On a practical, rather than philosophical level...You can make money mining shitcoin, but not as much money as those who have invested more. However, your very participation adds value to the whole system. It adds value to your shitcoin, and it adds value to shitcoin mined by those who have invested more, which increases the disparity between your income and theirs. So aren't you, in the long term, screwing yourself over along with your economic class? (It's easier to wrap your head around what happens over time if you imagine shitcoin as ubiquitous)
I meant there’s always one who seems salty about it because they can’t get in on the action and have to question how ethical it is. XD I only had around $6000 to invest with a friend and we made good money. That’s not a huge sum of cash, but you enjoy what you can.
For a start that's a presumptuous ad hominem. I could invest in it if I wanted to, but chose not to for the above concerns. Does anyone want to actually address those concerns rather than just skate around them?
Yeah that seemed unneeded. I think there are ethical issues, for me with regards to the electricity usage being plowed into the big farms rather than the idea of it being unethical to earn yourself money if it as a result earns more for those 'above' you. Otherwise with that thinking basically all jobs are unethical, at which point doesn't it lose it's value as an argument?
As for general ethical concerns regarding wealth and distribution of wealth I see mining as no worse than other pre-existing systems. As for the "wasting electricity" concern: Is my mining rig less ethical than my PS4? One makes me money, the other is just for fun. Also I'll just point out again that there are already projects out there that replace mining for the sake of proof of work with other stuff, like for example Golem.
The difference between normal jobs and mining is that normal jobs provide a social utility so that people in other jobs can provide other social utilities and that's how the economic cogs turn. Mining doesn't. It's virtual. It doesn't exist. It's just some self-referential mathematical ****ery. If you imagine a cryptocurrency being the only currency available then it's easy to see how you'd always be limited by your starting capital in relation to others. While you might make some cash, others are making much more. Other's are becoming richer than you and you are becoming poorer than them. All wealth is relative, so on a long-term, macro level are you entirely sure you're not playing yourselves?
This shows an inherent misunderstanding of the technology behind the blockchain: it's a distributed secure ledger which cannot be falsified or rewritten, and that security is provided - in the case of proof-of-work blockchains - by computational power. The more power that is ploughed into 'mining' Bitcoin, the more secure the blockchain is - because it increases the amount of power that you'd need to have in order to rewrite the blockchain to modify an entry. So, 'mining' provides a social utility: increasing the security of a distributed secure ledger. That ledger can then be used for all kinds of things. At the moment, the majority of these ledgers - Bitcoin included - are being used for currencies, but that's not all that sort of technology could be used for: Waltonchain and VeChain are two companies using blockchain technology to secure inventory tracking and logistics management, there are dozens of companies using blockchain technology in the insurance industry, Microsoft - Microsoft! - is actively pursuing a project which uses the Bitcoin blockchain specifically for identity verification and has partnered with Stampery to produce an Office plugin which uses the Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchain to prove a document has not been edited since creation - hell, I was talking to a guy the other day who was preparing a speech for the United Nations on using blockchain technology to tackle global warming, reducing the amount of fraud that goes on in the carbon credit/green credit markets and guaranteeing that payments to developing nations actually arrive where they're supposed to go. You literally just described capitalism, not a problem with cryptocurrencies. I make 3% interest on my bank account; not only does Richard Branson have orders of magnitude more money in his bank account, but having that much money means his bank gives him a better rate of interest. On a given day, if he does absolutely nothing and stays in bed, he'll earn more in interest than I'd make in revenue in a year working my arse off. Fair? I'm sure Branson thinks so, yeah.
Since we're going there, my main problem with cryptocurrencies is that generally speaking they're not being used to actually pay for anything. Doesn't seem like a sustainable situation in it's current state.
Some places do accept them, but yeah it's their own volatility which is ruining their chance of being used as a more widespread/'normal' currency.
At the moment they're mostly being used as a store of value, which is a valid utility in and of itself (as the continued market for Gold bullion attests).
Oh, I think I get it... How is this different from my saying that your participation adds value to the system, but those with greater computational (read: buying) power stand to gain more. The utility it provides only refers to itself. Self-referential. Again I'm not talking about the technology, I'm talking about the specific use case of mining. "Stop playing that playstation and get to bed" "But mom! Some people make supercomputers out of Playstations!" Indeed, mining is a subset of capitalism and has the same problems, but moreso. It's pure unrestrained capitalism. It can't be regulated by any government if it's ultimately found to be damaging to the global economy, only banned. It doesn't reward anything at all, other than wealth. It's also susceptible to manipulation by powerful, pseudo(anonymous) actors...unlike traditional banking where accounts are tied to an identity. So in a world where unrestrained capitalism is undeniably causing harm, is it wise to support a technology that supercharges it? (yes, there are comparisons to be made with existing economic tech...but those aren't functioning as intended either so the comparison is hardly a defence).
Sure, if there was anything preventing the creation of additional currencies, but that is not the case unlike with traditional currencies where you have a central authority with the power to tell you what to do. So isn't that a democratization of power? Lets say you don't like the way current crypto currencies operate, what is stopping you from creating one with rules that fit your preferences? Maybe you are not interested, maybe you don't have the skills required, whatever the reason might be, there is no "the man" preventing you from doing it, which gives crypto currencies the ability to address any issues that may crop up much better than traditional currencies since effectively everyone (at least in free and democratic countries) has access to the marketplace of ideas. Now of course what people do with that freedom is a different issue, but if they do something bad is that the fault of the specific people who are being c**ts? Or the fault of crypto currencies? However, I'll freely admit that I do count on some people doing the right thing and that if no one did the right thing, then yes, crypto currencies would definitely be a bad thing.
Your following statements suggest you do not. Mining is securing the blockchain. Without mining, the proof-of-work blockchain is insecure. An insecure blockchain has no reason to exist and cannot be used for anything important. Thus, mining is critical to the use of proof-of-work blockchains. Because the gain of having a secure blockchain applies to all who use the blockchain, whether you're sending a billion pounds to that nice Nigerian prince or proving that your CV hasn't been tampered with. I don't even have to mine to have that gain - I'm getting all the benefit of a secure blockchain with none of the effort or expense of mining. All that matters is the total computational power of the blockchain, not the individual computational power of its miners. If you launch your own blockchain which is being mined on a single ZX Spectrum, I can easily take it from you and rewrite it by firing up my Amiga A500+. If you convince a billion other people to mine on their Spectrums too (yes, yes, there aren't that many Spectrums, let me have this one) then my A500+ ain't going to do squat and I have no way to attack the blockchain - even though I have more 'capital' than you do in terms of having a faster, more expensive computer than you or any one (or dozen) of the other miners. This, I fear, is where your misunderstanding stems. You think that "mining on the blockchain" and "using the blockchain" are two separate things; they are not. Look at the Microsoft project to use the Bitcoin blockchain for identity verification: it can only work if there is significant computational power mining on the Bitcoin blockchain. Now, not a single one of those miners on the Bitcoin blockchain is doing it so Microsoft can launch an identity verification product - not a damn one - but that doesn't matter. The side effect of the miners mining for their own purposes (mad gainz yo) is that there's a whole hell of a lot of computational-power-backed security for anyone else to use for their own purposes. Have you read a financial newspaper recently? The traditional banking sector is rife with manipulation and fraud. In fact, modern banking is itself one giant fraud: you think you've got £1,000 in your bank account, but what you have is a promise of a £1,000 share of whatever your bank holds - which is only a tiny fraction of what it tells its customers they 'have' in their accounts. When everyone wants their money at once? That's a run on the bank, and everyone except the first few in the queue is going home empty handed. Ah, fractional reserve banking. Perfectly legitimate. You can easily argue the case the other way. A cryptocurrency makes fractional reserve banking impossible: if your Bitcoin address to which you hold the private key has 10 Bitcoins in it, then you have 10 Bitcoins. They're yours. They're not a promissory note, an IOU - they're there, and nobody can take them away. They're also provably yours. Want to sign up to a supplier and buy things on credit? Just sign a message using that private key and your supplier knows you have 10 Bitcoin waiting in the wings, and you're solvent.
This is only crucial if you want the blockchain to be decentralised. Other uses of blockchain exist and frankly, from my seat, seem much more viable.
D'you know what we used to call centralised blockchains in my day? Databases, and we've already got those.
No, I get it. While I've never performed any mining my knowledge on the blockchain comes from 3blue1brown. I've just been trying not to use the terminology to encourage a a broader discussion on it's outcomes rather than the tech itself. Your amiga/spectrum analogy - that's a very specific, made-up scenario. I would imagine that the distribution of computing power in every blockchain follows the Pareto distribution, which a very, very different proposition. 20% of participants providing 80% of the computational power - How does that look over time? As for my apparent misunderstanding between "mining on the blockchain" and "using the blockchain" - A blockchain requires an incentive to use, which may be economic gain, but I see no reason why it has to be. Just look at other distributed computing systems, which are incentivized by altruism. Traditional banking methods aren't perfect, nor did I say they were. However I wholeheartedly believe that the massive wealth disparty we see today is due to globalisation, more specifically the detachment of the market from the law. This is also my problem with decentralised currencies. Do we really want to popularise currencies that have zero legal oversight and don't reflect the state of the real world economy, just it's own abstractions?
