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Please spare us the Whataboutism. Even if the current global financial system was a power hog (it isn’t, and is incentivized by market forces to be incredibly e

Please spare us the Whataboutism. Even if the current global financial system was a power hog (it isn’t, and is incentivized by market forces to be incredibly efficient), it doesn’t excuse Bitcoin’s total disregard (and, more accurately) encouragement of energy waste by design. Yes, we have a system that uses a lot of energy but does so very efficiently. Bitcoin don’t solve any of the problems it alleges to, so all that has been accomplished is the establishment of a worse secondary system that doesn’t do 1/100th of what the existing system does but uses infinitely more power on a per-unit basis. It’s not as if with Bitcoin you suddenly don’t need a military or financial institutions.

solosoyokaze 6y ago
It’s not whataboutism. You need to secure value somehow. USD is secured with banks and bombs. BTC uses energy to secure value. We will never meaningfully cut our energy usage as a species (with or without BTC) we need clean energy not to move back into the Stone Age.
- lwansbrough 6y ago
  If I hide gold at home, that’s virtually zero energy and is fairly secure. It’s not perfectly secure but it’s good enough for a lot of people. It’s distributed and zero energy. Bitcoin will require banks at scale and an increasing amount of energy for the duration of its existence, or at least until mining is done. The network can’t handle transaction volume so people are forced to settle transactions off network. That’s the job of a bank. The US is secured by its foreign policy. The foreign policy exists to protect the world’s strongest economy. The dollar’s value is a product of the strong economy. It is not directly secured by the military. Without a military there would be no US, and no economy, only then could you say there would be no dollar. So unless you plan to eliminate the US economy, Bitcoin’s existence doesn’t affect the need for a military, even if it was the world’s standard currency. If you actually care about the environment, I can’t think of a worse idea than promoting an energy black hole powered by coal and tech garbage.
  - solosoyokaze 6y ago
    > If I hide gold at home, that’s virtually zero energy and is fairly secure. It’s not perfectly secure but it’s good enough for a lot of people. It’s distributed and zero energy. How did that gold get out of the ground? How did it get to your house? How will you get it to where you want to sell it? How will that buyer transport and secure the gold? > Bitcoin will require banks at scale and an increasing amount of energy for the duration of its existence, or at least until mining is done. The network can’t handle transaction volume so people are forced to settle transactions off network. That’s the job of a bank. The lightning network and pegging higher transaction coins to BTC are the answer to transaction volume. It's super early days in crypto, but there are already proposed solutions being developed. > The US is secured by its foreign policy. The foreign policy exists to protect the world’s strongest economy. The dollar’s value is a product of the strong economy. It is not directly secured by the military. Without a military there would be no US, and no economy, only then could you say there would be no dollar. So unless you plan to eliminate the US economy, Bitcoin’s existence doesn’t affect the need for a military, even if it was the world’s standard currency. The USD and its associated taxes are used to fund military actions that I have major ethical issues with. It's been that way since this country was created. I would be 100% fine with the US gov going away. In fact as an anarchist, it's the end goal of my philosophy. > If you actually care about the environment, I can’t think of a worse idea than promoting an energy black hole powered by coal and tech garbage. I promote clean energy and ethically clean stores of value. Not USD.
    - lwansbrough 6y ago
      > How did that gold get out of the ground? How did it get to your house? How will you get it to where you want to sell it? How will that buyer transport and secure the gold? These are fixed costs amortized over time. You only mine gold once. You don’t buy gold to sell it for a profit, so transactions tend to be limited. I can guarantee it’s less than 750kwh though. > The lightning network and pegging higher transaction coins to BTC are the answer to transaction volume. It's super early days in crypto, but there are already proposed solutions being developed. It is a proposed solution. Lightning Network suggests the use of watchtower nodes which is a fancy word for centralized control. The white paper even says with regards to routing “the network will look a lot like the correspondent banking network, or Tier-1 ISPs”. > In fact as an anarchist, it's the end goal of my philosophy. Anarchism is antithetical to game theory and is therefore a fundamentally flawed method of social organization. Organizations are always more powerful than individuals, and force their competitors to form organizations of their own. In other words, the king is dead, long live the king. And with all that I’ve said about Bitcoin it should be fairly obvious that it doesn’t solve any of the problems of finance in practice, even in an anarchistic paradise. There’s incentive for miners to organize on blockchains. > I promote clean energy and ethically clean stores of value. What is ethical about Bitcoin? It’s a fully auditable, online-only, energy black hole that is predominantly mined in China using coal energy, purchased and held by the 1% of the population who can afford to buy it.
NoOneNew 6y ago
This cat is right. Bitcoin's claim is saving the world from poverty and making right what gov currencies are doing wrong. It has failed on all fronts. It's a 1st world profitting cry room that used the 3rd world has a sacrificial lamb news piece. Bitcoin has become a polluting ponzi scheme in the grand picture. All it did was help some people who said, "why are those people rich? I should be rich. I'm going to use a new currency to become rich."

solosoyokaze 6y ago

It’s not whataboutism. You need to secure value somehow. USD is secured with banks and bombs. BTC uses energy to secure value. We will never meaningfully cut our energy usage as a species (with or without BTC) we need clean energy not to move back into the Stone Age.

lwansbrough 6y ago
If I hide gold at home, that’s virtually zero energy and is fairly secure. It’s not perfectly secure but it’s good enough for a lot of people. It’s distributed and zero energy. Bitcoin will require banks at scale and an increasing amount of energy for the duration of its existence, or at least until mining is done. The network can’t handle transaction volume so people are forced to settle transactions off network. That’s the job of a bank. The US is secured by its foreign policy. The foreign policy exists to protect the world’s strongest economy. The dollar’s value is a product of the strong economy. It is not directly secured by the military. Without a military there would be no US, and no economy, only then could you say there would be no dollar. So unless you plan to eliminate the US economy, Bitcoin’s existence doesn’t affect the need for a military, even if it was the world’s standard currency. If you actually care about the environment, I can’t think of a worse idea than promoting an energy black hole powered by coal and tech garbage.
- solosoyokaze 6y ago
  > If I hide gold at home, that’s virtually zero energy and is fairly secure. It’s not perfectly secure but it’s good enough for a lot of people. It’s distributed and zero energy. How did that gold get out of the ground? How did it get to your house? How will you get it to where you want to sell it? How will that buyer transport and secure the gold? > Bitcoin will require banks at scale and an increasing amount of energy for the duration of its existence, or at least until mining is done. The network can’t handle transaction volume so people are forced to settle transactions off network. That’s the job of a bank. The lightning network and pegging higher transaction coins to BTC are the answer to transaction volume. It's super early days in crypto, but there are already proposed solutions being developed. > The US is secured by its foreign policy. The foreign policy exists to protect the world’s strongest economy. The dollar’s value is a product of the strong economy. It is not directly secured by the military. Without a military there would be no US, and no economy, only then could you say there would be no dollar. So unless you plan to eliminate the US economy, Bitcoin’s existence doesn’t affect the need for a military, even if it was the world’s standard currency. The USD and its associated taxes are used to fund military actions that I have major ethical issues with. It's been that way since this country was created. I would be 100% fine with the US gov going away. In fact as an anarchist, it's the end goal of my philosophy. > If you actually care about the environment, I can’t think of a worse idea than promoting an energy black hole powered by coal and tech garbage. I promote clean energy and ethically clean stores of value. Not USD.
  - lwansbrough 6y ago
    > How did that gold get out of the ground? How did it get to your house? How will you get it to where you want to sell it? How will that buyer transport and secure the gold? These are fixed costs amortized over time. You only mine gold once. You don’t buy gold to sell it for a profit, so transactions tend to be limited. I can guarantee it’s less than 750kwh though. > The lightning network and pegging higher transaction coins to BTC are the answer to transaction volume. It's super early days in crypto, but there are already proposed solutions being developed. It is a proposed solution. Lightning Network suggests the use of watchtower nodes which is a fancy word for centralized control. The white paper even says with regards to routing “the network will look a lot like the correspondent banking network, or Tier-1 ISPs”. > In fact as an anarchist, it's the end goal of my philosophy. Anarchism is antithetical to game theory and is therefore a fundamentally flawed method of social organization. Organizations are always more powerful than individuals, and force their competitors to form organizations of their own. In other words, the king is dead, long live the king. And with all that I’ve said about Bitcoin it should be fairly obvious that it doesn’t solve any of the problems of finance in practice, even in an anarchistic paradise. There’s incentive for miners to organize on blockchains. > I promote clean energy and ethically clean stores of value. What is ethical about Bitcoin? It’s a fully auditable, online-only, energy black hole that is predominantly mined in China using coal energy, purchased and held by the 1% of the population who can afford to buy it.

NoOneNew 6y ago

This cat is right. Bitcoin's claim is saving the world from poverty and making right what gov currencies are doing wrong. It has failed on all fronts. It's a 1st world profitting cry room that used the 3rd world has a sacrificial lamb news piece. Bitcoin has become a polluting ponzi scheme in the grand picture. All it did was help some people who said, "why are those people rich? I should be rich. I'm going to use a new currency to become rich."