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Time is money. Bitcoin is wasted time. And wasted money. And wasted energy.
by joosters 6y ago
Time is money. Bitcoin is wasted time. And wasted money. And wasted energy.
- kneel 6y agoNegative yielding debt is literally a waste of time. Money is worth less as you move into the future. Fiat is literally a black hole.
- Scoundreller 6y agoWhat percentage of assets are negative yielding? They can’t all be negative in real terms.
- kolinko 6y agoAll cash is, also any investment below inflation - so most bonds.
- diab0lic 6y agoThis motivates productive use of that capital. Deflationary currencies just guarantee the rich get richer as an axiom.
- vntok 6y ago> This motivates productive use of that capital. Nah. It motivates rational beings to spend that capital on anything at all, as fast as possible, because the alternative is a net loss of purchasing power. Deflationary currencies on the contrary motivate actors to think before spending, because any spending has to be balanced with the future gains that won't come from holding it and seing it accumulate value over time.
- kneel 6y agoThe real solution exists somewhere in between an inflationary and deflationary currency. This is a balancing act.
- whatever1 6y agoWhich is by design, to encourage investments elsewhere. The rise of Bitcoin and the stock market are probably an indication that the policy worked. People indeed are willing to burn their money in crypto rather than keeping them in savings/bonds
- pydry 6y agoThere's an alternate timeline without ZIRP and Bitcoin is nothing more than a curiosity there.
- seibelj 6y agoI keep reading about how we need to discourage consumerism, wastefulness, mindless consumption. Recycle and reuse. Yet fiat enthusiasts keep parroting that the linear and intentional destruction of value through inflation, in order to encourage further mindless consumption, is a good thing? What is so bad about a currency that maintains its value throughout time? This would allow someone to actually save, rather than be forced to buy some stupid widget they don't need, or become a part-time fund manager trying to decide between a series of risky assets. As it stands, simple savings accounts pay zero and lose money to inflation, so if you don't become a one-man hedge fund or pay someone else to become one for you, you just lose your money.
- whatever1 6y agoEvery currency’s goal is to be stable in terms of value. The mechanics of achieving so are complicated though since you will need to exactly calibrate the supply of new money to match your economic activity. We are at the point where we don’t even agree what economic activity is lol.
- seibelj 6y agoIncorrect - central banks target inflation, such as 2%. The official goal is to lose 2% of value every year.
- dmak 6y agoWhy are you so salty? Care to elaborate?
- zapdrive 6y agoHe followed the collecting hacker News opinion at the time, which was highly negative. And beats himself everyday for not investing early on.
- randomsearch 6y agoIs there a name for the situation where you assume X of someone else because that’s how you feel? Is that projection? I discussed gambling on Bitcoin, considered it carefully, right near the beginning. Didn’t bother. Don’t regret it. I mean, why should I be enriched by Bitcoin? It’s not clear that Bitcoin is a good thing. I could have invested in cigarettes or oil companies but I wouldn’t do those things. I have no regrets about not buying Bitcoin, just as I have no regrets that I haven’t gone to work for Facebook and accumulated lots of cash. I find it so odd that people would assume I’d regret it. Life isn’t about finding easy ways to collect money, why would you think it is?
- Dzugaru 6y agoIt's just natural, that people are salty about proof-of-work that leads to computation devices scarcity. No one asked for this and it's really scary - society can economically decide, that distributed ledger protection is more important, than gaming and science. Just like we economically can decide that global warming is not important.
- doomroot 6y agoI think it naive to assume we can aggregate the desires of all people. Oh wait we can.
- zapdrive 6y agoI'm sorry you didn't buy when it was cheaper.
- Nursie 6y agoThat's right, all criticism of bitcoin or cryptocurrencies is necessarily down to jealousy, and therefore can be safely dismissed.
- vntok 6y ago> That's right, all criticism of bitcoin or cryptocurrencies is necessarily down to jealousy, and therefore can be safely dismissed. It all depends on the audience, but on HN in particular you are right. The site is rife with people who could not fathom the value at launch and who've been in denial since without ever putting the work to learn about the ecosystem. Notice how "debates" around cryptocurrency on HN never delve into technical arguments, and compare that peculiarity with discussions on Reddit for example.
- ksm1717 6y agoSome kind of projection, shows that making others jealous or at least trying to avoid being jealous is what drives some to invest
- Dirlewanger 6y agoEverything on the planet uses energy. Why are people so obsessed with Bitcoin's energy usage in particular?
- ttul 6y agoBecause it’s enormous? A colleague just finished putting together a 125MW BTC mining operation. That’s sheer insanity. Nobody has ever been able to explain how Bitcoin saves the world from climate catastrophe by using 0.3% of all electricity.
- vntok 6y ago> Nobody has ever been able to explain how Bitcoin saves the world from climate catastrophe by using 0.3% of all electricity. Why would you think that Bitcoin needs to accomplish that particular task? As far as I know ending climate change has never been mentioned as a goal or desirable outcome of the project.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ttul 6y agoThe maintainers of Bitcoin could make changes to the mining protocol that reduce its reliance on energy. By choosing to not do so, they are directly contributing - in a substantial way - to civilization-ending climate catastrophe. I do think that Bitcoin's maintainers have an obligation to do their part, considering that they are very materially a part of the problem. Ethereum is at least working hard on other algorithms that are energy efficient. But in the Bitcoin space, the tremendous investment in energy-intensive mining equipment means that the entrenched players have an interest in persisting the way that things currently work, rather than seeking an energy conserving replacement.
- mopsi 6y agoConcern trolling. A lot of jealousy hides behind environmental concerns these days. You went on a trip or bought a supercar? But MPG yada-yada-yada...
- dmm 6y agoIn the winter I ride my bike down streets lined with cars idling because their owners don't want to ride in the cold for a few minutes. In a way I appreciate bitcoin for its absurd and unambiguous wastefulness. It's sort of the perfect expression of consumerism, destroying the precious and irreplaceable earth for something immediately disposed of.
- arbawk 6y agoBitcoin is the most durable money we've had, it can never be disposed of. Lost, perhaps. Energy consumption != energy production. Bitcoin is incentivizing reusable energy and moving energy to cheaper locations, further from cities. I suggest you look into how it's actually quite positive for the Earth.
- ARandumGuy 6y agoYou know we have a limited amount of green energy production right now, right? It's not exactly green if your bitcoin mining is using wind energy, while a bunch of other stuff is stuck with coal.
- jhoechtl 6y agoBut it will race to cheaper energy which means using sun and wind. And the enormous surplus generated is for the bono of all of those who don't mine.
- chmod600 6y agoThe theory is that it provides demand for green energy, which will drive investment, technology, and expertise that can be used everywhere.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y agoWe know that is "the theory" We also know that this theory is really, really stupid: The kind of self-justifying idiocy that people don't come up with unless they're already deeply committed to a point of view come what may, logic and fact need not apply.
- naringas 6y agoI don't see it as waste, I see it as the cost of decentralized trust (no such thing as free lunch). The way I see it, it's either "burn" the energy in proof of work (the machines leave behind only heat and bitcoin) or let a closed institution take this energy to provide this trust. In the end, it's all tradeoffs and incentives decided by politics and made possible by technologies.
- joosters 6y agoTo be less glib, I think the article makes it clear just how inordinately difficult blockchains make their lives when they have to build, from scratch, a reliable definition of time. If you could have a trusted time source, you could at a stroke get rid of one of the most egregious flaws in bitcoin, its vast wastage of energy, because of its 'proof of work' mining. Bitcoin miners are running at full pelt 24/7, picking random numbers and doing math on them in the hope of striking lucky and discovering the next block. The mining difficult is artificially picked so that blocks are discovered about every ten minutes. However, imagine if bitcoin miners could all declare a cease-fire, for 9m59s of those ten minutes, i.e. they just do nothing for that long, consuming virtually no energy, and then they all furiously mine at full speed for the last second (with the difficulty adjusted so the global mining should take a second). This process would be just as fair as the current one; if you have more/faster hardware, you will still mine more, in the same proportion as before. The total energy usage would be reduced 600-fold! But - the reason you can't do this is that there's no way of stopping cheating. Who can tell if the other miners are really idling for those 9:59? This is where the time source comes in. Imagine you have a trusted time source: it could, every ten minutes, broadcast a random number. Miners would have to listen for this number, then mine a block containing it, to prove that they didn't start work early. Problem solved! Back to the real world: just about everyone can agree on time; we have NTP and can even use certificates to authenticate clock sources, we can even use multiple sources to make it harder for time to be faked. So why can't blockchains do the same thing? Why don't they use multiple time oracles to stop the colossal energy wastage? And, when bitcoiners tell you that relying on a centralised source, or even a quorum of sources, is completely unacceptable, why then are the same people happy to use smart contracts where the use of centralised oracles is apparently both acceptable and commonplace?
- reilly3000 6y agoI think you’re right on, but good luck with provable timestamps. You’re trying to coordinate and validate a measurement which in itself denies the reality of space time physics at least subtly. Time precision across space is hard enough, but adding bad actors and gravitational time dilation into the equation means... well I wouldn’t want that to keep track of my assets.
- howmayiannoyyou 6y agoIt takes 1/10th the time to initiate a funds transfer via crypto (eg. Bitcoin) as it does to effect the same wire transfer or ACH using most banks's treasury management systems. This, and the fees can be less depending on the token used; but are considerably less if the transfer is cross-currency. The transit time is about the same if BTC is used, less if one were to use XLM (Stellar) for example.
- mediaman 6y agoBitcoin has a strong base of advocacy not based on any logic or utility but solely sprung from the mule stubbornness of those who profited from their speculation. 1. Bitcoin is environmentally damaging. It produces 37 megatons of CO2 per year and consumes 78 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. Much of that electric consumption is powered by coal. Not all energy consumption or CO2 output is bad, but value should be provided commensurately to society for the damage incurred. And yet: 2. It is a terrible currency. Promoters claimed we could pay for things with Bitcoin, that it'd replace fiat currency. But the design of Bitcoin in particular makes it an awful currency. To prevent deflation, a currency should be able to increase its supply to maintain reasonably constant velocity as demand increases for it as a medium of exchange. With its limited number of coins, Bitcoin cannot increase supply to maintain velocity: its only solution is to fractionalize, a form of deflation. And deflation is what we get. Massively: everything you own, and all your income, constantly becomes worth less expressed in Bitcoin, day after day. 3. It's a terrible currency, part two: currencies should have very low transaction costs. Bitcoin transaction costs exceed $20. The response to this is to recentralize it in the form of services that cheaply transact Bitcoin rights management through traditional databases. Eliminating the very value proposition of Bitcoin. 4. After having given up on defending it as a currency, the next claim is that it's a "store of value." But stores of value should have some degree of consistency of value: volatility is not a virtue. Bitcoin supporters are right that fiat currency, to the degree it is exposed to inflation, is at risk of not being the best store of value, which is why we don't normally keep huge amounts of resources piled up as cash. But Bitcoin is an awful store of value because it has no fundamental utility that moderates its price swings. Normal assets - real estate, bonds, gold - have some sort of fundamental utility or cash flow that helps to moderate price action over time. The asset must have some sort of use first, then it can become a good store of value. Because of the above flaws, Bitcoin has no good use, which thusly makes it a poor store of value. None of this is a fundamental problem of crypto, just Bitcoin. Crypto could be very useful! But with many millionaires minted from a lucky speculation and their entire ego reliant on deceiving themselves that their speculation was clairvoyance, critiques of Bitcoin are invariably met with a flea market of intellectually mangy defenses that ultimately boil down to saying "well, look at its price!"
- BTCOG 6y ago
- BTCOG 6y agoAbsolute lies. @ Jooster's parent comment. Furthermore, there are not "blockchains," there is one blockchain, and then there are a thousand or more scams trying ride Bitcoin's shoulders. They are entirely pointless systems that are not made to solve anything, they don't solve anything, and they were not made by mathematicians or cryptographers.
- JxLS-cpgbe0 6y agoLots of small though-terminating clichés there. Any comments about this article?