3 ms·

Running out of reply nesting levels so responding to your latest comment here. For its current purpose (store of value, so not an every day payment currency),

by fleddr 5y ago

Running out of reply nesting levels so responding to your latest comment here. For its current purpose (store of value, so not an every day payment currency), Bitcoin does scale. Should for some reason miners be unable to gain access to more energy in the physical world, the protocol automatically adjusts the difficulty. Scaling transactions has no relation to energy usage, only mining does. As for its energy usage, that is a wildly complex topic, and it's moving very fast. Energy consumption in itself is not a problem, it is only considered a problem when: 1. The energy source is not renewable 2. The consumption directly competes with purposes deemed more useful by society (perceived or real). As for renewables, I believe the score to be somewhere between 30-50%, which is greener than almost any other industry. Furthermore, this score is going to rapidly improve as coal-based mining in China is in major decline whilst North America gains in mining. The NA mining companies have formed a council to report on energy usage and stimulate not just the use of renewables, specifically to go for stranded energy sources. These are types of energy that are locally available, yet too remote or costly to transport to civilization. To sum it up, it's not as bad as the headlines say, and rapidly improving for the better. Energy usage, not even it being dirty or green, isn't the heart of the debate though. Keeping devices powered on/plugged in costs more energy and serves no purpose, yet zero headlines about that. Rather, the debate is that a lot of energy is consumed for what skeptics consider to be no purpose. And now we do get to a hard divide. Believers and non-believers. A true believer thinks of Bitcoin as the hardest money ever created, absolute scarcity as a one time human invention. This classic article is one of many making the case for it: https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoin-6ecc8bdecc1 https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi... Read it with an open, but skeptical mind. If you're disgusted by it, your personal outcome is clear. If it does tickle some interest, this Twitter thread links to a few of such articles: https://twitter.com/anilsaidso/status/1290758632238276609?s=11 https://twitter.com/anilsaidso/status/1290758632238276609?s=... As for Bitcoin being speculative, yes and no. With a long term perspective, it is predictable to a degree. A dutch stock expert came up with a valuation model called "stock to flow": https://stats.buybitcoinworldwide.com/stock-to-flow/ https://stats.buybitcoinworldwide.com/stock-to-flow/ Actual price action versus predicted price is so accurate that it's creepy. And there's a reason for it. Bitcoin's supply is entirely predictable and mining rewards are cut in half every 4 years, triggering the next bull run, followed by a bear market. Like clockwork. Even the financial establishment agrees that Bitcoin is the most asymmetrical bet there is. The risk/reward ratio is one of its kind. To translate that to any ordinary citizen: you pick a portion of your wealth you can afford to lose entirely. 10-25% of savings are often heard numbers. There's a really small chance that this money, which you could afford to lose anyway, will be lost. A so-called "Black Swan event". More likely, the money would be halved and never recover. Against that limited risk (due to your limited exposure), is a much higher chance of it multiplying by 10, 20, more...depending on how long you hold the asset. As in, almost guaranteed. For Bitcoin, not for the shitcoins. This sounds like a sales pitch for buying Bitcoin, which is not my goal. I don't care if you do or don't. My point is to highlight the uniqueness of this asymmetrical bet. It has no comparison. There's no asset in the world with a risk/reward ratio this favorable. Or, you can call it funny internet money that heads to zero. Either conclusion is fine, if its an informed one.

knorker 5y ago
> Energy consumption in itself is not a problem My main point on that was that the exponential function grows quickly. If it's all of Sweden today, then it's just a couple of doublings before it's literally everything. If you graph the current use this is not the far away future. I don't have absolute proof, but you cannot hide the kind of electricity use without driving up demand noticeably, so actually people are already today paying more for electricity in order for someone to profiteer from hashing. We're all paying for this. > 1. The energy source is not renewable Or it displaces otherwise-renewable use into non-renewable. Which (at this scale) of course it has. > To sum it up, it's not as bad as the headlines say, and rapidly improving for the better. I disagree on both points. The waste graph (and that's just electricity. Where do you think non-economical mining rigs go?) is growing exponentially. Have you seen this guy talk about our inability to understand the exponential function? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4 > Keeping devices powered on/plugged in costs more energy and serves no purpose, It's a problem, yes. But it's not true that it serves no function. "It's easier to keep it plugged in than not" is convenience. I'm not justifying it, but yes actually it does have a purpose. Just like idling a diesel car outside my window while I'm trying to sleep does have a purpose. > Bitcoin's supply is entirely predictable Not really since an unknown amount is lost forever every year due to crashed hard drives and lost passwords. For your medium link, it can be summarized as "an intro to bitcoin". And I'm surprised it was written in 2018, as it seems to have the naivety of a small child, with regards to both bitcoin and economics. E.g. it doesn't motivate why we need to (effectively) get back on the gold standard. The "work" that was "proof of work" for my FDIC-insured bank balance is a combination of the value I added to my employer, and the value the market gave me for helping correctly price goods. I don't need my bits to be scarce. > "However, because bitcoins are traceable on the blockchain, a particular bitcoin may become tainted by its use in illicit trade and merchants or exchanges may be compelled not to accept such tainted bitcoins." Like I said. Naive. And this was written 4 years after Mt Gox, where 4% of all bitcoins that will ever exist, were stolen. In a legal money laundering sense I would guess that maybe the majority of bitcoin out there is tainted, since tumblers actually cause 100% of their output to legally be tainted. And with it being circulated, the only "clean" bitcoin is from HODLers who have never moved it after mining. > "Without improvements to the privacy and anonymity of Bitcoin’s network protocol, bitcoins cannot be considered as fungible as gold." And in this very next sentence he's essentially saying "yeah but let's help the criminals hide it, and not do that tainted thing I just said". He calls it "improvements". > "Nation-states have shown a persistent proclivity to inflate their money supply to solve short-term political problems. The inflationary tendencies of governments across the world leave the owner of a fiat currency with the likelihood that their savings will diminish in value over time." This is more naivety. E.g. in order to have our best future, we as a society actually don't want resting savings. I've been lectured by a friend because I have a coin jar, and that is money that isn't in motion. I wouldn't go that far, but there's some truth to the fact that money (in any form) at rest does nothing. Whereas money in motion does. GDP is not a perfect model, but like many models it can be useful. And GDP measures the velocity of money. So why "punish" people for hoarding cash (in any form) and not moving it? Because it's in society's best interest, or so goes the argument. This naive writeup seems to merely say (like other pro-coin ones) that taxation is theft, inflation is theft, etc... Anyway, I think I've read this before (or it's just the same coiner dogma repeated ad nauseum so that it's indistinguishable from something I've read before). I'm not disgusted by it. I don't get disgusted by uninformed naivety. > As for Bitcoin being speculative, yes and no. With a long term perspective, it is predictable to a degree. What I mean is that approximately nobody is buying bitcoin in order to actually use it. Unless they are using it to send money to ISIS, or something. No, they buy it in the hopes that someone else will pay more for it, later. That is neither payment, nor store of value. Maybe one day it'll be more stable, and thus a better store of value. But I hope it dies way before that. I don't disagree that these coins can be a good investment for the individual. But that's where the disgust comes in. It's profit over morals, with a spread never before seen. It's doing something evil (environmental impact), in order to profiteer from organized crime (anonymous currency). Even if you yourself commit no crime, it's you profiting from destruction[1], to fund organized crime. You're essentially making the argument for a lottery that has (unfortunately) reasonable odds. That doesn't make it right, or good, or nondestructive. I'm not sure why you think those bitcoin 101 links would be new to me. [1] And I don't mean "destroying the old to create the new", no I mean literally destroying productivity and base resources. As if you could mine bitcoin by proving that you've burned medication. That is resources society had, that could be used, that you burned at the expense of others for your profit.

by fleddr 5y ago

knorker 5y ago

> Energy consumption in itself is not a problem My main point on that was that the exponential function grows quickly. If it's all of Sweden today, then it's just a couple of doublings before it's literally everything. If you graph the current use this is not the far away future. I don't have absolute proof, but you cannot hide the kind of electricity use without driving up demand noticeably, so actually people are already today paying more for electricity in order for someone to profiteer from hashing. We're all paying for this. > 1. The energy source is not renewable Or it displaces otherwise-renewable use into non-renewable. Which (at this scale) of course it has. > To sum it up, it's not as bad as the headlines say, and rapidly improving for the better. I disagree on both points. The waste graph (and that's just electricity. Where do you think non-economical mining rigs go?) is growing exponentially. Have you seen this guy talk about our inability to understand the exponential function? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4 > Keeping devices powered on/plugged in costs more energy and serves no purpose, It's a problem, yes. But it's not true that it serves no function. "It's easier to keep it plugged in than not" is convenience. I'm not justifying it, but yes actually it does have a purpose. Just like idling a diesel car outside my window while I'm trying to sleep does have a purpose. > Bitcoin's supply is entirely predictable Not really since an unknown amount is lost forever every year due to crashed hard drives and lost passwords. For your medium link, it can be summarized as "an intro to bitcoin". And I'm surprised it was written in 2018, as it seems to have the naivety of a small child, with regards to both bitcoin and economics. E.g. it doesn't motivate why we need to (effectively) get back on the gold standard. The "work" that was "proof of work" for my FDIC-insured bank balance is a combination of the value I added to my employer, and the value the market gave me for helping correctly price goods. I don't need my bits to be scarce. > "However, because bitcoins are traceable on the blockchain, a particular bitcoin may become tainted by its use in illicit trade and merchants or exchanges may be compelled not to accept such tainted bitcoins." Like I said. Naive. And this was written 4 years after Mt Gox, where 4% of all bitcoins that will ever exist, were stolen. In a legal money laundering sense I would guess that maybe the majority of bitcoin out there is tainted, since tumblers actually cause 100% of their output to legally be tainted. And with it being circulated, the only "clean" bitcoin is from HODLers who have never moved it after mining. > "Without improvements to the privacy and anonymity of Bitcoin’s network protocol, bitcoins cannot be considered as fungible as gold." And in this very next sentence he's essentially saying "yeah but let's help the criminals hide it, and not do that tainted thing I just said". He calls it "improvements". > "Nation-states have shown a persistent proclivity to inflate their money supply to solve short-term political problems. The inflationary tendencies of governments across the world leave the owner of a fiat currency with the likelihood that their savings will diminish in value over time." This is more naivety. E.g. in order to have our best future, we as a society actually don't want resting savings. I've been lectured by a friend because I have a coin jar, and that is money that isn't in motion. I wouldn't go that far, but there's some truth to the fact that money (in any form) at rest does nothing. Whereas money in motion does. GDP is not a perfect model, but like many models it can be useful. And GDP measures the velocity of money. So why "punish" people for hoarding cash (in any form) and not moving it? Because it's in society's best interest, or so goes the argument. This naive writeup seems to merely say (like other pro-coin ones) that taxation is theft, inflation is theft, etc... Anyway, I think I've read this before (or it's just the same coiner dogma repeated ad nauseum so that it's indistinguishable from something I've read before). I'm not disgusted by it. I don't get disgusted by uninformed naivety. > As for Bitcoin being speculative, yes and no. With a long term perspective, it is predictable to a degree. What I mean is that approximately nobody is buying bitcoin in order to actually use it. Unless they are using it to send money to ISIS, or something. No, they buy it in the hopes that someone else will pay more for it, later. That is neither payment, nor store of value. Maybe one day it'll be more stable, and thus a better store of value. But I hope it dies way before that. I don't disagree that these coins can be a good investment for the individual. But that's where the disgust comes in. It's profit over morals, with a spread never before seen. It's doing something evil (environmental impact), in order to profiteer from organized crime (anonymous currency). Even if you yourself commit no crime, it's you profiting from destruction[1], to fund organized crime. You're essentially making the argument for a lottery that has (unfortunately) reasonable odds. That doesn't make it right, or good, or nondestructive. I'm not sure why you think those bitcoin 101 links would be new to me. [1] And I don't mean "destroying the old to create the new", no I mean literally destroying productivity and base resources. As if you could mine bitcoin by proving that you've burned medication. That is resources society had, that could be used, that you burned at the expense of others for your profit.