5 ms·

>FWIW, even though I'd probably disagree with your assessment of crypto overall, I love that your comment tries to take a reasonable position: not just blind ha

>FWIW, even though I'd probably disagree with your assessment of crypto overall, I love that your comment tries to take a reasonable position: not just blind hate or love. Thanks, I appreciate that. I don't have any financial or personal stake in crypto so I don't have any issue criticizing it and I am pretty pessimistic about it at this point. But the irrational hatred and dismissal of crypto sometimes bothers me more than the irrational optimism. I don't think the safety net argument works because there is so much physical and political infrastructure that crypto depends on in order to function. To run a cryptocurrency you still need a functioning power grid, datacenters, internet, and chip manufacturing/importing, all of which depend on a pre-existing political system and economy. I find it implausible that we will migrate all of these systems to run 100% on crypto with the current state of the technology. You could argue that it's feasible with some hypothetical much-better-bitcoin, but that's just speculation at this point and not something I would want to stake the future of whole societies on.

logicalmonster 4y ago
> I don't think the safety net argument works because there is so much physical and political infrastructure that crypto depends on in order to function. I'm not sure about the necessity of political infrastructure, but crypto depending on physical infrastructure is relatively true because I have to assume that calculating Bitcoin transactions by hand without a power grid is more of an involved math problem than most humans are able to do. We all (or I think most of us) want and need a stable and functional society with the lights staying on to function. And that stable society is what I'm concerned about with Fiat currencies. Without being backed up by anything, there is nothing that actually limits how much money printing can be done. We're already starting to reap some of the benefits of short-sighted policies in our current economies and have seen many historical examples of what happens to societies that ruin their own currencies. In contrast, as one example, Bitcoin can only ever have 21 million units. This limitation alone is worth almost any negative, IMO. And let's examine those negatives. Are they actually a big deal? Slow transactions in a layer 1 crypto suck, but are a relatively minor and solvable problem in the grand-scheme of things with different settlement layers being possible. More electricity usage than is ideal is a cost to be sure, but to me seems like a relatively minor issue when the technology for cleanly producing large amounts of electricity has existed for decades through nuclear power. To me, Bitcoin's negatives are real, but are far closer to the category of "minor inconveniences" than "fundamental flaws". But Fiat's negatives have the potential to be a civilization ender. A dead government currency can cause unbelievable chaos on the level of "bodies piling up in the streets".

logicalmonster 4y ago

> I don't think the safety net argument works because there is so much physical and political infrastructure that crypto depends on in order to function. I'm not sure about the necessity of political infrastructure, but crypto depending on physical infrastructure is relatively true because I have to assume that calculating Bitcoin transactions by hand without a power grid is more of an involved math problem than most humans are able to do. We all (or I think most of us) want and need a stable and functional society with the lights staying on to function. And that stable society is what I'm concerned about with Fiat currencies. Without being backed up by anything, there is nothing that actually limits how much money printing can be done. We're already starting to reap some of the benefits of short-sighted policies in our current economies and have seen many historical examples of what happens to societies that ruin their own currencies. In contrast, as one example, Bitcoin can only ever have 21 million units. This limitation alone is worth almost any negative, IMO. And let's examine those negatives. Are they actually a big deal? Slow transactions in a layer 1 crypto suck, but are a relatively minor and solvable problem in the grand-scheme of things with different settlement layers being possible. More electricity usage than is ideal is a cost to be sure, but to me seems like a relatively minor issue when the technology for cleanly producing large amounts of electricity has existed for decades through nuclear power. To me, Bitcoin's negatives are real, but are far closer to the category of "minor inconveniences" than "fundamental flaws". But Fiat's negatives have the potential to be a civilization ender. A dead government currency can cause unbelievable chaos on the level of "bodies piling up in the streets".