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Wait until you hear all the energy it takes to run the current financial system, or the energy it takes to run the worlds gaming consoles, or any other stuff th

Wait until you hear all the energy it takes to run the current financial system, or the energy it takes to run the worlds gaming consoles, or any other stuff that you have personally found to be more useful than crypto currency. If bitcoin frees us from financial tyranny it's all worth it.

natmaka 5y ago
Fiat money is trusted in good part because there are backed by institutions, mainly governments in turn are backed by armies (real soldiers and policemen). All this uses a fair amount of energy, and there is no other way. "Cryptos" are in their infancy and there are already ways for them to dissipate less energy.
paulgb 5y ago
> Wait until you hear all the energy it takes to run the current financial system Every Bitcoin defender repeats this line, but I never see any numbers. Whatever the energy use is, it's provably less than Bitcoin by any metric like transaction volume or market cap, by the simple fact that if you were to scale up Bitcoin's energy use for comparison to the world financial system, it would use magnitudes more energy than humans produce.
- drcross 5y ago
  The key to your misunderstand here is that the proof of work hashing is decoupled from transaction volume or market cap.
  - paulgb 5y ago
    It's not. If the market cap goes up, it's because the price of bitcoin goes up. If the price of bitcoin goes up, the mining reward goes up. If the mining reward goes up, the block reward that incentivizes mining goes up. The mining market is in equilibrium when miners expenses approach the block reward, so mining uses more energy as the market cap goes up.
- cogman10 5y ago
  The numbers I have seen usually comes from something like this https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2 https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2 However, it's a terribly bad faith argument. Essentially, they wrap up everything that isn't involved with ledger maintenance (ATM power, data center power for running the website, Air conditioning at branches power usage) and compare that to Bitcoin, which is only doing ledger maintenance. They do that, because if you had a true apples to apples comparison, you'd end up with kwh of power usage. That's because a ledger is computationally cheap to maintain over a trust network. We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis. And how do we know it's garbage? Because if banks stopped doing their own ledgers and instead did everything through bitcoin, would their power usage drop? Absolutely not. They'd still have branches, ATMs, and data centers running their websites. In fact, some banks do manage BTC. Do those banks have lower power footprints compared to like banks without BTC? Absolutely not.
  - drcross 5y ago
    >We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis. You weren't able to send value from one part of the world to another in minutes without an intermediary for a tiny fraction of the transaction amount in the 70's and you still can't do it today without crypto.
    - 8note 5y ago
      You can't per se do it with crypto today either. You go through two intermediaries with crypto. One to turn your chinese currency into crypto, then another to turn the crypto into us currency.
      - drcross 5y ago
        You're assuming fiat onramps are part of the process and dont realise that in the future fiat doesn't exist. How could it?
unknown_error 5y ago
How would cryptocurrency free us from financial tyranny? At some scale finance becomes a state affair, and regulated by law backed by a monopoly on violence. Or, otherwise, you end up with crypto-warlords with private military companies. In neither sense would the average user be meaningfully "free"; it seems like you're replacing democratic checks-and-balances with harder-to-regulate digital capital, which is "freedom" only to the super-rich. It's like somebody at the bottom of the Ponzi scheme defending it to death because someday, maybe, just maybe, he'll rise to the top...
- disruptalot 5y ago
  You only need to look around for a moment to find an example. There are people living under governments that don't allow their citizens access to the global financial system (i.e. capital controls) and are often living in high inflation environments. Storing their wealth in an unseizable asset, even $100 worth, means that they are decoupled from their government financially and can escape their hell hole with their wealth in tact.
- drcross 5y ago
  >How would cryptocurrency free us from financial tyranny? Inflation is theft. Crypto prevents this theft.
  - cogman10 5y ago
    Bwhahaha! You mean the crypto that just lost 30% of it's value? Literally the topic of the article. THAT crypto is an inflation defense?
    - drcross 5y ago
      Yes. It's in price discovery phase. Volatility is expected until it reaches a sufficient market cap to not be affected by single events. It's pretty silly to think what it's like now is what it will be like when the market cap hits that of gold.

natmaka 5y ago

Fiat money is trusted in good part because there are backed by institutions, mainly governments in turn are backed by armies (real soldiers and policemen). All this uses a fair amount of energy, and there is no other way. "Cryptos" are in their infancy and there are already ways for them to dissipate less energy.

paulgb 5y ago

> Wait until you hear all the energy it takes to run the current financial system Every Bitcoin defender repeats this line, but I never see any numbers. Whatever the energy use is, it's provably less than Bitcoin by any metric like transaction volume or market cap, by the simple fact that if you were to scale up Bitcoin's energy use for comparison to the world financial system, it would use magnitudes more energy than humans produce.

drcross 5y ago
The key to your misunderstand here is that the proof of work hashing is decoupled from transaction volume or market cap.
- paulgb 5y ago
  It's not. If the market cap goes up, it's because the price of bitcoin goes up. If the price of bitcoin goes up, the mining reward goes up. If the mining reward goes up, the block reward that incentivizes mining goes up. The mining market is in equilibrium when miners expenses approach the block reward, so mining uses more energy as the market cap goes up.
cogman10 5y ago
The numbers I have seen usually comes from something like this https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2 https://docsend.com/view/adwmdeeyfvqwecj2 However, it's a terribly bad faith argument. Essentially, they wrap up everything that isn't involved with ledger maintenance (ATM power, data center power for running the website, Air conditioning at branches power usage) and compare that to Bitcoin, which is only doing ledger maintenance. They do that, because if you had a true apples to apples comparison, you'd end up with kwh of power usage. That's because a ledger is computationally cheap to maintain over a trust network. We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis. And how do we know it's garbage? Because if banks stopped doing their own ledgers and instead did everything through bitcoin, would their power usage drop? Absolutely not. They'd still have branches, ATMs, and data centers running their websites. In fact, some banks do manage BTC. Do those banks have lower power footprints compared to like banks without BTC? Absolutely not.
- drcross 5y ago
  >We were able to do that in the 70s with servers that had no more power than today's raspberry pis. You weren't able to send value from one part of the world to another in minutes without an intermediary for a tiny fraction of the transaction amount in the 70's and you still can't do it today without crypto.
  - 8note 5y ago
    You can't per se do it with crypto today either. You go through two intermediaries with crypto. One to turn your chinese currency into crypto, then another to turn the crypto into us currency.
    - drcross 5y ago
      You're assuming fiat onramps are part of the process and dont realise that in the future fiat doesn't exist. How could it?

unknown_error 5y ago

How would cryptocurrency free us from financial tyranny? At some scale finance becomes a state affair, and regulated by law backed by a monopoly on violence. Or, otherwise, you end up with crypto-warlords with private military companies. In neither sense would the average user be meaningfully "free"; it seems like you're replacing democratic checks-and-balances with harder-to-regulate digital capital, which is "freedom" only to the super-rich. It's like somebody at the bottom of the Ponzi scheme defending it to death because someday, maybe, just maybe, he'll rise to the top...

disruptalot 5y ago
You only need to look around for a moment to find an example. There are people living under governments that don't allow their citizens access to the global financial system (i.e. capital controls) and are often living in high inflation environments. Storing their wealth in an unseizable asset, even $100 worth, means that they are decoupled from their government financially and can escape their hell hole with their wealth in tact.
drcross 5y ago
>How would cryptocurrency free us from financial tyranny? Inflation is theft. Crypto prevents this theft.
- cogman10 5y ago
  Bwhahaha! You mean the crypto that just lost 30% of it's value? Literally the topic of the article. THAT crypto is an inflation defense?
  - drcross 5y ago
    Yes. It's in price discovery phase. Volatility is expected until it reaches a sufficient market cap to not be affected by single events. It's pretty silly to think what it's like now is what it will be like when the market cap hits that of gold.