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Bitcoin Is a Hideous Monstrosity Made Out of Computers and Greed

108 points by gimliapp 4y ago

felixbillert 4y ago
All the people conflating "bitcoin" with "crypto" are unbelievably ignorant – or simply malicious. Really goes to show how low hacker news has fallen...
ephbit 4y ago
> Hideous Monstrosity ... Greed You know what's an even worse "hideous monstrosity" than Bitcoin? The way in which a few hundred million egocentric if not sociopathic people in the global west have allowed themselves to become addicted to excessive consumption of unnecessary trash produced with dirty energy and emitting millions of tons of harmful substances, thereby wrecking the ecosphere on the whole planet. And then one of these addicts comes along and portrays Bitcoin as if it were the worst of all evil things and "devouring the world" .. all while Bitcoin is using less than 1/700 of the world's energy consumption [1] (and some of that is renewable). That's about as huge as one can fuck up prioritization of problems. [1] https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons
- ephbit 4y ago
  Think of it this way: Someone's hosting a big party somewhere in the middle of nowhere, off-the-grid, so no grid electricity. Summer, sun shining, air is hot like a hair dryer. They put up a 20 kW generator run on gasoline. It's powering several fridges for cold drinks and ice, sound system, light effects, and so on. Unfortunately the heat is too much some old person, so they need to be kept cool in a tent and luckily there's an AC unit that could keep the temperature at some tolerable level. AC would use a few kW. Dang, the generator is maxed out already with all the other stuff. Aha, someone notices a guy who's plugged in a soldering iron and is burning patterns in pieces of wood. People start arguing with the guy to stop wasting electricity on his stupid wood art, because it'd be needed for the poor person suffering from the heat. This is what's happening here. People don't even think about questioning whether the party should keep going. Whether they should just switch off the fridges. Well, maybe they are questioning, but they still have most of their attention on this one guy using maybe 50 watts. Meanwhile the sick person in the tent is getting weaker. And people outside are now shouting at this guy to unplug his damned soldering iron or the person in the tent might die.
  - ephbit 4y ago
    If you want to save the ecosphere ... you do not go about and divert people's attention - which is very much a limited resource - to minuscule factors of the problem. You do instead point them to the big pieces of the pie chart. Here's a good overview but anyone who wants to can find such info lying around everywhere: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/carbon-costs-quantified https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/carbon-costs-quantifie...
misja111 4y ago
Interesting that articles like this are coming from everywhere at the moment, now that BTC$ is tanking. But when Bitcoin price was still going up, they were not all that popular, also not on HN. It seems the moral argument for Bitcoin is positively correlated with its price.
- rubatuga 4y ago
  More like now is the best time to convince others that shitcoins are a thing.
- piva00 4y ago
  They were pretty popular on HN, always been. I know because I participated in a lot of discussions the past years here about all the stupidity going around the cryptocurrency space. Don't let your biases write your comments.
  - sshine 4y ago
    Cryptocurrency criticism was prevalent for years on HN, yes. But the popularity of the criticism is increasing with its recent price drop.
    - rsynnott 4y ago
      That seems... expected? Magical internet money is more on peoples' minds than usual at the moment, so it's natural that stuff about it would get more engagement.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > the popularity of the criticism is increasing with its recent price drop This is how theories are proposed, vetted and adopted [1]. Bitcoin was proposed as a solution to a set of problems. Over time, the null hypothesis was refined. We're now seeing, with the tide going out, strong evidence to support it. So people are switching sides, or taking a side for the first time. In Kuhn's words, a paradigm shift was experimented with and appears to be in the process of being rejected. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
Proven 4y ago
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csee 4y ago
> I can also assure you perpetual futures would not be allowed to trade on any exchange inside the legitimate financial system. I don't disagree that the point of perpetual futures on crypto exchanges is primarily to facilitate speculation and gambling, but they're just delta 1 derivatives (track the underlying 1:1) in the form of a CFD, different in mechanism but no different in use case to regular futures, which themselves are traded widely on traditional exchanges. And these perps are quite useful to temporarily hedge holdings, even more convenient than regular futures since you don't have to bother with rollover. The instrument itself is really cool. The criticism should be directed to the high amounts of leverage which is only ever useful in a gambling context, and the marketing + gamification aspects which are clearly targeted at encouraging gambling behavior. If Binance got rid of their perpetual futures, users could still gamble all the same using Binance's regular futures contracts.
- cypress66 4y ago
  I never understood gambling addicts (me having gone to the casino and found it boring). But when I did some YOLO trades with insane leverage I felt what addicts feel. So I never touched leverage again except maybe 1.5x at most.
  - deleted 4y ago
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danamit 4y ago
I am someone from a developing country who regularly used crypto either to get paid, or to pay for things online. Does crypto have issues? yes. Is it good enough that in occasion it was my preferred payment method? yes. Crypto community and companies are maybe bad, but if you zoom out into IT overall there is a fair share of greed and misuse. The internet is full of scams, gurus selling courses with false claims, spam emails that drain your grandpa's account, affiliate programs with 70% margin to sell fake products from questionable weight loss ebooks with health-harming diets to fragrances claiming to be perfumes that attract females supported by endless fake video testimonies, online communities encouraging hate, demoralization, and lack of belief in society. Seem to me that those articles are nothing but status quo bias, does crypto has bad aspects? yes, is it worse than say internet? I don't know.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  Did "gurus selling courses" have 3T market cap? Did "affiliate programs with 70% margin" emit more CO2 than New Zealand? Once the scam can cripple whole countries, it becomes dangerous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War
  - Grimburger 4y ago
    Doesn't spam email energy usage come in close to 50TWh? That's from memory. Only decent link I can find on this is from 13 years ago with 33TWh: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/2010/oct/21/carbon-footprint-email https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...
    - KptMarchewa 4y ago
      And everyone agrees it's waste of time and energy, except actual scammers - spammers, right?
      - forum_ghost 4y ago
        An open and permission-less global monetary network that does not exclude anyone at all, is about as valuable to you as malformed viagra emails? 4 billion people today live under less than ideal circumstances. Spending a fraction of a percent of global electricity is absolutely worth it. It provides those 4 billion people with access to the financial services that they would otherwise never get. Nigeria alone has 34+ million users. Just one country. What, they are all scammers to you?
pmoriarty 4y ago
More accurately, bitcoin is a way for criminals to launder money.
bluelightning2k 4y ago
This is very, very well written. Recommend reading in its entirity.
potatototoo99 4y ago
I usually brush aside these doomsday articles about crypto, but the linked article is really depressing: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankman-fried-described-yield-farming-and-left-matt-levine-stunned https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm... I remember nicer days when crypto had some value, and yes exchanges were already shady and did a lot of washing, but there was clearly a closer approximation to market sentiment and real world use cases. Nowadays everything seems to be revolve around derivatives, margin lending, yielding and staking to be margin lent again. The problem, IMO, might actually have been smart contracts.
- deleted 4y ago
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- scotty79 4y ago
  The thing they describe as the box is literally a Ponzi scheme. You put in some money and you get high guaranteed return. You have money, and you even can cash out some unless too many people try to cash out at the same time. Then it turns out there's no money to cover the returns. Key innovation that further obfuscates this is that instead of cashing out directly you might use IOUs from the Ponzi scheme as a collateral to borrow some money and never pay it back leaving your Ponzi collateral with person that borrowed you money. Noone has an incentive to cash out direclty to not endanger percieved valuability of Ponzi box. And everybody has incentive to push as much IOUs to as many new people as possible in exchange for hard currency.
  - junofan 4y ago
    It’s not a Ponzi scheme. It’s a bubble—the belief is that prices will rise on the open market. You get tokens for putting money in the box. You can sell the tokens on an exchange later for cash. The cash comes from exchange participants, not box people. All the box people receive the tokens they expect. They don’t receive tokens from new box people. If it’s 1995 and Toys R Us is giving away Beanie Babies to the first 250,000 Elmo buyers, that’s not a Ponzi. If somebody buys lots of Elmos to flip Beanie Babies knowing 250,000 Beanie Babies are going to hit the market, they are delusional. It’s still not a Ponzi. It’s a bubble.
hardmoney99 4y ago
Bitcoin is the solution to the fundamentally broken debt-driven economy. Critics don't get it because they lump it together with "cryptocurrency". While technically a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin does not exhibit any of the ponzi, scam-like shenanigans that are easily observable in shitcoins. Yes, there is a lot of crazy stuff happening with wash trading - but this is a byproduct of lack of regulation and has nothing to do with the thing that is Bitcoin. Most critics just don't understand what problem Bitcoin solves. They think it has something to do with replacing currency, or sending payments. Bitcoin is a financial freedom tool for billions of people, the likes of which do not browse Hacker News. Those people get Bitcoin instantly. They don't need articles like this one to tell them why their needs are unmet by the traditional finance system. The thing that Bitcoin critics lack is the understanding of credit markets, central banking and manipulation of money - the source of a large number of problems in the world. To them, everything is fine. Reminds me of that meme where the place is on fire and the dog is sitting in the middle of the room - that's the Bitcoin critic.
- achow 4y ago
  > Bitcoin is a financial freedom tool for billions of people, the likes of which do not browse Hacker News These people are most vulnerable of the lot. They live hand to mouth, don't posses computing devices (may be cheap China smartphone). I cannot fathom how this demography manages bitcoin assets, manages to purchase their basic needs (which is all they can afford) using coins and not to mention this market crash when even millionaires are feeling the pinch.
  - hardmoney99 4y ago
    What you describe here is grouping of thousands of different types of demographics into one. The reality is very different depending where you live, and your level of technology access varies. A fleeing Ukrainian is very well versed in Bitcoin - Ukraine has one of the highest levels of adoption. A Nigerian is also very versed in Bitcoin - despite their government's attempt at curtailing use, they still find a way. A kid in Congo may or may not have access to a smart phone - that I have no way of knowing, but I do know that cell phone access is ubiquitous in Africa despite what many imagine or believe. Sure, their needs may be better served by a stable coin, but that does not relieve bitcoin of value. A Salvadorian may or may not understand Bitcoin - but this is like asking the population to understand how your email protocol works - there's a lot to learn. Even in a country like Japan, Bitcoin is becoming a safe haven with the Yen losing 20% of its value when comparing to USD. Going back to the topic of the "most vulnerable", a bank that you and I take for granted is a luxury in many of Africa's nations. Bitcoin is a permission-less banking system. Does it have technological hurdles for the average person to overcome? Yes. But this is all being worked on right now by people I talk to every day. The same way that most people have no idea how SMTP works, you won't really need to understand behind the scenes of Bitcoin. There are various levels of autonomy and people will fall on the spectrum of where they are comfortable, with the level of privacy / security that most fits their Bitcoin education. You might find this short video interesting (only 10 seconds or so): https://twitter.com/HODLneverSODL/status/1518134911244320769?s=20&t=St1zY7CDI-XoQlZvTmBvnQ https://twitter.com/HODLneverSODL/status/1518134911244320769...
drdrek 4y ago
The author is a bit melodramatic. Yes there are mostly scams in the space, but that is not a bug, its a feature of less regulation. Most advocates of Crypto like most critics think about Crypto from the perspective of a consumer, which is misguided. How many people, especially technically minded people, know the boring technical intricacies of the financial sector? Not many. The concepts, if not necessarily the current implementations of them will be used by large financial institutions to generate better margins, help High net worth individuals to avoid taxes better and possibly some other very boring things around decentralized consensus algorithms. Defi is interesting to Vanguard and Citi, not to the consumer. It will not revolutionize the world, nor destroy it... like most technology it will create a few successful companies and make some people rich. PS Just to be clear, it is currently a dumpster fire that needs to be regulated ASAP. But its not going to do much more than pump a bit of cash from poor people to scumbags, that is not new.
macinjosh 4y ago
Humans are so funny. Blaming the flawed tools we create for the problems caused by using them in all of our flawed manners. Bitcoin is a tool, like any other. Tools can be used constructively or destructively. The ease and affordability of transferring remittances internationally is the single most useful case for Bitcoin. In those instances value is not kept in BTC except for the duration of the transfer so it is not as susceptible to the market fluctuations. On top of that it is much faster and sometimes cheaper even for more local transactions like invoices for freelancers to be done via BTC. The banking systems have failed in a lot of ways related to the above use cases. In the US it can still take days for a check or transfer to clear. Red tape and fees abound when transferring large amounts between parties. PayPal will just shutoff your account because they don't want the risk. etc. etc. In the future I expect to see BTC to mainly utilized for these types of financial transfers and less as a long-term store of value. Of course like any item of value there will always be the speculation side.
- Nursie 4y ago
  > In the US Problem identified.
  - macinjosh 4y ago
    Hateful much? Sorry I was born here and not the super awesome perfect place you are from.
    - Nursie 4y ago
      Not in the slightest. The US is a fine country. But it lags behind in banking and payments.
      - Nursie 4y ago
        Acrually I take this back, the US is not a fine country, it's an utter mess.
        4y ago
scotty79 4y ago
And it works beautifully enriching people who understand greed-panic cycles on regularily reduced supply.
rob_c 4y ago
Frankly the author may have a point but calling something "demonic" rings of a bitchute rant. So thanks, but no thank you, have enough "fringe truths" to deal with from enough other people...
olalonde 4y ago
Yet another "criticism" which is entirely focused on price and groups together a bunch of unrelated people, companies and cryptocurrencies...
- regularjack 4y ago
  I mean, yes? That's what the article is about, the cryptocurrency space. What subjects do you think it should discuss instead?
  - birracerveza 4y ago
    There is a technological foundation that gets lost between all the money games that are being played on top of it and gets ignored or dismissed as a result, so you get opinions like "Bitcoin Is A Hideous Monstrosity Made Out Of Computers And Greed That Must Be Destroyed Before It Devours The World". There is no room for discussion here, and it's depressing to see how many people want to throw the baby out with the bathwater; instead of asking for it to be regulated in a sane manner they want to outright ban the use of said technology, which I would define as barbaric... imagine banning fire because people got burnt! The blockchain, smart contracts and NFTs are amazing technologies that could do wonders for mankind if properly used, but too many people, including tech literates, refuse to dig into it after seeing folks being defrauded out of their life savings and ruining their lives because they took a loan for hundreds of thousands of dollars on a jpeg of a badly drawn monkey. For them crypto is bad, period. There is nothing else to talk about because it's an absolute truth, what subject should there be to discuss? Might as well argue about the possibility of God not existing with religious extremists.
    - carapace 4y ago
      > The blockchain, smart contracts and NFTs are amazing technologies that could do wonders for mankind Like what? I'm seriously. (Not trolling, not trying to feed fires.) To me the whole thing seems bad, period, but I'm willing to entertain the idea that I'm wrong. FWIW, I think "crypto" et. al. (in quotes because to me the term means "cryptography") is pointless because the Earth is small relative to the speed of light. Once we go interplanetary maybe there is a use for blockchain &c., but until then trustworthy centralized systems are obviously better.
timcavel 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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adrianchifor 4y ago
Many of my Ukraininan/Russian friends would not be alive today if it wasn't for crypto, same goes for many journalists and innocent civilians that escaped controlling governments, war zones, hyperinflation etc. Show me another asset that you can take with you in times of crisis on a usb stick or piece of paper, and transact without middle-men globally. A significant number of people live in places where saying/doing something controversial can get your assets frozen (Canada '22) or much worse. Sure BTC uses a lot of electricity, but so does the US military which is key to maintaining the $ as global reserve currency. There are many people and projects in crypto trying to do the right thing about energy (https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/). Dunno why you would fight against a fair, open, censorship-resistant, global financial system, unless you're a dictator. You won't need it, until you do.
- carapace 4y ago
  > Dunno why you would fight against a fair, open, censorship-resistant, global financial system If that's all it was then you would be correct, only nasty folks would be against it. But that's not all it is, or even the main thing it is. The same qualities that make it useful for your friends during a war also make it useful for various sorts of crime, but all the time not just under (what should be) highly unusual and dangerous circumstances. The fight here is all of us against the dictators and warmongers. If we work to create a "fair, open, censorship-resistant, global financial system" together we can do that without enabling scammers and crooks.
  - forum_ghost 4y ago
    How do you create an “open and censorship resistant system” that blocks only a specific category of people? First we start with scammers and crooks, then fast forward a little, and suddenly now we are doing civil forfeitures? Either something is permissionless, or it isn’t.
    - carapace 4y ago
      > How do you create an “open and censorship resistant system” that blocks only a specific category of people? The current rise of ubiquitous surveillance is already creating a censorship-resistant system. Whether it's open or not is a matter of policy, rather than technology. > First we start with scammers and crooks, then fast forward a little, and suddenly now we are doing civil forfeitures? That's a really good point: I would hope if there were more footage of civil forfeiture it would be harder to get away with it, eh? If everybody can see what everybody else-- including police and politicians --is up to then we can only get away with what everybody (or most everybody) accepts. I call it the "Tyranny of Mrs. Grundy".
tossl568 4y ago
Yeah yeah. Bitcoin is an open financial network that anybody can use and nobody controls and is secured by energy. What an amazing, historical feat of human ingenuity. It's neutral and just like the internet can be used by anybody. We're not going to apologise for its energy use.
- lolsal 4y ago
  >Yeah yeah. Bitcoin is an open financial network that anybody can use and nobody controls and is secured by energy. What an amazing, historical feat of human ingenuity. It's neutral and just like the internet can be used by anybody. We're not going to apologise for its energy use. If you think the ends justifies the means, I suppose you could do anything.
  - tossl568 4y ago
    Bitcoin disappearing tomorrow wouldn't make a dent in our current fossil fuel emissions. Bitcoin mining ASICs don't emit CO2. Take it up with policymakers who subsidize fossil fuels.
    - lolsal 4y ago
      > Bitcoin disappearing tomorrow wouldn't make a dent in our current fossil fuel emissions. Bitcoin mining ASICs don't emit CO2. Take it up with policymakers who subsidize fossil fuels. This sounds a lot like you're not contesting the assertion that Bitcoin uses lots of energy, but deflecting the issue by saying it is irrelevant that it uses lots of energy and it's more the responsibility of policymakers to make the energy it uses clean instead of dirty. Am I understanding you correctly? I don't think I've ever heard anyone argue that mining literally emits CO2; the concern is about where the energy itself comes from.
      - tossl568 4y ago
        I'm not contesting it no. And I'm saying it's a perfectly valid use of energy. It will use even more energy in future. And it's worth it. Energy use doesn't need defending and isn't a bad thing. Energy secures the financial network, it's doing that work, even if the network isn't useful to you. Disincentivising fossil fuel use for every purpose needs to happen, not just Bitcoin.
nh23423fefe 4y ago
> centi-billion 10 million

108 points by gimliapp 4y ago

All the people conflating "bitcoin" with "crypto" are unbelievably ignorant – or simply malicious. Really goes to show how low hacker news has fallen...

ephbit 4y ago

> Hideous Monstrosity ... Greed You know what's an even worse "hideous monstrosity" than Bitcoin? The way in which a few hundred million egocentric if not sociopathic people in the global west have allowed themselves to become addicted to excessive consumption of unnecessary trash produced with dirty energy and emitting millions of tons of harmful substances, thereby wrecking the ecosphere on the whole planet. And then one of these addicts comes along and portrays Bitcoin as if it were the worst of all evil things and "devouring the world" .. all while Bitcoin is using less than 1/700 of the world's energy consumption [1] (and some of that is renewable). That's about as huge as one can fuck up prioritization of problems. [1] https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons

ephbit 4y ago
Think of it this way: Someone's hosting a big party somewhere in the middle of nowhere, off-the-grid, so no grid electricity. Summer, sun shining, air is hot like a hair dryer. They put up a 20 kW generator run on gasoline. It's powering several fridges for cold drinks and ice, sound system, light effects, and so on. Unfortunately the heat is too much some old person, so they need to be kept cool in a tent and luckily there's an AC unit that could keep the temperature at some tolerable level. AC would use a few kW. Dang, the generator is maxed out already with all the other stuff. Aha, someone notices a guy who's plugged in a soldering iron and is burning patterns in pieces of wood. People start arguing with the guy to stop wasting electricity on his stupid wood art, because it'd be needed for the poor person suffering from the heat. This is what's happening here. People don't even think about questioning whether the party should keep going. Whether they should just switch off the fridges. Well, maybe they are questioning, but they still have most of their attention on this one guy using maybe 50 watts. Meanwhile the sick person in the tent is getting weaker. And people outside are now shouting at this guy to unplug his damned soldering iron or the person in the tent might die.
- ephbit 4y ago
  If you want to save the ecosphere ... you do not go about and divert people's attention - which is very much a limited resource - to minuscule factors of the problem. You do instead point them to the big pieces of the pie chart. Here's a good overview but anyone who wants to can find such info lying around everywhere: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/carbon-costs-quantified https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/carbon-costs-quantifie...

misja111 4y ago

Interesting that articles like this are coming from everywhere at the moment, now that BTC$ is tanking. But when Bitcoin price was still going up, they were not all that popular, also not on HN. It seems the moral argument for Bitcoin is positively correlated with its price.

rubatuga 4y ago
More like now is the best time to convince others that shitcoins are a thing.
piva00 4y ago
They were pretty popular on HN, always been. I know because I participated in a lot of discussions the past years here about all the stupidity going around the cryptocurrency space. Don't let your biases write your comments.
- sshine 4y ago
  Cryptocurrency criticism was prevalent for years on HN, yes. But the popularity of the criticism is increasing with its recent price drop.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    That seems... expected? Magical internet money is more on peoples' minds than usual at the moment, so it's natural that stuff about it would get more engagement.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > the popularity of the criticism is increasing with its recent price drop This is how theories are proposed, vetted and adopted [1]. Bitcoin was proposed as a solution to a set of problems. Over time, the null hypothesis was refined. We're now seeing, with the tide going out, strong evidence to support it. So people are switching sides, or taking a side for the first time. In Kuhn's words, a paradigm shift was experimented with and appears to be in the process of being rejected. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

Proven 4y ago

[dead]

csee 4y ago

> I can also assure you perpetual futures would not be allowed to trade on any exchange inside the legitimate financial system. I don't disagree that the point of perpetual futures on crypto exchanges is primarily to facilitate speculation and gambling, but they're just delta 1 derivatives (track the underlying 1:1) in the form of a CFD, different in mechanism but no different in use case to regular futures, which themselves are traded widely on traditional exchanges. And these perps are quite useful to temporarily hedge holdings, even more convenient than regular futures since you don't have to bother with rollover. The instrument itself is really cool. The criticism should be directed to the high amounts of leverage which is only ever useful in a gambling context, and the marketing + gamification aspects which are clearly targeted at encouraging gambling behavior. If Binance got rid of their perpetual futures, users could still gamble all the same using Binance's regular futures contracts.

cypress66 4y ago
I never understood gambling addicts (me having gone to the casino and found it boring). But when I did some YOLO trades with insane leverage I felt what addicts feel. So I never touched leverage again except maybe 1.5x at most.
- deleted 4y ago
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danamit 4y ago

I am someone from a developing country who regularly used crypto either to get paid, or to pay for things online. Does crypto have issues? yes. Is it good enough that in occasion it was my preferred payment method? yes. Crypto community and companies are maybe bad, but if you zoom out into IT overall there is a fair share of greed and misuse. The internet is full of scams, gurus selling courses with false claims, spam emails that drain your grandpa's account, affiliate programs with 70% margin to sell fake products from questionable weight loss ebooks with health-harming diets to fragrances claiming to be perfumes that attract females supported by endless fake video testimonies, online communities encouraging hate, demoralization, and lack of belief in society. Seem to me that those articles are nothing but status quo bias, does crypto has bad aspects? yes, is it worse than say internet? I don't know.

KptMarchewa 4y ago
Did "gurus selling courses" have 3T market cap? Did "affiliate programs with 70% margin" emit more CO2 than New Zealand? Once the scam can cripple whole countries, it becomes dangerous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War
- Grimburger 4y ago
  Doesn't spam email energy usage come in close to 50TWh? That's from memory. Only decent link I can find on this is from 13 years ago with 33TWh: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/2010/oct/21/carbon-footprint-email https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    And everyone agrees it's waste of time and energy, except actual scammers - spammers, right?
    - forum_ghost 4y ago
      An open and permission-less global monetary network that does not exclude anyone at all, is about as valuable to you as malformed viagra emails? 4 billion people today live under less than ideal circumstances. Spending a fraction of a percent of global electricity is absolutely worth it. It provides those 4 billion people with access to the financial services that they would otherwise never get. Nigeria alone has 34+ million users. Just one country. What, they are all scammers to you?

pmoriarty 4y ago

More accurately, bitcoin is a way for criminals to launder money.

bluelightning2k 4y ago

This is very, very well written. Recommend reading in its entirity.

potatototoo99 4y ago

I usually brush aside these doomsday articles about crypto, but the linked article is really depressing: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankman-fried-described-yield-farming-and-left-matt-levine-stunned https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm... I remember nicer days when crypto had some value, and yes exchanges were already shady and did a lot of washing, but there was clearly a closer approximation to market sentiment and real world use cases. Nowadays everything seems to be revolve around derivatives, margin lending, yielding and staking to be margin lent again. The problem, IMO, might actually have been smart contracts.

deleted 4y ago
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scotty79 4y ago
The thing they describe as the box is literally a Ponzi scheme. You put in some money and you get high guaranteed return. You have money, and you even can cash out some unless too many people try to cash out at the same time. Then it turns out there's no money to cover the returns. Key innovation that further obfuscates this is that instead of cashing out directly you might use IOUs from the Ponzi scheme as a collateral to borrow some money and never pay it back leaving your Ponzi collateral with person that borrowed you money. Noone has an incentive to cash out direclty to not endanger percieved valuability of Ponzi box. And everybody has incentive to push as much IOUs to as many new people as possible in exchange for hard currency.
- junofan 4y ago
  It’s not a Ponzi scheme. It’s a bubble—the belief is that prices will rise on the open market. You get tokens for putting money in the box. You can sell the tokens on an exchange later for cash. The cash comes from exchange participants, not box people. All the box people receive the tokens they expect. They don’t receive tokens from new box people. If it’s 1995 and Toys R Us is giving away Beanie Babies to the first 250,000 Elmo buyers, that’s not a Ponzi. If somebody buys lots of Elmos to flip Beanie Babies knowing 250,000 Beanie Babies are going to hit the market, they are delusional. It’s still not a Ponzi. It’s a bubble.

hardmoney99 4y ago

Bitcoin is the solution to the fundamentally broken debt-driven economy. Critics don't get it because they lump it together with "cryptocurrency". While technically a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin does not exhibit any of the ponzi, scam-like shenanigans that are easily observable in shitcoins. Yes, there is a lot of crazy stuff happening with wash trading - but this is a byproduct of lack of regulation and has nothing to do with the thing that is Bitcoin. Most critics just don't understand what problem Bitcoin solves. They think it has something to do with replacing currency, or sending payments. Bitcoin is a financial freedom tool for billions of people, the likes of which do not browse Hacker News. Those people get Bitcoin instantly. They don't need articles like this one to tell them why their needs are unmet by the traditional finance system. The thing that Bitcoin critics lack is the understanding of credit markets, central banking and manipulation of money - the source of a large number of problems in the world. To them, everything is fine. Reminds me of that meme where the place is on fire and the dog is sitting in the middle of the room - that's the Bitcoin critic.

achow 4y ago
> Bitcoin is a financial freedom tool for billions of people, the likes of which do not browse Hacker News These people are most vulnerable of the lot. They live hand to mouth, don't posses computing devices (may be cheap China smartphone). I cannot fathom how this demography manages bitcoin assets, manages to purchase their basic needs (which is all they can afford) using coins and not to mention this market crash when even millionaires are feeling the pinch.
- hardmoney99 4y ago
  What you describe here is grouping of thousands of different types of demographics into one. The reality is very different depending where you live, and your level of technology access varies. A fleeing Ukrainian is very well versed in Bitcoin - Ukraine has one of the highest levels of adoption. A Nigerian is also very versed in Bitcoin - despite their government's attempt at curtailing use, they still find a way. A kid in Congo may or may not have access to a smart phone - that I have no way of knowing, but I do know that cell phone access is ubiquitous in Africa despite what many imagine or believe. Sure, their needs may be better served by a stable coin, but that does not relieve bitcoin of value. A Salvadorian may or may not understand Bitcoin - but this is like asking the population to understand how your email protocol works - there's a lot to learn. Even in a country like Japan, Bitcoin is becoming a safe haven with the Yen losing 20% of its value when comparing to USD. Going back to the topic of the "most vulnerable", a bank that you and I take for granted is a luxury in many of Africa's nations. Bitcoin is a permission-less banking system. Does it have technological hurdles for the average person to overcome? Yes. But this is all being worked on right now by people I talk to every day. The same way that most people have no idea how SMTP works, you won't really need to understand behind the scenes of Bitcoin. There are various levels of autonomy and people will fall on the spectrum of where they are comfortable, with the level of privacy / security that most fits their Bitcoin education. You might find this short video interesting (only 10 seconds or so): https://twitter.com/HODLneverSODL/status/1518134911244320769?s=20&t=St1zY7CDI-XoQlZvTmBvnQ https://twitter.com/HODLneverSODL/status/1518134911244320769...

drdrek 4y ago

The author is a bit melodramatic. Yes there are mostly scams in the space, but that is not a bug, its a feature of less regulation. Most advocates of Crypto like most critics think about Crypto from the perspective of a consumer, which is misguided. How many people, especially technically minded people, know the boring technical intricacies of the financial sector? Not many. The concepts, if not necessarily the current implementations of them will be used by large financial institutions to generate better margins, help High net worth individuals to avoid taxes better and possibly some other very boring things around decentralized consensus algorithms. Defi is interesting to Vanguard and Citi, not to the consumer. It will not revolutionize the world, nor destroy it... like most technology it will create a few successful companies and make some people rich. PS Just to be clear, it is currently a dumpster fire that needs to be regulated ASAP. But its not going to do much more than pump a bit of cash from poor people to scumbags, that is not new.

macinjosh 4y ago

Humans are so funny. Blaming the flawed tools we create for the problems caused by using them in all of our flawed manners. Bitcoin is a tool, like any other. Tools can be used constructively or destructively. The ease and affordability of transferring remittances internationally is the single most useful case for Bitcoin. In those instances value is not kept in BTC except for the duration of the transfer so it is not as susceptible to the market fluctuations. On top of that it is much faster and sometimes cheaper even for more local transactions like invoices for freelancers to be done via BTC. The banking systems have failed in a lot of ways related to the above use cases. In the US it can still take days for a check or transfer to clear. Red tape and fees abound when transferring large amounts between parties. PayPal will just shutoff your account because they don't want the risk. etc. etc. In the future I expect to see BTC to mainly utilized for these types of financial transfers and less as a long-term store of value. Of course like any item of value there will always be the speculation side.

Nursie 4y ago
> In the US Problem identified.
- macinjosh 4y ago
  Hateful much? Sorry I was born here and not the super awesome perfect place you are from.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    Not in the slightest. The US is a fine country. But it lags behind in banking and payments.
    - Nursie 4y ago
      Acrually I take this back, the US is not a fine country, it's an utter mess.
      - 4y ago

scotty79 4y ago

And it works beautifully enriching people who understand greed-panic cycles on regularily reduced supply.

rob_c 4y ago

Frankly the author may have a point but calling something "demonic" rings of a bitchute rant. So thanks, but no thank you, have enough "fringe truths" to deal with from enough other people...

olalonde 4y ago

Yet another "criticism" which is entirely focused on price and groups together a bunch of unrelated people, companies and cryptocurrencies...

regularjack 4y ago
I mean, yes? That's what the article is about, the cryptocurrency space. What subjects do you think it should discuss instead?
- birracerveza 4y ago
  There is a technological foundation that gets lost between all the money games that are being played on top of it and gets ignored or dismissed as a result, so you get opinions like "Bitcoin Is A Hideous Monstrosity Made Out Of Computers And Greed That Must Be Destroyed Before It Devours The World". There is no room for discussion here, and it's depressing to see how many people want to throw the baby out with the bathwater; instead of asking for it to be regulated in a sane manner they want to outright ban the use of said technology, which I would define as barbaric... imagine banning fire because people got burnt! The blockchain, smart contracts and NFTs are amazing technologies that could do wonders for mankind if properly used, but too many people, including tech literates, refuse to dig into it after seeing folks being defrauded out of their life savings and ruining their lives because they took a loan for hundreds of thousands of dollars on a jpeg of a badly drawn monkey. For them crypto is bad, period. There is nothing else to talk about because it's an absolute truth, what subject should there be to discuss? Might as well argue about the possibility of God not existing with religious extremists.
  - carapace 4y ago
    > The blockchain, smart contracts and NFTs are amazing technologies that could do wonders for mankind Like what? I'm seriously. (Not trolling, not trying to feed fires.) To me the whole thing seems bad, period, but I'm willing to entertain the idea that I'm wrong. FWIW, I think "crypto" et. al. (in quotes because to me the term means "cryptography") is pointless because the Earth is small relative to the speed of light. Once we go interplanetary maybe there is a use for blockchain &c., but until then trustworthy centralized systems are obviously better.

timcavel 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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adrianchifor 4y ago

Many of my Ukraininan/Russian friends would not be alive today if it wasn't for crypto, same goes for many journalists and innocent civilians that escaped controlling governments, war zones, hyperinflation etc. Show me another asset that you can take with you in times of crisis on a usb stick or piece of paper, and transact without middle-men globally. A significant number of people live in places where saying/doing something controversial can get your assets frozen (Canada '22) or much worse. Sure BTC uses a lot of electricity, but so does the US military which is key to maintaining the $ as global reserve currency. There are many people and projects in crypto trying to do the right thing about energy (https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/). Dunno why you would fight against a fair, open, censorship-resistant, global financial system, unless you're a dictator. You won't need it, until you do.

carapace 4y ago
> Dunno why you would fight against a fair, open, censorship-resistant, global financial system If that's all it was then you would be correct, only nasty folks would be against it. But that's not all it is, or even the main thing it is. The same qualities that make it useful for your friends during a war also make it useful for various sorts of crime, but all the time not just under (what should be) highly unusual and dangerous circumstances. The fight here is all of us against the dictators and warmongers. If we work to create a "fair, open, censorship-resistant, global financial system" together we can do that without enabling scammers and crooks.
- forum_ghost 4y ago
  How do you create an “open and censorship resistant system” that blocks only a specific category of people? First we start with scammers and crooks, then fast forward a little, and suddenly now we are doing civil forfeitures? Either something is permissionless, or it isn’t.
  - carapace 4y ago
    > How do you create an “open and censorship resistant system” that blocks only a specific category of people? The current rise of ubiquitous surveillance is already creating a censorship-resistant system. Whether it's open or not is a matter of policy, rather than technology. > First we start with scammers and crooks, then fast forward a little, and suddenly now we are doing civil forfeitures? That's a really good point: I would hope if there were more footage of civil forfeiture it would be harder to get away with it, eh? If everybody can see what everybody else-- including police and politicians --is up to then we can only get away with what everybody (or most everybody) accepts. I call it the "Tyranny of Mrs. Grundy".

tossl568 4y ago

Yeah yeah. Bitcoin is an open financial network that anybody can use and nobody controls and is secured by energy. What an amazing, historical feat of human ingenuity. It's neutral and just like the internet can be used by anybody. We're not going to apologise for its energy use.

lolsal 4y ago
>Yeah yeah. Bitcoin is an open financial network that anybody can use and nobody controls and is secured by energy. What an amazing, historical feat of human ingenuity. It's neutral and just like the internet can be used by anybody. We're not going to apologise for its energy use. If you think the ends justifies the means, I suppose you could do anything.
- tossl568 4y ago
  Bitcoin disappearing tomorrow wouldn't make a dent in our current fossil fuel emissions. Bitcoin mining ASICs don't emit CO2. Take it up with policymakers who subsidize fossil fuels.
  - lolsal 4y ago
    > Bitcoin disappearing tomorrow wouldn't make a dent in our current fossil fuel emissions. Bitcoin mining ASICs don't emit CO2. Take it up with policymakers who subsidize fossil fuels. This sounds a lot like you're not contesting the assertion that Bitcoin uses lots of energy, but deflecting the issue by saying it is irrelevant that it uses lots of energy and it's more the responsibility of policymakers to make the energy it uses clean instead of dirty. Am I understanding you correctly? I don't think I've ever heard anyone argue that mining literally emits CO2; the concern is about where the energy itself comes from.
    - tossl568 4y ago
      I'm not contesting it no. And I'm saying it's a perfectly valid use of energy. It will use even more energy in future. And it's worth it. Energy use doesn't need defending and isn't a bad thing. Energy secures the financial network, it's doing that work, even if the network isn't useful to you. Disincentivising fossil fuel use for every purpose needs to happen, not just Bitcoin.

nh23423fefe 4y ago

> centi-billion 10 million