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> If a relatively small number of people (say, 10m) stop using the US dollar, This is a very weak straw man. The majority of people on the planet interact with

by cwkoss 5y ago

> If a relatively small number of people (say, 10m) stop using the US dollar, This is a very weak straw man. The majority of people on the planet interact with the dollar economy, either directly or indirectly, because of its extreme dominance. Of course a ~0.3% reduction in users isn't going to change much. Dollar hegemony is fairly binary: either it's the dominant world currency or it isn't. If hegemony falls, the US military will have to reduce in size, because it can no longer be funded by being the gatekeeper of the global economy.

wpietri 5y ago
Interesting speculation, but all wildly off the point. Which is that ending POW "currencies" would have a significant environmental benefit with an amount of inconvenience somewhere between marginal and net negative.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  It would not be a "significant environmental benefit". POW mining is ~0.5% of global energy usage. If it was magically eliminated, that 'progress' would be eliminated in a year as growth in the more urgently-relevant sectors continues marching on. It seems you don't see the value of POW cryptocurrencies at all. The attitude that "bitcoin is worthless, so any energy spent on it is wasteful" has been parroted a lot on HN recently, but... scoreboard: the market disagrees. I wish more bitcoin skeptics kept some intellectual curiosity around it rather than just writing it off as "I don't get it: its worthless" - there are reasons people are paying tens of thousands of dollars for a bitcoin, even if you don't understand them. I think these attitudes are indicative of cognitive dissonance in individuals who dismissed Bitcoin a long time ago and don't want to recognize their own regret for discounting it: if they didn't dismiss it their net worth would probably be higher today.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Redirecting 0.5% of global energy to productive use is very clearly significant. That's the whole-country level of energy usage. Markets also value Ponzi schemes highly. So what? Markets can be a useful guide to value in certain circumstances, but it's correlative, not probative. I've had plenty of intellectual curiosity around Bitcoin, blockchains, etc. For a while I was hoping something good would come out of it. But it's been 10 years and there's been almost no economically positive use demonstrated. It's great for certain kinds of light financial crime (ransomware, money laundering, etc) and it's great for creating the sort of unregulated markets in which scammers, fraudsters, and other economic parasites thrive. I'm personally very happy never to have put a nickel into cryptocurrencies. Could I have made a bunch of money? Maybe! Would have it been through creating value? No, not at all. It's a "greater fool" game, and I don't play those. I haven't since I quit working for financial traders in the 1990s, as I don't think it's moral to get paid when no value is created.

by cwkoss 5y ago

wpietri 5y ago

Interesting speculation, but all wildly off the point. Which is that ending POW "currencies" would have a significant environmental benefit with an amount of inconvenience somewhere between marginal and net negative.

cwkoss 5y ago
It would not be a "significant environmental benefit". POW mining is ~0.5% of global energy usage. If it was magically eliminated, that 'progress' would be eliminated in a year as growth in the more urgently-relevant sectors continues marching on. It seems you don't see the value of POW cryptocurrencies at all. The attitude that "bitcoin is worthless, so any energy spent on it is wasteful" has been parroted a lot on HN recently, but... scoreboard: the market disagrees. I wish more bitcoin skeptics kept some intellectual curiosity around it rather than just writing it off as "I don't get it: its worthless" - there are reasons people are paying tens of thousands of dollars for a bitcoin, even if you don't understand them. I think these attitudes are indicative of cognitive dissonance in individuals who dismissed Bitcoin a long time ago and don't want to recognize their own regret for discounting it: if they didn't dismiss it their net worth would probably be higher today.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Redirecting 0.5% of global energy to productive use is very clearly significant. That's the whole-country level of energy usage. Markets also value Ponzi schemes highly. So what? Markets can be a useful guide to value in certain circumstances, but it's correlative, not probative. I've had plenty of intellectual curiosity around Bitcoin, blockchains, etc. For a while I was hoping something good would come out of it. But it's been 10 years and there's been almost no economically positive use demonstrated. It's great for certain kinds of light financial crime (ransomware, money laundering, etc) and it's great for creating the sort of unregulated markets in which scammers, fraudsters, and other economic parasites thrive. I'm personally very happy never to have put a nickel into cryptocurrencies. Could I have made a bunch of money? Maybe! Would have it been through creating value? No, not at all. It's a "greater fool" game, and I don't play those. I haven't since I quit working for financial traders in the 1990s, as I don't think it's moral to get paid when no value is created.