promises.

Never determine there’s a “vibe shift” based on one HN story. It’s equally likely that some folks got riled up on social media and decided to comment on this story.

[looks side ways as central banks and the state]

> Inflation encourages investment because if you just sit on your money it gets eaten away by inflation.

People shouldn't be penalised for saving money.

"Oh, but just invest it!"

With investment comes risk. Why shouldn't people be allowed to save without risk or having their savings melted by lost purchasing power through inflation?

Inflation is a hidden tax and theft of those furthest from the newly "minted" money to benefit those that are closest to the source i.e. banks and large borrowers.