11 ms·

To me it seems like Bitcoin (and other pow cryptocurrencies) are almost like the climate change scapegoat for a number of social and economic issues that have s

by ayngg 6y ago

To me it seems like Bitcoin (and other pow cryptocurrencies) are almost like the climate change scapegoat for a number of social and economic issues that have seemingly come to a head recently to facilitate their rise. People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?" and I think it is probably related to other questions like why have the greater financial markets become so wonky, why has the behavior of investors changed so radically (GME et al), why have politicians been unable to be effective policymakers for decades, and why many institutions, both social and political in nature, appear to have become less trustworthy in the eye of the greater public? These are some of the questions among others which I think probably provide a better understanding of what is happening than the overly simplistic 'ponzi scam' explanation that has been repeated ad nauseam since its inception. Bitcoin is just one of many things (pretty much everything) that have been able to use energy profitably, while subsidizing the costs by externalizing them via climate change, that part isn't new. People get too caught up on bitcoin because it is new and nobody understands it (not just from a technical perspective), so it is really easy to dismiss. Singling it out in that manner seems silly.

caf 6y ago
I don't think the criticism is exactly wrong, but it's more like Bitcoin mining is the reductio ad absurdum exposing the waste of resources that goes into gold mining (yes, there's some industrial uses, but that is a rounding error compared to the quantities that are dug up, purified, cast into bars, shipped around the world and buried back underground in vaults).
- arcticbull 6y ago
  About half is used for jewelry because gold is shiny pebbles. About 10% is used for electronics. Mining Bitcoin consumes 5X as much energy as gold, btw, per unit value extracted. It also requires mining gold to produce the circuit boards used for mining Bitcoin - given the popularity of the ENIG immersion gold plating process for PCB contacts. The secondary issue is that of course each Bitcoin transaction generates 100g of e-waste which cannot be recycled and just gets buried. E-waste has a few grams of metals, but is mostly plastic and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Plastic and FR4 cannot be recycled. What little of the e-waste can be recycled is shipped to third-world countries where poor people dig through piles of scrap and dunk it in toxic chemicals. The only meaningful way to move forward is to reduce consumption, especially consumption which achieves nothing, like literally wiring up a power plant to compute hashes of random data instead of attaching it to the grid to do useful things. What a disaster.
  - CTDOCodebases 6y ago
    The miners don’t compute hashes of random data. They confirm transactions. If you don’t think that a technology that allows you to store value in a tamper free digital ledger is useful it’s hard to argue the usefulness of PoW crypto currencies to begin with.
    - tsss 6y ago
      It does so with the same efficiency as a Rube Goldberg machine moves a marble from one place to another.
      - CTDOCodebases 6y ago
        Efficient or secure. Take your pick.
        salawat 6y ago
        I"ll hire a few guys with guns, plus auditors. Their ability to maintain no sense of humor beats out your wonky crypto scheme in both regards. Your issue is you don't like the rules that come with the auditors. Those rules have a purpose, and that purpose is tied with sovereign diplomatic interrelation of civic bodies the world over. Many of whom are expressing great concern over the very thing PoW hastens. So no, it isn't either or. It's stop jeopardizing the planet in the long term so you can do whatever you're doing now. I don't care that you're doing it, and we can talk civily about the warts of the financial system so it can be tuned to meet your use case better and cone to a compromise; but PoW has the worst set of dysfunctional societal incentives I've seen in my life.
        gruez 6y ago
        >I"ll hire a few guys with guns A few guys with guns can be beaten by several other guys with guns. >plus auditors https://www.wsj.com/articles/wirecard-scandal-puts-spotlight-on-auditor-ernst-young-11593286933 https://www.wsj.com/articles/wirecard-scandal-puts-spotlight...
- imtringued 6y ago
  Jewelry is a surprisingly big chunk of global gold demand. Yes it is ultimately meaningless other than to impress other humans, however this meaningless activity is part of human nature. We derive joy from it. Meanwhile Bitcoin is just a means to an end, getting rich quick. The fun doesn't happen because we have Bitcoin, but rather because we get rid of them for an unreasonable price.
  - CTDOCodebases 6y ago
    It could be argued that people are flocking to Bitcoin not to increase wealth but to preserve it over a long period of time. I don’t know where you live in the world but where I live wages haven’t risen in line with the cost of food and shelter. Leaving money in the bank is like working to buy a block of ice only to watch it melt away. To argue that any store of value isn’t speculative to some degree is naive.
    - etripe 6y ago
      > To argue that any store of value isn’t speculative to some degree is naive. Isn't there a difference between currency in general being speculative to some degree and cryptocurrencies specifically, whose main value proposition is speculation?
      - CTDOCodebases 6y ago
        I wasn’t referring to fiat currency since that is a terrible store of value. It is guaranteed to have less buying power in the future. What I was referring to was stocks since they have outperformed government bonds and gold the last few years. Take Amazon for instance. I don’t think the share price is equal to total assets minus total liabilities divided by number of shares. Amazon doesn’t issue dividends so why did the shareholders pay so much for the shares?
- ballenf 6y ago
  Maybe humans were created by an ET life as mining/purifying beings whose sole purpose is to be dropped on planets and left alone for a few millennia to do their thing. The ETs come back once all the minerals are refined and purified and neatly stacked.
bb88 6y ago
> People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?" FOMO, mining lotteries, and the guise of financial innovation are typical cover stories here. But all stocks and other publicly traded investments are basically making a bet that others will buy in after you do, raising the price higher. Most stock owners hope this very thing, though some stocks actually pay dividends on profits. The same is true with BTC with the added benefit of that novel mining lottery thing going for it. > These are some of the questions among others which I think probably provide a better understanding of what is happening than the overly simplistic 'ponzi scam' explanation that has been repeated ad nauseam since its inception. So what if the rich have too much money? That would explain a lot. It would explain why GME stock was shorted %140 of float. It would also explain why politicians are so ineffective at regulation. If you were rich, would you want effective politicians? No. You would put your money behind the least effective politicians. It would also explain why most institutions have become less trustworthy in the eye of the public, as big money has corrupted the system. And finally it would explain the gold rush on BTC. Because they need new investment vehicles.
- jariel 6y ago
  "Most stock owners hope this very thing, t" Stocks imply ownership of assets. Sure, in terms of 'hoping that someone willy buy' is similar to BTC, but the valuation is completely different. A stock is valued based on the performance of it's actual profit generation. BTC is just a made up number. It's what people think the crowd will buy it for. Granted, this mechanism itself can be useful in some scenarios, but BTC itself isn't useful, at least not right now.
  - _huayra_ 6y ago
    I think people with BTC FOMO forget that it was always some sort of "hype Ponzi scheme". Back in 2011, I worked in an office that had one guy who was really into BTC. Looking back now, everyone thinks "wow he was such a genius to get in so early", but back then it was not profitable to mine, even if the difficulty was far lower. We'd constantly roast this coworker over his seemingly loony efforts to put solar on his house to cover the cost of mining neglecting to consider the solar panels would (in our opinions back then) put him in the red for a long time. (good on him for at least going green with it). I must admit I'm quite jealous of his insistence despite us roasting him (he's probably a multimillionaire now on BTC), but anyone who says "Oh yeah I could totally tell that BTC would take off in 2011" is being disingenuous at best. Unlike stocks which imply ownership of assets of a company, BTC is a pure hype machine, with the most hype given out by people who are already bought in. If any product or service has ONLY people who use it hyping it up (e.g. BTC, and especially NFTs!) or only people who are NOT using it hyping it up (e.g. the myriad get-rich-quick schemes about some drop-shipping Amazon thing, real estate, or "hOw To BE aN eNTrePreNeUR" in a vague sense of the term (whatever the Gary V & friends stuff is); all those guys make money not by doing what they're telling you to do but by telling you what to do...), it's usually a bad sign.
young_unixer 6y ago
Yes. Cryptocurrencies are used because they're the only market that hasn't yet been regulated to death. People come to Bitcoin for 2 reasons, mainly: 1. It's a practical way to store value without the government destroying it by monetary emission. 2. People are free to speculate. The solution to the first point is that governments should stop pulling the rug from under people's feet. Monetary emission should be predictable in the short, medium, and long term, or be tied to some real world indicator, like the cost of consumer goods. Just stop with this inflationary nonsense. Problem 2 will be partially solved by time. Relative price changes in Bitcoin are reduced each cycle, so by the year 2030 the incentive to speculate in the short term will be much smaller. We will see it more as a long term investment. Another solution is to deregulate other markets so that we can freely speculate in them and stop putting as much attention to Bitcoin, but I don't think politicians are very eager to do that, and it could also have some negative consequences.
- bb88 6y ago
  > 1. It's a practical way to store value without the government destroying it by monetary emission. > 2. People are free to speculate. So it's a store of value that's destroyable by speculation. That's, if anything, worse than the US Dollar.
  - puchatek 6y ago
    Doesn't look destroyable in the long-term
    - cromwellian 6y ago
      If some flaw is discovered in SHA-256 or other parts of the algorithm, like how MD-5 and SHA-1 had weaknesses, overnight the value goes to zero. Or if a basic widespread exploitable bug was found in most bitcoin stacks like Heartbleed, that went unnoticed, boom, value evaporated overnight. You can based the entire world monetary economy on a single point of failure like this.
      - 6y ago
reader_mode 6y ago
I think Bitcoin (and crypto in general) has prooven to be disruptive in many areas (in a negative way) and has yet to deliver any tangible positives that would outweight the negatives. It's basically becoming a unregulated comodity that big money institutions get to gamble with because there is just nowhere to put the money on the market right now. If bitcoin and crypto (ETH, etc.) was just a money dumping speculation comodities I wouldn't even bother thinking about it - but it's causing realworld problems (eg. hardware disruptions) and it's going to get worse and worse. So I'm in favor of preventing institutional investors in crypto in some form, but unfortunately it's not going to happen - too many individual interests behind it at this point and nobody gives a fuck about the overall stability.
- DennisP 6y ago
  ETH is on track to eliminate its hardware disruptions and energy consumption in less than a year.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  "because there is just nowhere to put the money on the market right now" For civilisation to survive we need renewables, electric cars/trucks/busses, nuckear power olants, grid scale storage and fusion power or hydrogen. There are only two scenarion -there things are built and our society rewards them - or in the alternative money in your bank ceases to exist, along with moth of economy
jariel 6y ago
No, this is really quite upside down. "People get too caught up on bitcoin because it is new and nobody understands it" We understand it quite well thank you (and it's not new!) - far far more often than not, it's the BTC proponents who don't really grasp what it is, and it's not the 'technical aspects' that are the most salient factors. Bitcoin creates no value. It's 'profitable' to an individual, but not the system as a whole - and because it has negative externalizations in the form of CO2 emissions etc. - it's actually a net negative. Making magic digital baseball cards and trading them does not help us make roads, bridges, iPhones, software, drugs, vaccines, clothing, homes - it just makes all of that a little bit harder actually. Much like residents of Easter Island using all their resources competing to make Giant Heads. Those heads may have mad some people very powerful, they did not help them grow food, make boats. If all BTC mining stopped right now, not a single thing would change, other than the price of electricity would be a little cheaper in some places. BTC isn't going to 'end the world' but the energy consumption is a really negative artifact of this purely speculative activity. There's not so much wrong with people wanting to exchange digital baseball cards if they want to do that - fine - but with the externalizes it's a problem.
- gverrilla 6y ago
  your understanding of blockchain, nft and crypto is very superficial. do your research better
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - etripe 6y ago
    As written, your comment is neither insightful nor informative. What should jariel have known about, in your opinion? How does that requisite knowledge move the needle towards blockchain or crypto being net positives to society?
    - gverrilla 6y ago
      It is informative in it that there's people out here who think he knows nothing about that which he speaks of. I'm not parsing this information for him though - we have search engines and a lot of good resources that fit the purpose. Or he can just go on thinking NFT's are "magic digital baseball cards" if he wishes. Not even gonna comment on his remarks about rapa nui history.
throwawayzRUU6f 6y ago
> why have the greater financial markets become so wonky, why has the behavior of investors changed so radically Since the global saving glut (1), the best question to ask of crazy asset valuations is not "does it reflect the fundamental value?", but "does the money have anywhere else to go?" (1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_saving_glut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_saving_glut
ganafagol 6y ago
How is this related to the comment you replied to? It was about pollution and introduction of a carbon tax. As long as we are having this kind of "discussion" I can see why fantasies about leaving earth and colonizing space are popular.
- rhn_mk1 6y ago
  The parent highlighted that carbon tax may do little to nothing to stop proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. The relevant quote is: > People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?"
wayoutthere 6y ago
I think the problem with the whole economy right now is wealth inequality. You have a lot of people really struggling, which keeps overall prices low, but the top 10% or so of earners have more money than they know what to do with. The pandemic cut my expenses by probably $1000/mo in addition to the huge bonus I got last year, I literally have money burning a hole in my pocket. Where do I invest that cash? Equities are obviously overvalued as an asset class, and treasuries return basically zero, so people are buying up real estate and crypto instead, and using some cash on the side to gamble in the options market. But this really only exacerbates the wealth inequality problem.
dpweb 6y ago
Since the cryptos electricity usage, at least that part which is generated by fossils, is a real problem (it is) - it would be nice to see this problem addressed with blockchain technologies. Carbon offset tokens, or some token that will increase in value when cryptos global electricity usage goes up, and offsets with renewable projects. If it were funded by governments in billions of dollars it would make an impact, and everyone could participate in funding the token. The problem must be addressed in altering the fossil/non-fossil energy mix. You are not going to control the financial incentive to mine, or kindly ask ppl to use less electricity please. Carbon taxes have been proposed but you would have to get that done globally, they are certainly working on that from a political perspective but you never know there are always resistance to a new tax.
TomSwirly 6y ago
"What about the climate change impact of things that aren't Bitcoin"?` Literal whataboutism.
ballenf 6y ago
Loss of trust. Trust in society creates enormous efficiencies. We're seeing the loss of those efficiencies as society splits apart into more and more tribes. Bitcoin, in part, is a marker for loss of trust in governments. Trust in their motives and/or ability to responsibly steward currencies.
hooande 6y ago
> "why many institutions, both social and political in nature, appear to have become less trustworthy in the eye of the greater public?" It sounds like you're saying that bitcoin is like a hedge against trust in government. A sort of financial measurement of conspiracy theorism. This is a fascinating perspective, but I'm not sure who is financially exposed to that form of risk. It seems like a great vehicle for speculation ("do I think people will trust institutions more or less in the near future?") but not much else. I'm sure there's someone who stands to lose money if public faith in government erodes. but its difficult to imagine that investor
- bruiseralmighty 6y ago
  Many institutions are exposed. Most university loans are federally backed. All home loans are understood to be federally backed since '08 and most low income home loans are officially federally insured as well. US Treasury bonds which make up a significant portion of pensions and corporate debt are essentially federally insured as well since it is know that the Fed will simply print the dollars needed to cover those debts. So far higher education, home ownership, pensions, and corporate debt; and those are just the financial exposure. There is not a single financial instrument that doesn't in some way depend on these financial bases working properly other than crypto and perhaps some commodities.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by ayngg 6y ago

caf 6y ago

I don't think the criticism is exactly wrong, but it's more like Bitcoin mining is the reductio ad absurdum exposing the waste of resources that goes into gold mining (yes, there's some industrial uses, but that is a rounding error compared to the quantities that are dug up, purified, cast into bars, shipped around the world and buried back underground in vaults).

arcticbull 6y ago
About half is used for jewelry because gold is shiny pebbles. About 10% is used for electronics. Mining Bitcoin consumes 5X as much energy as gold, btw, per unit value extracted. It also requires mining gold to produce the circuit boards used for mining Bitcoin - given the popularity of the ENIG immersion gold plating process for PCB contacts. The secondary issue is that of course each Bitcoin transaction generates 100g of e-waste which cannot be recycled and just gets buried. E-waste has a few grams of metals, but is mostly plastic and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Plastic and FR4 cannot be recycled. What little of the e-waste can be recycled is shipped to third-world countries where poor people dig through piles of scrap and dunk it in toxic chemicals. The only meaningful way to move forward is to reduce consumption, especially consumption which achieves nothing, like literally wiring up a power plant to compute hashes of random data instead of attaching it to the grid to do useful things. What a disaster.
- CTDOCodebases 6y ago
  The miners don’t compute hashes of random data. They confirm transactions. If you don’t think that a technology that allows you to store value in a tamper free digital ledger is useful it’s hard to argue the usefulness of PoW crypto currencies to begin with.
  - tsss 6y ago
    It does so with the same efficiency as a Rube Goldberg machine moves a marble from one place to another.
    - CTDOCodebases 6y ago
      Efficient or secure. Take your pick.
      - salawat 6y ago
        I"ll hire a few guys with guns, plus auditors. Their ability to maintain no sense of humor beats out your wonky crypto scheme in both regards. Your issue is you don't like the rules that come with the auditors. Those rules have a purpose, and that purpose is tied with sovereign diplomatic interrelation of civic bodies the world over. Many of whom are expressing great concern over the very thing PoW hastens. So no, it isn't either or. It's stop jeopardizing the planet in the long term so you can do whatever you're doing now. I don't care that you're doing it, and we can talk civily about the warts of the financial system so it can be tuned to meet your use case better and cone to a compromise; but PoW has the worst set of dysfunctional societal incentives I've seen in my life.
        gruez 6y ago
        >I"ll hire a few guys with guns A few guys with guns can be beaten by several other guys with guns. >plus auditors https://www.wsj.com/articles/wirecard-scandal-puts-spotlight-on-auditor-ernst-young-11593286933 https://www.wsj.com/articles/wirecard-scandal-puts-spotlight...
imtringued 6y ago
Jewelry is a surprisingly big chunk of global gold demand. Yes it is ultimately meaningless other than to impress other humans, however this meaningless activity is part of human nature. We derive joy from it. Meanwhile Bitcoin is just a means to an end, getting rich quick. The fun doesn't happen because we have Bitcoin, but rather because we get rid of them for an unreasonable price.
- CTDOCodebases 6y ago
  It could be argued that people are flocking to Bitcoin not to increase wealth but to preserve it over a long period of time. I don’t know where you live in the world but where I live wages haven’t risen in line with the cost of food and shelter. Leaving money in the bank is like working to buy a block of ice only to watch it melt away. To argue that any store of value isn’t speculative to some degree is naive.
  - etripe 6y ago
    > To argue that any store of value isn’t speculative to some degree is naive. Isn't there a difference between currency in general being speculative to some degree and cryptocurrencies specifically, whose main value proposition is speculation?
    - CTDOCodebases 6y ago
      I wasn’t referring to fiat currency since that is a terrible store of value. It is guaranteed to have less buying power in the future. What I was referring to was stocks since they have outperformed government bonds and gold the last few years. Take Amazon for instance. I don’t think the share price is equal to total assets minus total liabilities divided by number of shares. Amazon doesn’t issue dividends so why did the shareholders pay so much for the shares?
ballenf 6y ago
Maybe humans were created by an ET life as mining/purifying beings whose sole purpose is to be dropped on planets and left alone for a few millennia to do their thing. The ETs come back once all the minerals are refined and purified and neatly stacked.

bb88 6y ago

> People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?" FOMO, mining lotteries, and the guise of financial innovation are typical cover stories here. But all stocks and other publicly traded investments are basically making a bet that others will buy in after you do, raising the price higher. Most stock owners hope this very thing, though some stocks actually pay dividends on profits. The same is true with BTC with the added benefit of that novel mining lottery thing going for it. > These are some of the questions among others which I think probably provide a better understanding of what is happening than the overly simplistic 'ponzi scam' explanation that has been repeated ad nauseam since its inception. So what if the rich have too much money? That would explain a lot. It would explain why GME stock was shorted %140 of float. It would also explain why politicians are so ineffective at regulation. If you were rich, would you want effective politicians? No. You would put your money behind the least effective politicians. It would also explain why most institutions have become less trustworthy in the eye of the public, as big money has corrupted the system. And finally it would explain the gold rush on BTC. Because they need new investment vehicles.

jariel 6y ago
"Most stock owners hope this very thing, t" Stocks imply ownership of assets. Sure, in terms of 'hoping that someone willy buy' is similar to BTC, but the valuation is completely different. A stock is valued based on the performance of it's actual profit generation. BTC is just a made up number. It's what people think the crowd will buy it for. Granted, this mechanism itself can be useful in some scenarios, but BTC itself isn't useful, at least not right now.
- _huayra_ 6y ago
  I think people with BTC FOMO forget that it was always some sort of "hype Ponzi scheme". Back in 2011, I worked in an office that had one guy who was really into BTC. Looking back now, everyone thinks "wow he was such a genius to get in so early", but back then it was not profitable to mine, even if the difficulty was far lower. We'd constantly roast this coworker over his seemingly loony efforts to put solar on his house to cover the cost of mining neglecting to consider the solar panels would (in our opinions back then) put him in the red for a long time. (good on him for at least going green with it). I must admit I'm quite jealous of his insistence despite us roasting him (he's probably a multimillionaire now on BTC), but anyone who says "Oh yeah I could totally tell that BTC would take off in 2011" is being disingenuous at best. Unlike stocks which imply ownership of assets of a company, BTC is a pure hype machine, with the most hype given out by people who are already bought in. If any product or service has ONLY people who use it hyping it up (e.g. BTC, and especially NFTs!) or only people who are NOT using it hyping it up (e.g. the myriad get-rich-quick schemes about some drop-shipping Amazon thing, real estate, or "hOw To BE aN eNTrePreNeUR" in a vague sense of the term (whatever the Gary V & friends stuff is); all those guys make money not by doing what they're telling you to do but by telling you what to do...), it's usually a bad sign.

young_unixer 6y ago

Yes. Cryptocurrencies are used because they're the only market that hasn't yet been regulated to death. People come to Bitcoin for 2 reasons, mainly: 1. It's a practical way to store value without the government destroying it by monetary emission. 2. People are free to speculate. The solution to the first point is that governments should stop pulling the rug from under people's feet. Monetary emission should be predictable in the short, medium, and long term, or be tied to some real world indicator, like the cost of consumer goods. Just stop with this inflationary nonsense. Problem 2 will be partially solved by time. Relative price changes in Bitcoin are reduced each cycle, so by the year 2030 the incentive to speculate in the short term will be much smaller. We will see it more as a long term investment. Another solution is to deregulate other markets so that we can freely speculate in them and stop putting as much attention to Bitcoin, but I don't think politicians are very eager to do that, and it could also have some negative consequences.

bb88 6y ago
> 1. It's a practical way to store value without the government destroying it by monetary emission. > 2. People are free to speculate. So it's a store of value that's destroyable by speculation. That's, if anything, worse than the US Dollar.
- puchatek 6y ago
  Doesn't look destroyable in the long-term
  - cromwellian 6y ago
    If some flaw is discovered in SHA-256 or other parts of the algorithm, like how MD-5 and SHA-1 had weaknesses, overnight the value goes to zero. Or if a basic widespread exploitable bug was found in most bitcoin stacks like Heartbleed, that went unnoticed, boom, value evaporated overnight. You can based the entire world monetary economy on a single point of failure like this.
    - 6y ago

reader_mode 6y ago

I think Bitcoin (and crypto in general) has prooven to be disruptive in many areas (in a negative way) and has yet to deliver any tangible positives that would outweight the negatives. It's basically becoming a unregulated comodity that big money institutions get to gamble with because there is just nowhere to put the money on the market right now. If bitcoin and crypto (ETH, etc.) was just a money dumping speculation comodities I wouldn't even bother thinking about it - but it's causing realworld problems (eg. hardware disruptions) and it's going to get worse and worse. So I'm in favor of preventing institutional investors in crypto in some form, but unfortunately it's not going to happen - too many individual interests behind it at this point and nobody gives a fuck about the overall stability.

DennisP 6y ago
ETH is on track to eliminate its hardware disruptions and energy consumption in less than a year.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
"because there is just nowhere to put the money on the market right now" For civilisation to survive we need renewables, electric cars/trucks/busses, nuckear power olants, grid scale storage and fusion power or hydrogen. There are only two scenarion -there things are built and our society rewards them - or in the alternative money in your bank ceases to exist, along with moth of economy

jariel 6y ago

No, this is really quite upside down. "People get too caught up on bitcoin because it is new and nobody understands it" We understand it quite well thank you (and it's not new!) - far far more often than not, it's the BTC proponents who don't really grasp what it is, and it's not the 'technical aspects' that are the most salient factors. Bitcoin creates no value. It's 'profitable' to an individual, but not the system as a whole - and because it has negative externalizations in the form of CO2 emissions etc. - it's actually a net negative. Making magic digital baseball cards and trading them does not help us make roads, bridges, iPhones, software, drugs, vaccines, clothing, homes - it just makes all of that a little bit harder actually. Much like residents of Easter Island using all their resources competing to make Giant Heads. Those heads may have mad some people very powerful, they did not help them grow food, make boats. If all BTC mining stopped right now, not a single thing would change, other than the price of electricity would be a little cheaper in some places. BTC isn't going to 'end the world' but the energy consumption is a really negative artifact of this purely speculative activity. There's not so much wrong with people wanting to exchange digital baseball cards if they want to do that - fine - but with the externalizes it's a problem.

gverrilla 6y ago
your understanding of blockchain, nft and crypto is very superficial. do your research better
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- etripe 6y ago
  As written, your comment is neither insightful nor informative. What should jariel have known about, in your opinion? How does that requisite knowledge move the needle towards blockchain or crypto being net positives to society?
  - gverrilla 6y ago
    It is informative in it that there's people out here who think he knows nothing about that which he speaks of. I'm not parsing this information for him though - we have search engines and a lot of good resources that fit the purpose. Or he can just go on thinking NFT's are "magic digital baseball cards" if he wishes. Not even gonna comment on his remarks about rapa nui history.

throwawayzRUU6f 6y ago

> why have the greater financial markets become so wonky, why has the behavior of investors changed so radically Since the global saving glut (1), the best question to ask of crazy asset valuations is not "does it reflect the fundamental value?", but "does the money have anywhere else to go?" (1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_saving_glut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_saving_glut

ganafagol 6y ago

How is this related to the comment you replied to? It was about pollution and introduction of a carbon tax. As long as we are having this kind of "discussion" I can see why fantasies about leaving earth and colonizing space are popular.

rhn_mk1 6y ago
The parent highlighted that carbon tax may do little to nothing to stop proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. The relevant quote is: > People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?"

wayoutthere 6y ago

I think the problem with the whole economy right now is wealth inequality. You have a lot of people really struggling, which keeps overall prices low, but the top 10% or so of earners have more money than they know what to do with. The pandemic cut my expenses by probably $1000/mo in addition to the huge bonus I got last year, I literally have money burning a hole in my pocket. Where do I invest that cash? Equities are obviously overvalued as an asset class, and treasuries return basically zero, so people are buying up real estate and crypto instead, and using some cash on the side to gamble in the options market. But this really only exacerbates the wealth inequality problem.

dpweb 6y ago

Since the cryptos electricity usage, at least that part which is generated by fossils, is a real problem (it is) - it would be nice to see this problem addressed with blockchain technologies. Carbon offset tokens, or some token that will increase in value when cryptos global electricity usage goes up, and offsets with renewable projects. If it were funded by governments in billions of dollars it would make an impact, and everyone could participate in funding the token. The problem must be addressed in altering the fossil/non-fossil energy mix. You are not going to control the financial incentive to mine, or kindly ask ppl to use less electricity please. Carbon taxes have been proposed but you would have to get that done globally, they are certainly working on that from a political perspective but you never know there are always resistance to a new tax.

TomSwirly 6y ago

"What about the climate change impact of things that aren't Bitcoin"?` Literal whataboutism.

ballenf 6y ago

Loss of trust. Trust in society creates enormous efficiencies. We're seeing the loss of those efficiencies as society splits apart into more and more tribes. Bitcoin, in part, is a marker for loss of trust in governments. Trust in their motives and/or ability to responsibly steward currencies.

hooande 6y ago

> "why many institutions, both social and political in nature, appear to have become less trustworthy in the eye of the greater public?" It sounds like you're saying that bitcoin is like a hedge against trust in government. A sort of financial measurement of conspiracy theorism. This is a fascinating perspective, but I'm not sure who is financially exposed to that form of risk. It seems like a great vehicle for speculation ("do I think people will trust institutions more or less in the near future?") but not much else. I'm sure there's someone who stands to lose money if public faith in government erodes. but its difficult to imagine that investor

bruiseralmighty 6y ago
Many institutions are exposed. Most university loans are federally backed. All home loans are understood to be federally backed since '08 and most low income home loans are officially federally insured as well. US Treasury bonds which make up a significant portion of pensions and corporate debt are essentially federally insured as well since it is know that the Fed will simply print the dollars needed to cover those debts. So far higher education, home ownership, pensions, and corporate debt; and those are just the financial exposure. There is not a single financial instrument that doesn't in some way depend on these financial bases working properly other than crypto and perhaps some commodities.

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