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Making a monetary system function is important work. From the Federal Reserve chairman to the sysadmins running wire transfer servers to the crew running the pr
by GavinB 13y ago
Making a monetary system function is important work. From the Federal Reserve chairman to the sysadmins running wire transfer servers to the crew running the printing presses to the security guards who transport cash, there's a huge amount of work involved in running current fiat money systems.
You can dislike cryptocurrencies for all sorts of other reasons, but that fact that some resources are consumed to keep it running really is going to be a feature of any sort of monetary system.
- aninhumer 13y agoI think you're making a rather tenuous argument here. Just because existing monetary systems involve work, and a new alternative system also involves work, doesn't imply that such systems always must.
- mushishi 13y agoCould you give some estimates how much energy is spent on having current fiat currencies, and how much energy would be spent if similar amount of transactions were used for cryptocurrency. I always wonder why people don't discuss this, or when do, no estimates are given.
- dllthomas 13y agoMy worry, regarding resources, is not that any are burned, but that it's an arms race where effort to attack is O(effort to defend), which means we always need to collectively burning more resources than attackers could and we don't even get the tremendous discount afforded us by crypto in other spheres (brute forcing encryption takes effort of O(2^effort to defend), for example). If we get more efficient algorithms or processes or technology in traditional finance, the resources we spend can shrink - not so, with proof-of-work. Of course, with physical attack there is always an arms race, but bitcoin is still vulnerable to physical attack.