211–220 of 463 posts
Bitcoin is an ongoing environmental disaster, profiting off of subsidized coal power in China and elsewhere in the world. Millions of people die every year from air pollution. But on the other side, hey blockchains are so cool they can do the same work as banks but six orders of magnitude less efficiently.
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Fraud is absolutely a big deal in banking.
Thankfully many types of fraud can be reversed in our modern financial system. With bitcoin, virtually any form of fraud leaves you completely fucked with absolutely no recourse. Which makes bitcoin an even bigger joke because on a per transaction basis (one that includes miner subsidies) bitcoin costs several orders of magnitude more and cannot even deliver the same basic features that mainstream fiat offers.
Saying that you can transact fiat cheaply is a silly comparison: bitcoin can be transacted for free as well. It is flawed to compare the fractional expense of maintaining the entire system for Bitcoin against any value but the fractional cost of maintaining the entire financial sector: comparing against the cost to consumer without accounting for the system maintenance costs is fallacious.
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I think the traditional stock market has significantly greater environmental externalities, even proportionally to net value. Greed creates waste in all venues.
I very much doubt that. You have a source?
Further, fiduciary duty of corporations to maximize shareholder profit has led to almost every environmentally harmful exploit of externalities. I'd argue that the stock market is fundamentally responsible for 99% of all pollution.
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I am really surprised that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies in general) hasn't solved its energy use yet and is still legal. I thought the world would switch to proof-of-stake coins and gradually make bitcoins harder to use.
Bitcoin is pure free market. People keep it because of its history - same as how people buy gold coins.
But that's just me.
Per transaction is intentionally a bit misleading, as the amount of power usage is proportional to how-much-power the block-reward can buy regardless of there being 1 or 1 million transactions. Not to mention, a single transaction can power an infinite amount of (wash) transactions thanks to 2nd layer stuff like the lightning network. So it'd be similarly misleading to try quote in terms of that. So the correct unit…
The bitcoin network has a limited number of transactions per second that it can process (Limited by block size). Last time I checked the network was basically at the limit so per transaction is not an insane way of looking at it. I get what you mean, if you decide not to make a transaction, the energy still gets spent but the more you use bitcoin the more valuable it becomes which incentivizes miners to keep mining.…
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and yet all you need is a simple phone and access to these satellites: https://blockstream.com/satellite/ I agree the infrastructure isn't there yet but problems with national currency is a government issue, infrastructure issues can usually be solved but governmental issues tend to be a lot harder and all countries that rely on fiat currency are subject to inflation
Countries that don't have reliable currencies are countries like South Sudan and Somalia. Do you really expect illiterate people (3 in 4 women in Somalia are illiterate, 1 in 2 men) to use Blockstream? You can tell that Bitcoin, and its advocates, are from developed countries. No one who has lived in a developing country and seen crushing poverty would make such arguments.
Per transaction is intentionally a bit misleading, as the amount of power usage is proportional to how-much-power the block-reward can buy regardless of there being 1 or 1 million transactions. Not to mention, a single transaction can power an infinite amount of (wash) transactions thanks to 2nd layer stuff like the lightning network. So it'd be similarly misleading to try quote in terms of that. So the correct unit…
The bitcoin network has a limited number of transactions per second that it can process (Limited by block size). Last time I checked the network was basically at the limit so per transaction is not an insane way of looking at it. I get what you mean, if you decide not to make a transaction, the energy still gets spent but the more you use bitcoin the more valuable it becomes which incentivizes miners to keep mining.…
With enough people using the second layer network, each "settlement" could mean finalising hundreds of transactions for thousands of people. This second layer network acts like a caching layer, and consolidates many transactions into a single transaction (put into very simple terms).
[1] Combinations of inputs and outputs.
The energy consumption of Bitcoin isn't new news. What continues to disappoint me, however, is how many people immediately jump to its defense with arguments based on the value it provides, as if that offset its cost. What gets neglected is that the Bitcoin algorithm is inherently wasteful . By its very design, it results in an insane amount of duplicated, pointless computation. The question isn't whether something l…
You say pointless computation. I say layers on layers of security protecting the most sound monetary policy in human history
The most powerful supercomputer in the world reaches 143 petaflops, bitcoin network in comparison reaches 80704290.84 Petaflops. Granted that a majority of this computing power is in the form of custom ASIC's, but the figure is really staggering. And all of the 80704290.84 Petaflops, consume 73.12 TWh to repeatedly calculate SHA256 ! What could be the world's most powerful network does absolutely nothing but crunch h…
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> We have countries that have no reliable form of currency at all, again bitcoin solves that problem Countries that don't have reliable forms of currency also don't have reliable power or internet access.
I would argue all currencies are unreliable ,because they go down in value due increase of supply. Throwing 2-4% every year sounds awful
Yes, the causality of "create too much money -> inflation" is plausible (but note the emphasis on "too much").
However, we live in a world of endogenous money, where money is largely created by commercial banks in the form of loans to private entities. When prices increase, those loans get bigger. So there is also the causality "inflation -> create more money".
At the same time, there are other factors that can drive inflation, such as workers and companies exercising price setting power (which Econ 101 likes to pretend doesn't exist, but plays an important role in the real world).
So yeah, the causality that you're casually throwing out there hasn't actually been proven as the driving factor here.
At the same time, the widespread belief in it and similar misunderstandings causes us as a society to make extremely damaging macroeconomic policy decisions, in particular the decision to attempt to fight recessions using monetary policy instead of fiscal policy.