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This is accidentally a good analogy. Because yes, cars have made the world materially worse, not because horses are better, but because dense urban developmen
by hannasanarion 6y ago
This is accidentally a good analogy.
Because yes, cars have made the world materially worse, not because horses are better, but because dense urban development, public transit, walking, and cycling is better.
Cars are enormously wasteful, much like bitcoin is, not only because it uses way more energy than is necessary for the task it is performing (~90% of the energy used by cars is spent to move the car, not the cargo or people), but also because it takes up space that could be used for more useful things: the average American city has 8 parking spaces per car, that means that each car on the road represents an entire ~1600sqft house that can't be built because a car needs places to park.
- fredfoobar 6y ago"accidentally" Do you always feel superior to other people? or is it just today?
- californical 6y agoI think it was “accidentally” because your earlier post came off as sarcastic.
- fredfoobar 6y agoSo, you're telling me all the progress we've made so far has been wasteful and damaging to the environment? I agree. Look at the ecological damage humans have caused! Several other animals extinct because of us, we've taken over their space on earth too. Our greed has caused this. We must boycott all new things until nature heals.
- hannasanarion 6y agoAccidentally because opposition to bitcoin, like opposition to cars, isn't luddite rustic anti-industrialism, it's common sense advocacy for equally modern but different solutions to the problem. Bitcoin doesn't do anything that electronic banking can't do better, and it causes a lot of harm in wasted energy and space. Cars don't do anything that busses, trains, and bicycles can't do better, and they cause a lot of harm in wasted energy and space.
- SamPatt 6y agoBitcoin exists because electronic banking requires trust in centralized financial institutions. When you see the entire stock market move because the Fed chairperson makes an offhand comment about when they'll start or stop doing xyz policy, you realize having such a highly centralized system is dangerous.
- hannasanarion 6y agoDude... the stock market is not the same thing as the banking system. How your investment porfolio reacts to a change in monetary policy has nothing whatsoever to do with the utility of your checking account. Trust in centralized financial institutions is not a problem. In fact it's is the opposite of a problem, it's an enormous benefit. Centralized financial institutions with government backing ensure the availability and safety of deposited funds. Nobody has ever had their bank account drained in the US since the introduction of FDIC in 1933. In the last 10 years alone, over a billion dollars in bitcoin has been stolen out of people's wallets by hacked exchanges and smart contract exploits, money that can never be returned because blockchain is irreversible by design. Does that really sound trustworthy to you?
- npongratz 6y ago> Nobody has ever had their bank account drained in the US since the introduction of FDIC in 1933. Plenty of people have had their bank accounts drained when they fell victim to "identification theft." That is quite a crafty euphemism -- banks fail to create secure systems, attackers steal funds from victims' bank accounts, and instead of owning up to their failure, banks blame the victims of the thefts by saying the victims' "identities" were "stolen." I'll give the banks some credit, however: they'll prop up a seemingly empathetic customer service representative who will repeatedly say how "sorry" they are on behalf of their employer. If the victim is persistent enough, the customer service rep will eventually promise to initiate a lengthy investigation, after which the bank will perhaps reinstate the funds that were stolen from their system. Do they fix their broken, insecure system? Of course not. But at least the victim isn't clogging the customer service lines any more.
- baxtr 6y agoI liked your first comment. This one: not so much. It’s not HN like.
- fredfoobar 6y agoDownvote away! HN apparently is ok with condescending/patronizing replies. But if I call them out, downvotes! Besides, I don't care about these fake points. You can keep them.
- kenniskrag 6y agoWhat happens if you have the same amount of horses like cars? Aren't they wasteful and need a lot of space and at night a heated parking spot? :)
- hannasanarion 6y agoYes, which is why I didn't say anything about horses. Opposition to cars, like opposition to bitcoin, isn't rustic ludditism. There are modern solutions to transportation that are superior to cars, like rail, frequent busses, and bike infrastructure, but lose out in funding and hype because they're not prestigious and utopian like cars are. Likewise, Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction network technology can't solve, but it gets all the attention because it's flashy and new and utopian. And if you think cars aren't utopian, tell me the last time you've seen an automobile ad that showed somebody being stuck in gridlocked traffic in the lincoln tunnel inhaling gas fumes for over half an hour. I will contend that there does not exist a single automobile advertisement that shows the average car owner's typical experience of driving, certainly never in an urban setting.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago> There are modern solutions to transportation that are superior to cars, like rail, frequent busses, and bike infrastructure, Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers; mass transit is less flexible. So they aren’t strictly superior. > Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction network technology can't solve, How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?
- heterodoxxed 6y ago| How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation? A deflationary distributed ledger has yet to prove itself as having any kind of real utility in the first place.
- 6y ago
- marshmallow_12 6y agotechnically almost everything beyond food and medicine is wasteful. BUT cars improve the quality of my life (i like to drive). bitcoins floating through the cybersphere do not. end of story.
- notJim 6y ago> cars improve the quality of my life (i like to drive) And if cars were primarily used as an enthusiast pursuit (like horses in the modern world, actually), this argument would make sense. But cars are not primarily an enthusiast pursuit, instead they are something that we've structured our entire way of life around, and made enormous sacrifices for. Many people need a car whether they want one or not, and we all pay the consequences for it.
- solveit 6y agoThat says more about you than it does about cars and Bitcoin. I like having code that nobody can take down but don't drive.
- marshmallow_12 6y agoI think most people will agree you have rather singular tastes.
- fredfoobar 6y agoHorses are nice, end of story.
- marshmallow_12 6y agoHN doesn't stand for Horse News
- fredfoobar 6y agoIt should!
- imtringued 6y ago
- fireeyed 6y ago> because dense urban development, public transit, walking, and cycling is better Why is dense urban development better ? I could cite 100 studies why it’s not better not to mention all the people who hate living in “dense” living conditions
- ilikehurdles 6y agoIt's better if you acknowledge climate change as the real, human-caused catastrophe that it is.
- yurielt 6y ago>you should psychologically punish yourself and live like tuna in a can because companies want to pollute
- ALittleLight 6y agoCars are only an incremental step towards an even more sustainable future. Once we get self-driving electric cars powered by nuclear, solar, wind, fusion - then they'll become pretty green. Self-driving cars will cut down on parking space too because we'll be able to have our cars drop us off and go somewhere out of the way while we shop/eat/whatever. I'm also not certain how much cars are worse for the environment compared to horses. If we had to sustain similar numbers of people without cars we would have tons of horses (I assume horses emit similar amounts of methane to cows, which I know are a major contributor). We'd also have to feed our hundreds of millions or billions of horses. That agricultural effort would probably have a huge environmental cost. We'd have to deal not only with places to park our horses but also somehow manage the immense amount of waste that would come with packing a few million horses into a city and the accompanying health problems with that. I think cars are a pretty good invention and wouldn't be surprised if, on net, they were better for the environment.
- chidg 6y agoICEs might be incremental, but its a long enough increment that it is having severely detrimental effects on planetary and human health, so I'm not sure if it counts. Cars, on the other hand, are not incremental - they have locked us into an urban design pattern that will remain problematic no matter what the form of energy generation that drives them is.
- trident5000 6y agoVideo rendering is enormously wasteful. Nobody needs to see your TikTok video of you getting a grandma to slip on a banana peel. The list goes on. Having a global store of value where central banks cant print away peoples lifelong labor they sacrificed their time and health for sounds legitimate to me.
- leereeves 6y agoBitcoin is far too volatile to be a good store of value. There are much more stable ways to protect savings against inflation.
- ThomPete 6y agoAnd yet bitcoin have delivered just that since it's inception.
- trident5000 6y agoAll that matters for a store of value is the long term moving average
- leereeves 6y agoIf you want to exchange your store of value for something in the future, it matters very much what its value is at the exact time you want to trade it. Unless you mean that the volatility doesn't matter if the asset appreciates so much that the volatility becomes irrelevant, but that's not a property of a store of value, that's a property of a speculative gamble.
- ThomPete 6y agoCars is a net positive to society. The positive externalities far outweigh the negative. Cars like all other machines free up times for humans to among other things invent the internet. So unless you are claiming that cars are a net negative then it's not a good analogy.