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Yeah, 100% with you here. I actually tremendously enjoy hearing a well constructed negative argument against Bitcoin/Crypto that presents a perspective I haven

Yeah, 100% with you here. I actually tremendously enjoy hearing a well constructed negative argument against Bitcoin/Crypto that presents a perspective I haven't heard a 100 times before and/or hasn't been debunked in depth. These are actually necessary given how new and different the whole shebang is. But that hasn't happened in a rather long time on HN, or if it has, it's buried 10 level of indent deep amongst HN randos parroting lame climate change arguments they've heard on reddit of FB.

1996 6y ago
> I actually tremendously enjoy hearing a well constructed negative argument against Bitcoin/Crypto that presents a perspective I haven't heard a 100 times before and/or hasn't been debunked in depth. Me too! /r/Buttcoin is a nice place for that, but you must already know (as your nick looks familiar to me) My personal favorite well constructed new negative argument: like India and Nigeria, governments will try to ban crypto since it endangers their total control. It will come as a coordinated attack by OECD countries, who will need to inflate big time after Covid: they will ban all transactions to fiat accounts, and all exchanges on their territory. Counter argument: politicians (and the 1%) need to protect against inflation/taxations, so they may not all be in favor, and will leak the plan. It will cause a huge Streisand effect, as "there is no such thing as negative publicity": random Joes will buy crypto, making the plan politically undefensible.
- audunw 6y ago
  > Counter argument: politicians (and the 1%) need to protect against inflation/taxations, so they may not all be in favor, and will leak the plan. It will cause a huge Streisand effect, as "there is no such thing as negative publicity": random Joes will buy crypto, making the plan politically undefensible. Uh, what? This makes zero sense. There is absolutely such a thing as negative publicity, especially if major governments threaten to effectively wipe out the value of Bitcoin. You could just as easily see a large fraction of the holders of Bitcoin try to cash out, to put into more safe investments while the situation stabilizes. This will probably create a crash, as Bitcoin is so prone to. More people will cash out. This will probably increase support for regulating or banning crypto exchanges. Some will already have cashed out, they're happy. Some of the ones that haven't will direct their anger against Bitcoin and support regulations. Some of the ones still holding will try to fight it, but they'll be in the minority. Most people who never invested will probably support bans ("I don't want to risk unwittingly getting hit by a crash like that in the future"). You'll probably have lots of emotional stories about grandpa losing all his savings in the media. I mean, we've seen this story over and over before in the stock markets. Someone figures out "get-rich-quick" schemes, they crash, people demand regulation. What makes anyone think that it'll be any different with cryptocurrencies once they become big enough? I think it'd be absolutely reasonable to require exchanges to guarantee that there's X% of reserves behind any cryptocurrency it trades. That'll probably kill Bitcoin, since you'd probably want to build such a requirement into the implementation of the currency. And it'll probably put a big damper on the growth of the conforming cryptocurrencies.
Jochim 6y ago
I'm interested in what you find lame about the climate change arguments? They seem fairly appealing to me, cryptocurrency is a fraction of the size of current payment processors and is already consuming a small country's worth of power. How much more power will it consume if scaled further? How will power efficiency strategies affect the utility of the network? I think there are some reasonable arguments for mining farms that draw from excess power during periods of low utilisation, but even that power seems like it could be put to more productive use.
- tippytippytango 6y ago
  The energy is used to provide security for the value the network stores. The energy consumed by the actual transaction processing is incidental. If bitcoin used a traditional database to store value it would need physical security (people with guns and/or lawyers) to ensure its integrity. To decide if bitcoin is actually wasteful you'd have to compare it to the energy consumption of the physical security that would be required to protect an equivalent amount of value (getting close to $1T).
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    The Fed building isn't all that well protected, and "stores" essentially an arbitrarily large amount of USD. It helps that it's impossible to steal, since if you somehow "robbed" the Fed all it would take is a court order to retroactively clarify that your robbery never happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccles_Building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccles_Building I'm happy to call Bitcoin wasteful because we already know what's going to replace it. Proof of work is a dead end and with it all coins that are anchored on PoW and aren't working on migrating to proof of stake. The writing is on the wall that proof of stake is the future.

1996 6y ago

> I actually tremendously enjoy hearing a well constructed negative argument against Bitcoin/Crypto that presents a perspective I haven't heard a 100 times before and/or hasn't been debunked in depth. Me too! /r/Buttcoin is a nice place for that, but you must already know (as your nick looks familiar to me) My personal favorite well constructed new negative argument: like India and Nigeria, governments will try to ban crypto since it endangers their total control. It will come as a coordinated attack by OECD countries, who will need to inflate big time after Covid: they will ban all transactions to fiat accounts, and all exchanges on their territory. Counter argument: politicians (and the 1%) need to protect against inflation/taxations, so they may not all be in favor, and will leak the plan. It will cause a huge Streisand effect, as "there is no such thing as negative publicity": random Joes will buy crypto, making the plan politically undefensible.

audunw 6y ago
> Counter argument: politicians (and the 1%) need to protect against inflation/taxations, so they may not all be in favor, and will leak the plan. It will cause a huge Streisand effect, as "there is no such thing as negative publicity": random Joes will buy crypto, making the plan politically undefensible. Uh, what? This makes zero sense. There is absolutely such a thing as negative publicity, especially if major governments threaten to effectively wipe out the value of Bitcoin. You could just as easily see a large fraction of the holders of Bitcoin try to cash out, to put into more safe investments while the situation stabilizes. This will probably create a crash, as Bitcoin is so prone to. More people will cash out. This will probably increase support for regulating or banning crypto exchanges. Some will already have cashed out, they're happy. Some of the ones that haven't will direct their anger against Bitcoin and support regulations. Some of the ones still holding will try to fight it, but they'll be in the minority. Most people who never invested will probably support bans ("I don't want to risk unwittingly getting hit by a crash like that in the future"). You'll probably have lots of emotional stories about grandpa losing all his savings in the media. I mean, we've seen this story over and over before in the stock markets. Someone figures out "get-rich-quick" schemes, they crash, people demand regulation. What makes anyone think that it'll be any different with cryptocurrencies once they become big enough? I think it'd be absolutely reasonable to require exchanges to guarantee that there's X% of reserves behind any cryptocurrency it trades. That'll probably kill Bitcoin, since you'd probably want to build such a requirement into the implementation of the currency. And it'll probably put a big damper on the growth of the conforming cryptocurrencies.

Jochim 6y ago

I'm interested in what you find lame about the climate change arguments? They seem fairly appealing to me, cryptocurrency is a fraction of the size of current payment processors and is already consuming a small country's worth of power. How much more power will it consume if scaled further? How will power efficiency strategies affect the utility of the network? I think there are some reasonable arguments for mining farms that draw from excess power during periods of low utilisation, but even that power seems like it could be put to more productive use.

tippytippytango 6y ago
The energy is used to provide security for the value the network stores. The energy consumed by the actual transaction processing is incidental. If bitcoin used a traditional database to store value it would need physical security (people with guns and/or lawyers) to ensure its integrity. To decide if bitcoin is actually wasteful you'd have to compare it to the energy consumption of the physical security that would be required to protect an equivalent amount of value (getting close to $1T).
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  The Fed building isn't all that well protected, and "stores" essentially an arbitrarily large amount of USD. It helps that it's impossible to steal, since if you somehow "robbed" the Fed all it would take is a court order to retroactively clarify that your robbery never happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccles_Building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccles_Building I'm happy to call Bitcoin wasteful because we already know what's going to replace it. Proof of work is a dead end and with it all coins that are anchored on PoW and aren't working on migrating to proof of stake. The writing is on the wall that proof of stake is the future.