Miners Aren’t Friends

Their entry on Wikipedia got deleted. That's how relevant they are. They're a BV with iDEAL/Currence is a PSP as well.

How important has Bitcoin been for Mollie? Do you have any data on the absolute or relative amount of Bitcoin transactions?

> Note that not evey merchant using mollie will have Bitcoin enabled, I'm not sure if e.g. ah.nl has the bitcoin option enabled, but I haven't checked them either.

??? Hello? Have you ever ordered on ah.nl??? I order there practically every week. You pay either in store if you pick it up, or you gotta pay by PIN if they deliver. You CANNOT pay online. Do you get that? They got barely time to deliver the groceries in your house. Do you think they'd be cool to wait till the Bitcoin transaction was finalised? Who are you kidding?!?!?!

> You come across as someone who has some axe to grind with Bitcoin.

Of course I do, its akin to MLM. I already burned my hands on that. Why would I want other people to get burned by scammers?

> or because you decide that the volume processed there is too low

You never refuted the volume being important premise. You had the opportunity to do this in your previous 2 posts but you neglected that by coming up with more niche examples which simply don't prove the existence of a Bitcoin techhub as you put forth in your earlier post. I know there are niche examples, and I know you're well aware of them. Here, have a cookie. What I'm interested in is figuring out how important Bitcoin is for the Amsterdam Area. From what I can tell by the data I have we have:

* Adoption (market penetration). Terrible. Only a few niche cases.

* Volume. Terrible. One data point from Thuisbezorgd, one data point from yourself.

And this isn't rocket science its reflected by the lack of large online stores accepting Bitcoin. Its reflected by the high transaction fees, and slow transaction speed. You say that's a sign of Bitcoin being used for legit transactions in the physical world. Where's the proof for that? Nothing we observe points to that. Might as well be bots to ensure people cannot and do not cash out their Bitcoins. All you've proven is that there are quite some niches which reluctantly accept Bitcoin, and very few data on volume. The rest is all red herring & ad hominem.

I think most people would agree with you on that one. And the fact that people in "rich" countries are still food-insecure is horrible.

One problem is that there isn't a clear bright line between "starvation" (in the sense of malnutrition) and "nutritious but not very tasty food" and "nutritious and tasty but not very pretty food". And you can keep going in that vein to things like "not having a flat-screen tv", say, which I think most people would classify as quite different from "starvation". But there isn't an obvious cutoff point on the way.

Oh, and what we consider sufficiently nutritious today may not be so considered tomorrow. Both literally (at some point nutrition science discovered vitamins and then trace minerals, etc), but people nowadays also get into arguments about whether internet access is a fundamental right like food or a luxury. And whether personal transportation (e.g. cars) is a fundamental right. What will people think about access to a self-driving car 50 years from now: luxury or fundamental right?

In practice, what we consider below-acceptable standards of living (which we as a society need to subsidize until they reach acceptable levels) are a good bit higher than what was considered totally acceptable 50 years ago. That's a natural consequence of society growing richer, of course and I would say it's a _good_ thing.

But here's the question that bothers me: Had we frozen per-capita production at 50 years ago levels, while subsidizing living standards to a level above the 50-years-ago acceptable minimum but below the today acceptable minimum, such that vast numbers of people today would be forced to live below what we consider an acceptable living standard today, would that be a net gain? In the short term, clearly yes (we subsidized people at a higher level). In the medium term (to today), it seems clear to me the answer is no. In the longer term (200 years from now, say), I have no idea.

It's hard to tell even post facto, much less a priori, whether we're over-subsidizing or under-subsidizing to achieve maximal happiness. And that's even if we can all agree on a timeframe. Combine that with the fact that different people already have different definitions of what constitutes minimum acceptable living standards, and it becomes very hard to apply ethical considerations to this problem in a principled way. :(