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Nic Carter's rebuttal to a Bloomberg comparison between Bitcoin/Visa, including assessments of total and per/transaction energy usage: "First of all, Bitcoin a

Nic Carter's rebuttal to a Bloomberg comparison between Bitcoin/Visa, including assessments of total and per/transaction energy usage: "First of all, Bitcoin and Visa are fundamentally different systems. Bitcoin is a complete, self-contained monetary settlement system; Visa transactions are non-final credit transactions that rely on external underlying settlement rails. Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global correspondent banking system, the Federal Reserve and, of course, the military and diplomatic strength of the U.S. government to ensure all of the above are working smoothly. Any energy comparison must take the above into account – including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar. As those who make this comparison inevitably fail to mention, the dollar’s ubiquity is partly due to a covert arrangement whereby the U.S. provides military support to countries like Saudi Arabia that agree to sell oil exclusively for dollars. It’s worth noting that the grossly oversized U.S. military, whose presence worldwide is necessary to backstop the international dollar system, is the largest single consumer of oil worldwide." https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bitcoins-climate-footprint https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...

choward 6y ago
> including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar This isn't true. Internationally the thing that backs the dollar is the U.S. economy. People know they can spend dollars to get anything they need. Domestically what drives the dollar is that it's the only way you can pay taxes. I suppose you could say that oil is used to defend the U.S. economy but that's a stretch.
- loveistheanswer 6y ago
  >>including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar >This isn't true. Basic economics and the law of supply and demand says that it is true. >when demand increases and supply remains the same, the higher demand leads to a higher equilibrium price and vice versa. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/033115/how-does-law-supply-and-demand-affect-prices.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/033115/how-does-law...
Aunche 6y ago
The first paragraph is a fair consideration. The second is a complete stretch. It's not as if America would suddenly stop providing military support to Saudi Arabia if we suddenly switched to bitcoin. An America that historically used Bitcoin would be even more incentivized to "secure" fossil fuel nations.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  Take a look at OPEC companies that have priced oil in other currencies: Iraq started pricing oil in euros in 1999: https://www.theglobalist.com/iraq-the-dollar-and-the-euro-5/ https://www.theglobalist.com/iraq-the-dollar-and-the-euro-5/ Iran started pricing oil in yuan in 2012: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-17988142 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-17988142 What's our geopolitical relationship with Iraq and Iran now?
  - randomopining 6y ago
    So they changed their pricing currency and then we became enemies? Or we were enemies, and they changed their pricing currency because of that... lol
    - tareqak 6y ago
      The US CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Mossadegh in Iran and then received backlash for it in the form of the Iranian Revolution [0][1]. [0] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/iran/2017-06-15/iran-1953-state-department-finally-releases-updated-official-history https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/iran/2017-06-15/iran... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
  - totalZero 6y ago
    The first Gulf War began in 1990, and the Iranian Revolution took place in 1979. The causality may well have taken place in the reverse of what you suggest.
    - 6y ago
mdoms 6y ago
On the other hand Visa actually works for its intended purpose.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  And Bitcoin is a paper asset backed by absolutely nothing.
  - splintercell 6y ago
    Bitcoin is a global settlement layer. it is not a representation of something else, it's the final product on its own. You're not going to say that in a prison system cigarettes are not backed by anything for them to be used as a currency.
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      I take my comment back. Bitcoin is backed by 'the market can stay delusional longer than you can stay solvent'
      - midasuni 6y ago
        You can say that about any currency. An 80 year old billionaire still needs someone to care for him, just like an 80 year old pauper. He relies on the hope that his dollars will be accepted, to look after his medical and care needs as well as security and ownership needs.
        forty 6y ago
        My understanding is that because people have mortgages in dollar (or other useful money), you can be pretty confident that many people are going to be motivated enough to get some dollar (they have to pay their mortgage with it) On the other hand, no one is going to be in a difficult situation if they cannot get bitcoin.
        6y ago
endless1234 6y ago
Would the need for oil and military go away were we to switch to using bitcoin for everything? Why are those coupled to the dollar's energy usage?
- lucisferre 6y ago
  Seems to depend on how well your tinfoil hat fits.
- DickingAround 6y ago
  You still need to use oil, but you don't have to use dollars. The support for dollars relies on a lot of things including the government and thus the military, which are big costs and oil consumes. If the dollar didn't rely on the military power of the US, why is the Bretton Woods meeting and the post war monetary policy so important to it's dominance (something practically no one disputes)? Why is it that the US seems to care so much about pricing oil in dollars? You don't need a tinfoil hat (as other comments suggest) to notice the US government has a strong interest in everyone using our currency and that where the gov has a strong interest, it also uses it's guns.
jayd16 6y ago
Ask yourself which of those things would go away if BTC replaced Visa. Only then should it count towards the cost. Somehow I doubt BTC would lower military spending.
rspeele 6y ago
Bitcoin fans when you complain that transactions are expensive, slow, and always irreversible: "Bitcoin isn't a replacement for Visa or for your checking account. It's a store of value. It's not for day-to-day purchases." Bitcoin fans when you complain that Bitcoin is massively wasteful: "If you compare it to every cost that can be attributed to the existing financial system as a whole, including military spending, it's cheap."
- justicezyx 6y ago
  Please provide meaningful evidences for these claims? I might be in a bubble, but it seems my intake of bitcoin information is balanced enough that most things are not this polarized.
- op03 6y ago
  Its getting to a point where it can be a component in the Gross Domestic Ignorance calculation.
- conanbatt 6y ago
  Also bitcoin fans say all that swimming in millions of dollars the vast amount of people could never get in a lifetime by simply owning bitcion.
Capira 6y ago
This nails it!
- harwoodleon 6y ago
  Unless your fiat money is not actually real and is just a made up number by the Fed. Bitcoin may not be useful in the local store, but if it can make fiscal, fair rules that the globe works within - I’ll take that. The other mad comparison is that Bitcoin is globally distributed. If Argentina was globally distributed it would eat far more energy than Bitcoin. What this really means is that Bitcoin is out of reach of a nation state attack. For the local store, there’s always Nano currency.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Fiat only needs to hold its value for as long as it takes you to purchase assets and investments with. At 2% inflation it does. End of story. Anywhere you drag your thesis out beyond that needs to take into account that you are fighting a straw-man. That's not what currency is for. Currency is a temporary, intentionally lossy (to encourage investment and velocity of money), store of value and medium of exchange. It is not an investment. It is not a long-term store of value. > What this really means is that Bitcoin is out of reach of a nation state attack. Right except 70% of the hash power is concentrated in a few mining pools in the PRC. A strongly worded memo from Xi that unless you permit their compromise of the network you'll find a new hobby mining minerals in Xinjiang, and party's over.
    - shawnz 6y ago
      > Right except 70% of the hash power is concentrated in a few mining pools in the PRC. A strongly worded memo from Xi that unless you permit their compromise of the network you'll find a new hobby mining minerals in Xinjiang, and party's over. What attack are you imagining? Chinese miners cooperate to do a double-spend... on who? And how does it help them to destroy international trust in the coin and make their own assets worthless?
      - 6y ago
imhoguy 6y ago
Ok here is a puzzle: is there any electricity provider who accepts BTC? BTC runs on fiat money.
- elvatoloco55 6y ago
  The goal is for everyone to accept it, but bitcoin is still on a journey to become store of value and medium of exchange.
  - chii 6y ago
    it'd be a very long journey. the deflationary nature of btc means that people generally don't want to pay in btc, since it would be expected to become more valuable in the future.
    - stale2002 6y ago
      That doesn't make any sense. My amazon stock that I hold is going up in value, and is therefore "deflationary". But it would be silly to say that I would never have a reason to sell those stocks. I sell things, whether they are dollars or stock or crypto, because I want to buy something.
      - chii 6y ago
        if you had 1 amazon share (worth $3286 right now), and $3286 in USD cash, and you wish to buy a $3286 computer, would you rather sell the share to obtain the cash, or transact using your existing USD?
        stale2002 6y ago
        I would have no preference. It's the same thing. The only difference maybe, is regarding friction. IE, maybe it is a bit more difficult to immediately sell the Amazon stock at a store. But transaction friction is different than the deflation argument.
- 6y ago
hokkos 6y ago
That's not scope 1, 2 or 3 accounting, more like scope 23 at this point. And scope 0.1 for bitcoin.
arcticbull 6y ago
Nic Carter's point is intentionally obtuse and belies his conflicted interests. The reality is that if you scaled up the bitcoin system linearly so it provided as much transaction capacity as Visa (let alone the entire world economy) [edit or rather worded differently if each Visa transaction consumed as much power as a Bitcoin transaction], it would require a number of times more power than the entire world produces, and produce as much e-waste as the entire world put together. Obviously this is not how bitcoin scales because even if you did that it would still process 7 tps. That is, however, proof that it is drastically less efficient on a per transaction basis even factoring in any and all possible externalities including the army and mining and the fed (lol). This is a proof by contradiction. Anything else is a talking point and also trivially falsifiable. The US Army protects the US not the dollar and its budget would not be reduced in a Bitcoin powered world. Neither would its oil consumption because tanks don't fill up on bitcoins. The ubiquity of the dollar specifically is also irrelevant as we're not comparing crypto to US Dollars but rather to well-managed fiat systems. Any and all. Not just one albeit dominant one. This is obvious stuff if you think about it for a half second without trying to justify the unjustifiable.
- miracle2k 6y ago
  > The reality is that if you scaled up the bitcoin system linearly so it provided as much transaction capacity as Visa (let alone the entire world economy), it would require a number of times more power than the entire world produces, and produce as much e-waste as the entire world put together. It's fair to judge Bitcoin's energy use by its tps, but the above is not true. Energy use and tps are, as you then acknowledge, not related. It is possible to increase the number of tps by many multiples. The trade-off is centralization due to hardware requirements.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Once they increase it, which they won’t for philosophical reasons, I’ll update my assessment. Until then it’s strictly fair and accurate. It’s representative of the world in which we live today not some hypothetical world that could exist in the future - that the team has promised and failed to deliver for a decade. I can make up numbers for visa that match too. After all climate change doesn’t care about hypotheticals.
Slartie 6y ago
For some reason the Euro does not need all that "grossly oversized military" to be a proper, stable and usable currency. That alone kind of contradicts the entire grossly overstretched argument of this Nic Carter guy.
- ImaCake 6y ago
  While I am also skeptical of the parent comment's quotes. The Euro is still backed by a centralized state(s) which does indeed have a monopoly on violence and require huge amounts of resources to maintain legitimacy. Crypto currencies demonstrably do not need these kind of resources. The rest of what people preach about crypto might be Bullshit, in a strict sense, but they are right about the anarchism thing.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    All states by definition requires a monopoly on violence and resources to retain legitimacy. The currency is just a freeloader, and the consumption of resources to sustain a cryptocurrency is purely strictly additive.
- BelenusMordred 6y ago
  The European Union has a huge standing army if they were counted as one force? Over 1 million active personnel. The US by comparison has 1.4m and China 2.0m
efwfwef 6y ago
> Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global correspondent banking system, the Federal Reserve do you have a good link that explains how this all works and how these different components interact?
- st1ck 6y ago
  For rather deep dive: https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking/home/welcome https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking/home/welcome Something shorter: https://gendal.me/2013/11/24/a-simple-explanation-of-how-money-moves-around-the-banking-system/ https://gendal.me/2013/11/24/a-simple-explanation-of-how-mon...
xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
This strikes me as a terrible argument. Yes, Visa is a small part of the whole system. It's also the only part that Bitcoin does anything to replace. Moving numbers from one column to another is trivial. If that were all the banking system needed to do we could run the whole world economy off my laptop with software I wrote in a month. You can't do "non-final credit transactions" on Bitcoin. You can't take out a mortgage. You can't manage investments. You can't pay for groceries without waiting a half an hour. You can't buy a $1.25 pack of gum. Bitcoin is complete and self-contained because it is inextensible and feature-poor. It cannot solve the problems the banking system solves. Its solution is the classic "you didn't need it anyway". And then Bitcoin fans realize that yes, they did in fact need those things after all. We can watch them reinventing the entire modern banking system before our very eyes. The main differences are that they run everything on the world's worst database, they insist on calling their banks "exchanges", and that they think it's OK to have all their money stolen every so often. (Bitcoin also lacks the ability to prevent money laundering or to enforce judgments. I'd consider that a bug. Other people might consider it a feature. In either case, it means Bitcoin is solving a much easier problem than normal banks.)

choward 6y ago

> including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar This isn't true. Internationally the thing that backs the dollar is the U.S. economy. People know they can spend dollars to get anything they need. Domestically what drives the dollar is that it's the only way you can pay taxes. I suppose you could say that oil is used to defend the U.S. economy but that's a stretch.

loveistheanswer 6y ago
>>including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar >This isn't true. Basic economics and the law of supply and demand says that it is true. >when demand increases and supply remains the same, the higher demand leads to a higher equilibrium price and vice versa. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/033115/how-does-law-supply-and-demand-affect-prices.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/033115/how-does-law...

Aunche 6y ago

The first paragraph is a fair consideration. The second is a complete stretch. It's not as if America would suddenly stop providing military support to Saudi Arabia if we suddenly switched to bitcoin. An America that historically used Bitcoin would be even more incentivized to "secure" fossil fuel nations.

nostrademons 6y ago
Take a look at OPEC companies that have priced oil in other currencies: Iraq started pricing oil in euros in 1999: https://www.theglobalist.com/iraq-the-dollar-and-the-euro-5/ https://www.theglobalist.com/iraq-the-dollar-and-the-euro-5/ Iran started pricing oil in yuan in 2012: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-17988142 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-17988142 What's our geopolitical relationship with Iraq and Iran now?
- randomopining 6y ago
  So they changed their pricing currency and then we became enemies? Or we were enemies, and they changed their pricing currency because of that... lol
  - tareqak 6y ago
    The US CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Mossadegh in Iran and then received backlash for it in the form of the Iranian Revolution [0][1]. [0] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/iran/2017-06-15/iran-1953-state-department-finally-releases-updated-official-history https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/iran/2017-06-15/iran... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
- totalZero 6y ago
  The first Gulf War began in 1990, and the Iranian Revolution took place in 1979. The causality may well have taken place in the reverse of what you suggest.
  - 6y ago

mdoms 6y ago

On the other hand Visa actually works for its intended purpose.

Gibbon1 6y ago
And Bitcoin is a paper asset backed by absolutely nothing.
- splintercell 6y ago
  Bitcoin is a global settlement layer. it is not a representation of something else, it's the final product on its own. You're not going to say that in a prison system cigarettes are not backed by anything for them to be used as a currency.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    I take my comment back. Bitcoin is backed by 'the market can stay delusional longer than you can stay solvent'
    - midasuni 6y ago
      You can say that about any currency. An 80 year old billionaire still needs someone to care for him, just like an 80 year old pauper. He relies on the hope that his dollars will be accepted, to look after his medical and care needs as well as security and ownership needs.
      - forty 6y ago
        My understanding is that because people have mortgages in dollar (or other useful money), you can be pretty confident that many people are going to be motivated enough to get some dollar (they have to pay their mortgage with it) On the other hand, no one is going to be in a difficult situation if they cannot get bitcoin.
        6y ago

endless1234 6y ago

Would the need for oil and military go away were we to switch to using bitcoin for everything? Why are those coupled to the dollar's energy usage?

lucisferre 6y ago
Seems to depend on how well your tinfoil hat fits.
DickingAround 6y ago
You still need to use oil, but you don't have to use dollars. The support for dollars relies on a lot of things including the government and thus the military, which are big costs and oil consumes. If the dollar didn't rely on the military power of the US, why is the Bretton Woods meeting and the post war monetary policy so important to it's dominance (something practically no one disputes)? Why is it that the US seems to care so much about pricing oil in dollars? You don't need a tinfoil hat (as other comments suggest) to notice the US government has a strong interest in everyone using our currency and that where the gov has a strong interest, it also uses it's guns.

jayd16 6y ago

Ask yourself which of those things would go away if BTC replaced Visa. Only then should it count towards the cost. Somehow I doubt BTC would lower military spending.

rspeele 6y ago

Bitcoin fans when you complain that transactions are expensive, slow, and always irreversible: "Bitcoin isn't a replacement for Visa or for your checking account. It's a store of value. It's not for day-to-day purchases." Bitcoin fans when you complain that Bitcoin is massively wasteful: "If you compare it to every cost that can be attributed to the existing financial system as a whole, including military spending, it's cheap."

justicezyx 6y ago
Please provide meaningful evidences for these claims? I might be in a bubble, but it seems my intake of bitcoin information is balanced enough that most things are not this polarized.
op03 6y ago
Its getting to a point where it can be a component in the Gross Domestic Ignorance calculation.
conanbatt 6y ago
Also bitcoin fans say all that swimming in millions of dollars the vast amount of people could never get in a lifetime by simply owning bitcion.

Capira 6y ago

This nails it!

harwoodleon 6y ago
Unless your fiat money is not actually real and is just a made up number by the Fed. Bitcoin may not be useful in the local store, but if it can make fiscal, fair rules that the globe works within - I’ll take that. The other mad comparison is that Bitcoin is globally distributed. If Argentina was globally distributed it would eat far more energy than Bitcoin. What this really means is that Bitcoin is out of reach of a nation state attack. For the local store, there’s always Nano currency.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Fiat only needs to hold its value for as long as it takes you to purchase assets and investments with. At 2% inflation it does. End of story. Anywhere you drag your thesis out beyond that needs to take into account that you are fighting a straw-man. That's not what currency is for. Currency is a temporary, intentionally lossy (to encourage investment and velocity of money), store of value and medium of exchange. It is not an investment. It is not a long-term store of value. > What this really means is that Bitcoin is out of reach of a nation state attack. Right except 70% of the hash power is concentrated in a few mining pools in the PRC. A strongly worded memo from Xi that unless you permit their compromise of the network you'll find a new hobby mining minerals in Xinjiang, and party's over.
  - shawnz 6y ago
    > Right except 70% of the hash power is concentrated in a few mining pools in the PRC. A strongly worded memo from Xi that unless you permit their compromise of the network you'll find a new hobby mining minerals in Xinjiang, and party's over. What attack are you imagining? Chinese miners cooperate to do a double-spend... on who? And how does it help them to destroy international trust in the coin and make their own assets worthless?
    - 6y ago

imhoguy 6y ago

Ok here is a puzzle: is there any electricity provider who accepts BTC? BTC runs on fiat money.

elvatoloco55 6y ago
The goal is for everyone to accept it, but bitcoin is still on a journey to become store of value and medium of exchange.
- chii 6y ago
  it'd be a very long journey. the deflationary nature of btc means that people generally don't want to pay in btc, since it would be expected to become more valuable in the future.
  - stale2002 6y ago
    That doesn't make any sense. My amazon stock that I hold is going up in value, and is therefore "deflationary". But it would be silly to say that I would never have a reason to sell those stocks. I sell things, whether they are dollars or stock or crypto, because I want to buy something.
    - chii 6y ago
      if you had 1 amazon share (worth $3286 right now), and $3286 in USD cash, and you wish to buy a $3286 computer, would you rather sell the share to obtain the cash, or transact using your existing USD?
      - stale2002 6y ago
        I would have no preference. It's the same thing. The only difference maybe, is regarding friction. IE, maybe it is a bit more difficult to immediately sell the Amazon stock at a store. But transaction friction is different than the deflation argument.
6y ago

hokkos 6y ago

That's not scope 1, 2 or 3 accounting, more like scope 23 at this point. And scope 0.1 for bitcoin.

arcticbull 6y ago

Nic Carter's point is intentionally obtuse and belies his conflicted interests. The reality is that if you scaled up the bitcoin system linearly so it provided as much transaction capacity as Visa (let alone the entire world economy) [edit or rather worded differently if each Visa transaction consumed as much power as a Bitcoin transaction], it would require a number of times more power than the entire world produces, and produce as much e-waste as the entire world put together. Obviously this is not how bitcoin scales because even if you did that it would still process 7 tps. That is, however, proof that it is drastically less efficient on a per transaction basis even factoring in any and all possible externalities including the army and mining and the fed (lol). This is a proof by contradiction. Anything else is a talking point and also trivially falsifiable. The US Army protects the US not the dollar and its budget would not be reduced in a Bitcoin powered world. Neither would its oil consumption because tanks don't fill up on bitcoins. The ubiquity of the dollar specifically is also irrelevant as we're not comparing crypto to US Dollars but rather to well-managed fiat systems. Any and all. Not just one albeit dominant one. This is obvious stuff if you think about it for a half second without trying to justify the unjustifiable.

miracle2k 6y ago
> The reality is that if you scaled up the bitcoin system linearly so it provided as much transaction capacity as Visa (let alone the entire world economy), it would require a number of times more power than the entire world produces, and produce as much e-waste as the entire world put together. It's fair to judge Bitcoin's energy use by its tps, but the above is not true. Energy use and tps are, as you then acknowledge, not related. It is possible to increase the number of tps by many multiples. The trade-off is centralization due to hardware requirements.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Once they increase it, which they won’t for philosophical reasons, I’ll update my assessment. Until then it’s strictly fair and accurate. It’s representative of the world in which we live today not some hypothetical world that could exist in the future - that the team has promised and failed to deliver for a decade. I can make up numbers for visa that match too. After all climate change doesn’t care about hypotheticals.

Slartie 6y ago

For some reason the Euro does not need all that "grossly oversized military" to be a proper, stable and usable currency. That alone kind of contradicts the entire grossly overstretched argument of this Nic Carter guy.

ImaCake 6y ago
While I am also skeptical of the parent comment's quotes. The Euro is still backed by a centralized state(s) which does indeed have a monopoly on violence and require huge amounts of resources to maintain legitimacy. Crypto currencies demonstrably do not need these kind of resources. The rest of what people preach about crypto might be Bullshit, in a strict sense, but they are right about the anarchism thing.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  All states by definition requires a monopoly on violence and resources to retain legitimacy. The currency is just a freeloader, and the consumption of resources to sustain a cryptocurrency is purely strictly additive.
BelenusMordred 6y ago
The European Union has a huge standing army if they were counted as one force? Over 1 million active personnel. The US by comparison has 1.4m and China 2.0m

efwfwef 6y ago

> Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global correspondent banking system, the Federal Reserve do you have a good link that explains how this all works and how these different components interact?

st1ck 6y ago
For rather deep dive: https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking/home/welcome https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking/home/welcome Something shorter: https://gendal.me/2013/11/24/a-simple-explanation-of-how-money-moves-around-the-banking-system/ https://gendal.me/2013/11/24/a-simple-explanation-of-how-mon...

xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago

This strikes me as a terrible argument. Yes, Visa is a small part of the whole system. It's also the only part that Bitcoin does anything to replace. Moving numbers from one column to another is trivial. If that were all the banking system needed to do we could run the whole world economy off my laptop with software I wrote in a month. You can't do "non-final credit transactions" on Bitcoin. You can't take out a mortgage. You can't manage investments. You can't pay for groceries without waiting a half an hour. You can't buy a $1.25 pack of gum. Bitcoin is complete and self-contained because it is inextensible and feature-poor. It cannot solve the problems the banking system solves. Its solution is the classic "you didn't need it anyway". And then Bitcoin fans realize that yes, they did in fact need those things after all. We can watch them reinventing the entire modern banking system before our very eyes. The main differences are that they run everything on the world's worst database, they insist on calling their banks "exchanges", and that they think it's OK to have all their money stolen every so often. (Bitcoin also lacks the ability to prevent money laundering or to enforce judgments. I'd consider that a bug. Other people might consider it a feature. In either case, it means Bitcoin is solving a much easier problem than normal banks.)