>As far as I can tell, hundreds of millions in drugs and contraband are regularly transacted using Bitcoin
What a hilarious claim. Everything else you've said just confirms you've fallen for the "BTC bad" narrative. I wonder how you feel about you-know-who printing unlimited toilet paper money for their own benefits.
This whole public lynching of Stallman out of absolutely nowhere is suspicious. Hell, even corporations that barely even donated to FSF is virtue signaling. They're all saying the exact same thing about Richard.
Stallman was always right and what's happening now really makes it look like he's on a hitlist.
>There was no immediate explanation provided for the blaze, which erupted just two days after the French cloud computing firm kicked off plans for an initial public offering.
Yep RenVM is a big deal. Iirc they had something called Cafe which demonstrated turning your bitcoins into a privacy coin, ZEC. I remember when REN was only 5 cents. Amazing how much it costs to run a darknode now! Truly a successful project.
Also another cool dApp is DyDx, margin trading platform
This is so cool, I can't wait to see a multiplayer adaption now that it's open-source! Oh please reverse engineer GTA:IV and bring it back to life as well
You're looking at it from a totally wrong perspective. The U.S. government can print as much dollars as they want, whereas BTC cannot. The government does not care about green energy unless they can profit from it. To say that you did not buy BTC because of "wasting energy" is a very odd way to cope.
You guys are so hung up on energy consumption, a meme, that you're forgetting the real intrinsic value of Bitcoin.
It's hilarious to see the naysayers about Bitcoin say that BTC is not usable. Now it's worth almost 50 grand and all they can come up with is expensive transaction fees which in hindsight, are really not that expensive, and the energy consumption of maintaining the Bitcoin network.
It sure is a lot better than using human lives, usually & most likely forced labor, to mine real Gold. Right? After all, energy is free when you're using solar power to mine your Bitcoins or any other coins. Does the energy really goes to waste when it provides heating? Etc?
It just seems like people are running out of excuses at this point. I wonder what they'll be saying when BTC hits $100,000.
Personally, I've just come to terms HN is good for tech news. There's always some good people calling out any bullcrap in the comment sections which is wonderful, but when it comes to sharing opinions, it just feels like a karma battle. A similar reason why I ditched Reddit years ago.
I've often shared genuine questions and thoughts before on HN with other accounts and always found myself getting absolutely karma destroyed. It was very discouraging, so now I just really don't bother engaging anymore. This was my same issue on Reddit. I (shamefully) admit I find myself even reading discussions on 4chan where there is no point system, but I see the problems with that: mass trolling
