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Economic value is measured by how much people are willing to pay for it. Transactions have economic value, because people are willing to pay a fee in return fo
by lottin 5y ago
Economic value is measured by how much people are willing to pay for it. Transactions have economic value, because people are willing to pay a fee in return for having a transaction processed. And cryptocurrencies are transaction processing systems. So it absolutely makes perfect sense to measure how efficient these systems are processing transactions, and the way to measure that is by looking at how much it costs to process a transaction with each of these systems.
If you wanted to know how much people are willing to pay for decentralisation, trustlessness and privacy (most certainly not an infinite amount of money) you could also do that, but that's answering a different question.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago> Transactions have economic value, because people are willing to pay a fee in return for having a transaction processed. Why transact via cryptocurrencies instead of other systems? Because of these other desirable properties. They're the value cryptocurrencies add to the world and the reason why people choose to them despite the inefficiency. People transact in Ethereum because they want to run smart contracts. People transact in Monero because they want privacy. > So it absolutely makes perfect sense to measure how efficient these systems are processing transactions, and the way to measure that is by looking at how much it costs to process a transaction with each of these systems. I don't think so. People measure this in order to compare with traditional banking systems which are centralized, require trust in institutions and affords no privacy. This is not a fair comparison.
- lottin 5y agoThe fact that some people don't care about efficiency doesn't mean we shouldn't measure it. For example, a lot of people buy cars that are fuel-inefficient. Does that mean we should stop measuring car efficiency? No, that's a ridiculous argument. If you don't care about efficiency because you care more about other stuff, at least you should be aware of the trade-offs, and also have the intellectual honesty to admit that you don't care about efficiency, instead of pretending that efficiency is not important.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoI didn't say you shouldn't measure it. I said people are buying other things for their money. Simply measuring transactions/energy ignores all that. Monero provides decentralized trustless private untraceable transactions, Ethereum provides decentralized trustless transactions that execute smart contracts. The energy consumption is merely the cost of all those features.
- lottin 5y ago> The energy consumption is merely the cost of all those features. This is a big assumption, and almost certainly untrue.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoWhy?
- lottin 5y agoBecause we don't know that any of these systems incurs the least possible cost in processing transactions with these particular features.
- wpietri 5y ago> Economic value is measured by how much people are willing to pay for it. That's an ok general rule, but it breaks down in a lot of circumstances. Look at scams, for example. People pay quite a lot for them, but at a societal level, they have strong negative value.