11 ms·

Economic estimation of Bitcoin mining’s climate damages

58 points by gusgus01 4y ago

timcavel 4y ago
hoppyhoppy2 4y ago
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33023882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33023882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33023115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33023115
superkuh 4y ago
These analyses never take into account the energy other currencies need to keep themselves stable. Usually it is in the form of a standing army, or the diplomatic trades necessary to benefit from an allied country's standing army. The energy needed to maintain a credible modern standing army is incomparably more than Bitcoin is using. And not only that, bitcoin protects itself non-violently while fiat currencies depend on violence. These other resources it is compared to do not have to protect themselves, or, if you included the resources spent doing so, would far outstrip Bitcoin.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  I didn't realize "world peace" was now a selling point for bitcoin. Curious how switching currencies will stop invasions and genocide and such...
  - UncleOxidant 4y ago
- SrslyJosh 4y ago
  > Usually it is in the form of a standing army, or the diplomatic trades necessary to benefit from an allied country's standing army. Citation needed.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  It's not currencies that are protected by threats of violence. It's countries. They would still spend all that money if everyone used bitcoin.
  - brutusborn 4y ago
    Counterfeiting is prevented by police forces via violence, so I would argue that some of the police energy budget could be included. Police are kept in power by militaries, so some of the military's budget should be included too.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      Counterfeiting is mostly prevented through security measures on the bill itself which can be confirmed through counterfeit detectors. The police force just makes it easier for people to not have to carry detectors and use them for every single transaction. Aka optimistic security. Anyway, the problem is even if you do all of that, Bitcoin miners also pay taxes that fund the military and Bitcoin miners depend on property rights, landownership, electricity infrastructure, fiat currency just like any other company. Internalising these costs makes the economy more efficient, it doesn't absolve Bitcoin of benefiting from human violence.
      - brutusborn 4y ago
        Isn't the energy cost of this violence the real point though? Proof of work cost is analogous to the police violence/detection/bill security costs you mention, so that is what we should be comparing. The cost of land ownership, security and electricity is included in the cost of POW, so including it is counting double. You could argue the police help secure the miners from physical theft, but they also help prevent physical theft from fiat banks, so shouldn't that be equal if not in favour of bitcoin?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  These analyses also never take into account all the energy used to make all the goods and services in the global economy that bitcoin can be used purchase. Or not comparing it to the total energy output of the sun which shines down on the earth which has people on it who use bitcoin. These analyzes are therefore flawed.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  Fun fact: there exist currencies that have maintained stability despite the country in question lacking any kind of military. Funner fact: there exists one fiat currency that maintained stability despite the government in question effectively ceasing to exist. Funnest fact: the energy invested in the maintenance of appropriate armed forces appears to have no correlation with the stability or lack thereof of a currency. I mean, there's just no evidence that stability of fiat currency is driven by military considerations as opposed to, say, fiscal and monetary policy.
  - imgabe 4y ago
    > Fun fact: there exist currencies that have maintained stability despite the country in question lacking any kind of military. Such as? And for a further question, would they have remained stable if other countries had not invested in their military to the point that the world in general remained peaceful? The US gets a lot of criticism for military spending, but the fact is, the rest of the world leeched off this by enjoying the peace and prosperity that was created by having one country be such an overwhelming superpower that it discouraged wars everywhere. Now, the US is starting to show weakness and with the Ukraine we immediately see the effects of not having a 500 pound gorilla in the room to keep everyone else in line.
    - xracy 4y ago
      You're creating a really difficult causal link. Does the US' military create peace and prosperity? I would disagree with your assessment of that for Ukraine.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - jcranmer 4y ago
      > Such as? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_armed_forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_arme... Mostly the European microstates and several Caribbean and Pacific islands, but if you don't count a gendarmerie as armed forces, you could include Costa Rica and Panama--two not-tiny countries--in the list. (If you do count them, the largest is the Solomon Islands). > And for a further question, would they have remained stable if other countries had not invested in their military to the point that the world in general remained peaceful? That this question is being asked is I think a concession of the underlying point: fiat currencies aren't maintained by military investment, not in the same way that Bitcon is maintained by hashing power. Furthermore, it's not at all clear that the decrease in active conflicts over the past century or so is really due to military investment. One can argue that the establishment of international communities such as the EU, or the UN charter forswearing territorial changes via war has had as much, or more, of an impact on reducing the outbreak of wars such as the War of the Pacific as American military might did.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rspeele 4y ago
  Even if all fiat currencies went away and the entire world was on a Bitcoin standard, countries would still have standing armies, just as big as they have today, to protect their hard assets. The stuff you buy with money, like oil, gas, farmland, factories, and so on. In the absence of an army, you can have all the Bitcoin you want, and still be dirt poor because somebody else with an army can just waltz in and take your stuff. So I find it laughable to claim that the cost of standing armies should be tallied up as an operating expense specific to fiat currencies.
  - neodypsis 4y ago
    Also, consider the energy required to mine precious metals or to produce those hard assets you mention.
- imtringued 4y ago
  How does Bitcoin defend itself non violently if it derives its energy from infrastructure that is being protected by the standing armies you complain about? Not to mention that the infrastructure was paid for in fiat currency.
AnEro 4y ago
Im not a web3 person at all but I find these comparisons to say Bitcoin is hurting the climate pointless. It's the electricity source is the problem. Sure it takes a ton of electricity to mine but why is it the consumer's fault for using a service they don't have another option to use. Are we supposed to switch powergirds? Are we supposed to all create our own green power grid? It's awfully convenient it's the consumer's fault not large organizations and governments not upgrading a power grid when we knew this was an issue for decades
- xracy 4y ago
  This reads like you're actually defending bitcoin, but you know that it's not cool, so you're describing your support as if you don't support it. (Not saying you do, just saying how this comment comes across now that I've seen it in 2 places). Why do people need to mine bitcoin. One piece of creating a green power grid is lowering unnecessary uses of electricity on said power grid. Bitcoin is an easy mark for that. We can't entirely greenify the power grid to make the same level of power that we're currently using. So part of the process is trimming excess. Given that framing, why isn't bitcoin excess?
  - jkepler 4y ago
    But why single out Bitcoin? What about all the data centers serving Netflix movies? Others might say those are excess. Consider the annual energy consumption of tumble-dryers in the USA (which uses more energy than bitcoin mining): in Europe where I live most people I know hand their clothing to dry, thus they might consider American dryers to be an excess of electric consumption. Last time I checked, bitcoin miners have to compete for energy same as anyone else---and when energy prices rise, they move their operations to where its cheaper. That why they're using methane gas that would have been flared by oil companies to generate electricity to mine bitcoin in the west Texas oil fields... which is net positive, because the resulting CO2 emissions are 84x less carbon-intense for the atmosphere than the flared methane would have been. Or, there is Vespene Energy, a bitcoin mining startup helping US municipal landfill operators comply with new expensive EPA methane emissions regulations by using landfills emitted methane to generate electricity, which they then use to mine bitcoin and they share the profits with the landfill operators. The cool thing with their business model is they can simply sell the electricity to other grid customers, but the reason they often end up mining Bitcoin with the power is because the landfills are often not near cities or large areas of electricity demand. If one takes time to research this, one would see that bitcoin miners have a strong financial incentive to find the cheapest sources of power, which are typically stranded or waste power. Bitcoin mining is improving the environment.
rufusroflpunch 4y ago
An endless parade of articles attacking Bitcoin mining have been flooding in since since Ethereum switched consensus mechanisms. Almost enough to make one a conspiracy theorist.
- wmf 4y ago
  Or many people independently made the obvious observation that it's now possible to maintain a blockchain without wasting energy.
  - jkepler 4y ago
    Yup. Ethereum is now ruled by the riches people in that network. Sounds an awful lot like legacy financial networks that are also run by the rich. The question is, can a truly decentralized blockchain maintain its security against all adversaries without proof of work?
    - exo762 4y ago
      You are mistaking two different types of consensus. Social one: we are running this software, which encodes particular rules; we have a roadmap; we are sharing similar values. Technical one: transaction A came before transaction B. Proof of Stake is responsible for technical consensus and nothing else. Your statements are of low resolution.
    - socialismisok 4y ago
      Wait, why wouldn't that be true for Bitcoin too? Surely the folks who can afford the most Asics can exert the most control... Both Ethereum and Bitcoin are subject to basic laws of capital... The rich were always going to benefit the most.
      - strings29 4y ago
        Bitcoin miners do not control the network. People that run bitcoin nodes do.
bluepnume 4y ago
Full disclosure: I'm a bitcoiner. That said -- I feel that any arguments along the lines of "humanity should use less energy" are doomed to failure. More technology, a larger population, and third world nations developing into first world nations, and the world's energy usage is only going to go up. It's not a question of whether that's good or bad, it's just inevitable. The number one goal of humanity should be to find or create clean sources of energy that give us orders of magnitude more supply than there is demand. Then we can stop arguing about which uses of energy are legitimate and which aren't.
- Telemoto 4y ago
  You clearly favour cheap money over any responsibility or accountability. Yes because of you we will need to lobby and start pushing more for Bitcoin ban. And yes of course we need cheap and lots of renewable energy but if you would actually spend your time and energy to actually read up on things like climate change you would also see that FIRST we need to compensate so much current normal energy consumption before we can start playing again with Bitcoin etc. I really really would like to understand how smart people (assuming people on hn have a certain amount of it, I might just be wrong here) totally ignore critical and relevant topic climate change but spend so much time defending Bitcoin. Have you not seen any drought this year? Have you not seen the pictures around the globe like from floods? Did you not ready anything fr the IPCC? Do you just look at money money money? People on hn also have family and might create new humans. What do you think will help your kids or kids from your siblings more? Bitcoin or a stable planet a?
- silexia 4y ago
  I agree. Nuclear?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bluepnume 4y ago
    Yes. Please. And soon.
- 4y ago
silexia 4y ago
Sadly, Bitcoin's sales pitch was not what it delivered. It is not used as a new currency, it's simply a wildly speculative "investment". Nature came out with a statement recently that they will only pick and choose science to publish that agrees with their worldview. Nothing published there can be trusted as Nature is no longer a true science journal.
- jedimastert 4y ago
  > Nature came out with a statement recently that they will only pick and choose science to publish that agrees with their worldview. Nothing published there can be trusted as Nature is no longer a true science journal. Gonna need a source for that
  - samatman 4y ago
    It was Nature Human Behavior, and here you go https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2 . Personally I consider this damning, ymmv.
    - socialismisok 4y ago
      Which part, specifically, is damning? Because this document largely says, "we believe that ethics is important in research" and "we shouldn't stigmatize the populations we research".
      - glofish 4y ago
        Because the word "stigmatize" is a loose word that can be applied to anything If tomorrow you were to find in a reproducible experiment that people with samoans origins are not good at abstract math you would be "stigmatizing" the population and your research would be banned. The problem with the word "stigmatize" is that it is a code word that draws a line of what may be studied and published. It is basically a warning to steer clear of anything "controversial" because at any time it could be declared at "stigmatizing" and there would be no recourse.
jedimastert 4y ago
Bitcoin mining does not need to be nearly the scale that it is right now to sustain the volume of transactions. If the value of bitcoin completely crashed tomorrow, back down to a cent per coin, how many people would still be interested? How many people would still be mining?
- dudebrooo 4y ago
  Its based on free market and freedom principals, both of which are under a very subversive attack by powerful forces for a while now but has been intensifying lately for many reasons, but... The electricity is either for sale in a market or it is not a free market and you are in some communist or fascist style rule of law. What we have now is turning into some kind of worst of all worlds. A price cap on btc by law or manipulation is despotic. Value judgements on what you use electricity for is despotic. And using propaganda to destroy competition in currency markets is despotic. Competition makes us all better and nothing anyone can say on a washed up startups website can change that.
  - somewhereoutth 4y ago
    There is no more a 'free market' as there is such a thing as a 'free house cat'. Markets require an outside authority to impose structure, otherwise it is simply a question of who is strongest. The 'powerful forces' of which you speak are actually the further right, since Reagan, who would rip up social structures precisely so they can take by force what otherwise would be rightfully denied them.
  - Telemoto 4y ago
  - imtringued 4y ago
    If there is such a thing as a free market then Bitcoin and similar currencies that do not neutralize liquidity preference are the reason we don't have free markets. >under a very subversive attack by powerful forces for a while now but has been intensifying lately for many reasons, What many reasons? As I already said liquidity preference in combination with non neutral liquidity is ultimately the reason why markets aren't "free".
Proven 4y ago

58 points by gusgus01 4y ago

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33023882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33023882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33023115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33023115

superkuh 4y ago

These analyses never take into account the energy other currencies need to keep themselves stable. Usually it is in the form of a standing army, or the diplomatic trades necessary to benefit from an allied country's standing army. The energy needed to maintain a credible modern standing army is incomparably more than Bitcoin is using. And not only that, bitcoin protects itself non-violently while fiat currencies depend on violence. These other resources it is compared to do not have to protect themselves, or, if you included the resources spent doing so, would far outstrip Bitcoin.

vorpalhex 4y ago
I didn't realize "world peace" was now a selling point for bitcoin. Curious how switching currencies will stop invasions and genocide and such...
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
SrslyJosh 4y ago
> Usually it is in the form of a standing army, or the diplomatic trades necessary to benefit from an allied country's standing army. Citation needed.
colinmhayes 4y ago
It's not currencies that are protected by threats of violence. It's countries. They would still spend all that money if everyone used bitcoin.
- brutusborn 4y ago
  Counterfeiting is prevented by police forces via violence, so I would argue that some of the police energy budget could be included. Police are kept in power by militaries, so some of the military's budget should be included too.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Counterfeiting is mostly prevented through security measures on the bill itself which can be confirmed through counterfeit detectors. The police force just makes it easier for people to not have to carry detectors and use them for every single transaction. Aka optimistic security. Anyway, the problem is even if you do all of that, Bitcoin miners also pay taxes that fund the military and Bitcoin miners depend on property rights, landownership, electricity infrastructure, fiat currency just like any other company. Internalising these costs makes the economy more efficient, it doesn't absolve Bitcoin of benefiting from human violence.
    - brutusborn 4y ago
      Isn't the energy cost of this violence the real point though? Proof of work cost is analogous to the police violence/detection/bill security costs you mention, so that is what we should be comparing. The cost of land ownership, security and electricity is included in the cost of POW, so including it is counting double. You could argue the police help secure the miners from physical theft, but they also help prevent physical theft from fiat banks, so shouldn't that be equal if not in favour of bitcoin?
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
These analyses also never take into account all the energy used to make all the goods and services in the global economy that bitcoin can be used purchase. Or not comparing it to the total energy output of the sun which shines down on the earth which has people on it who use bitcoin. These analyzes are therefore flawed.
jcranmer 4y ago
Fun fact: there exist currencies that have maintained stability despite the country in question lacking any kind of military. Funner fact: there exists one fiat currency that maintained stability despite the government in question effectively ceasing to exist. Funnest fact: the energy invested in the maintenance of appropriate armed forces appears to have no correlation with the stability or lack thereof of a currency. I mean, there's just no evidence that stability of fiat currency is driven by military considerations as opposed to, say, fiscal and monetary policy.
- imgabe 4y ago
  > Fun fact: there exist currencies that have maintained stability despite the country in question lacking any kind of military. Such as? And for a further question, would they have remained stable if other countries had not invested in their military to the point that the world in general remained peaceful? The US gets a lot of criticism for military spending, but the fact is, the rest of the world leeched off this by enjoying the peace and prosperity that was created by having one country be such an overwhelming superpower that it discouraged wars everywhere. Now, the US is starting to show weakness and with the Ukraine we immediately see the effects of not having a 500 pound gorilla in the room to keep everyone else in line.
  - xracy 4y ago
    You're creating a really difficult causal link. Does the US' military create peace and prosperity? I would disagree with your assessment of that for Ukraine.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    > Such as? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_armed_forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_arme... Mostly the European microstates and several Caribbean and Pacific islands, but if you don't count a gendarmerie as armed forces, you could include Costa Rica and Panama--two not-tiny countries--in the list. (If you do count them, the largest is the Solomon Islands). > And for a further question, would they have remained stable if other countries had not invested in their military to the point that the world in general remained peaceful? That this question is being asked is I think a concession of the underlying point: fiat currencies aren't maintained by military investment, not in the same way that Bitcon is maintained by hashing power. Furthermore, it's not at all clear that the decrease in active conflicts over the past century or so is really due to military investment. One can argue that the establishment of international communities such as the EU, or the UN charter forswearing territorial changes via war has had as much, or more, of an impact on reducing the outbreak of wars such as the War of the Pacific as American military might did.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rspeele 4y ago
Even if all fiat currencies went away and the entire world was on a Bitcoin standard, countries would still have standing armies, just as big as they have today, to protect their hard assets. The stuff you buy with money, like oil, gas, farmland, factories, and so on. In the absence of an army, you can have all the Bitcoin you want, and still be dirt poor because somebody else with an army can just waltz in and take your stuff. So I find it laughable to claim that the cost of standing armies should be tallied up as an operating expense specific to fiat currencies.
- neodypsis 4y ago
  Also, consider the energy required to mine precious metals or to produce those hard assets you mention.
imtringued 4y ago
How does Bitcoin defend itself non violently if it derives its energy from infrastructure that is being protected by the standing armies you complain about? Not to mention that the infrastructure was paid for in fiat currency.

AnEro 4y ago

Im not a web3 person at all but I find these comparisons to say Bitcoin is hurting the climate pointless. It's the electricity source is the problem. Sure it takes a ton of electricity to mine but why is it the consumer's fault for using a service they don't have another option to use. Are we supposed to switch powergirds? Are we supposed to all create our own green power grid? It's awfully convenient it's the consumer's fault not large organizations and governments not upgrading a power grid when we knew this was an issue for decades

xracy 4y ago
This reads like you're actually defending bitcoin, but you know that it's not cool, so you're describing your support as if you don't support it. (Not saying you do, just saying how this comment comes across now that I've seen it in 2 places). Why do people need to mine bitcoin. One piece of creating a green power grid is lowering unnecessary uses of electricity on said power grid. Bitcoin is an easy mark for that. We can't entirely greenify the power grid to make the same level of power that we're currently using. So part of the process is trimming excess. Given that framing, why isn't bitcoin excess?
- jkepler 4y ago
  But why single out Bitcoin? What about all the data centers serving Netflix movies? Others might say those are excess. Consider the annual energy consumption of tumble-dryers in the USA (which uses more energy than bitcoin mining): in Europe where I live most people I know hand their clothing to dry, thus they might consider American dryers to be an excess of electric consumption. Last time I checked, bitcoin miners have to compete for energy same as anyone else---and when energy prices rise, they move their operations to where its cheaper. That why they're using methane gas that would have been flared by oil companies to generate electricity to mine bitcoin in the west Texas oil fields... which is net positive, because the resulting CO2 emissions are 84x less carbon-intense for the atmosphere than the flared methane would have been. Or, there is Vespene Energy, a bitcoin mining startup helping US municipal landfill operators comply with new expensive EPA methane emissions regulations by using landfills emitted methane to generate electricity, which they then use to mine bitcoin and they share the profits with the landfill operators. The cool thing with their business model is they can simply sell the electricity to other grid customers, but the reason they often end up mining Bitcoin with the power is because the landfills are often not near cities or large areas of electricity demand. If one takes time to research this, one would see that bitcoin miners have a strong financial incentive to find the cheapest sources of power, which are typically stranded or waste power. Bitcoin mining is improving the environment.

rufusroflpunch 4y ago

An endless parade of articles attacking Bitcoin mining have been flooding in since since Ethereum switched consensus mechanisms. Almost enough to make one a conspiracy theorist.

wmf 4y ago
Or many people independently made the obvious observation that it's now possible to maintain a blockchain without wasting energy.
- jkepler 4y ago
  Yup. Ethereum is now ruled by the riches people in that network. Sounds an awful lot like legacy financial networks that are also run by the rich. The question is, can a truly decentralized blockchain maintain its security against all adversaries without proof of work?
  - exo762 4y ago
    You are mistaking two different types of consensus. Social one: we are running this software, which encodes particular rules; we have a roadmap; we are sharing similar values. Technical one: transaction A came before transaction B. Proof of Stake is responsible for technical consensus and nothing else. Your statements are of low resolution.
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    Wait, why wouldn't that be true for Bitcoin too? Surely the folks who can afford the most Asics can exert the most control... Both Ethereum and Bitcoin are subject to basic laws of capital... The rich were always going to benefit the most.
    - strings29 4y ago
      Bitcoin miners do not control the network. People that run bitcoin nodes do.

bluepnume 4y ago

Full disclosure: I'm a bitcoiner. That said -- I feel that any arguments along the lines of "humanity should use less energy" are doomed to failure. More technology, a larger population, and third world nations developing into first world nations, and the world's energy usage is only going to go up. It's not a question of whether that's good or bad, it's just inevitable. The number one goal of humanity should be to find or create clean sources of energy that give us orders of magnitude more supply than there is demand. Then we can stop arguing about which uses of energy are legitimate and which aren't.

Telemoto 4y ago
You clearly favour cheap money over any responsibility or accountability. Yes because of you we will need to lobby and start pushing more for Bitcoin ban. And yes of course we need cheap and lots of renewable energy but if you would actually spend your time and energy to actually read up on things like climate change you would also see that FIRST we need to compensate so much current normal energy consumption before we can start playing again with Bitcoin etc. I really really would like to understand how smart people (assuming people on hn have a certain amount of it, I might just be wrong here) totally ignore critical and relevant topic climate change but spend so much time defending Bitcoin. Have you not seen any drought this year? Have you not seen the pictures around the globe like from floods? Did you not ready anything fr the IPCC? Do you just look at money money money? People on hn also have family and might create new humans. What do you think will help your kids or kids from your siblings more? Bitcoin or a stable planet a?
silexia 4y ago
I agree. Nuclear?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bluepnume 4y ago
  Yes. Please. And soon.
4y ago

silexia 4y ago

Sadly, Bitcoin's sales pitch was not what it delivered. It is not used as a new currency, it's simply a wildly speculative "investment". Nature came out with a statement recently that they will only pick and choose science to publish that agrees with their worldview. Nothing published there can be trusted as Nature is no longer a true science journal.

jedimastert 4y ago
> Nature came out with a statement recently that they will only pick and choose science to publish that agrees with their worldview. Nothing published there can be trusted as Nature is no longer a true science journal. Gonna need a source for that
- samatman 4y ago
  It was Nature Human Behavior, and here you go https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2 . Personally I consider this damning, ymmv.
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    Which part, specifically, is damning? Because this document largely says, "we believe that ethics is important in research" and "we shouldn't stigmatize the populations we research".
    - glofish 4y ago
      Because the word "stigmatize" is a loose word that can be applied to anything If tomorrow you were to find in a reproducible experiment that people with samoans origins are not good at abstract math you would be "stigmatizing" the population and your research would be banned. The problem with the word "stigmatize" is that it is a code word that draws a line of what may be studied and published. It is basically a warning to steer clear of anything "controversial" because at any time it could be declared at "stigmatizing" and there would be no recourse.

jedimastert 4y ago

Bitcoin mining does not need to be nearly the scale that it is right now to sustain the volume of transactions. If the value of bitcoin completely crashed tomorrow, back down to a cent per coin, how many people would still be interested? How many people would still be mining?

dudebrooo 4y ago
Its based on free market and freedom principals, both of which are under a very subversive attack by powerful forces for a while now but has been intensifying lately for many reasons, but... The electricity is either for sale in a market or it is not a free market and you are in some communist or fascist style rule of law. What we have now is turning into some kind of worst of all worlds. A price cap on btc by law or manipulation is despotic. Value judgements on what you use electricity for is despotic. And using propaganda to destroy competition in currency markets is despotic. Competition makes us all better and nothing anyone can say on a washed up startups website can change that.
- somewhereoutth 4y ago
  There is no more a 'free market' as there is such a thing as a 'free house cat'. Markets require an outside authority to impose structure, otherwise it is simply a question of who is strongest. The 'powerful forces' of which you speak are actually the further right, since Reagan, who would rip up social structures precisely so they can take by force what otherwise would be rightfully denied them.
- Telemoto 4y ago
- imtringued 4y ago
  If there is such a thing as a free market then Bitcoin and similar currencies that do not neutralize liquidity preference are the reason we don't have free markets. >under a very subversive attack by powerful forces for a while now but has been intensifying lately for many reasons, What many reasons? As I already said liquidity preference in combination with non neutral liquidity is ultimately the reason why markets aren't "free".

Proven 4y ago