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> Bitcoin is a long term bet on collapse. Honest question: if you truly believe that, how do you account for the infrastructure required to mine it in a post-a
by spupe 4y ago
> Bitcoin is a long term bet on collapse.
Honest question: if you truly believe that, how do you account for the infrastructure required to mine it in a post-apocalyptic society? How do you guys envision a post-apocalyptic world where BTC is even remotely viable?
- jbhouse 4y agosound like FUD to me! /s
- randomhodler84 4y ago
- sgt101 4y agoYou are starving. How many bitcoins for my turnip? I say all of them, and also I say you are my slave now. I think we just did a trade in a hyper-adversarial environment.
- rglullis 4y agoCalm down, Michael Saylor... In a hyper adversarial environment we want guns, ammo, access to fresh water and land that can be easily protected. Any kind of trade will be done with someone who you can meet physically, and you will be either bartering or using some completely local currency. To think that people would depend on a global distributed ledger is so incredibly stupid, it makes me wonder if you are not just trolling.
- labrador 4y agoI don't like to assume ill intent so I'm going to say that it's possible to be delusional like that because I had girlfriend who turned out not to be joking about these kinds of fantasies. Those kind of delusions is how people lose their life savings on some scheme the rest of us can tell is insane right out of the gate.
- rglullis 4y agoNo need to speculate... from parent's about page: Character account — I only play a Bitcoin maximalist on the internet.
- labrador 4y agoI don't often see ppl playing characters on HN so it's not something I think to check. Good catch.
- ramphastidae 4y agoThanks for letting us know. God this is lame. I flagged.
- WJW 4y agoBecause in a hyper-adversarial environment, the chances of a sufficiently worldwide internet seem extremely slim. The terms "hyper adversarial" and "mesh networks" don't match very well for example. In a more bigger-picture sense; any society that struggles to keep up large scale power plants will definitely struggle maintaining a distributed system maintaining a copy of every transaction everywhere on each node. Blockchains trade in resource waste for decentralization, so they don't work well in resource constrained environments.
- adrianN 4y agoA post apocalyptic society will lack the manufacturing ability to maintain things with microchips in them. Why would I store my wealth in something that requires microchips to be useful? What do I do when my computer breaks?
- einszwei 4y agoThings like Solar Panels, Deep Cycle batteries, CPU and GPUs are a product of globe spanning supply chains and resource hungry manufacturing processes (water is a key resource in them). And in post apocalyptic scenario - I would imagine food and water to be far more important than some digital coin.
- piva00 4y agoThis is all techno-babble fantasy of a post-apocalyptic novel. In the real world a post-apocalyptic world won't have enough food to sustain basic labour, all global supply chains will cease to exist and skirmishes for arable land and drinkable water will take over. Anything remotely needing cooperation on a greater scale than a local community will be absolutely broken. Plenty of old hardware that will cease to function in 5-10 years won't help a post-apocalyptic society for long. Constant brown outs and blackouts due to a shortage of labour, maintenance capacity (parts and labour) will absolutely wreck any chance of mining using electricity. The scarce electricity, be it solar or some lingering power plant that can continue to function with lowered maintenance will be needed to sustain life, not trade. Solar panels need a quite complex supply chain, photovoltaic cells are a high-technology product. Bitcoin won't exist in a post-apocalyptic scenario. This is a teenager fantasy of how humans work, and a technocratic one at that...
- shreyshnaccount 4y agoIts a joke account, I feel for it too xD
- piva00 4y agoYeah, I don't expect joke accounts on HN :( Just checked their profile, thanks for the heads-up!
- shreyshnaccount 4y agoIkr caught me off guard, well, here goes the redditification of HN sigh
- arka2147483647 4y agoBitcoin (or crytos, more generally) require: - Abundant power - Hightech personal electronics - Electronics manufacturing - Global and reliable networking - Education to understand it all Remove any one of those, and i think it wont work. Now there are different kinds of apocalypses, here are some thoughts: - It's a fair bet that electronics cannot be really manufactured in any kind of scale, and most current consumer electronics are not especially long lived. Give a decade, and most people will not have the gear to run Bitcoin. - If you have Abundant power, i would use it grow potatoes in greenhouses, or similar, not for crypto mining. - How would the global networking, or even local, survive the apocalypse? Given that is needed for the blockchain to sync, it seems it will stop working more-or less immediately, or worse, fork. - Which brings me to, how would people agree on which blockchain, or fork of bitcoin to use? - And most of all, if modern education systems fail also, how would anybody understand any of this anyway? On the other hand, everybody understands potatoes. Boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew. Now that is the currency of the apocalypse!
- Geee 4y agoBitcoin is a bet on the collapse of fiat money and central banks. It doesn't mean a collapse of everything. It will cause turmoil, but in the end things will be better. People are increasingly realizing that central banks don't have any scientific reason to exist, and the economy actually runs better without them. Their only reason to exist is to give unlimited power to governments and funnel wealth from the poor to the rich. Bitcoin is the bet that what I said is actually true.
- spupe 4y agoCentral banks have very rational reasons to exist. Do you have any examples of an economy operating better without a central bank?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Ekaros 4y agoCentral banks are backed by governments. And there is no way of at least western ones giving up the monetary control they offer... The results of such actions would ruin their electability for years or decades.
- spupe 4y agoYou talk as if governments are necessarily adversarial, and as if I as an average citizen would prefer that the monetary control lies with anonymous wealthy individuals rather than an electable body of representatives.
- Geee 4y agoI mean specifically the modern inflationist central banking, which started in the 20th century, and more precisely in 1914 when British pound lost its 1:1 backing in gold, ending the era of the gold standard. You must understand that monetary theft has always happened in many forms, in addition to central banking and fiat currency. For example, even in a gold coin economy, the rulers have always sought to debase the coins with various methods, such as mixing them with less valuable metals. In history, everyone understood that debasing gold coins was theft. Everything worked fine when central banks succeeded in defending the gold standard. However, things changed and this theft became modern economics, and it's difficult to question, because it's "science".