Texas' government just spent $31.7M in the middle of a heat wave and energy shortage.
No, not to provide fresh shelter to the homeless. Neither to install booths with free fresh water. Neither to increase the number of public spaces (outside of shopping malls) where people can gather, instead of burning energy to keep their homes cool 24/7. Neither to boost its investments in renewables and pivot away from the oil that it keeps digging.
No, the government just gave that money away to Bitcoin miners to convince them to turn off their energy-hungry machines, so everybody else can also use energy to keep themselves cool.
Let that sink in. Even a life-threatening heatwave can't get miners to behave cooperatively and turn off their machines, whose only purpose is as pointless as randomly guessing a number whose SHA256 hash satisfies a certain arbitrary numeric constraint - and they skim some profits out of these pointless puzzles just because someone decided that putting up a system with such perverse financial incentives was a good idea. In order to get them to behave as someone who's not a complete selfish sociopath and evolutionary failure, the government had to compensate them for the losses that they would make by turning off their computers.
I guess that today's capitalism is that system where it's actually ok for the government to spend public money - as long as that money goes to those who need it the least.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-cryptocurrency-riot-texas-power-grid/
Fabio Manganiello /
npub1v7…ukv0u
2023-09-08 09:50:12
Author Public Key
npub1v78mmuz20p6qd6nve30axhqu74avwn4f6z4grhug7755rat7wh3syukv0uSeen on
wss://relay.noswhere.comPublished at
2023-09-08 09:50:12Event JSON
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"content": "Texas' government just spent $31.7M in the middle of a heat wave and energy shortage.\n\nNo, not to provide fresh shelter to the homeless. Neither to install booths with free fresh water. Neither to increase the number of public spaces (outside of shopping malls) where people can gather, instead of burning energy to keep their homes cool 24/7. Neither to boost its investments in renewables and pivot away from the oil that it keeps digging.\n\nNo, the government just gave that money away to Bitcoin miners to convince them to turn off their energy-hungry machines, so everybody else can also use energy to keep themselves cool.\n\nLet that sink in. Even a life-threatening heatwave can't get miners to behave cooperatively and turn off their machines, whose only purpose is as pointless as randomly guessing a number whose SHA256 hash satisfies a certain arbitrary numeric constraint - and they skim some profits out of these pointless puzzles just because someone decided that putting up a system with such perverse financial incentives was a good idea. In order to get them to behave as someone who's not a complete selfish sociopath and evolutionary failure, the government had to compensate them for the losses that they would make by turning off their computers.\n\nI guess that today's capitalism is that system where it's actually ok for the government to spend public money - as long as that money goes to those who need it the least.\n\nhttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-cryptocurrency-riot-texas-power-grid/",
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