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A single Bitcoin transaction uses more energy than an Argentine family goes through in a year. As bad as the IMF is the cure you're proposing is worse than the

by drekk 4y ago

A single Bitcoin transaction uses more energy than an Argentine family goes through in a year. As bad as the IMF is the cure you're proposing is worse than the sickness. Have open banking standards. Implement proper consumer finance regulations. Fight against corporate capture of government. You aren't going to bootstrap human liberty — power concedes nothing without a demand.

ETH_start 4y ago
First of all, the average household in Argentina uses 3,500 kWh of electricity, which is 5 times more than the energy consumption of Bitcoin divided by the number of transactions it processes. Second, Bitcoin is a special case, in that its leadership deliberately chose to not scale its transaction throughput, which is independent of its mining-rewards/energy consumption. Had Bitcoin scaled, then its energy consumption would be securing a massive number of transactions, leading to far less energy expended per transaction. Right now speculation sustains this massive expenditure of resources to maintain the Bitcoin network, and if the speculators are wrong about the value of the BTC the network sustains, then they will lose a huge amount of money, and the energy consumption of the network will plummet. We should let the market decide, instead of assuming we can be so certain of the potential of novel technologies, that we can overrule millions of investors. Maybe they know something we don't? Maybe looking only at number of on-chain tranasctions processed is an incomplete analysis that misses other utility derived from Bitcoin, like off-chain transactions, store-of-value functionality, high-powered money transfersr between nation-states, etc? Bitcoin also uses Proof of Work, which the largest cryptocurrency network, Etheruem, is going to abandon in a month when it transitions to Proof of Stake. So your analysis is quite limited and doesn't justify the blanket anti-cryptocurrency stance you've taken. >>Have open banking standards. Implement proper consumer finance regulations. Fight against corporate capture of government. You aren't going to bootstrap human liberty — power concedes nothing without a demand. This puts all hope in the political process being effective. If this effort fails, people will be stuck with the same global financial system we've had for decades. You're advocating a plan that's based on a naive idealism, and there is no space for that when the stakes involve the financial well-being of billions of people. Allowing consumer choice and multiple competing ideas to co-exist is how historically societies have evolved and progressed.

by drekk 4y ago

ETH_start 4y ago

First of all, the average household in Argentina uses 3,500 kWh of electricity, which is 5 times more than the energy consumption of Bitcoin divided by the number of transactions it processes. Second, Bitcoin is a special case, in that its leadership deliberately chose to not scale its transaction throughput, which is independent of its mining-rewards/energy consumption. Had Bitcoin scaled, then its energy consumption would be securing a massive number of transactions, leading to far less energy expended per transaction. Right now speculation sustains this massive expenditure of resources to maintain the Bitcoin network, and if the speculators are wrong about the value of the BTC the network sustains, then they will lose a huge amount of money, and the energy consumption of the network will plummet. We should let the market decide, instead of assuming we can be so certain of the potential of novel technologies, that we can overrule millions of investors. Maybe they know something we don't? Maybe looking only at number of on-chain tranasctions processed is an incomplete analysis that misses other utility derived from Bitcoin, like off-chain transactions, store-of-value functionality, high-powered money transfersr between nation-states, etc? Bitcoin also uses Proof of Work, which the largest cryptocurrency network, Etheruem, is going to abandon in a month when it transitions to Proof of Stake. So your analysis is quite limited and doesn't justify the blanket anti-cryptocurrency stance you've taken. >>Have open banking standards. Implement proper consumer finance regulations. Fight against corporate capture of government. You aren't going to bootstrap human liberty — power concedes nothing without a demand. This puts all hope in the political process being effective. If this effort fails, people will be stuck with the same global financial system we've had for decades. You're advocating a plan that's based on a naive idealism, and there is no space for that when the stakes involve the financial well-being of billions of people. Allowing consumer choice and multiple competing ideas to co-exist is how historically societies have evolved and progressed.