8 ms·

You must still be missing something if you think it's a waste of energy. You might understand the "tech", but probably not the economic side. Do you understan

by npoc 3y ago

You must still be missing something if you think it's a waste of energy. You might understand the "tech", but probably not the economic side. Do you understand the scam that is central banking? For example, do you realise that the number of dollars is doubling every decade and that this halves the value of each one. Do you understand the Cantillon effect, Gresham's Law and Thier's Law? How about that the banking system is receiving interest on every dollar in existence even though it printed them out of thin air, backed by nothing? Do you know what the 3 purposes of money are (unit of account etc) and it's fundamental requirements (e.g. divisibility, portability, etc) Do you understand why gold is/was so valuable? Why it replaced shells and beads as money?

danShumway 3y ago
> You might understand the "tech", but probably not the economic side. I have heard every argument you make here. I have been in this space, I have heard the talks, I have heard the economic theories. You are starting from a conclusion that if someone thinks Bitcoin is a waste of energy there must be something they don't understand. But there's another possibility here that you're not considering, which is that maybe Bitcoin actually just didn't work, and the economic theories were wrong. If that literally can't be a possibility in your head, then I don't know what to say -- this is like talking to Flat Earthers where every experiment has some mitigating factor that means it doesn't count, or there's some phenomenon that means that anyone who thinks the world is round must just be missing some point or must just have not seen some argument. I don't know how to work through someone starting entirely from a conclusion -- that Bitcoin is good and it's not a waste of energy and it accomplishes its goals -- and then working backwards to try and figure out why the conclusion they've already drawn is right. The possibility you're not considering is that yes, the existing fiat monetary system has tons of problems, and Bitcoin was a cool attempt to build something better. But it just didn't work out. The tech didn't work out, the economic theories didn't end up playing out the way people wanted them to play out, the privacy guarantees didn't hold up, the bandwidth and transaction capabilities didn't scale the way we all wanted them to scale, the energy costs went out of control, and (most importantly) the community behavior didn't match what the founders and early proponents thought would happen. They tried to create a currency and unfortunately failed. They had interesting theories that didn't play out in actual reality. But sometimes I feel like Bitcoin proponents literally can't envision that as a possibility, they're too invested in the thing and so it's become a leap of faith. Questioning it isn't possible. And I can't think of any better example of that then having someone come into a conversation almost directly saying, "I don't know what you don't understand or where you're going wrong or why you think that Bitcoin is a waste of energy, but you must not know what you're talking about because you reached a different conclusion than me." I don't want to be mean about this, but all I can think about reading this comment is that Youtube documentary where the guy goes into Flat Earth comment sections and systematically walks through an experiment and at the end they just say, "well, we don't know what you did wrong to get a result that indicates the world is round, but you must have done something wrong, try it again until you get a different result." The reality is that Bitcoin is not working well as a currency. Come up with whatever theories you want about that, but the economic predictions people made about how Bitcoin would be adopted and used... didn't happen. The evidence isn't there. I'm not saying that as a critic, it would have been great if those people had been right, I'd love for there to be a good, privacy-preserving digital currency that works across countries and allows for low-cost microtransactions. But I also have to be honest about when an attempt to build that thing fails. And continuing to dump energy and resources into a failed attempt to build a currency is a waste of energy. At best it's sunk-cost fallacy preventing people from learning from Bitcoin's mistakes and trying to build something better. At worst it's a speculative confidence game where the tech and theories are irrelevant and the only thing that matters is that the price of the coin (measured in USD, ironically) keep going up.
- npoc 3y ago
  The reason I'm so confident that you must have missed something is because I'm so confident that I'm right about bitcoin. Why are you confident the earth is round? It's because you've been able to debunk every bit of evidence that suggests it's not. Since learning about bitcoin in-depth a few years ago, I haven't found a single criticism that I can't debunk. Perhaps you'll be able to offer the first, but the odds are heavily stacked against you. Especially if your main arguments against bitcoin are: - it wastes energy (I disagree in the strongest way - I'd prefer it to use more energy) - it doesn't work as a currency (I agree, not yet at least, maybe never) - it's used differently to how early proponents thought it might be (I don't care) If you've listened to and understood Michael Saylor's "pitch" for bitcoin, but still see the energy it uses as wasted, then I don't think there's much more I can add - it takes so long to explain bitcoin, and it seems that you've likely already heard everything I'll say. One of us is the flat-earther and all I can say is that it's not me.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    > Perhaps you'll be able to offer the first In quite literally every single practical application that Bitcoin has been used, from currency, to anonymity, to investment, to regulatory circumvention, to price reliability, to the democratization of finance, even to independence from the USD, Bitcoin has been found lacking. I'm not making that last criticism up either, there's strong evidence that Bitcoin's value tracks with the stock market. That should be a major red flag to its proponents, but it's not because... :shrug: sunk-cost line needs to go up. The criticism of Bitcoin is that from its inception, it has not succeeded in a single one of its goals. On literally every axis, both technological and economic, it has either been surpassed by other coins or the underlying theories have turned out to not hold up in the real world. The criticism of Bitcoin is that all of its hype boils down to the hope that it might become useful in the future, even though it has thus-far failed or been surpassed in every attempt to be useful. And this has been going on since Bitcoin began, and still people come in and say "well, I got into this a few years ago and it seems sound to me." My sibling in Christ, there is a history of failure here that you are either not privy to or are ignoring. You can have all the theories you want, the problem is that none of them are demonstrable and the things being built with those theories don't actually work in the real world. But as long as you keep everything in theory and keep talking about gold vs beads, sure, you can debunk anything that anyone says because economics are complicated and it's easy to make arguments that sound good even if they're not practically useful in the real world for building actual systems that people use. > it doesn't work as a currency (I agree, not yet at least, maybe never) This is also why these conversations are exhausting, because there is no singular philosophy that Bitcoin proponents share other than that they think Bitcoin is good. I can jump from a Bitcoin proponent telling me that Bitcoin is the future of financial transactions to someone telling me that it's not intended to be a currency in the first place, and they'll happily promote Bitcoin alongside each other even though their actual goals are completely contrary to each other and their philosophies are completely incompatible. This should also be a warning sign to people, but for some reason it's not. There is no unified consistent philosophy from Bitcoin proponents about what the coin is even intended to do. There are a lot of factions, and you'd think they'd all be at each others' throats, but they're not. For some weird reason, people with radically different philosophies about the goal of the coin don't seem to have much disagreement with each other as long as the USD-price keeps going up. Almost like the USD-price going up is the actual uniting goal. Almost like it is first and foremost a speculative asset designed to exploit FOMO, and all of the philosophies and theories are secondary to that goal. > it's used differently to how early proponents thought it might be (I don't care) The irony of someone saying this after coming and saying, "if you're critical you obviously don't know enough about the theory behind the coin" is not lost on me. You're coming into a conversation extremely late, looking at the people who invented the thing you're calling revolutionary, looking at their claims which ended up being proven wrong, and saying, "it's actually everyone else who doesn't understand what's happening here." ---- > it wastes energy (I disagree in the strongest way - I'd prefer it to use more energy) Not so much relevant to our conversation, but for anyone else reading, this is why discussions about proof of stake are contentious in crypto spaces and why efforts to build efficient coins are likely to fail, because a large portion of the space sees the wastefulness as a feature. The entire design is oriented around making the coin inefficient and making transaction verification inaccessible to anyone who does not control large amounts of power/hardware. Burning the world is not an unfortunate side effect that can be mitigated, it is a desired part of the process, to the point where I have actually heard proponents call Bitcoin a "battery for excess electricity." Their philosophy is that burning the world is desirable as long as they're able to sell the ashes for a profit. And that's a big reason why it took so long for Ethereum to move to PoS and why people were so mad about it; that's why discussions about energy efficiency aren't going to work out. That's also why the only way that energy usage is ever going to decrease for Bitcoin is if the coin crashes entirely, because the energy usage is a function of the coin's USD market value and the USD market value that miners can extract from wasting that energy. If energy prices go down, miners will use more electricity until they rise again. If there's excess electricity somewhere else, miners will use that too. They have to, that's how Bitcoin is designed to work, it's designed to soak up any electricity that is priced efficiently enough that it can be used to mine coins. Bitcoin is a machine that purposefully inflates energy usage in proportion to its USD market value.

by npoc 3y ago

danShumway 3y ago

> You might understand the "tech", but probably not the economic side. I have heard every argument you make here. I have been in this space, I have heard the talks, I have heard the economic theories. You are starting from a conclusion that if someone thinks Bitcoin is a waste of energy there must be something they don't understand. But there's another possibility here that you're not considering, which is that maybe Bitcoin actually just didn't work, and the economic theories were wrong. If that literally can't be a possibility in your head, then I don't know what to say -- this is like talking to Flat Earthers where every experiment has some mitigating factor that means it doesn't count, or there's some phenomenon that means that anyone who thinks the world is round must just be missing some point or must just have not seen some argument. I don't know how to work through someone starting entirely from a conclusion -- that Bitcoin is good and it's not a waste of energy and it accomplishes its goals -- and then working backwards to try and figure out why the conclusion they've already drawn is right. The possibility you're not considering is that yes, the existing fiat monetary system has tons of problems, and Bitcoin was a cool attempt to build something better. But it just didn't work out. The tech didn't work out, the economic theories didn't end up playing out the way people wanted them to play out, the privacy guarantees didn't hold up, the bandwidth and transaction capabilities didn't scale the way we all wanted them to scale, the energy costs went out of control, and (most importantly) the community behavior didn't match what the founders and early proponents thought would happen. They tried to create a currency and unfortunately failed. They had interesting theories that didn't play out in actual reality. But sometimes I feel like Bitcoin proponents literally can't envision that as a possibility, they're too invested in the thing and so it's become a leap of faith. Questioning it isn't possible. And I can't think of any better example of that then having someone come into a conversation almost directly saying, "I don't know what you don't understand or where you're going wrong or why you think that Bitcoin is a waste of energy, but you must not know what you're talking about because you reached a different conclusion than me." I don't want to be mean about this, but all I can think about reading this comment is that Youtube documentary where the guy goes into Flat Earth comment sections and systematically walks through an experiment and at the end they just say, "well, we don't know what you did wrong to get a result that indicates the world is round, but you must have done something wrong, try it again until you get a different result." The reality is that Bitcoin is not working well as a currency. Come up with whatever theories you want about that, but the economic predictions people made about how Bitcoin would be adopted and used... didn't happen. The evidence isn't there. I'm not saying that as a critic, it would have been great if those people had been right, I'd love for there to be a good, privacy-preserving digital currency that works across countries and allows for low-cost microtransactions. But I also have to be honest about when an attempt to build that thing fails. And continuing to dump energy and resources into a failed attempt to build a currency is a waste of energy. At best it's sunk-cost fallacy preventing people from learning from Bitcoin's mistakes and trying to build something better. At worst it's a speculative confidence game where the tech and theories are irrelevant and the only thing that matters is that the price of the coin (measured in USD, ironically) keep going up.

npoc 3y ago
The reason I'm so confident that you must have missed something is because I'm so confident that I'm right about bitcoin. Why are you confident the earth is round? It's because you've been able to debunk every bit of evidence that suggests it's not. Since learning about bitcoin in-depth a few years ago, I haven't found a single criticism that I can't debunk. Perhaps you'll be able to offer the first, but the odds are heavily stacked against you. Especially if your main arguments against bitcoin are: - it wastes energy (I disagree in the strongest way - I'd prefer it to use more energy) - it doesn't work as a currency (I agree, not yet at least, maybe never) - it's used differently to how early proponents thought it might be (I don't care) If you've listened to and understood Michael Saylor's "pitch" for bitcoin, but still see the energy it uses as wasted, then I don't think there's much more I can add - it takes so long to explain bitcoin, and it seems that you've likely already heard everything I'll say. One of us is the flat-earther and all I can say is that it's not me.
- danShumway 3y ago
  > Perhaps you'll be able to offer the first In quite literally every single practical application that Bitcoin has been used, from currency, to anonymity, to investment, to regulatory circumvention, to price reliability, to the democratization of finance, even to independence from the USD, Bitcoin has been found lacking. I'm not making that last criticism up either, there's strong evidence that Bitcoin's value tracks with the stock market. That should be a major red flag to its proponents, but it's not because... :shrug: sunk-cost line needs to go up. The criticism of Bitcoin is that from its inception, it has not succeeded in a single one of its goals. On literally every axis, both technological and economic, it has either been surpassed by other coins or the underlying theories have turned out to not hold up in the real world. The criticism of Bitcoin is that all of its hype boils down to the hope that it might become useful in the future, even though it has thus-far failed or been surpassed in every attempt to be useful. And this has been going on since Bitcoin began, and still people come in and say "well, I got into this a few years ago and it seems sound to me." My sibling in Christ, there is a history of failure here that you are either not privy to or are ignoring. You can have all the theories you want, the problem is that none of them are demonstrable and the things being built with those theories don't actually work in the real world. But as long as you keep everything in theory and keep talking about gold vs beads, sure, you can debunk anything that anyone says because economics are complicated and it's easy to make arguments that sound good even if they're not practically useful in the real world for building actual systems that people use. > it doesn't work as a currency (I agree, not yet at least, maybe never) This is also why these conversations are exhausting, because there is no singular philosophy that Bitcoin proponents share other than that they think Bitcoin is good. I can jump from a Bitcoin proponent telling me that Bitcoin is the future of financial transactions to someone telling me that it's not intended to be a currency in the first place, and they'll happily promote Bitcoin alongside each other even though their actual goals are completely contrary to each other and their philosophies are completely incompatible. This should also be a warning sign to people, but for some reason it's not. There is no unified consistent philosophy from Bitcoin proponents about what the coin is even intended to do. There are a lot of factions, and you'd think they'd all be at each others' throats, but they're not. For some weird reason, people with radically different philosophies about the goal of the coin don't seem to have much disagreement with each other as long as the USD-price keeps going up. Almost like the USD-price going up is the actual uniting goal. Almost like it is first and foremost a speculative asset designed to exploit FOMO, and all of the philosophies and theories are secondary to that goal. > it's used differently to how early proponents thought it might be (I don't care) The irony of someone saying this after coming and saying, "if you're critical you obviously don't know enough about the theory behind the coin" is not lost on me. You're coming into a conversation extremely late, looking at the people who invented the thing you're calling revolutionary, looking at their claims which ended up being proven wrong, and saying, "it's actually everyone else who doesn't understand what's happening here." ---- > it wastes energy (I disagree in the strongest way - I'd prefer it to use more energy) Not so much relevant to our conversation, but for anyone else reading, this is why discussions about proof of stake are contentious in crypto spaces and why efforts to build efficient coins are likely to fail, because a large portion of the space sees the wastefulness as a feature. The entire design is oriented around making the coin inefficient and making transaction verification inaccessible to anyone who does not control large amounts of power/hardware. Burning the world is not an unfortunate side effect that can be mitigated, it is a desired part of the process, to the point where I have actually heard proponents call Bitcoin a "battery for excess electricity." Their philosophy is that burning the world is desirable as long as they're able to sell the ashes for a profit. And that's a big reason why it took so long for Ethereum to move to PoS and why people were so mad about it; that's why discussions about energy efficiency aren't going to work out. That's also why the only way that energy usage is ever going to decrease for Bitcoin is if the coin crashes entirely, because the energy usage is a function of the coin's USD market value and the USD market value that miners can extract from wasting that energy. If energy prices go down, miners will use more electricity until they rise again. If there's excess electricity somewhere else, miners will use that too. They have to, that's how Bitcoin is designed to work, it's designed to soak up any electricity that is priced efficiently enough that it can be used to mine coins. Bitcoin is a machine that purposefully inflates energy usage in proportion to its USD market value.