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0 pointssalawat4y ago0 comments

Mining should not cost a damn thing. This is where the entire thing falls apart, and why fiat is the most efficie t basis of currency.

Literal scraps of cloth are distributed as physical stores of value. Most of the value in the economy doesn't even have a physical manifestation.

Most importantly, it's much more practical securing those pieces of cloth in the physical world in the long run than "securing the Bitcoin network" which consumes more and more energy over time when the cash and fiat handling infrastructure is already relatively mature against everything but nation states, which is arguably working as designed.

None of this warrants bringing ice cream into this fight, and to hell with the person so obsessed with cryptoccurrency as to imply that if we don't accept cryptocurrencies, we shouldn't accept ice cream.

It also conflates twodifferent industries that synergize well. Part of what makes modern logistics work is that we even have refrigeration capabilities. Those aren't going to disappear just because your cryptocurrency might have a similar energy function. Which arguably it doesn't, seeing as the BitcoinNetworks energy consumption per transaction is high enough to run household energy requirements over extended timesans, and part of those operating is stprage of and consumption of, refrigerated goods.

Now we at least know what side of things cryptocurrency people are really on.

Nobody looking out for anybody but themselves would get behind getting rid of ice cream.

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kodah4y ago

I doubt as many people keep track of the negative effects of ice cream as much as the recent moral interest of Bitcoin. I don't blame people though, for whatever reason, American moralism is on the rise again. It's going to be a dark decade.

Just a couple negative effects of ice cream that I could think of, put in similar morally leaning terms as people talk about Bitcoin on:

- ice cream is violence against animals because it is part of the dairy ecosystem which forever keeps cows in a lactating state even to their own detriment [1]

- ice cream contains high fat, calories, sodium, sugar and dairy components which contribute to obesity and a higher death toll [2]

- ice cream impacts the environment because it requires large dairy farms, in order to be cost effective, packed with lots of cows which produce their own green house gases [0]

I very much dislike the abundance of moral arguments. In debate a moral argument requires you to offer no alternative to solve the problem, just dictate what something should or should not be and some supporting evidence for why. In my view, a moral argument should be one that occurs in your head and is the catalyst for developing a paradigm that is better, not one you bring to the debate floor or at very least less often than we see them in debate today.

Some links:

0: https://foodprint.org/reports/the-foodprint-of-dairy/

1: https://freefromharm.org/dairyfacts/

2: https://www.foodbehind.com/risks-of-eating-ice-cream/

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