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A lot of people need bitcoin. It is really useful to hoard! Not to ge rich, but to avoid getting poorer in countries with rampant inflation. Also it facilitat

A lot of people need bitcoin. It is really useful to hoard! Not to ge rich, but to avoid getting poorer in countries with rampant inflation. Also it facilitate money transfers a lot. Yes, a transaction in bitcoin is expensive, but a international wire transfer on my country for example is EVEN MORE expensive, so transferring money using Bitcoin, even after eating all the fees, is cheaper (and easier too). So people that has the same opinion as you, I consider this opinion invalid until they come up with a solution better than bitcoin for the problems I mentined. To be clear the problems are: 1. How to save money when government is hostile to saving money. 2. How to transfer money when it is ludicrously expensive and/or government or companies are hostile to money transferrence. EDIT: people downvote me, but none of the answers below so far address the 2 problems I mentioned. The closest is someone talking about solving problems with trust, but that is the whole issue, if you can't trust the central authorities and companies, who you trust?

SuoDuanDao 6y ago
A great comparison I've heard is 'how much energy is required to mine one bitcoin's worth of gold'? I haven't seen a figure, and as gold's negative externalities are more about groundwater pollution than CO2e it wouldn't tell the whole story, but it would still be an interesting comparison.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  Gold is about 0.8 tons / troy oz. Given the current exchange rate of ~30 troy oz / BTC, that's 24 tons of CO2 / one-bitcoin-worth-of-gold. At current mining rewards, 329,000 BTC are mined each year, producing 37 megatons of CO2, or about 110 tons of CO2 / one-bitcoin-worth-of-bitcoin.
rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
>It is really useful to hoard! Not to ge rich, but to avoid getting poorer in countries with rampant inflation. >Also it facilitate money transfers a lot. You do realize that, because the total number of bitcoins is limited, it will get harder and harder to get bitcoins? So every generations will have to work/fight harder to get their currency, which is extremely unfair? Why would a newborn have more trouble to get his hands on money compared to the ones (like myself) who had it easy to buy cryptos while it was cheap? And what about increase/decrease in population: central bans may implement bad policies but at least they did not tied their hands in principles (e.g hardcoded limited number of coins) and can adjust things as they are needed. I understand your argument as "humans do bad things today, let's hardcode things with technics" without consideration as to why the hardcoded things will remain beneficial to all/most in the long term. Humans are fallible and inconstant but they are human after all. We can't do without trust so why try to replace it with mathematics anyway? Only because we _currently_ lack trust? If so, shouldn't we focus on that instead?
- nyolfen 6y ago
  your comment only makes sense if it's interpreted as describing a world where bitcoin conquers the world and there is no other kind of money > Only because we _currently_ lack trust? If so, shouldn't we focus on that instead? my friend, if you can solve the problems of trust in human social systems, you will have solved a lot more than decentralized digital cash
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    We've been solving the problems of trust literally for millennia. For some reason bitcoin apologists pretend history never happened, and painstakingly attempt to re-create the trust systems humans have had in place, once again literally, for millennia.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    In practice the problem of trust is not a big deal, otherwise nobody would be able to trade anything.
    - ehnto 6y ago
      I think you're mostly right. As with many problems in society at the moment, the complexities have arisen because we're so eager to connect everything to the internet and make it "exist" there. Also that we're so eager to make it work globally. I can trust that the local coffee shop will give me a coffee for my money. I can trust my employer will pay me, failing that I can trust the local courts will sort it out. I can't really trust that a bitcoin wallet host, some ephemeral digital entity I have very little insight into, will hold onto my wallet. I can't trust that a cloud provider in the states will hold onto my files without scanning them. I can't trust that an eCommerce store will definitely ship me goods internationally. The human element disappears online and we have starting trying to fill that void with digital trust artifacts, like digital contracts. The blockchain itself was a technology entirely about trust. Maybe we're trying to stretch our ability to trust networks, social or otherwise, too far.
    - MrMan 6y ago

SuoDuanDao 6y ago

A great comparison I've heard is 'how much energy is required to mine one bitcoin's worth of gold'? I haven't seen a figure, and as gold's negative externalities are more about groundwater pollution than CO2e it wouldn't tell the whole story, but it would still be an interesting comparison.

saalweachter 6y ago
Gold is about 0.8 tons / troy oz. Given the current exchange rate of ~30 troy oz / BTC, that's 24 tons of CO2 / one-bitcoin-worth-of-gold. At current mining rewards, 329,000 BTC are mined each year, producing 37 megatons of CO2, or about 110 tons of CO2 / one-bitcoin-worth-of-bitcoin.

rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago

>It is really useful to hoard! Not to ge rich, but to avoid getting poorer in countries with rampant inflation. >Also it facilitate money transfers a lot. You do realize that, because the total number of bitcoins is limited, it will get harder and harder to get bitcoins? So every generations will have to work/fight harder to get their currency, which is extremely unfair? Why would a newborn have more trouble to get his hands on money compared to the ones (like myself) who had it easy to buy cryptos while it was cheap? And what about increase/decrease in population: central bans may implement bad policies but at least they did not tied their hands in principles (e.g hardcoded limited number of coins) and can adjust things as they are needed. I understand your argument as "humans do bad things today, let's hardcode things with technics" without consideration as to why the hardcoded things will remain beneficial to all/most in the long term. Humans are fallible and inconstant but they are human after all. We can't do without trust so why try to replace it with mathematics anyway? Only because we _currently_ lack trust? If so, shouldn't we focus on that instead?

nyolfen 6y ago
your comment only makes sense if it's interpreted as describing a world where bitcoin conquers the world and there is no other kind of money > Only because we _currently_ lack trust? If so, shouldn't we focus on that instead? my friend, if you can solve the problems of trust in human social systems, you will have solved a lot more than decentralized digital cash
- dmitriid 6y ago
  We've been solving the problems of trust literally for millennia. For some reason bitcoin apologists pretend history never happened, and painstakingly attempt to re-create the trust systems humans have had in place, once again literally, for millennia.
- adrianN 6y ago
  In practice the problem of trust is not a big deal, otherwise nobody would be able to trade anything.
  - ehnto 6y ago
    I think you're mostly right. As with many problems in society at the moment, the complexities have arisen because we're so eager to connect everything to the internet and make it "exist" there. Also that we're so eager to make it work globally. I can trust that the local coffee shop will give me a coffee for my money. I can trust my employer will pay me, failing that I can trust the local courts will sort it out. I can't really trust that a bitcoin wallet host, some ephemeral digital entity I have very little insight into, will hold onto my wallet. I can't trust that a cloud provider in the states will hold onto my files without scanning them. I can't trust that an eCommerce store will definitely ship me goods internationally. The human element disappears online and we have starting trying to fill that void with digital trust artifacts, like digital contracts. The blockchain itself was a technology entirely about trust. Maybe we're trying to stretch our ability to trust networks, social or otherwise, too far.
  - MrMan 6y ago