All blockchain games are predicated on guessing random numbers in exchange for money. How is this not gambling?
Did you know that two percent of USA’s energy is just bitcoin mining?1
This is dumb. Blockchain is automated gambling. I don’t mean “I’m gambling the cost of bitcoin will go up, so I buy some” I mean the entire system is:
- Guess a number
- Plug it into an equation, and see if the output matches a random number generated by another equation. The only difference between this coin or that is how the equations work.
- if it matches, you win some ‘coin’! The number you guessed is ‘proof’ you earned the coin. Now you can sell it to someone who thinks this is valuable, and they’ll give you money2.
(essentially, at an allegory level).
And for that, we run giant data centers and burn coal in third world countries3 to keep doing trillions of guesses per second to earn a little coin.
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“Two percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin” https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/over-2-percent-of-the-uss-electricity-generation-now-goes-to-bitcoin/ ↩︎
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Hey, it’s cool that “selling” means you change the equations of how the random numbers are generated, but so what? It doesn’t change the fundamental nature of gambling how you record who won. ↩︎
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It happens here too: https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/6/24063773/the-epa-just-fined-a-bitcoin-mining-plant-for-violating-coal-ash-rules ↩︎
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