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It sounds like the reason is that you don’t understand money, which is generally regarded as having 3 core functions. Acting as a medium of exchange, a store of

It sounds like the reason is that you don’t understand money, which is generally regarded as having 3 core functions. Acting as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. Bitcoin does all of those things. Your issue seems to be that it’s not widely accepted enough as a medium of exchange to properly facilitate that function? The problem with that view is that it is widely accepted enough to drive some level of demand. With that demand being generated by (probably a relatively small number of) people who use it for retail payments, speculators, and black market participants.

XorNot 6y ago
You don't seem to understand the OP's point: Bitcoin makes minting tokens incredibly expensive due to the electricity usage. A good currency is not consuming a huge chunk of the resources it is tracking. Electricity spent "mining" bitcoin is not somehow recoverable from the tokens. Which makes it worse then gold, which actually is.
gorgoiler 6y ago
I don’t think I really understand money, no. What makes much more sense to me is agreeing on a central authority (or a distributed one, if we have the math to be able to do that securely) to track the exchange of things with actual value. Bitcoin-the-tech feels like it’s partly that, but also it’s partly some side-wheeze for the initial Bitcoin folks to print their own money. Bitcoin would make sense if the inflation (deflation?) component was removed because at least you then actually had to do something to gain Bitcoin wealth — namely buy computers and burn electricity. If you want $15,000 of Bitcoin then you buy an ASIC and pay your power bills in time. That seems extremely wasteful. Wouldn’t a global tally of IOUs satisfy the same requirements, without having to have this centralised coin stuff? Of the two things it represents — a global ledger, and a money printing machine — all I hear about are people focused on the latter.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  Well a bank account provides all the functions of money, and to a much greater level of functionality. But the whole reason cryptocurrency exists is to avoid some of the issues you get when dealing with centralized financial institutions. If you want to decentralize that role, you need a new way of managing scarcity. Proof of work is one way to do that. Whether that’s wasteful or not would be a personal judgement, but the reasons the demand exists are pretty simple to understand.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gorgoiler 6y ago
    Thanks for explaining, it’s very helpful.

XorNot 6y ago

You don't seem to understand the OP's point: Bitcoin makes minting tokens incredibly expensive due to the electricity usage. A good currency is not consuming a huge chunk of the resources it is tracking. Electricity spent "mining" bitcoin is not somehow recoverable from the tokens. Which makes it worse then gold, which actually is.

gorgoiler 6y ago

I don’t think I really understand money, no. What makes much more sense to me is agreeing on a central authority (or a distributed one, if we have the math to be able to do that securely) to track the exchange of things with actual value. Bitcoin-the-tech feels like it’s partly that, but also it’s partly some side-wheeze for the initial Bitcoin folks to print their own money. Bitcoin would make sense if the inflation (deflation?) component was removed because at least you then actually had to do something to gain Bitcoin wealth — namely buy computers and burn electricity. If you want $15,000 of Bitcoin then you buy an ASIC and pay your power bills in time. That seems extremely wasteful. Wouldn’t a global tally of IOUs satisfy the same requirements, without having to have this centralised coin stuff? Of the two things it represents — a global ledger, and a money printing machine — all I hear about are people focused on the latter.

AmericanChopper 6y ago
Well a bank account provides all the functions of money, and to a much greater level of functionality. But the whole reason cryptocurrency exists is to avoid some of the issues you get when dealing with centralized financial institutions. If you want to decentralize that role, you need a new way of managing scarcity. Proof of work is one way to do that. Whether that’s wasteful or not would be a personal judgement, but the reasons the demand exists are pretty simple to understand.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  Thanks for explaining, it’s very helpful.