Let me fix that title. Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I only have 11 points. Go ahead.
"Bitcoin Is A Waste of Time (and Resources)"
What Bitcoin has done is that it taught people they can come together in a sustained flash mob (like an on-the-fly hedge fund operation) and manipulate the price of speculative assets by creating artificial short-term pump-n-dump type demand. Bitcoin has trained our collective neural network to do this.
The huddled masses can take their new superpower and apply it to stock, crypto, commodities on the commodity exchange, and all kinds of speculative assets, especially the virtual kind.
It's taken a gambling-friendly society with feverish lust for winning (think for-profit fantasy sports, online poker, day trading, Vegas et al) and turned us into a giant decentralized casino.
I've been saying the same damn thing about automobiles man, horses already have self driving even! and they don't pollute like cars.
Look at the mess we're in now! who's laughing?? Cars pollute and need roads, we had to build so many roads and gas stations. We even had to go to war to make sure we have enough oil.
Because yes, cars have made the world materially worse, not because horses are better, but because dense urban development, public transit, walking, and cycling is better.
Cars are enormously wasteful, much like bitcoin is, not only because it uses way more energy than is necessary for the task it is performing (~90% of the energy used by cars is spent to move the car, not the cargo or people), but also because it takes up space that could be used for more useful things: the average American city has 8 parking spaces per car, that means that each car on the road represents an entire ~1600sqft house that can't be built because a car needs places to park.
Video rendering is enormously wasteful. Nobody needs to see your TikTok video of you getting a grandma to slip on a banana peel. The list goes on. Having a global store of value where central banks cant print away peoples lifelong labor they sacrificed their time and health for sounds legitimate to me.
If you want to exchange your store of value for something in the future, it matters very much what its value is at the exact time you want to trade it.
Unless you mean that the volatility doesn't matter if the asset appreciates so much that the volatility becomes irrelevant, but that's not a property of a store of value, that's a property of a speculative gamble.
Network effects are well studied. If you cant deduce an action based on that and where btc is, than you can just sit it out. A very high number of the most successful people in the world are not and recognize the directionality. You can call that a gamble if you want.
Yes, which is why I didn't say anything about horses.
Opposition to cars, like opposition to bitcoin, isn't rustic ludditism. There are modern solutions to transportation that are superior to cars, like rail, frequent busses, and bike infrastructure, but lose out in funding and hype because they're not prestigious and utopian like cars are.
Likewise, Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction network technology can't solve, but it gets all the attention because it's flashy and new and utopian.
And if you think cars aren't utopian, tell me the last time you've seen an automobile ad that showed somebody being stuck in gridlocked traffic in the lincoln tunnel inhaling gas fumes for over half an hour. I will contend that there does not exist a single automobile advertisement that shows the average car owner's typical experience of driving, certainly never in an urban setting.
But do you think we ever could have gotten to electric cars if we hadn't used gas-powered cars as a stepping stone? I'd probably agree with you if you were to say that it's taken too long, but I'd argue that the crappy fuel-burning stuff is a necessary milestone on the transition to something better.
I see Bitcoin as the Model T of new currency models. Decentralization is the future of currency and contracts, even if Bitcoin itself is wasteful and inefficient as a v1 product.
The fact that cars burn gas is one of the least harmful parts of them. Electric cars are just as bad as any other car.
The real harm of cars is in how they forced cities to spread out, putting miles of asphalty moonscape between every destination, forcing people to spend thousands of dollars a year on vehicles that they shouldn't need, driving greenfill development that doesn't raise enough revenue to support itself, forcing cities to develop ever more automobile suburbs for the immediate revenue to fulfil their maintenance obligations on the old ones, going into massive debt to keep up appearances on what is effectively a ponzi scheme, not to mention the human cost of traffic violence.
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Decentralization is not an advantage for currency and contracts. The problems that decentralization "solves" were never problems in the first place.
Nobody was asking for a new way to store their money that doesn't have any identity verification besides a single digital key, which doesn't have the ability to dispute or undo transactions, and which takes multiple minutes to clear transactions.
To quote Kai Stinchcombe
> There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve that problem, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast. ...
> Nobody went out and did a survey about whether most credit card users would be willing to give up their frequent flyer miles in return for also losing the ability to dispute a transaction.
I didn't mean to get caught up on the specifics of electric cars vs. other technological innovations. I clarified a little more over here[1].
As for the decentralization aspect: I think a lot of people in countries outside of the US would disagree with you that trust is not a problem with the banking system. Not everyone out there can just get a credit card with 2% cashback that's backed by the rule of law I enjoy in the US.
I think you've also sidestepped the issue of inflation. Just because the American public hasn't yet learned that their money's value is being printed away doesn't mean that they're not going to be the ones feeling the hurt in 5-20 years, particularly if UBI et al don't keep pace with their decrease in purchasing power.
I saw another one of your comments allude to the idea that democracy is a solution to this, but I don't ascribe to the idea that we should shirk technology solutions because political ones might exist. In many cases, technological innovation drives demand for political action. I don't want to debate the merits of Uber as a company, but I think it's hard to ignore the idea that the introduction of car-hailing apps created demand for governments to completely rethink taxi monopolies.
Ultimately, I'm not trying to make a case for Bitcoin. I'm trying to make a case for the idea that the adoption of and furor around Bitcoin is going to significantly influence the vNext of our banking system, even if that just means e.g. that the near-instant clearing of large Bitcoin transactions is showing folks that ACH is garbage, or that T+1 stock settlement is achievable.
If you think that deflationary monetary policy is a good thing, you are welcome to vote for politicians who promise to implement it and convince everybody else to do likewise.
The reason monetary policy is inflationary is not because there's a shadowy cabal of evil people who want to make your money worthless. Inflationary monetary policy is necessary to incentivize commerce and investment.
If money increases value at rest, then everybody will just hoard it, which is exactly what happened during every deflationary period of American monetary history: the economy ground to a screeching halt because everybody with money to spare stopped spending.
I feel like the bitcoin speculation bubble has led enthusiasts to forget what currency is supposed to be for. No, the purpose of money is not to be a number on an account sheet that goes up and makes you happy.
What're you talking about?? Before payment options like Zelle were available, I regularly had trouble settling small debts with my friends. Then Ethereum came along and made it easy, cheap, and cool
Nowadays it's a lot easier to just use a bank-sponsored method, and cryptocurrency transactions have gotten pretty expensive, but there definitely was a use case that made me like cryptocurrency.
Venmo does not work without a bank account or Government Id.
Venmo does not make cross-border payments.
Venmo does not allow me to take a loan or to borrow money to anyone that has any kind of collateral.
Venmo can seize my funds.
Venmo (or Paypal, Stripe or any payment system) won't accept to work with me if I sell things that are perfectly legal but deemed risky.
Venmo (or Paypal, Stripe or any payment system) won't accept to work with me if I sell things that are perfectly legal but deemed immoral.
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Okay, I get that the standard crypto "enthusiast" keeps talking about it like it is going to replace everything and that therefore they will get in to become quadrillionaries.
That's a naive view. Crypto is important even if doesn't replace all of the existing institutions. It is important because it increases optionality. If a centralized system works for you, great. But for some people it doesn't, and these people still need a way to invest, save, make commerce, etc, etc, etc...
> But do you think we ever could have gotten to electric cars if we hadn't used gas-powered cars as a stepping stone?
That's probably not a good example, considering that electric cars predate gas powered cars. By the start of the 20th century, 40% of the cars in the US were steam powered, 38% electric, and 22% gasoline.
Yes, but do you think we would have reached the innovations and supply chain capabilities required to make modern electric cars if not for the supply chain build-out of trucks, the commutes of folks researching these technologies, etc.
And even if my specifics are wrong, my point is that some technology may be impossible to leapfrog because we build on the innovations and rollout of past technology in order to innovate further.
And again, you can debate that modern electric cars could have been more capable earlier if we had distributed more towards innovation than to rollout of old tech (e.g. would a carbon tax on gas cars 20 years ago that went towards battery research have accelerated us towards our current position more quickly?). But my uber-point is that gas cars were probably required for some period of the last century. Maybe even to make, like, internet, smartphones, and all kinds of stuff
I need to haul an old kitchen oven to my dad's house so he can cook dinner, since his failed. Dad lives deep in the mountains at the end of a dirt road, far from any train station.
I've got a 20 foot fishing boat sitting in my backyard. I want to take it out on the lake.
I'd like to visit my in-laws who live on a farm in a rural town without bus service, 200 miles away. The temperature is a few degrees above freezing and it's raining.
I can't use a car, either owned or rented. What superior transportation solutions exist that allow me to do them?
The question to ask, is why your dad and in-laws live so far away from civilization. Probably because cars make it convenient. No matter the weather (excepting extreme conditions) they are not far from any of the comforts of civilization and benefits of dense living. In a way, their relationship to density is parasitic… they receive a great deal (electrification, roads, security, plus many other benefits) and pay relative pittances. Even their votes tend to count for a great deal more than urban votes (which perhaps explains the large benefits they receive).
No-one's arguing for an outright ban on cars everywhere in all circumstances. I'm pretty extremist but all I want to see is an end to using public space for private car storage, zero-parking buildings as a norm where land costs warrant it, single-vehicle-width shared streets (Americans would probably perceive them as alleyways) as a norm in cities where land costs warrant it...
There are still genuine uses for cars, and I doubt OP would disagree. But in urban areas your example situations aren't relevant. The point is that cars are inefficient in most if not all urban cases.
The anti-car brigade's argument always hinges on assuming everyone lives in urban areas, and only has to go to urban areas. If you constrain the problem space that much, then yea, nobody needs cars. In the rest of the universe, they are indispensable.
The vast majority of trips in a car aren't for transportation of kitchen ovens to houses deep in the mountains at the end of a dirt road guarded by an eldritch Being.
It’s a huge luxury to be able to live like that and still have access to modern amenities. These people usually don’t appreciate how much their lifestyle is subsidized, largely because their votes can be worth 25-30x as much as an urban voter.
> And if you think cars aren't utopian, tell me the last time you've seen an automobile ad that showed somebody being stuck in gridlocked traffic in the lincoln tunnel inhaling gas fumes for over half an hour.
I don’t think this is as ubiquitous as is suggested here - there aren’t really any tunnels in a lot of places, and New York has one of the best park and ride systems around if you have to make that trip regularly and want to avoid this scenario on the daily.
> I will contend that there does not exist a single automobile advertisement that shows the average car owner's typical experience of driving, certainly never in an urban setting.
I think it all depends on where one lives and their lifestyle. There are plenty of places, urban or otherwise, in America at least, where the picture painted preceding this quote is not a regular experience for people. I would venture to suggest the urban traffic grind is probably not the experience for a large majority of people. A ton of people drive in rural or suburban areas and run local errands and things as is depicted in many car ads.
Overall, I understand the importance of alternative means of transportation, but cars are one of the most personally efficient modes to get from Point A to Point B directly.
> Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers; mass transit is less flexible. So they aren’t strictly superior.
Mass transit in much of the world is perfectly acceptable. You build cities around transit, walking and biking instead of giant chasms between buildings. This is not a problem that exists in Europe.
You don't have to get rid of all cars, just most of them. And the best way to start is by getting rid of free parking, which is a regressive tax on the poor.
> How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?
That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets. So long as wages keep pace with inflation, which they do, this is not an issue. In fact if you purchase your necessities on a credit card the 0% APR until your bill comes due makes inflation work for you.
Exactly, you purchase BTC instead of watching the value of your fiat drop every day. Apps like Celsius offer far superior APY than traditional savings accounts. Also, look at all the institutional BTC purchases near BTC ATH. Are they all wrong?
Literally anything you buy is 100% inflation resistant. Literally. Anything. Shoes, gum, dryer lint, stocks, real estate, crypto. Once you're not in fiat currency the only thing that matters is ROI, not inflation.
Anything offering you 15% APY for "no risk" is a great way for you to go bankrupt because obviously something hasn't been priced in. If the benchmark interest rate is 0% ask yourself why on earth you're getting 15%. If someone offers you something that seems too good to be true it absolutely is.
I'm actually known as quite an optimist when im not dealing with speculative manias :) I would caution you however that such replies aren't in the spirit of site rules. I suspect that is why so many of your comments are flagged and deleted.
I'm sorry you still think it's a speculative mania. Optimists don't go out of their way to put down things that are seemingly useful to others. Just because you don't find it useful doesn't mean it's useless. Bitcoin is a decentralized, non-state asset and the market is valuing it appropriately, and it will continue to do so.
What you seem to be saying is that the market participants are idiots and are in a state of mania, and that you somehow "know better" than them. This is equally bad, maybe HN rules should add this in too, because the condescension is tiresome.
I'm not sure why you felt the need to "caution" me about the way I write my posts on here and point me to the rules, but I'll have you know that the "fake points" I gained were a (large) order of magnitude greater than the "flagged" posts.
Optimists aren’t optimistic about everything haha, there’s very few optimists about global warming or oil consumption. Optimism isn’t blind support of technology no matter what evidence appears. It’s taking early signs and pushing good ideas forward.
Speculative mania doesn’t mean participants are idiots it just means they’re playing musical chairs, and once the music stops whoever’s left without a chair is left with nothing. And yeah some people get swept up through confirmation bias, seeing number go up and convincing themselves there’s something where nothing exists. Those will be the ones most likely left without a chair.
As for “knowing better” I have my theories which I back with evidence.
I’m not into keeping score here just saying net karma of 0 is not the objective per se, I’m pointing out your post was clearly not in the letter or spirit of the site rules, this isn’t Reddit.
It’s been 13 years now and even the most hardcore blockchain enthusiasts have been unable to point to a single measurable concrete thing achieved better with blockchain that a classical solution. Not one and no path in sight. Only number go up and money laundering? 13 years of time from some of the smartest most ambitious and optimistic folks in all of the tech world. And nothing.
This is ill informed and not in the spirit of HN. I don't even want to argue against this because you haven't done the bare minimum in terms of "research", speaking of confirmation bias, have you considered that you may be confirming your own biases by spouting things like "number go up and money laundering"? really? bitcoin is probably the worst way to launder money. You are yet another irrational critic.
>just buy assets
What?
You think like that everyone can JUST buy assets that is preposterous
Moreover and in regards to your arguments no the wages of lots of people do not go up with inflation like have you ever talked to anyone that isn’t in the software industry? Lots of jobs don’t do that and that set of people want to be saved against inflation if inflation is not a problem for you that is one thing but it sure is for a lot of people
> You think like that everyone can JUST buy assets that is preposterous
Who's "everyone" exactly? My comments are broadly speaking applicable to a US audience as I don't have sufficiently deep first-hand knowledge of other markets. If you don't have money, then you don't have anything to invest and it's not really a problem. If you do have money, you shouldn't have any trouble with services like Robinhood, Acorns, Betterment or Wealthfront.
In lower-income countries, a $20 fee may be as much as 10% of GDP per capita, and therefore totally unsuitable.
Do you challenge that assertion?
> Moreover and in regards to your arguments no the wages of lots of people do not go up with inflation like have you ever talked to anyone that isn’t in the software industry?
This is tracked by the BLS. [1]
> Lots of jobs don’t do that and that set of people want to be saved against inflation if inflation is not a problem for you that is one thing but it sure is for a lot of people
Which is why we need meaningful social policy changes, such as a $15 minimum wage and one that's indexed to inflation. Changing the currency to one that doesn't inflate will simply lead to a flat or reduction year over year in nominal wages. What matters isn't the units, it's how much of what they represent that people get to take home.
You need to make social policy changes, not monetary ones to achieve your goal. Your cause is noble but your target is off.
> So long as wages keep pace with inflation, which they do, this is not an issue.
Lots of workers don't get inflation adjustments to their wages. And even if they do, you'll still lose money because a larger share of your income will go to taxes unless the tax brackets are adjusted for inflation very frequently, which they're not.
> Mass transit in much of the world is perfectly acceptable.
Thats a good demonstration of ignoring the interests of everyone who doesn’t share your opinion, but it’s not how representative government is supposed to work.
> That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
Then you can go back to ignoring bitcoin.
> Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets.
Again, this is not an answer for the problem, and pretending it is just ignores the reality that billions of people live with every day.
> Thats a good demonstration of ignoring the interests of everyone who doesn’t share your opinion, but it’s not how representative government is supposed to work.
No, not really. Democracy relies on the idea of majority rule. Frameworks for ensuring minority rights aren't trampled on are created but for the most part it is in fact the needs of the many that take precedence. That is mass transit, not individual transit.
> Then you can go back to ignoring bitcoin.
I'm actually short CME Bitcoin futures from 56,000, so I'm paying a lot of attention. Don't wanna end up on the wrong side of that one, it's a spicy meatball!
> Again, this is not an answer for the problem, and pretending it is just ignores the reality that billions of people live with every day.
This assertion is completely unfounded. Generally folks who have no money spend all of their income on necessities as they receive it. Folks who have money have access to places to park it.
> Apparently the many disagree with you, and like their cars.
Many people were into CFC refrigerants. Many people are into coal. Many people are into fossil fuels. An idea that enjoys a lot of support isn't automatically a good idea. We need to be prepared to argue ideas on their merits without appealing to the status quo.
> You can keep pretending that things you don’t like don’t exist.
Well, I was referring specifically to the massive roadways between buildings devoid of value - in that American cities were designed around cars whereas European cities tended to be designed around walkers and horses. Public transit is also substantially better on the whole, and so is walkability and bikeability. I'm confident it's not perfect but I was trying to focus on concrete things.
>> How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?
> That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
The distributed ledger isn't even secure. Just look where the cheap electricity is, create a network partition and all the other transaction will vanish after the network partition doesn't exist anymore.
What makes you think you alone will find that cheap electricity, that is so much cheaper than anywhere else that it allows you to beat everyone else that is also mining?
>Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers
My e-cargo bike with a trailer can hold more stuff than my sedan ever could. Did an Ikea trip with it last year, carried home a filing cabinet, a desk frame, and a small table.
> mass transit is less flexible
frequent mass transit is plenty flexible. If a bus comes by your stop every 5 minutes, you never need to worry about planning.
> distributed
multi-node database. Done.
> resistant to inflation
Not something that sane people should want. Economies grow from commerce and reinvestment, not people jealously hogging every dollar they can find so that they can stash it under a bed to be used at higher value later.
> frequent mass transit is plenty flexible. If a bus comes by your stop every 5 minutes, you never need to worry about planning.
I never once missed my car when I lived in London. Pop along to the end of the street for a bus every 5-10 minutes, or just a little bit further away and I was at a tube station where I could be on a train within 10 minutes that took me right across London far faster than any car could.
The one or two occasions I needed a car, I could rent one, and still be better off than if I'd been paying the month-to-month expenses of keeping a car on the road (insurance, MOT etc.)
Car rentals are even easier these days than they were back then.
And deflation, where the value of your cash increases constantly if you do literally nothing with it, leads to good allocation of assets?
There have been two major periods of deflation in the history of the US dollar. 1930-1933, and 2007-2008. When the value of money increases, people don't spend it, they hoard it, commerce stops, and the economy grinds to a halt.
Just look at your beloved bitcoin, who is actually using it to buy and sell anything (besides illegal goods and money laundering)? The price is entirely propped up by speculation and fake Tethers, and because it is increasing, everyone who has any knows they would be a fool to use it, which is the whole point of currency.
What use is a deflationary distributed ledger to anyone? We've had 12 years of Bitcoin and no killer app for a reason. It's simply not a useful technology.
Let's see how easy this game is to play, now I only need to claim that any advantages you bring up are either irrelevant or not unique to PayPal. At least that's how every argument against Bitcoin usually goes.
A speculative store of value that everyone has coordinated upon is utility, and this has little to do with the quality of the underlying technology. The fact remains that I can pay merchants of varying degreees of shadiness in BTC much easier than I can send them a wire transfer. Now, you might not think this is good for the world, but it certainly is utility.
Because BTC is what they take. The coordination is more important than the tech. Granted, this is only because I don't patronize the super illegal Go To Jail Go Directly To Jail Do Not Pass Go type of merchants, but the point stands.
If you just need unfreezable funds and pseudonymity, not total cryptographically secured anonymity, you'll use Bitcoin instead of a dozen better methods (which are all crypto anyway, so wouldn't really count as a point against crypto, just BTC) because everyone else is using it.
So it's utility is for sketchy (but not too sketchy!) merchants in which a much cheaper wire transfer or free visa/mc payment would be unacceptable, but not illegal because it's a permanent public record of the transaction. Got it.
I mean, yes, they exist. And the public record is fine because you just create a new address for every transaction and cash out. Just because phone companies keep a record of who's calling who doesn't mean phones aren't useful for crime. You just use a burner phone in the full knowledge that the police can track you down, but won't because you're small fish doing minor crime.
To take one example, the global counterfeit brand market is worth trillions. They don't trade exclusively or even mainly in BTC (mostly you'd sell with physical cash), but they do use it for the reasons I mentioned above.
To be fair that argument could be made about any speculative asset. Art, classic cars, watches, etc. With btc currently the barrier to entry is lower. I can buy some satohis for a few bucks in hopes that they appreciate in value. I cant buy a piece of a Picasso or a Rolex. It is a speculative investment much like those, just one that has a wider audience.
For me its a speculative investment. For others your answer may vary. Doesn't really matter though, no one is buying it with an expectation that it wont appreciate so it can be a currency and a groundbreaking technology while still being a speculative investment.
It seems to me that it's a speculative investment for almost everyone, because the case for anything else is extraordinarily weak. And the case for it as a speculative investment is based on the other cases.
A single car lane can move 600-1600 people per hour while a two way bike lane of the same size can transport 7500 people per hour (https://nyc25x25.org/#report)
Proof of stake will give pervert the incentives of the network. It'll allow large stake holders to control the network, we don't want that. Proof of Work will ensure that nobody has control over the network and everyone is incentivized to participate honestly.
Unfortunately it requires one Argentina of power to do the work of a single raspberry pi, and I suggest environmentalists and the government won't look the other way indefinitely. Carbon pricing for instance makes the whole thing topple over.
bitcoin works just fine with any power source, not just conveniently located grid energy. you can mine bitcoin in a remote place and transmit the network data much more easily than you can transport/transmit energy. you could raise the price of fossil fuels by a factor of 1 million and crypto mining would be the least affected of any industry. so go right ahead and try it.
Is proof of waste not a suitable name? It's proof a huge quantity of resources were wasted on deriving some random garbage you can append to a piece of data to obtain a certain number of leading zeroes on a SHA lol. 600kWh per transaction. Horrifying.
I'm sorry, but how is you being "horrified" an objective measure of goodness? You described the process and just said it's horrifying, what do you expect me to respond with?
That may be the case for some car fanatics, but by and large the average person simply wants easy and flexible transportation. If public transportation were better, lots of people would opt to take the local train/bus/ride share because it would be a fraction of the cost, with ideally only slightly more friction as a passenger.
I really don't this this, I think the average person really wants a good reliable car. Cars are pretty nice to have. Travelled to an Airbnb 3 hours away with my dogs and kids last weekend. No way I could have done that in 3 hours with public transportation. Even if I took a train that allowed my pets, you still face the issue of the last mile or 5 from the terminal. There are also no crazy people in my car and I don't have to worry about someone sitting next to me coughing. If anything this pandemic has made me appreciate cars all the more so.
Without a car, everything transportation related has to be planned and weighed.
Coming from someone who grew up in a car culture city, learned to drive at 18, bought my first car at 19, and drove most days of the week... I'm much happier without a car. I don't want to have to own one again. In hindsight, car culture feels like a jail that I didn't realize I was born into.
I moved to Tokyo 5 years ago. If I want to get somewhere, I walk to one of three train stations within a 10 minute walk, hop on the train, and am there in – usually – about 30 minutes. There's always the option to take a taxi, but they're often no faster than train. I can still drive out to the mountains if there's no train to the one I want to climb, because there are more car rental shops within walking distance than there are train stations.
Sure, there are cars in this city. They're useful tools that make a lot of sense for many people to own. But the average person chooses to live without one, because in a city designed for people instead of cars, life can actually be better that way.
I am very possibly incorrect in my assumption and if so I apologize but it does sound like you don't have kids. For me the idea of having kids and not having a car is choosing to play a first world life on hard mode. I know there are a million other issues in the world but not having a car to move my kids / pets / groceries / hardware is just a complicating factor I dont want.
With that said, more power to those people that don't want or need one, life is all about what works for the individual.
For commuting to work, sure. But if you are going to get groceries for your family or buy anything large (furniture, TV, lumber, etc), it's very nice to use car.
Horses are well adapted to living in very cold weather. How do you think they survived in the wild? It’s only because we decided to close them inside that they need to have a cosy spot and blanket when they go out.
When they live outside, they get a thick coat, which is very good at isolation. Even if they get wet from rain, the water is repelled so it does not get to their skin. A good indication of this isolation is that snow will not immediately melt as it hits their fur.
The only thing they need is enough to eat, as they still expend more energy to keep warm.
Source: my SO and I have 2 horses at home and they live in the open all the time. Their only shelter is a small roof as an extension to the barn, so there’s a dry place for the food.
Cars are only an incremental step towards an even more sustainable future. Once we get self-driving electric cars powered by nuclear, solar, wind, fusion - then they'll become pretty green. Self-driving cars will cut down on parking space too because we'll be able to have our cars drop us off and go somewhere out of the way while we shop/eat/whatever.
I'm also not certain how much cars are worse for the environment compared to horses. If we had to sustain similar numbers of people without cars we would have tons of horses (I assume horses emit similar amounts of methane to cows, which I know are a major contributor). We'd also have to feed our hundreds of millions or billions of horses. That agricultural effort would probably have a huge environmental cost. We'd have to deal not only with places to park our horses but also somehow manage the immense amount of waste that would come with packing a few million horses into a city and the accompanying health problems with that.
I think cars are a pretty good invention and wouldn't be surprised if, on net, they were better for the environment.
ICEs might be incremental, but its a long enough increment that it is having severely detrimental effects on planetary and human health, so I'm not sure if it counts.
Cars, on the other hand, are not incremental - they have locked us into an urban design pattern that will remain problematic no matter what the form of energy generation that drives them is.
> because dense urban development, public transit, walking, and cycling is better
Why is dense urban development better ? I could cite 100 studies why it’s not better not to mention all the people who hate living in “dense” living conditions
technically almost everything beyond food and medicine is wasteful.
BUT cars improve the quality of my life (i like to drive). bitcoins floating through the cybersphere do not. end of story.
> cars improve the quality of my life (i like to drive)
And if cars were primarily used as an enthusiast pursuit (like horses in the modern world, actually), this argument would make sense. But cars are not primarily an enthusiast pursuit, instead they are something that we've structured our entire way of life around, and made enormous sacrifices for. Many people need a car whether they want one or not, and we all pay the consequences for it.
Wasteful things like space programs still result in training and gaining experience. That experience can then be used on more productive activities once they have been discovered.
Human existence is meaningless and thus anything we do is meaningless. However, that also frees us up to do whatever we want since there is no universal authority telling us how to live our lives. Even in the face of an abusive police state we can still decide to resist.
The problem with Bitcoin is that if one were to maximize human potential then Bitcoin would be a really, really low bar. It's basically a premium currency for an MMO, except the MMO doesn't exist and there is no item shop and even the idea of creating such an item shop (think of NFTs) suffers from problems mentioned in the article. You can simply copy digital assets. Ownership over a digital asset doesn't protect it from being copied.
Cars is a net positive to society. The positive externalities far outweigh the negative. Cars like all other machines free up times for humans to among other things invent the internet.
So unless you are claiming that cars are a net negative then it's not a good analogy.
Accidentally because opposition to bitcoin, like opposition to cars, isn't luddite rustic anti-industrialism, it's common sense advocacy for equally modern but different solutions to the problem.
Bitcoin doesn't do anything that electronic banking can't do better, and it causes a lot of harm in wasted energy and space.
Cars don't do anything that busses, trains, and bicycles can't do better, and they cause a lot of harm in wasted energy and space.
Bitcoin exists because electronic banking requires trust in centralized financial institutions.
When you see the entire stock market move because the Fed chairperson makes an offhand comment about when they'll start or stop doing xyz policy, you realize having such a highly centralized system is dangerous.
Dude... the stock market is not the same thing as the banking system.
How your investment porfolio reacts to a change in monetary policy has nothing whatsoever to do with the utility of your checking account.
Trust in centralized financial institutions is not a problem. In fact it's is the opposite of a problem, it's an enormous benefit. Centralized financial institutions with government backing ensure the availability and safety of deposited funds.
Nobody has ever had their bank account drained in the US since the introduction of FDIC in 1933. In the last 10 years alone, over a billion dollars in bitcoin has been stolen out of people's wallets by hacked exchanges and smart contract exploits, money that can never be returned because blockchain is irreversible by design. Does that really sound trustworthy to you?
> Nobody has ever had their bank account drained in the US since the introduction of FDIC in 1933.
Plenty of people have had their bank accounts drained when they fell victim to "identification theft." That is quite a crafty euphemism -- banks fail to create secure systems, attackers steal funds from victims' bank accounts, and instead of owning up to their failure, banks blame the victims of the thefts by saying the victims' "identities" were "stolen."
I'll give the banks some credit, however: they'll prop up a seemingly empathetic customer service representative who will repeatedly say how "sorry" they are on behalf of their employer. If the victim is persistent enough, the customer service rep will eventually promise to initiate a lengthy investigation, after which the bank will perhaps reinstate the funds that were stolen from their system. Do they fix their broken, insecure system? Of course not. But at least the victim isn't clogging the customer service lines any more.
Identity theft is reversible. It has happened to me, somebody got a hold of my checking account details and drained the account of about $10,000. I called the bank, they reversed the transaction and gave me all my funds back right away, and it was over, just like that, no questions asked.
What happens if your bitcoin details get stolen, hm? What happens when somebody drains your bitcoin wallet? Who can you complain to to get your cryptographically secure irrevocably transferred money back?
That's simply the risk a person takes by having a bitcoin wallet. Seems (at least right now) there are plenty of people who want the benefit of a permissionless value transfer system and are willing to shoulder that risk. Hopefully they secure their magical numbers / private keys better than the banks do, because yes, obviously, there is no Central Bitcoin Governor acting as the Reinstater of Last Resort.
Some people are fine with that risk. Others are not. It's totally cool. More than one value transfer system can coexist in the world.
What do you mean "better than the banks do"? For one, banks don't have single-point-of-failure account access like blockchain does, and for another, the risks of banks are much lower because credit card and ACH transactions are easily reversible.
These are all reasons that banks are more trustworthy and more secure than blockchain, which sees tens of millions of dollars of irreversible theft annually.
You're right in that the stock market and the banking system are not the same thing, but I'd argue that they're intrinsically linked.
I move USD from my checking account into my investment accounts in order to buy equities, and I do that more when the Federal Reserve is pumping more liquidity into the market via low interest rates. There are many folks out there using e.g. TSLA as an inflation hedge (which is why it has a P/E > 1000) because they know that USDs will decline in value as liquidity keeps getting pumped.
If we're all using a decentralized currency like Bitcoin with a fixed inflation rate, you're going to see a lot more sanity and price stability in the equities markets.
> When you see the entire stock market move because the Fed chairperson makes an offhand comment about when they'll start or stop doing xyz policy, you realize having such a highly centralized system is dangerous.
Then you see that Bitcoin moves more when Elon tweets...
I support the idea of Bitcoin and blockchain despite flaws in both but you beat me to pointing this obviously bad argument against stock markets in defense of Bitcoin. BTC constantly has insane movements over absurd things like Musk tweets and etc.. It's much worse than the stock market at being volatile.
...try bringing your cat to the vet on a bicycle in a thunderstorm, or walking fifteen minutes with him in a moderate rain to your bus stop. Try going on a date with someone with no car, or working second or third shift and have to go home in the midnight hours on a train with sketchy as hell people. Try bicycling to work with a decent cold, or having to work a 12 hour shift doing manual labor and then need to bicycle back 30 minutes.
Really, there are plenty of use cases for cars. Right now where I live its incredibly cold with biting winds, and bicycling or even walking 20 minutes to a stop and waiting in the cold would be murder.
Want a deflationary monetary policy? Vote for it. Technology isn't going to solve the problem for you.
Also, deflationary monetary policy is insane and nobody should want it. Economies grow from continuous re-investment and commerce, not from people stashing away their money and watching its value increase for no reason.
edit: also, the fact that bitcoin is deflationary is entirely incidental, that was just Nakamoto's choice. It would have been just as easy to make bitcoin highly inflationary. The only thing that blockchain guarantees is that monetary policy can't ever change, which is also a thing that no sane person would ever want, there are lots of good reasons to modify the rate of inflation/deflation.
What mainstream candidate in the last two elections had a deflationary monetary policy?
ROn Paul was the last candidate with something relatively close to that.
That being said the idea that I want a deflationary policy on cash is ridiculous, but I want a deflationary policy on my semiliquid investments. BItcoin does that.
>It would have been just as easy to make bitcoin highly inflationary.
Yeah but then nobody would have liked it.
There is definitively nothing wrong with two different kinds of cash existing in a system, one purely liquid one semiliquid. Again please do not be dishonest. There are very specific reasons that make bitcoing attractive. Acting as if electronic banking deals with what bitcoin is intended to solve, is an extremely dishonest way of framing things.
Small amounts of inflation like 2% are necessary because of productivity improvements and full employment. Every year the economy becomes slightly more productive and that means that supply is rising naturally over time. If you print a tiny bit of money then that money can be spent on the excess production and thus companies are encouraged to produce more and employ more people since future prices are always higher than in the past. Think of the opposite. Deflation reduces prices of goods and thus makes it harder to employ people. The coming years can only get worse.
The reason why we have fiat money in the first place is that money has to adapt to us and our economyy, we don't want to adapt to the money.
Ok, now onto the second point. Hyperinflation isn't the same as inflation. Hyperinflation is primarily caused by the inability to exchange currency to purchase basic necessities. If there is a war and all the farmers have died there is not enough bread for everyone. No matter how much paper you have you can't conjure bread out of nothing. The currency becomes worthless, precisely because you can no longer use it for anything useful like buying food. The government/super market will have to import food from a different country. That country uses a different currency. So you either have to borrow the foreign currency or exchange your money into the foreign currency. Money is leaving your economy and being put into foreign people's hands.
Every single coin or bank note that is being printed to e.g. pay back debts or buy food in a foreign currency will instantly turn into inflation and since there isn't enough food for everyone you can never stop the printing press. The bigger and more resilient your economy, the lower the potential for hyperinflation.
The central bank might be doing crazy things but it is not forced to do them. Nobody is putting a gun to their heads and forcing them to do this. If they stopped creating more money the worst thing that could happen is a crash and we had so many of them and lived through all of them that it's really no big deal, compared to hyperinflation.
Inflation is not a problem so long as you invest your money as soon as you receive it and your wages keep pace with inflation (and they do). In that case the 2% per annum inflation rate only hurts you from the day you get your pay check to the day you invest it productively or spend it on necessities. In fact if you purchase your necessities on a credit card the 0% APR until your bill comes due makes inflation work for you.
So, you're telling me all the progress we've made so far has been wasteful and damaging to the environment? I agree.
Look at the ecological damage humans have caused! Several other animals extinct because of us, we've taken over their space on earth too. Our greed has caused this.
We must boycott all new things until nature heals.
I agree that cars are a horrible solution to the problem of transporting people and goods.
It's only by virtue of history and our willingness to accept massive loss of life and limb every year that cars, driven at 100 kph by sleepy, angry, elderly or distracted people, are still a thing.
Not to mention the massive loss of life and limb from climate change spurred by cars.
I think building life around cars is the dark turn that could have been avoided. At the time, I doubt anyone saw burning too much oil from the ground or giving the poor jobs to toil at as an evil thing, it just made them richer. In retrospect, manipulating people into wasteful lifestyles for personal gain might be the invention that ends us.
I second this. I was poised to dismiss your comment as facetiousness, and then suddenly realized that you are exactly correct. Why indeed should we prefer cars over horses for most (but of course not all) applications?
Aren't we as technologists always preaching the benefits of technological conservatism, minimalism and simplicity?
Our environment has obviously changed in such a way that it's now difficult to re-introduce equine transportation on a mass scale (where would you park them in a city designed for automobiles?), but we need to think long and hard about the world view that led us to conclude cars were universally superior to horses. I suspect the argument comes down to "productivity", and the axiomatic belief that it should be maximized in all circumstances.
fredfoobar _was_ being facetious. By his comments such as [1] and [2] it's clear that he's trying to attack other things in the world that happen to be both useful and pollutant, and induce a parallel between them and bitcoin — his implicit argument being that bitcoin supposedly a net-positive beneficial thing in spite of the pollution it causes. Whenever someone counters that assumption, the mask falls off and he's back on the attack [3].
That does not invalidate the point that cars _are_ highly pollutant and shouldn't be the primary means of transportation in any sustainable society.
Indeed! you sound like eminent scholar in the area of "usefulness of things", clearly your opinions are free of bias. I tip my hat to you, you have unmasked me! I feel naked.
In all seriousness though, we should at least move to electric cars.
If that is acceptable we already have electric money (bitcoin), it'll fix most of our pollution problems. We don't have to worry about how much oil is being consumed to secure the petrodollar network. I've been waiting for a better argument against bitcoin for a long time, I haven't heard any yet.
Most people who criticize bitcoin don't even understand it fully. My belief is that as people look deeper into it, they will be convinced by themselves. It has been generally true among my friends, including myself. I have gone through those phases of criticism (energy usage, funds terror, governments will ban it, it will be hacked, quantum computers will destroy it). As a software engineer, I think the system is beautiful, if you are one by profession (or not), I implore you to study it.
In Europe, there are not much cities that were designed for automobiles. Most down town designs predate automobiles by several centuries. That is why traffic congestion, and related externalities, are very significant problem for Europe, much more than for US. During several last years, there had emerged a movement when large cities introduce anti-car rules, effectively banning traffic in the most affected areas.
One argument is that horses are living creatures. Farming them as labor slaves to meet the needs of industry is cruel and would likely have comparable environmental impact to factory farming meat.
Will an electrobike take you home when you are blind drunk? What do we do when you run out of charge on your electrobike? what happens when there is a blackout? I don't think you've thought through all the problems properly.
An electro bike doesn’t require someone to pick up all the crap and won’t throw you when it hears a loud bang. I don’t think you’ve thought through the problems with horse transportation properly.
I live in NYC, in 50 story apartment building next to several other similarly sized high rises.
Our cars need about 75 sq. ft each (they're on stacked up 3 levels high in the garage)
How many sq. ft. would we need for all of our horses? How many people would be needed to take care of them full time?
Actually yeah... outside of cities who'd be taking care of these horses? Because cars need mechanics when something goes wrong obviously, but likewise horses need vets.
The day-to-day stuff like refueling a car is dead easy, meanwhile you can't just ignore your horse in the stable for a week because you didn't feel like going anywhere then fill it up on the way to your destination...
Edit response because I'm rate limited:
It seems you're not joking with the tone you're taking. I feel bad for you.
Our world would be much better off if we all lived in cities like NYC. Ten years ago average New Yorker generated 30% less CO2 than the average, and greenhouse emissions from the city were trending downward as economic activity trended upwards.
But yeah, I guess you're just enlightened past living near other people and shame on anyone who's comfortable enough with human contact to live in a city.
For all your posturing it's ironic you'd balk at "living in a crowded place"... the 30% in CO2 we'd save by living in cities like NYC is more than if we got rid of all forms of transportation in the US. Meaning simply by living in a city I don't really need to play ridiculous mental gymnastics like, but it's fun to tear down a bad argument.
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You're privileged enough to have an existence where taking care of a horse is easy and "therapeutic" I'm sure all the people barely making ends meet working 2 jobs would have just as easy a time filling up their car in 5 minutes as taking care of a horse.
I wonder what percentage of Americans have and additional 2 to 4 hours every single day just burning a hole in their pockets
And let's not forget the fact a car requires operating two pedals and a wheel. We can even modify them to require less for people who are physically impaired.
Good luck with taking care of an actual horse with a physical impairment. I'm sure you'll just say it's good exercise though, and woe onto you if you're someone with something like limited mobility trying to muck a horse stall.
It's always funny how the people who lived in the most privileged little bubbles seem to think those big city sheeple just don't get it
So, you're telling me you want less responsibility and want to live in a crowded place. I feel bad for you.
Taking care of a horse is easy, it's therapeutic even. Besides, if you don't want to own a horse, you can always hitch a ride from a friendly neighborhood horse-carriage operator.
I don't live in a crowded city, I own horses (for real). I have a mini farm at home that grows some micro-greens and veggies, I'm also trying my hand at aquaponics, I have a solar powered home. What more do you want??
They do. Source: a neighbor where I grew up used to ride quite a lot, and drink even more (he has since given up both). After a particularly wet night at a neighbor's place, some 7-8 km away (or half that, going straight through the forest like a horse), his friends simply heaved him on to his horse and sent him home.
Improperly maintained cars make me almost as sad as improperly maintained horses. We destroy billions of dollars worth of cars each year collectively because of people not affording/otherwise failing to do maintenance. On the flip side, thoroughly maintaining them would tend to result in a glut of older, less efficient cars, so it's not a cut and dry issue.
Sir, are you telling us that instead of dealing with that small problem of pollution (https://www.workinghorsetack.com/catch-it-manure-bag-horse-d...), we created a whole new system for transport that requires you to build infrastructure from the ground up just to use them? I wonder why.
In 1880 NYC’s population was 2 million. Today there are 23 million in the metropolitan area. We probably still wouldn’t have a good way of dealing with 25M+ pounds of poop a day. And at least garbage disposal is relatively orderly; horses just pooped everywhere.
The poop problem is certainly made easier by the fact that the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers poop in toilets, in specially designated rooms, that are directly connected to the sewers. And the poop gets flushed out of the toilet immediately. We also don't generally make humans work without bathroom breaks.
Decomposing poop takes time, and it's pretty awful to be around while it's happening. Also, for something to decompose into the ground, it needs to reach the ground, which it's not going to do if the street is paved.
You think its a small problem? Imagine as many horses as cars in a dense urban environment, each one using those bags. Now how do you get all those bags out without garbage trucks? It isn't as easy a problem as our modern minds might imagine.
Of course, cars as the savior is also an oversimplified narrative, but it was a fun one.
Sure, but the horse era was before efficient solutions to those problems as well. Cf, "night soil" and the processes used to (try) to keep it from stinking up the city.
My SUV pollutes less than a dog, simply because I run it once a week or less. The dog, as a horse, must breathe, eat and poop 24x7. Animals generate CO2 too. And methane.
To be short, saying that Bitcoin has the right of polluting while doing nothing useful in return because there are cars, is wrong.
As much as it's funny, this is a false analogy. Horses don't travel as fast as cars, or as far. They also can't pull/carry as much as a car, let alone a truck. How many horses are needed to carry the same load as one 18 wheeler?
Would Amazon be possible without trucks? How about Walmart?
Horses are also living creatures capable of feeling pain, fear, fatigue and can also be stubborn or aggressive. Horses also need to be sexed, reared, trained, fed and cared for, you can't simply build more horses on demand or scrap and recycle their parts. It's a silly analogy all around.
> Would Amazon be possible without trucks? How about Walmart?
Not Walmart, but Amazon makes even more sense in a horse-driven economy: First, you don't have to ride to the store and back -- mailing a small item is much cheaper than that. Second, with the price of shipping per mile per pound being higher, there would be more of an incentive to ship items directly from the manufacturer to the consumer. Mail-order catalogs existed before the age of cars.
I think I know where you want to go with this, but I'm not falling for it. Bitcoin is not progress towards the future, but a regression to the past. Pegging our economy to a finite (potentially volatile) asset has led to boom-bust cycles in the past, whether it is physical like gold or digital like Bitcoin.
People crave financial stability. Bitcoin will not give it to them. I'm not averse to the idea of a distributed ledger acting as an underlying settlement mechanism for global finance, but Bitcoin does not achieve that goal either as it's zero sum (whereas economies are actually growing).
The financial system literally gives you no guarantees about the supply. We just inflated the USD by trillions of dollars. USD cash is the number one asset used in criminal finance (from slavery to drugs to terrorism).
You can use horse manure to grow the food for the horses. It's a total ecosystem. What can you do with the pollution cars create?? can you capture it in a bag?? THINK for a second!
lol, cars have some tradeoffs as compared to horses, but overall they are a vast improvement to the problem of transportation compared to horses. Bitcoin is generally worse than what came before, despite being a new and otherwise interesting phenomenon unto itself.
I almost typed a snarky remark, but then realized that you make a valid point with that analogy. However the analogy feels a little weak to me:
> We even had to go to war to make sure we have enough oil
I don't see countries going to war over BTC (or the mining pool) as they already have cornered all the fiat currencies in a tight system. All they could do is sabotage the BTC system and make it less lucrative for normal public.
> I don't see countries going to war over BTC (or the mining pool) as they already have cornered all the fiat currencies in a tight system.
I think that's the point here. Unlike BTC which is powered by Proof of Work (POW), the US Dollar is powered by Proof of Violence (POV). As a result the full accounting for the externalities caused by US dollars would have to include the cost of supporting and using the largest military industrial complex in the history of the world to protect the market for oil being denominated in US Dollars (petrodollars).
Fiat is not powered by "proof of violence" because violence is not needed for it to function. It is maintained by social contract and the threat of violence, because otherwise it could only depend on trust, and trust is very expensive, as Bitcoin proves.
I'm sensing a small nuance missed here, I'll clarify pro-actively: Adding more energy to your mining operation won't result in more bitcoin for you, you will only make the network more secure. Mining bitcoin is mostly about securing the bitcoin network and there is a small reward for doing so.
~600K USD per block is not “small” :). Mining power is directly correlated to cost of electricity. Most mining is located in electricity-rich districts for good reason. It’s the only cost-effective way to sustain the network. Those regions are scarce across the globe, ergo in high demand.
I like how you get so close to the truth and then shy away into your biases. People are funny. Are you going to lead the crusade against Christmas lights?
I'm sorry.. this feels like whataboutism and it misses the point entirely. Christmas trees are hung for festive purposes, not monetary gain. With Bitcoin, electricity is a major cost input that drives miner actions. We see them move collectively to lower energy jurisdictions to keep mining activities as profitable as possible. Hydroelectric dams are the cheapest, most consistent source of energy. It's no surprise that miners move en masse to sources of hydroelectricity. And you can't just throw up a hydroelectric dam anywhere, it's very much a function of geography. Some places are blessed [1], others less so.
If you do have a salient point to make about the "truth," perhaps you should come out and make it. I'm sure a bunch of us would be happy to hear it.
I'm not understanding your reasoning, are you suggesting that wasting energy for "not monetary gain" is ok? It's not whataboutism, it's an expectation of consistency of thought/reasoning, how do you come to the conclusion that some activity is worth spending energy on and not others, I'm trying to suss it out.
Think about how the petro-dollar network is secured, how much energy it consumes, arguably more polluting than hydroelectricity (or another non-polluting/renewable source) used to secure a decentralized, permissionless, digital monetary network (it's not just a token, it's also the network and a store). Can you honestly tell me that you see no value in that system? if you do, what amount of energy use is justified, there has to be some number, right?
Compare it with gold, for instance, how much energy is expended in moving a billion dollars of gold from one location to another (based on distance), think about the amount of security it needs while it is being moved and stored, how much energy is expended while mining and smelting it.
Bitcoin seems to be an order of magnitude better than the existing comparable systems, there is a clear ability to choose where that energy can come from (unlike petro-dollars or gold). There's already enough natural pressure to move to renewable/stranded energy sources, a few years from now, almost all bitcoin mining will be from renewables/non-polluting sources and all this noise around bitcoin's energy use will be moot, what will you guys complain about then?
To me personally, the auditability of the network by ANYONE is the best feature, I have a node running at home that watches the network, and I can read the source code.
If 'cars' as means of transportation are analogous to bitcoin as currency, then the car would cost a fortune and you'd keep it in the garage, while driving around on a horse.
I have been trying to convince this in comments here but you did a damn good job with the analogy and now I am gonna use it every time this comes up. Thank you.
Transfer funds across borders without dealing with multi-business-day bank delays or capital controls in countries like China. Accept donations or other online transactions without relying on Visa/Mastercard.
> Accept donations or other online transactions without relying on Visa/Mastercard.
And then you can either try and meet someone in an alley somewhere, or go to a gatekeeper exchange just like Visa/Mastercard to try and convert those transactions back to money that can actually be exchanged for food and shelter!
I mean, let's be serious here. In theory, blockchain could allow us to build a good online payment system -- and that is a problem worth solving.
But in practice, Bitcoin in particular is completely awful as an online payment system, and I don't understand how people can reasonably claim otherwise. If the goal of Bitcoin was actually to make online payments easier, we would be using a different coin other than Bitcoin. The community would have moved on to any of the far better alternatives.
The fact that Bitcoin is still the predominant coin proves that the technology and the convenience of online payment processing is not the end goal for most people getting into cryptocurrency.
The payment provider layer is the part that ordinary people worry about when they're looking at transaction fees, security, censorship, and privacy.
If Bitcoin isn't a payment provider, then why should I care about it? It's more expensive and slower than ACH is. It's being converted into normal currencies and tracked by the same companies that are making payment providers today. What is it solving?
All of these payment providers that are being built on top of Bitcoin are going to have the same regulations, restrictions, and problems as the payment providers that exist today. If Bitcoin isn't capable of replacing them (and there's every indication that it is not), then it's not going to have a tangible impact on how and where I can spend money online.
I* think the average person probably shouldn't/wont care about Bitcoin. Bitcoin will become something that only the sort of entities who directly interact with the ACH system are worried about.
If Bitcoin succeeds, I don't think it is likely the average person will ever touch Bitcoin: it is technically complex to handle it securely. However, many of the Venmos and Squares in this future would likely be using Bitcoin to settle flow disparities behind the scenes.
In terms of what it's solving:
- Bitcoin has a much lower barrier to entry. It is very expensive and slow to get direct access to the ACH system (vs having your bank make transactions on your behalf).
- Bitcoin is apolitical. Banking and finance is still very much an old-boys network of after hours handshake deals. Bitcoin lets you swim with the big fish without having to worry about kissing the right asses. Similarly to claimed noble benefits of public markets, Bitcoin has a democratizing effect by not having a mechanism to favor entrenched players.
- Bitcoin is insulated from US monetary policy. This tends to appeal to gold-bug types who believe inflation is being underaccounted and will get worse.
- Bitcoin is permissionlessly auditable. I wish there was more development in this space, but I think bitcoin could be very powerful for non-profits and other organizations which want to be as transparent as possible with their finances. If an organization wanted to prove holdings or transactions, Bitcoin is arguably better than bank-money because Bitcoin txns cannot be forged, while documents being alleged to be coming from a bank could. (Similarly, I think it would be really cool for a bank to make an option for fiat accounts to have their balances and transaction history published publicly online)
* I am certainly not speaking for all Bitcoin advocates
> All of these payment providers that are being built on top of Bitcoin are going to have the same regulations, restrictions, and problems as the payment providers that exist today.
It creates a separation of concerns: If the layer 2 service providers you are using today become abusive/untrustworthy, it would be easy to switch to different ones.
Violating Chinese currency controls generally results in spending one's life in a tiny prison cell.
As for bank transfers, at my previous company we had to send hundreds of international payments each year and all of the transfers were finished within minutes of initiation.
And Paypal and other companies have made it possible to donate to charities without a credit card for almost 2 decades.
> Violating Chinese currency controls generally results in spending one's life in a tiny prison cell.
I sure as hell wouldn't want to be associated with a cryptocurrency that has a public ledger then if that's the type of punishment I am trying to avoid. You're just one exchange leak or hack away from being imprisoned.
The housing market in California is direct proof of the success of China's capital controls. Capital outflow from China to the West Coast dropped over 90% after Xi introduced capital controls.
When I was still in consulting, I had dozens of clients whose projects were killed when their Chinese investors could no longer get their money out of China to invest. A billion building sits unfinished across the street from Staples Center in LA (and has, for 3 years) because the developer can't get its money out of China to finish the building.
Thousands of local buyers are able to buy houses and condos in LA these past 3 years because they don't have to compete with all-cash foreign buyers any longer.
>Capital outflow from China to the West Coast dropped over 90% after Xi introduced capital controls.
Big claim. Source?
Its non-Chinese foreigners getting deals in LA now that China is sandbagged. If you don't see all the other foreign money buying LA then I am not surprised you are no longer a consultant.
Lastly what do you think of US capital controls such as OFAC?
The only answer that makes any sense is that you can do things that are otherwise illegal or banned by major companies.
But the drawbacks are plentiful, even for this sort of use case. And this use case doesn't get easier with a whole bunch of speculation. In fact, it gets harder.
And there's no particular reason for such users to leave it in a volatile form. Rather, they would be rational to cash out once the illegal transaction is over.
So the real value of bitcoin should be the expected float for all the crypto-compatible types of black market transactions. Which I'm quite sure is many orders of magnitude below the current price.
It should be noted that should you have the right kinds of connections, bitcoin mining itself lets you launder. The miner is given the dirty money as capital, energy subsidies, etc, then creates clean bitcoin, which appears in some anonymous wallet and is then sold.
So it's not just that the black market has incentive to use it, there's incentive to make it and even to prefer it over alternatives, because the operation's excess is a good front.
The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!" The actual place of decentralized ledgers is as one of several tools for designing autonomous, non-coercive communities, and when designed as such most of the overhead of proving disappears(e.g. DAG coins). Everything else is an attempt to extract rent into the coercive economy, which in due course will be trivially subverted by forking the chain or starting a new one.
> It should be noted that should you have the right kinds of connections, bitcoin mining itself lets you launder. The miner is given the dirty money as capital, energy subsidies, etc, then creates clean bitcoin, which appears in some anonymous wallet and is then sold.
The government could just look at your electricity bill and ask how you paid for it and then ask where you got all those mining rigs without a loan. If you can't find an explanation where that money came from you are in a bad spot. It's actually harder than laundering cash since cash can be spent directly without depositing it somewhere where your identity is known.
>The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!"
Yes, it's always the same boring old answer. If you could wave a magic wand and make it impossible to pay with euro it would suffer from the same problem. The value in the euro doesn't lie in itself, it lies in the ability to exchange for a service or good. Because I value the good or service I value anything that grants me access to the good or service, the euro grants me access to goods and services, thus I value the euro. Foreign currencies are worthless to me since I cannot use them to buy things, unless I want to import something denominated in a foreign currency, then the currency suddenly gains value for me.
It's laughable that Bitcoin exclusively being a store of value is somehow lauded as a benefit, as if being able to purchase goods with Bitcoin would be a bad thing for Bitcoin. It gets worse now because people insist that it is merely a settlement layer. As the price of Bitcoin goes up its value proposition is somehow getting worse over time. How is this even possible?
The date of the provenance of the coin would be possible to note on the ledger, and cross-reference with the hashrate at the time to determine how much capital would be needed to mine the coin. Which in turn poses the question of where that capital came from.
The vast majority of services that allow you to pay with Bitcoin merely convert it back to your local currency. That's like saying you can pay with euros in the united states.
The USD (and more importantly, the banking system), also allows for efficient high-volume transfers, reversibility, ID verification, and fraud investigation. None of this is possible with blockchain, by design.
I'd argue that USD in isolation doesn't support those use cases: the banking system does.
There is no reason a parallel banking system with all of the same features cannot built with Bitcoin being used as the denomination. I think this future is increasing likely (probably much to the chagrin of decentralization advocates) as Bitcoin increases in value and number of holders.
efficient high-volume transfers - risky and expensive to do with cash, really requires a hawala-like middleman (often a bank)
reversibility - not true of cash, only true within the context of softer credit systems. You could build a "Venmo backed by Bitcoin" where funds cannot be withdrawn for the reversibility period if you thought there was market demand for it.
ID verification - subject to discretion of counterparty
fraud investigation - Bitcoin is likely much better than USD for this because of it's traceability.
Which is a case that made headlines because of how unusual it is for this money to not get returned - it relies on an ultra-specific set of circumstances and still could have been decided the other way.
Now that people are understanding that horses are better, can I turn your attention to concrete?
The manufacture of cement produces about 0.9 pounds of CO2 for every pound of cement. Since cement is only a fraction of the constituents in concrete, manufacturing a cubic yard of concrete (about 3900 lbs) is responsible for emitting about 400 lbs of CO2.
We should stop making things out of concrete, it's destroying our climate, Mud huts are more than enough to protect us from the elements. We have so much land in the US, why can't we all spread out instead of building high rises??
Edit: who's downvoting this? look at the replies below, people know this is a real problem.
A solution for full-scale CCS has now matured that facilitates the further development of CCS in both Norway and Europe. The project has encompassed carbon capture from Norcem’s cement factory in Brevik and carbon capture from Fortum Oslo Varme’s waste incineration facility at Klemetsrud, Oslo. Northern Lights, which is a collaboration between Equinor, Shell and Total, has been responsible for the CO2 transport and storage part of the project. This part of the project comprises ships for transport of liquid CO2, a reception terminal in Øygarden municipality, and pipeline to a well where CO2 will be injected into a storage formation beneath the seabed
Concrete is indeed a major polluter, your point stands. The world is already experiencing a severe shortage of concrete, it's that valuable. But it's also very hard to switch to alternatives as concrete has the best compressive strength per unit volume and is very well understood as a building material. Plus, it's hard to build high-density housing out of mud huts (buildings require concrete).
Watched a cool video about the benefits of hempcrete last night. Very neat substance with good mechanical properties and it absorbs CO2 as it cures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempcrete
I see another comment on top doing the same. Why do people start with this? If you don't bother you should not even brought that up. Seems like an underhanded way of getting more points. Do people even fall for this?
It's a very effective meme. Like most such memes, it worms itself inside, and the vehicle doesn't consciously know of its presence. These people aren't thinking "I'll do this. It'll get me votes". It is unconscious mimetic memetics, if you will :)
Some of these memes become elevated into conscious actions. For instance, people cynically exploit "Linux can't do X" to get help for X. But some memes are unconscious and I think "I'll be downvoted for this" or "Get out of here with your facts and reason" or "Source?" are definitely examples of these.
Personally, I think many of the privacy and security comments are also memes that propagate through mimicry of success, but that's its own thing.
Yes, indeed! I can certainly tell you that post The Selfish Gene I have been entirely enamoured of the concept of the meme. I find it very elegant. If that isn't a brainjack, I don't know what is.
I have a personal policy, which, if treated as a Kantian imperative, would eliminate this.
Any invitation to downvotes, I take. Any comment about downvotes, means at the least that I won't upvote that comment. Meta-comments about downvotes are exempt, I would probably upvote this comment if I saw it from someone else.
Every person who adopts this policy improves the discourse by discouraging this behavior, please consider it!
However, people wanting feedback beyond mere downvotes is legitimate and downvoting without comment is the actual wrong here IMO.
IMO the best scheme here is that you _must_ provide a reason to downvote. People who vote for your reason [ie they agree with you about downvoting the parent] should be the actual downvotes.
This way instead of apparently arbitrary downvotes one gets a list of reasons with scores (HNs score hiding aside, though they'd still be ordered) indicating their relative worth as reasons for downvoting.
That is actionable. Under K2I that would allow everyone to tailor their contents to the audience if they wished, or at least understand the audience's approbation.
tl;dr I downvoted you ;o) ... except I didn't because your comment has value even if I disagree !
I agree that the downvote mechanism on HN could use some refinement!
Funny thing, when I went to quote the specific HN guideline, I'm almost certain it used to say "Please don't comment about downvotes. It never helps" or something very much like that.
But the current guideline says:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Which we're all in violation of! I'll do my best to follow this rule in the future.
It's a request, not an interdiction ;o). I find it occasionally illuminating to discuss meta-aspects but as a general rule the site guidelines are sensible.
Yes. It's a common pattern on reddit (and probably other sites) to let people know your intentions, thoughts and feelings to give context to the content of your post
For most other topics, I'd probably agree. In the case of crypto currencies it's important to point out that you'd rather hear compelling counterarguments rather than the all too frequent "You're right but I wish you weren't" downvotes.
I'm genuinely amazed at how you're able to take such an in-depth, thoughtfully written article, and reduce it into a mere "bitcoin is a waste of time, people are gamblers".
I was going to respond with a snippy quote about how transferring money around with Eth used to be convenient, but now it sucks
BUT I checked the current gas prices, and it's really not bad. You're looking at $3-4 for 5-10 minutes on a transaction. Too pricey for splitting restaurant bills, but not too bad for sending $100 around
I guess that when you get to $100+ though you have to deal with too much volatility, and there's no good way to hedge against it as a US citizen (at least, I can't find any reputable brokerage/exchange that will let me short small amounts of crypto)
I am one the people you describe, and I am still sure it is a stupid idea. Worse ideas got more support from the public in the past, and I think this one needs more time to be seen.
On the other hand, a government-issued cryptocurrency that is entirely under government's control with no anonymity, is not stupid at all. And I think this will be the future of crypto. Not saying it is good, just saying it is inevitable.
I’ve come to realize, that prejudice is amplified online. Prejudice is, at its root, poorly examined opinions based on insufficient evidence.
Prejudice gets amplified because it often seems insightful, and online, barraged by information all day, people click, read these blurbs and one liners, then pass them on.
Prejudice is also emotionally satisfying because typically people believe what is already inline with their beliefs. So taking the time to research and understand topics is not as pleasurable as passing along prejudice.
It’s all around us online, from simple celebrity gossip, to political analysis, on and on.
We’ve somehow as a society got to get our heads around the fact that this form of communication online is brand new to the human experience, and we have to understand it’s impacting us in new ways.
I fear all the ways Prejudice is pushing us apart, and away from fact, understanding, and compassion.
Except in this case the prejudice is spot on. That is where the absurdity starts. These comments have no right to be correct and yet they are. When you do your own research you will reach the same conclusions as them.
>I fear all the ways Prejudice is pushing us apart, and away from fact, understanding, and compassion.
As said, it's absolutely defying expectations. It's driving people toward fact, understanding and compassion.
A criticism tires if it’s target doesn’t change. Meanings are upvoted if a majority supports them. Are you expecting a new view on the aged rat or a pitying silence?
They've been saying the same shit about Bitcoin for over a decade. I started fucking around with it in 2010 on a spare Asus laptop I had with a Core2Duo. Glad I did. I thought it was intriguing then and I believe in it now.
We've seen the exact same cycles over and over and yet no one seems to "get it". When the block reward halved from 50 to 25, the price skyrocketed, then crashed. When the block reward halved from 25 to 12.5, the price skyrocketed, then crashed. And after every crash, there was a recovery.
Guess what's gonna happen the block reward halves from 12.5 to 6.25?
Go on... take a wild guess.
Worldwide central banks are printing money nonstop, literally by the trillions, which is great if you're in a shitload of debt, but not so hot if you're holding a lot of cash assets. Well you can't "print" another 21,000,000 Bitcoins. And BTC is just the first of the cryptocurrencies. It won't be the last, and it probably won't even be the one the world eventually settles on, but make no mistake, this'll be where humanity goes.
I wonder why no one bothers to ask how much power all the payment processors in the world like VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Stripe, QuickPay, etc. and so forth use... oh yeah, that's because in their mind they're "legitimate", whatever the fuck that means. This illusion that seems to grasp everyone's mind and never let go utterly boggles me. Its a bunch of made-up bullshit, including Bitcoin, yet for some reason people hang onto it like its a loaf of bread they could eat to stay alive.
All these currencies have as much value as a bunch of people think they have. Period. I've never seen someone eat Renminbi and stay alive. Never seen someone build a house out of British Pounds.
>We've seen the exact same cycles over and over and yet no one seems to "get it".
This is the wrong assumption to start from. You should think of the opposite assumption. These people fully understand Bitcoin and other stupid investments.
I thought long and hard about all of this and there is nothing to "get".
>Worldwide central banks are printing money nonstop, literally by the trillions, which is great if you're in a shitload of debt, but not so hot if you're holding a lot of cash assets. Well you can't "print" another 21,000,000 Bitcoins. And BTC is just the first of the cryptocurrencies. It won't be the last, and it probably won't even be the one the world eventually settles on, but make no mistake, this'll be where humanity goes.
Here is the short story. Everything is up. What makes cryptocurrencies special? That they are entirely fictional? So ultimately, since cryptocurrencies aren't used as currencies and instead treated as assets with 0 return like gold the expectation is that it merely catches up with inflation. If it goes up faster than inflation then it is a bubble purely driven by human irrationality. In other words, Bitcoin is a bubble/speculation sentiment index. You can benchmark any other asset against Bitcoin to mostly "cancel" out the speculation part of the market.
>All these currencies have as much value as a bunch of people think they have. Period. I've never seen someone eat Renminbi and stay alive. Never seen someone build a house out of British Pounds.
I can believe that the value of 1€ is high enough to buy a house and then get smacked in the face by house construction companies who build houses for 200k€.
Meanwhile with Bitcoin that is fair game since there is no company that accepts 4 Bitcoin to buy a house no matter what the current value of Bitcoin is. There is no economy that is making the price sticky by making people consider what you can actually do with the currency. Since you can barely do anything with Bitcoin its value isn't based on the existence of an economy that exchanges it, it is merely based on random thoughts of random people who want a self fulfilling prophecy aka a bubble.
I'm more amazed that people reach the correct conclusion without thinking too much. Snarky people don't have any right to be this "smart".
If you start off with the stupid explanations of Bitcoin HODLers then it requires a lot of deep thinking to debunk all of it and ultimately reach the same conclusion as those snarky people.
I'm not sure if you're trying to dismiss the parent comment, or if this is a damning observation on "thought" regarding bitcoin. Probably some of both, right?
Earlier I thought it had some obscure use case but this article convinced me that Bitcoin does not deserve the hate it does. It needs more discussion on ways to improve it and solve energy problem! Full disclosure I have 0 bitcoins.
This is compounded by the fact that people don't want Bitcoin to change. The very critics of Bitcoin want it to change to be more useful. Isn't it absurd how there are people (HODLers) that insist that it is valuable and should go up and simultaneously insist on keeping the value of Bitcoin down?
This distinction is so tiring. It's just not interesting calling something gambling as if that is supposed to be bad. Every move we make is a gamble (yes, even storing that precious cash in the bank). Money is all about opportunity cost and choosing to do nothing is just as much of a gamble as doing something like storing it in bitcoin. Sticking ones head in the sand doesn't change the fact that your only choice is to place your bets and gamble.
Bitcoin is also not zero sum, it's a monetary system with unique properties (particularly censorship resistance and resistance to seizure) that can't be found in any other monetary system.
Those qualities add value in a way that makes it attractive to buyers even if they expect the price to go down over time.
I think you are the one with your head firmly shoved in the sand. Bitcoin has enormous problems with legality, energy usage, lack of trust, hacking, and slow, expensive transactions that make it a really shitty alternative to fiat. Bitcoin isn't just a gamble - its sole use as of now is as a pump and dump scam. There is no earthly reason why a digital token should be worth $50k a pop. Bitcoin is a shitty bet, and I'd take USD and a bank account any day over it.
Why do you think young people today are willing to take these extreme risks? Casinos and speculative instruments existed decades ago.
I think it's because of the massive economic inequality that people experience today. Working an unskilled, or even a skilled job doesn't go as far today as it has in the past. Many people have internalized that they will never be as "successful" or as rich as their elders. Given that situation, it's easy to see why these risky asymmetrical bets are attractive. A failed investment pushes you deeper into poverty, but doesn't fundamentally change your situation. A successful one has the potential to change your life and break the cycle of poverty for you.
For someone who's about to declare bankruptcy, a lottery ticket is an excellent deal. For the lower class of America, so are these investments.
It's not an extreme risk if you only invest a small amount of money. I wouldn't suggest anyone remortgage their house to put that into bitcoin, but I've invested ~$1200 in there and I'm willing to wait and see what happens. If I lose it, it will be a learning experience and I'll be just fine.
People bet big when the ETA to payoff is perceived as near and possibly large. A number of elements impede this behavior wrt BTC I wager since it was always pitched as a slow roasting investment, whereas in the case of GME, being a stock and not Bitcoin, we saw this behavior more liberally I think
You're absolutely correct. The inability to "make it" through honest work makes people hopeless and thus they would rather lose money because of their gambling decisions than to give up on the potential for massive gains that are otherwise impossible.
Interest rates are negative - if you're saving in cash you're losing money. Everyone is happy to gamble in assets and commodities because the money has to go somewhere and it's not like there's infinite opportunities the money can go into, so it's "to the moon" on the markets.
This is one of the few positives about Bitcoin - if people choose to sink money into it, effectively redistributing weatlh to people that bought these useless hashes when they were sold at $100, real estate, gold and other useful things we want will not appreciate as fast as if it didn't exist :)
Yes this is true. What people want is a less risky investment/inflation hedge and the Fed is forcing people to accept more risk. That's not a good thing because there are better ways to utilize the stimulus money.
You just described the stock market. The only difference is that before, there were only a handful of people with the power and tools to manipulate it (ie. Wall Street), whereas now, due to the power of the Internet and social networks, masses of people are able to coordinate to achieve similar effects.
In a way, what has been happening lately, is the democratization of the power to game the system. Which doesn’t mean that now anyone can do it, but rather that it is not limited only to the rich and powerful anymore (until they figure out a way to gate-keep it again).
The stock market is a place to purchase productive assets. That share I own represents actual work done by human beings to produce goods and services. That BTC I own represents an immutable thing that itself does nothing.
> That BTC I own represents an immutable thing that itself does nothing.
Part of BTC's value is probably the hope (speculation) that it will one day be used as an alternative payment system / store of value / whatever, and that will cause it to maintain value. As of right now, a share of AMZN itself does virtually nothing either. Its value lies in the hope (speculation) that one day Amazon will pay us money for holding it.
Mining is productive. It supports the payment system. BTC does not. If we took 90% of all coins, shoved them in a wallet, and destroyed the key it wouldn't change the network's capabilities at supporting payments or storing value or whatever. That's the difference between a productive asset and something else.
An AMZN share on the other hand represents some small percentage of actual labor and production being done by Amazon's employees.
> An AMZN share on the other hand represents some small percentage of actual labor and production being done by Amazon's employees.
Which is nice on paper but is functionally worthless for virtually all shareholders unless AMZN pays a dividend, no? The only way to generate wealth from AMZN right now is to give it to someone else for more money than you paid for it. If you bought AMZN 20 years ago for retirement, you'd still be waiting for that asset to produce anything on its own. For fun, compare that to the East India companies which paid up to double digit dividends from year one.
To be fair, AMZN is one of the more promising examples of these tech growth stocks, but many of them seem to be trading in a way similar to BTC: pure speculation on an asset which currently does not produce anything on its own -- and has no guarantee that it ever will.
>Which is nice on paper but is functionally worthless for virtually all shareholders unless AMZN pays a dividend, no? The only way to generate wealth from AMZN right now is to give it to someone else for more money than you paid for it. If you bought AMZN 20 years ago for retirement, you'd still be waiting for that asset to produce anything on its own. For fun, compare that to the East India companies which paid up to double digit dividends from year one.
Of course when an investor buys single stocks he is taking on the risk that the company has to survive until it pays out dividends or does stock buybacks. However, literally everyone knows and understands that risk. Everyone has heard about companies going bankrupt. This is why you are supposed to have a portfolio of a variety of stocks. Employees who receive stock compensation want to avoid the risk that their employer will disappear and they lose their job and the stocks both at the same time.
But if we assume that Amazon is not paying out dividends right now because it is still growing (I don't know, haven't checked since I consider Amazon to be an awful company) then it would grow its ability to pay out dividends in the future. There will be one day in the future that Amazon will stop growing and then be forced to just pay out the profits. If it turns out that the margins at the end are super thin and it can't pay enough dividends to justify its market cap then the value of the stock will simply go down because investors sell their stock and look for companies with growth potential. This will happen until the value of the stock is low enough that the valuation of the company is entirely based on dividends.
>pure speculation on an asset which currently does not produce anything on its own -- and has no guarantee that it ever will.
This is an undesirable property of the stock market, at least if you were to ask the central bank or government or me. With Bitcoin, this is actually considered desirable because there is nothing to it other than speculation.
The stock market suffers from the same biases that Bitcoin speculators suffer from. However, Bitcoin only suffers from the biases. At least with the stock market the stock actually represents a company, even if its overvalued. However, when people are talking about the stock market absolutely nobody wants it to be out of whack with reality. All those people who are bullish on Tesla want Tesla to become a huge company that is worth its valuation. The fact that it probably won't happen is just something we have to accept and consider the risk when buying Tesla stock.
People insist on chaos with Bitcoin. It's the only way you can make money off of it.
Why are no-coiners so obsessed with price? You dismiss a breakthrough technology, and probably skipped on reading a quite interesting article, because you don't like Bitcoin's price graph and the fact it attracts speculators?
I do remember when Linux was the useless technology and didn't have any use case, we already had all the OSes we needed. This wasn't the story on this forum, but it was popular. Same thing here.
Yes I agree, but I think you miss the point. The reality is folks buying bitcoin are also indirectly betting on the failure of our globalised central banking systems. This was the pitch in the early days and it remains a key value proposition. Think of it like this how much reach does a USD have? It’s limited by some factors but all things equal the reach of a USD is pretty good. I can use USD in most African and Asian countries. However the USD in China has limited reach. I’m using the word reach to loosely describe how usable the currency is in a foreign country. The sterling pound has a very limited reach if I were travelling I would convert it before. So one day in the future when the SHTF and no one wants to trade there will be a currency that is decentralised that has an unlimited reach. The reality is we need to get serious about the predicament of our financial systems or the folks with the BTC will be holding all the cards. I own no crypto and am just a interested observer wanting to share my perspective.
Your comment would have made more sense before everyone had the ability to use their debit/credit cards almost anywhere in the world, meaning the fact that other countries don't take GBP doesn't matter a huge amount at all. Last few times I was abroad if I needed cash I got it out of an ATM in the local currency.
The entire world of finance is built upon there being an infinitely increasing supply of people who want to buy in.
You're effectively saying that the global economy is also a scheme. I wouldn't disagree with that, it's just that
what you're describing isn't unique to bitcoin.
Actually, it's the opposite. The economy keeps getting more productive and this has to be countered with inflation to keep prices stable and reward further productivity growth.
Bitcoin and dollars are not comparable. The US government forces you to use dollars under threat of violence. To exist as a legal entity in society you must use dollars, to pay fees, taxes, etc. And if you depend on the government, you must accept dollars.
No one needs to use bitcoin. Its demand is chiefly speculation. It has very little use other than a speculative vehicle.
I disagree 100%. Having a reason for existing is, literally, it's meaning.
Something may become meaningless over time if the landscape changes to undermine the reasons for existence, but that underscores the point that 'reason for existence' is another way of saying 'it means something'.
Bitcoin's reason for existence was the bank bailouts of 2008. It has found supplemental reason in the current economic climate of quantitative easing. That means everything.
"Having a reason for existing doesn't mean anything" is an absurd statement.
You are right. I own Btc and other crypto assets for that very reason. The desire to hit big is the primary motivator and it unfortunately bleeds into other investments such as stocks etc. I very much am attempting to go back to the buy and long term hold mentality but you are right, crypto has mentally ruined it for me.
I'm also skeptical of bitcoin, but it can't be dismissed so easily anymore. There's clearly something to it, but what? Is it it just speculation about future value, a hedge against inflation and government control? A way around laws and currency export controls?
Bitcoin obviously offers some value to some people, but I think bitcoin's greatest innovations were social.
The bitcoin community has innovated all sorts of social tools for advocating causes and pumping assets. Could $TSLA have reached $850 post-split without these techniques? Maybe. Could $GME have reached around $350 without an army of "diamond hands" and "to the moon" (read: crypto memes)? Definitely not.
This may feel like a stupid point, but I mean it. Goldbugs have been a thing for forever, but the sort of digital advocacy that bitcoin sees puts them to shame by comparison. Not only is there a hoard of crypto fanatics ready to tell you why sitting out of bitcoin is the worst decision you've been making your entire life, but you can even get several entirely disjoint explanations for why bitcoin is something you should invest in (some at a glance: it's going to make digital payments easy, it's a scarce asset like gold and will only increase in price, it will replace fiat as a global currency, it's a revolutionary technology and nothing else like it has been seen before, etc). Similarly, if you try to critique any one of these, another supporter will instantly take up the fight by moving the goalposts to their preferred explanation on why bitcoin is great. (Oh sure it can't do many transactions, but it's not actually for payments it's digital gold...)
This isn't meant to be derogatory against bitcoin supporters, but rather an expression of wonder. It's clearly not a fluke: bitcoin drops off the radar for most people and comes back every couple of years, clearly whatever the supporters and investors are doing to advocate for it is working.
Financially aligning people through greed, speculation, is certainly one way to gain "consensus" - however that ignores, attempts to circumvent the harder work - which takes healthy individuals who have genuine community via regular, conversations that go deep - of building trust; Bitcoin is a virus that has spread because our immune system isn't working, we're currently weak due to a lack of real connection, interconnection.
Goldrush FOMO is a very powerful force. Not saying this applies to you, but I think some people can’t stand the cognitive dissonance of being a hacker and not getting into bitcoin, missing out on life-changing money. To deal with it, they need to vilify bitcoin often on quasi-moral grounds.
That's a fallacy into which they're falling. Not a logical one, just a mental fault in their thinking.
You and everyone else around you are always missing out on life-changing money.
I missed out on GameStop when it was $4. Roaring Kitty was posting on YouTube then... but I didn't know about him. I didn't hear anything about GameStop until it was already in the hundreds of dollars. I missed out on Tesla. I missed out on Microsoft, Apple, Apple's resurgence in the 90s, etc.
There's always going to be some thing that everyone misses out on.
I'm biased, because I've been mining Bitcoin since 2010, starting with an old Asus Core2Duo laptop, then I got a Butterfly Labs Jalapeno miner, and then the Chinese miners took over the scene and I got out because I didn't see the point trying to compete with them.
But I'm still missing out of all kinds of life-changing money scenarios even today. And so is everyone else.
Yes, this is true of course. FOMO is a fallacy. Nonetheless, I think it does play a role in the nature of bitcoin criticism, which I otherwise find is somewhat odd and repetitive and moralising. You clearly don't have this problem - I think it is most severe in those people that never owned any bitcoin.
>There's always going to be some thing that everyone misses out on.
Definitively, I don't have enough money to execute all the possible investment strategies I want to follow up on.
It's also weird that the bet size is being ignored. With Bitcoin your maximum bet size is much smaller than with stocks because of the high risk. I can put more money into stocks because they are less risky and thus I can actually end up being exposed to greater gains.
It seems to be the other way round to me. Certain Bitcoin fans can't stand that other "hackers" don't buy into the Bitcoin story as religiously as they do.
As the other comment pointed out, for FOMO to be this "powerful force" everyone would be constantly enraged they didn't buy Tesla shares 10 years ago, or save that collection toys from their childhood that suddenly became valuable, or any number of other things.
Well the top comments in crypto threads are never bitcoin fans complaining that hackers aren't drinking crypto Kool-Aid. Maybe they get downvoted to oblivion.
And yet this is the way to create money - money is what we believe other people will want and will give us something valuable in exchange. It only works because other people also believe in it. It started with shells and gold and other collectibles - and we still collectively manipulate the price of gold in a kind of sustained flash mob. It is all circular - but it works and when you want to create a new kind of money you have to do the same trick again.
I just posted this in another comment: "Convincing yourself that someone commenting negatively about Bitcoin is simply jealous is also a common thing I've seen many Bitcoin owners use to justify ignoring legitimate counter-narratives of a lot of propaganda."
In my country, bitcoin guards against inflation. Local currency in relation to the dollar, in 2020, I lost 50%. Bitcoin in relation to the dollar, in 2020, did 300%.
Bitcoin here is a wealth transfer from the older generation to the newer generation. The older generation owns and invests the real estate, and this keeps the prices high and exclusive. The newer generation (techn-savvy) can now use crypto profits to fund innovation and progress. Several people I know funded their own startups.
Of course the crypto market attracts tons of scum and shady people too. And the hype can be damaging (older generation buying in at all-time-highs, and panic selling, causing high variance).
Early adopters were far from the huddled masses. Can't really blame them for others jumping on the hype train, just like you can't judge someone holding gold, by all the criminals holding gold or states going to war over it. Forget energy usage for a second, and wonder, "how many people actually die yearly to keep the dollar valuation high?" I feel the "resource waste" is more a feature, than a bug. If you need the electricity of entire countries to attack the network, the network becomes more robust.
And then let the new rich generation use their profits on creating more green or nuclear energy, then keep on mining and holding. Tesla could perhaps help here. Industries where energy is a large part of the budget have the right economic incentives to make renewable energy more cost-effective. Older economies, industries, and hegemonies are married to oil, in aggregate pollute far more, and lack the right incentives.
Poker is a game of skill which will serve you well if trading. Don't judge the game by the drunk pot-splashing tourists, or the risk-averse spectators in the stands, or the regulators looking for a ban after being lobbied by the older generation.
Edit: I stopped bickering about and promoting bitcoin on HN when the price was around 4500$. The very sentiment then: This is a waste, and a hype, and a bubble, and only criminals use it, tulip mania, gambling addicts. All the nay-sayers back then should realize they actually lost people money! I got into Bitcoin and ETH early due to an enthusiastic post on HN. Please think back a few years, has your viewpoint changed? Do you allow yourself to keep commenting negatively, knowing how wrong you were for years now? Are you really doing the HN community a service with your expert hot takes?
> I topped bickering about and promoting bitcoin on HN when the price was around 4500$. The very sentiment then: This is a waste, and a hype, and a bubble, and only criminals use it, tulip mania, gambling addicts. All the nay-sayers back then should realize they actually lost people money!
Same. I did cost me dearly to listen to the loud voices on HN, people so certain about themselves that they just couldn't envision the possibility they could be wrong.
Fortunately, I did not suffer from this hubris, so when confronted to evidence that I was wrong, I changed my mind.
It served me well, but like you I feel so sad these stupid people caused so many hackers to remain poor, and are still hurting the community.
> Do you allow yourself to keep commenting negatively, knowing how wrong you were for years now? Are you really doing the HN community a service with your expert hot takes?
These negative people are the reason may bright minds will remain chained to a day job at a FANG selling ads and dopamine, instead of really innovating.
>Same. I did cost me dearly to listen to the loud voices on HN, people so certain about themselves that they just couldn't envision the possibility they could be wrong.
Are you serious? This isn't a topic that is about being "right or wrong". You can massively criticize Bitcoin and still invest in it, precisely because you understand the risk and are fully aware of its mechanisms and how it relates to other assets. The price doesn't prove anything since its completely arbitrary.
>Fortunately, I did not suffer from this hubris, so when confronted to evidence that I was wrong, I changed my mind.
Sorry, but what hubris? If anything, an increased understanding allows you to be aware of the risks and thus correctly choose your bet size.
>It served me well, but like you I feel so sad these stupid people caused so many hackers to remain poor, and are still hurting the community.
I'm not poor because I worked hard to obtain assets that directly benefit me every month. Meanwhile that expectation doesn't even exist for Bitcoin. It's a pure gamble. The fact that some people got rich is meaningless because that happens with gambling and lotteries as well.
>These negative people are the reason may bright minds will remain chained to a day job at a FANG selling ads and dopamine, instead of really innovating.
Is this supposed to be a joke? FANG employees with 6 digit salaries who are earning more than enough to afford stocks? I said I am not poor but that doesn't change that there is still a huge gap between me and someone who earns $200k per year at that salary the effort and risk needed to increase your wealth is so low that any dead horse can become financially independent.
>Sad, really sad.
The real sadness is that people think that Bitcoin is the solution to economic problems. Instead of building a working economy that helps everyone we get a second generation of people with legacy wealth. A new generation to hate because they got the spoils early. How long until there is a third generation? A fourth? Because you are going to need a lot of these if you want everyone to benefit.
> You can massively criticize Bitcoin and still invest in it, precisely because you understand the risk
But that degree of complex thought seems impossible to most geeks: for them, things are either good or bad. It's a very black and white thinking.
> Sorry, but what hubris?
The belief that my opinions about a technology are better than the market evaluation of said technology is just hubris. Clearly, you don't have it, given what you said above. You and me are lucky. Not everybody is.
By talent or by luck, you can be more often right that wrong, or the opposite called "harbinger of doom" in marketting [the ipod "lamer than a nomad" on Slashdot and BTC "no future" on HN makes me think nerds are such harbinger of doom!]
However, it's not 100% of the time. You must keep in mind the possibility you may be wrong. You do. I do. Most people don't. They succumb to magical thinking. It keeps them poor.
> The fact that some people got rich is meaningless because that happens with gambling and lotteries as well
The fact is was predicted, and there are more future testable predictions (flow-to-cash) invalidate this point. It's more like buying tickets to lotteries where, due to the jackpot value, the EV is positive. It then makes sense to buy as many tickets as you can, inducing friends and family to the scheme. Some people became quite rich that way. Of course, it entails risk, as nothing is guaranteed. So you should just invest what you can afford to lose.
> > These negative people are the reason may bright minds will remain chained to a day job at a FANG selling ads and dopamine, instead of really innovating.
> Is this supposed to be a joke? FANG employees with 6 digit salaries who are earning more than enough to afford stocks?
It's not a joke. Try to understand the difference between people working in FANGs and me: they yearly pay is funny money to me, something I did spend before just for the lol of watching a market crash after having too many drinks.
> I said I am not poor but that doesn't change that there is still a huge gap between me and someone who earns $200k per year at that salary
You feel the huge gap between you and them? I feel it too, except in the opposite direction. And even with our slight differences in opinions, I believe we agree more than you think.
> the effort and risk needed to increase your wealth is so low that any dead horse can become financially independent
Exactly this!!
They have to work hard. I don't, money works for me. I'm sufficiently diversified that, barring a WW3 style event, I will not have to care about money ever.
Hell, I don't even care if crypto will keep booming, as I'm out. I give a hand to a few projects here and there, but that's it.
Now I'm studying biology because it's fun and I have time to occupy. Some people worry about a postdoc after their studies, or finding a job? It's like they are from a different world: if I want, after I'm done studying, I will start a lab and hire people to work on stuff I find interesting - and just with funny money I would blow anyway. No need of VC or anything.
This is the difference between sellings ads at a FANG and being really innovative: taking control of the narrative and the destiny. Making changes in the world.
And it is extremely sad to find myself in that position, after having seen many people I believe more deserving than me stuck in jobs. I tried to tell them. They didn't listen. They didn't use their rationality. They let their fear of high variance in price discourage them from even trying to edge their bets.
> The real sadness is that people think that Bitcoin is the solution to economic problems.
The sadness is that it's available for anyone to benefit, yet most people won't - because they don't understand what a profound change of system it entails, and how deep the changes will be. They don't update their beliefs.
Everybody lucky to be alive today can buy just $1,000 of BTC, and be assured to have enough money get a very nice car in a few years. It's not much (sorry, you had to be an early adopter) but in the US, that's still enough to lift someone to middle class, as a working car increase work opportunities.
Someone at a FANG making 200 times that amount per year could certainly save more, say 20k, and get a (inflation adjusted, so present value) cool half million by 2024 - enough to never have to worry about almost anything, and maybe enough to retire in some parts of the country.
But they won't. They are too busy spitting on crypto. If you have time, read this comment: https://wolfstreet.com/2021/02/28/the-big-buy-hype-bitcoin-c... and the original post for lol (the author tries to rationalize his decision of refusing 6 bitcoins, saying he would have sold early)
The comment by Z stands out in the magnitude of ignorance and stupidity of other commenters who read as people from another generation not understanding - not even understanding the fact that they don't understand.
Like I did, this person realized their mistake. Now they did some mental math, came with a price model (slightly higher than the $1M I estimate per BTC, but still reasonable if the network effects open new markets for BTC as a store of value compared to the gold market), and will wait until they have enough money to change their life.
$5M isn't that much, but it has the potential to change that person life according to their own calculation.
And that's the beauty of it: there is still enough gain on table to change the life of everybody alive right now - at least of anyone who does understand the change currently happening!
> Because you are going to need a lot of these if you want everyone to benefit.
Unlike you, I'm not worried about the future generations. They will invent great things standing on our shoulders.
A new world economy based on a BTC deflationary base will also provide them a much better environment, as governments will be constrained by reason and reality again.
You can’t blame Bitcoin for starting the fire, people have been speculating on financial assets as long as they’ve existed. And not just the huddled masses; smart people like Isaac Newton have been burned by bubbles.
> It's taken a gambling-friendly society with feverish lust for winning (think for-profit fantasy sports, online poker, day trading, Vegas et al) and turned us into a giant decentralized casino.
I agree with your post overall, but I think you'd be foolish to think that it wasn't always this way. The only difference is another strata of folk now can play as well.
I'm really glad someone can articulate what I've bee thinking for a long time. It started when I realized that bitcoin was being used to fuel dark markets then again when I saw that anyone was able to make a coin and pre-mine thousands before sharing with others struck with FOMO.
You can easily make rpowerscoin. But it won’t be bitcoin. And its existence will have negligible impact on bitcoin.
There have been 100,000 clones of bitcoin (according to someone who claimed to have counted)but none are genuinely successful. Even forks if bitcoin fail despite spending millions on propaganda.
Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash have already surpassed bitcoin in transaction throughput. If anyone has spent millions on propaganda it is the people pushing the second layer on bitcoin's crippled transaction throughput.
In the analog perception of time it takes for me to complain about kids getting on my lawn, a measurable percentage of the pics taken in the 20th century were just now taken digitally.
bitcoin isn't just for speculators. It's also for longer term buy and hold investors. there's a very real demand for investments that will hold their value against inflation. can you name a single asset class that will do that, other than equities or gold? real estate is out of the question because the overhead of buying and selling it is to expensive, not to mention it's so hard to execute that you'd loose your shirt if you dont know what your doing.
They make money from you when you use their services. If FinancialCo thinks you'll buy Bitcoin, they'll offer it to you for a fee. They'd sell investments in inflatable dinosaurs if they could make enough money from fees for doing so.
Ignorant people like to call it Dutch Tulips. Was Dutch Tulips a one-tie event? Or did it continue to increase in value and usage with higher highs and higher lows every couple years?
By your "waste of resources" take, which is again so tired - at least Bitcoin is helping Venezuelans and Nigerians and others who have purchased it, unlike video games, which waste FAR more electricity and are a larger waste of resources.
yes, bitcoin was specifically invented to co-opt our consciousness to self-propagate. it is successful in this. some people recognized that capability 10 years ago, some people recognize it today.
I believe it takes 72 TERAWATTS running for 10 minutes to mine one bitcoin. How is that justifiable when we are slipping deeper into an environmental crisis?
The Wolf of Wall St would agree with you. Although I agree with the the following article, I have taken a small position and bought the hype. My intention is to exit long before the jig is up.
> Let me fix that title. Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I only have 11 points. Go ahead.
> "Bitcoin Is A Waste of Time (and Resources)"
The fact this clever whoring works on HN, saying you'll be downvoted then saying something mainstream popular to get upvoted says a lot about the HN community.
Absolutely 100% off topic to the article and painting the garden shed.
Good work to OP turning their claimed karma level from 11 to 177, that's hacking.
"Bitcoin Is A Waste of Time (and Resources)"
What Bitcoin has done is that it taught people they can come together in a sustained flash mob (like an on-the-fly hedge fund operation) and manipulate the price of speculative assets by creating artificial short-term pump-n-dump type demand. Bitcoin has trained our collective neural network to do this.
The huddled masses can take their new superpower and apply it to stock, crypto, commodities on the commodity exchange, and all kinds of speculative assets, especially the virtual kind.
It's taken a gambling-friendly society with feverish lust for winning (think for-profit fantasy sports, online poker, day trading, Vegas et al) and turned us into a giant decentralized casino.