It's telling that the theoretical justifications the crypto folks use is mostly warmed over goldbuggery, and therefore concerns about the effects on society at large are discounted. The appeal is to people who have no fucks to give about society at large.
Cryptocurrencies Are Detrimental to Society
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Re: Cryptocurrencies Are Detrimental to Society
#22Stopped reading after first two sentences.
Bitcoin works because it provides a transaction platform that’s virtually impossible to censor or control and a monetary system that is virtually impossible to debase.
Bitcoin provides those things through law of the universe - you can’t make energy out of nothing.
If you figure out a different way to provide those things, feel free to make your alternative to Bitcoin, but don’t make these dumb comparisons and arguments that just demonstrate your complete lack of understanding how and why something works.
Re: Cryptocurrencies Are Detrimental to Society
#23OP, how do you propose that Bitcoin be shut down? How would you go about it?
I know we can't. But the people involved should stop and do something 'less detrimental' with their lives.
Re: Cryptocurrencies Are Detrimental to Society
#24You might see how useful they are quite soon. “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in re…
Now you just need to trust the software developers not to increase mining rewards and the crypto exchanges not to scam you
Re: Cryptocurrencies Are Detrimental to Society
#25> Therefore, I would propose to shut them all down. How?
I'm pro-crypto; but Proof-of-Work mining is an ecological atrocity. If it's infeasible to outright ban mining at scale, a sufficiently onerous carbon tax to disincentivize might be enough. In either case, miners would recoup their losses by selling ASICs, certainly to those in countries with no such restrictions, and the mining would continue. Maybe a government buyback program, similar to what countries have done with guns; but it seems difficult to summon that much political will.
We've created a monster.
Re: Cryptocurrencies Are Detrimental to Society
#26This blog post fails to mention anything about alternative consensus mechanisms to Proof of Work (PoW).
Proof of Work requires the energy expenditure of a small country.
Proof of Stake requires far far less power, negligible amounts of power.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/ethereum-plans-...
Re: Cryptocurrencies Are Detrimental to Society
#27The extreme energy waste is the most salient point to me. Imagine what you could have if you took all the energy spent mining crypto and instead had spent it on building solar panels or N95 masks or high speed rail.
I don't know, how much energy is spent producing reality TV shows? To me, those have less value than instant, trustless payments. That's not to say that I don't hope non-PoW cryptocurrencies become more popular, we should conserve energy when we can. I haven't looked very much into it, but Stellar seems interesting, and it's not PoW.
While I'm not a fan of reality TV, I know plenty of people who are, and whose lives are enriched because of reality television. There is no accounting for taste.
I don't know how much people's lives are enriched by cryptocurrency. Other than the people directly involved in mining and speculating on it.
Re: Cryptocurrencies Are Detrimental to Society
#28[deleted]
Re: Cryptocurrencies Are Detrimental to Society
#29Stopped reading after first two sentences. Bitcoin works because it provides a transaction platform that’s virtually impossible to censor or control and a monetary system that is virtually impossible to debase. Bitcoin provides those things through law of the universe - you can’t make energy out of nothing. If you figure out a different way to provide those things, feel free to make your alternative to Bitcoin, but d…
> Bitcoin works because it provides a transaction platform that’s virtually impossible to censor or control and a monetary system that is virtually impossible to debase.
Why is this good? What tangible problem are we solving here?
Re: Cryptocurrencies Are Detrimental to Society
#30tl;dr - "So in short, I think that cryptocurrencies provide nothing of value to society. They do however facilitate crime and contribute to climate change." Is this satire? I'm wondering if this author covertly intends to strengthen the perceived utility of through this article. Yes, near-free & instant to exchange, borderless, alternative to gov't, privacy-preserving, competitively evolving etc. digital money provid…
I don't think a public ledger of every transaction is a privacy preserving feature.