6 ms·

I see Bitcoin like a 21st century Apollo project. While I agree the resources appear wasted, they are supporting a revolutionary concept that holds tremendous p

I see Bitcoin like a 21st century Apollo project. While I agree the resources appear wasted, they are supporting a revolutionary concept that holds tremendous potential to change the way the world works. Also, consider the scale of resources used by the existing financial system, with its thousands of buildings staffed by millions of people who use energy to come into work every day to keep the whole centralized system running. I see this call to destroy it as akin to the 1969 Apollo mission protests, when civil rights leaders argued that the space mission resources would be better used on Earth. https://www.history.com/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-launch-protests https://www.history.com/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-launch-p...

ForHackernews 6y ago
If we're going to follow this analogy, what are the beneficial side effects from bitcoin? Better ASICs that do nothing but calculate sha256 hashes? Easier money-laundering? New venues for tax evasion? I guess censorship-resistant online value transfer is worth something, but I'm not sure it outweighs all the negatives.
- dave_sullivan 6y ago
  Some people think the internet should be beyond the control of a single government, and perhaps by extension so too should the financial system. There are a lot of caveats to this idea.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    Even for those that do, a network capable of handling maybe a few million transactions per day while consuming more energy than many small countries is so obviously useless in that regard that it should be abandoned entirely.
    - dave_sullivan 6y ago
      I don't disagree with the weaknesses you point out, but I do think "abandon entirely" is an extreme stance. It's completely possible for bitcoin to lose while some other crypto (or basket of crypto coins) wins.
      - tsimionescu 6y ago
        It's important to remember that Bitcoin (and other proof-of-work coins) have a very real and direct environmental cost. Given the state of global warming and how urgent it is to stop it, I believe that letting miners continue to waste energy is a much more extreme stance than stopping them today (with some kind of compensation program for their and others' investments in bitcoin, of course you can't just delete a trillion dollars worth of people's money in a minute).
- nx7487 6y ago
  Forcing budget reform because the government wouldn't be able to rely on printing money.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    .. but should instead increase austerity, cut social programs, and raise taxes? Besides, the seignorage revenue is pretty tiny in western economies..
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    You would still need a lending infrastructure outside of bitcoin to handle the economy, and then it would be trivial to return to fractional reserve banking with bitcoin instead of dollars. As long as people don't all call in their debts at the same time, which would be catastrophic either way, the system would work with bitcoin just like it works today (if bitcoin weren't so ridiculously slow and expensive to register a transaction, that is) .
- jeofken 6y ago
  Power over other people is intoxicating. It attracts those who value it over virtue, and the virtuous reject it. For their wicked thirst for power, some will do anything. In our age there is an unholy alliance between the worlds greatest power ever and its military industrial complex, where the incentives for government leaders is to wage war in strange faraway lands, and to bribe the population at home with dependence on the state, in exchange for votes. This is all funded by printing money - inflating its supply. In effect, this is devaluing the salaries and savings of anyone who earns their living, and who can not do anything about it, as they are forced to trade in this currency created by fiat. By creating Bitcoin, Satoshi took gold to the internet, and we can now trade in a currency which no one can inflate to fund wars, or to in essence steal productivity from every earner. A sound system of ethics must contain the right to ownership of your property - you body, your money, and other possessions. Bitcoin practically gives us this in the Information Age.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    > This is all funded by printing money - inflating its supply. > By creating Bitcoin, Satoshi took gold to the internet, and we can now trade in a currency which no one can inflate to fund wars, or to in essence steal productivity from every earner. Utter bullshit. The power of the US government doesn't stem from its ability to print money. Rather, it's the other way around essentially: its ability to print money stems from its power. The US government controls the most successful economy and army in the world's history, by far. If it had a reason to, the US government could, with resources it entirely owns, out-mine the entire bitcoin network and print its own bitcoin as well, in violation of the protocol. What's more, assuming it were done publicly and with a commitment to maintain it, people all over the world would use the newly printed US-bitcoin. More realistically, it could easily lend bitcoin that don't exist yet and create a fractional-reserve system right on top of bitcoin. The problems of today's economy stem much more from "free market" systems like the officially-sanctioned speculation happening every second on Wall Street. Workers are hurt much more by so-called "free trade" agreements that allow US companies to own other parts of the world and exploit those for cheap labor at the cost of both US workers and the foreign economy. And wars get started not because the US has money, but because the US doesn't allow enough democratic control of its workings.
- primitivesuave 6y ago
  From the ASIC perspective, what I see personally is a massive waste of engineering talent. Why build ASICs for boring but important tasks (especially bioinformatics) when you can cash in on Bitcoin mining while the going is good. With regards to tax evasion, my opinion is that it will simply force taxation to occur in other ways like VAT. People are quite capable of evading taxes in the present system, so wide adoption of online value transfer would simply democratize access to tax evasion (and force governments to rethink how they collect taxes). Money laundering makes me think of the dangerous flip side, where anyone can covertly accumulate and use resources without scrutiny - e.g. Ali Alexander using Bitcoin to finance the transport and lodging of groups that took part in the January 6th riot.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
Yajirobe 6y ago
> change the way the world works Change how exactly? To me bitcoin seems like this: Expectation: the world ditches banks, dollars, euros, etc. People switch to bitcoin and everyone lives happily, paying for everyday stuff with bitcoin. Reality: people do not use bitcoin to buy groceries. In fact, people do not use bitcoin per se - people are only interested in buying and holding (speculating).
- shawnz 6y ago
  The idea that Bitcoin can only be useful if it completely replaces all existing financial instruments is a strawman
- emteycz 6y ago
  People actually use Bitcoin - to transfer money across the world where other options are unavailable or too expensive. It's very popular in Africa.
  - FlyingSnake 6y ago
    > It's very popular in Africa. Source? Africa has mPesa which is vastly superior than BTC
    - inter_netuser 6y ago
      Remittances by traditional methods fell by 97% in Nigeria. Central bank had to ban Bitcoin. Look it up. It's real.
- midjji 6y ago
  Its also popular as a means to withdraw resources from dictatorships, basically improving private property protections at the expense of state ability to control their population.
  - wegs 6y ago
    You mean "withdraw resources by dictatorships", not "from" dictatorships. As a dictator, my goal is to fill my bank accounts for when I get deposed. In most cases, countries who have their resources fleeced have lawful means to go after former dictators. Bitcoin removes that.
tsimionescu 6y ago
I think this is a very bad comparison, for several reasons. 1. With the Apollo missions, the money being put into the project was going into research and development, so there was at least some expectation of getting new science and technology out of it. With Bitcoin,nthe money put in is going into speculation or mining, which only fuels the network. There is no reason to expect new technologies to come out of this, and certainly not any new science. 2. The Apollo project was a big consumer of money, of which there exist plenty in the world and we can create more. Bitcoin is a huge consumer of electricity, the production of which is generally accelerating global warming, the single biggest threat to our survival as a civilized society that has ever existed in history. We already know that Bitcoin itself is not even remotely close to being a solution to the problem you're thinking about (decentralized money), even IF I agreed that this is a real problem (I don't, I believe Bitcoin is going in the wrong direction compared to fiat money). You could make a decent argument for investing in developing scalable crypto coins, maybe Ethereum or maybe something else, but proof-of-work crypocoins and Bitcoin in particular are an obvious dead end, and can be decommissioned entirely without much loss (especially if the bitcoin holders were compensated somehow).
- Koiwai 6y ago
  For #1, there is no actual evidence to counter that, but, the logic doesn't stand either, just, why not? https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1348094702550216707 https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1348094702550216707
- shawnz 6y ago
  > There is no reason to expect new technologies to come out of this, and certainly not any new science Proof-of-stake coins are one obvious counterexample. Would proof-of-stake technologies have been developed if proof-of-work didn't come along first to incentivise development and build trust in cryptocurrencies?
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    Proof-of-stake is not an iteration on proof-of-work, it is a lateral idea. There is no reason why the first popular crypto-coin wouldn't have been proof-of-stake, except that it didn't occur to Satoshi (or it did and they didn't like it for other reasons).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tomxor 6y ago
Bitcoin already went to the moon and back. We learned about blockchain, we learned cryptocurrencies are possible. Now it's continuing to burn tons of rocket fuel for no further benefit... Saturn V served it's purpose, there is a good reason we don't continue building rockets this way. We learned a lot from Bitcoin, critically, we learned it is _not_ the solution to a sustainable decentralized digital currency.
isoprophlex 6y ago
It's not revolutionary. For almost every use case, blockchain solution are almost always inferior to the alternatives. As a payment system, it's sluggish, wasteful, and in 2021 STILL poorly adopted. I'm not arguing anything about the current system of doing financial transactions. But the environmental disaster that is BTC has to die. If there is truly a need for innovation in the digital currency space, it should be replaced with something less wasteful. Too bad all the pundits and hodlers are too invested to admit this.
- effie 6y ago
  If BTC mining and related operations were halted right now as you wish, by what percentage would the CO2 production decrease? By 0.1%, inconsequential. We need to focus on decomissioning coal/gas power plants and combustion motors for transport. That will get us at least 60%.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    > We need to focus on decomissioning coal/gas power plants and combustion motors for transport. Bitcoin is actively working against that. By increasing the energy demand from the network, it makes it harder to simply stop producing energy. It doesn't matter if miners are directly buying only from renewable sources (as some claim), they are still likely out-bidding someone else, who then has to go to a fossil fuel plant for their electricity.
    - effie 6y ago
      The energy consumption of BTC is minuscule when compared to total electric consumption and its physical/economic effect on power networks is similarly minuscule. Yes, it consumes and contributes to CO2. So do other electric energy consumers, like big companies like Amazon, Google. So do, orders of magnitude more than BTC, consumers of fossil fuels. BTC is just an easy inconsequential scapegoat.
      - tsimionescu 6y ago
wegs 6y ago
The Nazi and Stalinist regimes also stood to change the world too, you know. That didn't make them like the Apollo project. To be clear, I'm not trying to liken Bitcoin to either of those, just to point out that there's a spectrum from good to bad. I'm glad Apollo succeeded, but I'm also glad fascism didn't succeed. French Revolution changed the world too, in the short term, for the worse, but probably had a net positive in the long run. Bitcoin? I'm not so sure. Bitcoin definitely stands to change the world, but I'm not sure for the better. Bitcoin would: * By design, have exploding deflation * Allow insane inter-generational wealth accumulation and disparity * Block most of the controls used by central banks to stabilize the economy * Allow a disk failure or hacker to wipe out someone's life savings ... and so on. I'd actually liken it to the /early/ fascist, communist, and democratic regimes, which had a lot of good ideas for how to replace monarchies, a lot of bad ideas, and perhaps a 25% hit rate. The US worked out fairly well, at least once it got past the Articles of Confederation bit. France didn't work for a long time, but eventually worked out okay. Fascism and Soviet Communism /appeared/ to work better than what came before for a few years, and then imploded into horrors. The jury is still out on where the Chinese form of government lands. At this point, we don't quite know which track we're on with Bitcoin. I was optimistic at the beginning, and now I'm more pessimistic, but it's too early to tell. In either case, we've learned a lot, and we could probably design a better system without many of Bitcoin's flaws.
TobyBrull 6y ago
Not convinced this is a good analogy. If we could have gone to the moon at a fraction of the cost, but people had still insisted on doing it the expensive way, just because the expensive approach came first, that would be a better analogy.

ForHackernews 6y ago

If we're going to follow this analogy, what are the beneficial side effects from bitcoin? Better ASICs that do nothing but calculate sha256 hashes? Easier money-laundering? New venues for tax evasion? I guess censorship-resistant online value transfer is worth something, but I'm not sure it outweighs all the negatives.

dave_sullivan 6y ago
Some people think the internet should be beyond the control of a single government, and perhaps by extension so too should the financial system. There are a lot of caveats to this idea.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Even for those that do, a network capable of handling maybe a few million transactions per day while consuming more energy than many small countries is so obviously useless in that regard that it should be abandoned entirely.
  - dave_sullivan 6y ago
    I don't disagree with the weaknesses you point out, but I do think "abandon entirely" is an extreme stance. It's completely possible for bitcoin to lose while some other crypto (or basket of crypto coins) wins.
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      It's important to remember that Bitcoin (and other proof-of-work coins) have a very real and direct environmental cost. Given the state of global warming and how urgent it is to stop it, I believe that letting miners continue to waste energy is a much more extreme stance than stopping them today (with some kind of compensation program for their and others' investments in bitcoin, of course you can't just delete a trillion dollars worth of people's money in a minute).
nx7487 6y ago
Forcing budget reform because the government wouldn't be able to rely on printing money.
- pjc50 6y ago
  .. but should instead increase austerity, cut social programs, and raise taxes? Besides, the seignorage revenue is pretty tiny in western economies..
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  You would still need a lending infrastructure outside of bitcoin to handle the economy, and then it would be trivial to return to fractional reserve banking with bitcoin instead of dollars. As long as people don't all call in their debts at the same time, which would be catastrophic either way, the system would work with bitcoin just like it works today (if bitcoin weren't so ridiculously slow and expensive to register a transaction, that is) .
jeofken 6y ago
Power over other people is intoxicating. It attracts those who value it over virtue, and the virtuous reject it. For their wicked thirst for power, some will do anything. In our age there is an unholy alliance between the worlds greatest power ever and its military industrial complex, where the incentives for government leaders is to wage war in strange faraway lands, and to bribe the population at home with dependence on the state, in exchange for votes. This is all funded by printing money - inflating its supply. In effect, this is devaluing the salaries and savings of anyone who earns their living, and who can not do anything about it, as they are forced to trade in this currency created by fiat. By creating Bitcoin, Satoshi took gold to the internet, and we can now trade in a currency which no one can inflate to fund wars, or to in essence steal productivity from every earner. A sound system of ethics must contain the right to ownership of your property - you body, your money, and other possessions. Bitcoin practically gives us this in the Information Age.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  > This is all funded by printing money - inflating its supply. > By creating Bitcoin, Satoshi took gold to the internet, and we can now trade in a currency which no one can inflate to fund wars, or to in essence steal productivity from every earner. Utter bullshit. The power of the US government doesn't stem from its ability to print money. Rather, it's the other way around essentially: its ability to print money stems from its power. The US government controls the most successful economy and army in the world's history, by far. If it had a reason to, the US government could, with resources it entirely owns, out-mine the entire bitcoin network and print its own bitcoin as well, in violation of the protocol. What's more, assuming it were done publicly and with a commitment to maintain it, people all over the world would use the newly printed US-bitcoin. More realistically, it could easily lend bitcoin that don't exist yet and create a fractional-reserve system right on top of bitcoin. The problems of today's economy stem much more from "free market" systems like the officially-sanctioned speculation happening every second on Wall Street. Workers are hurt much more by so-called "free trade" agreements that allow US companies to own other parts of the world and exploit those for cheap labor at the cost of both US workers and the foreign economy. And wars get started not because the US has money, but because the US doesn't allow enough democratic control of its workings.
primitivesuave 6y ago
From the ASIC perspective, what I see personally is a massive waste of engineering talent. Why build ASICs for boring but important tasks (especially bioinformatics) when you can cash in on Bitcoin mining while the going is good. With regards to tax evasion, my opinion is that it will simply force taxation to occur in other ways like VAT. People are quite capable of evading taxes in the present system, so wide adoption of online value transfer would simply democratize access to tax evasion (and force governments to rethink how they collect taxes). Money laundering makes me think of the dangerous flip side, where anyone can covertly accumulate and use resources without scrutiny - e.g. Ali Alexander using Bitcoin to finance the transport and lodging of groups that took part in the January 6th riot.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

Yajirobe 6y ago

> change the way the world works Change how exactly? To me bitcoin seems like this: Expectation: the world ditches banks, dollars, euros, etc. People switch to bitcoin and everyone lives happily, paying for everyday stuff with bitcoin. Reality: people do not use bitcoin to buy groceries. In fact, people do not use bitcoin per se - people are only interested in buying and holding (speculating).

shawnz 6y ago
The idea that Bitcoin can only be useful if it completely replaces all existing financial instruments is a strawman
emteycz 6y ago
People actually use Bitcoin - to transfer money across the world where other options are unavailable or too expensive. It's very popular in Africa.
- FlyingSnake 6y ago
  > It's very popular in Africa. Source? Africa has mPesa which is vastly superior than BTC
  - inter_netuser 6y ago
    Remittances by traditional methods fell by 97% in Nigeria. Central bank had to ban Bitcoin. Look it up. It's real.
midjji 6y ago
Its also popular as a means to withdraw resources from dictatorships, basically improving private property protections at the expense of state ability to control their population.
- wegs 6y ago
  You mean "withdraw resources by dictatorships", not "from" dictatorships. As a dictator, my goal is to fill my bank accounts for when I get deposed. In most cases, countries who have their resources fleeced have lawful means to go after former dictators. Bitcoin removes that.

tsimionescu 6y ago

I think this is a very bad comparison, for several reasons. 1. With the Apollo missions, the money being put into the project was going into research and development, so there was at least some expectation of getting new science and technology out of it. With Bitcoin,nthe money put in is going into speculation or mining, which only fuels the network. There is no reason to expect new technologies to come out of this, and certainly not any new science. 2. The Apollo project was a big consumer of money, of which there exist plenty in the world and we can create more. Bitcoin is a huge consumer of electricity, the production of which is generally accelerating global warming, the single biggest threat to our survival as a civilized society that has ever existed in history. We already know that Bitcoin itself is not even remotely close to being a solution to the problem you're thinking about (decentralized money), even IF I agreed that this is a real problem (I don't, I believe Bitcoin is going in the wrong direction compared to fiat money). You could make a decent argument for investing in developing scalable crypto coins, maybe Ethereum or maybe something else, but proof-of-work crypocoins and Bitcoin in particular are an obvious dead end, and can be decommissioned entirely without much loss (especially if the bitcoin holders were compensated somehow).

Koiwai 6y ago
For #1, there is no actual evidence to counter that, but, the logic doesn't stand either, just, why not? https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1348094702550216707 https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1348094702550216707
shawnz 6y ago
> There is no reason to expect new technologies to come out of this, and certainly not any new science Proof-of-stake coins are one obvious counterexample. Would proof-of-stake technologies have been developed if proof-of-work didn't come along first to incentivise development and build trust in cryptocurrencies?
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Proof-of-stake is not an iteration on proof-of-work, it is a lateral idea. There is no reason why the first popular crypto-coin wouldn't have been proof-of-stake, except that it didn't occur to Satoshi (or it did and they didn't like it for other reasons).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tomxor 6y ago

Bitcoin already went to the moon and back. We learned about blockchain, we learned cryptocurrencies are possible. Now it's continuing to burn tons of rocket fuel for no further benefit... Saturn V served it's purpose, there is a good reason we don't continue building rockets this way. We learned a lot from Bitcoin, critically, we learned it is _not_ the solution to a sustainable decentralized digital currency.

isoprophlex 6y ago

It's not revolutionary. For almost every use case, blockchain solution are almost always inferior to the alternatives. As a payment system, it's sluggish, wasteful, and in 2021 STILL poorly adopted. I'm not arguing anything about the current system of doing financial transactions. But the environmental disaster that is BTC has to die. If there is truly a need for innovation in the digital currency space, it should be replaced with something less wasteful. Too bad all the pundits and hodlers are too invested to admit this.

effie 6y ago
If BTC mining and related operations were halted right now as you wish, by what percentage would the CO2 production decrease? By 0.1%, inconsequential. We need to focus on decomissioning coal/gas power plants and combustion motors for transport. That will get us at least 60%.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  > We need to focus on decomissioning coal/gas power plants and combustion motors for transport. Bitcoin is actively working against that. By increasing the energy demand from the network, it makes it harder to simply stop producing energy. It doesn't matter if miners are directly buying only from renewable sources (as some claim), they are still likely out-bidding someone else, who then has to go to a fossil fuel plant for their electricity.
  - effie 6y ago
    The energy consumption of BTC is minuscule when compared to total electric consumption and its physical/economic effect on power networks is similarly minuscule. Yes, it consumes and contributes to CO2. So do other electric energy consumers, like big companies like Amazon, Google. So do, orders of magnitude more than BTC, consumers of fossil fuels. BTC is just an easy inconsequential scapegoat.
    - tsimionescu 6y ago

wegs 6y ago

The Nazi and Stalinist regimes also stood to change the world too, you know. That didn't make them like the Apollo project. To be clear, I'm not trying to liken Bitcoin to either of those, just to point out that there's a spectrum from good to bad. I'm glad Apollo succeeded, but I'm also glad fascism didn't succeed. French Revolution changed the world too, in the short term, for the worse, but probably had a net positive in the long run. Bitcoin? I'm not so sure. Bitcoin definitely stands to change the world, but I'm not sure for the better. Bitcoin would: * By design, have exploding deflation * Allow insane inter-generational wealth accumulation and disparity * Block most of the controls used by central banks to stabilize the economy * Allow a disk failure or hacker to wipe out someone's life savings ... and so on. I'd actually liken it to the /early/ fascist, communist, and democratic regimes, which had a lot of good ideas for how to replace monarchies, a lot of bad ideas, and perhaps a 25% hit rate. The US worked out fairly well, at least once it got past the Articles of Confederation bit. France didn't work for a long time, but eventually worked out okay. Fascism and Soviet Communism /appeared/ to work better than what came before for a few years, and then imploded into horrors. The jury is still out on where the Chinese form of government lands. At this point, we don't quite know which track we're on with Bitcoin. I was optimistic at the beginning, and now I'm more pessimistic, but it's too early to tell. In either case, we've learned a lot, and we could probably design a better system without many of Bitcoin's flaws.

TobyBrull 6y ago

Not convinced this is a good analogy. If we could have gone to the moon at a fraction of the cost, but people had still insisted on doing it the expensive way, just because the expensive approach came first, that would be a better analogy.