Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin still makes no sense

thinkoutloudnews.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 161 posts

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#21

Post by codyb »

immigration311 wrote: post #9
tomerico wrote: post #4

The problem with Bitcoin and is that it creates real negative effects, with little positive effects to show for it. The most prominent negative effect is the huge energy waste, which doesn't help when we are trying to cut on our carbon footprint The second one is that it makes illegal activities easier, and at a larger scale. It's quite common right now for companies to be coerced pay millions of dollars to anonymous…

Making (certain) illegal activities easier is one of the primary positive effects.

I'll assume you're referring to obtaining drugs which many consider to be something that at the very least should not be punished by prison time (myself included), as opposed to say... the distribution of child pornography, ordering hit men, arms trafficking, or the selling of hacked credit card numbers, passwords, and zero days.

If that was your idea, wouldn't we be better served by lobbying our politicians to move the needle on the drug war (seems to be happening) instead of creating volatile whale controlled crypto "currencies" which use huge amounts of electricity as our planet faces a climate change crises and which also enables all of the other really terrible illegal things listed?

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#22

Post by silexia »

There have been lots of other currencies privately traded previously, but since the state has the guns the state can outlaw it. If it truly started competing with major currencies you would see it outlawed.

It also is not secure as China is controlling a majority of the mining now and the majority can control the currency. Further, Google has a computer that can hack the encryption and you will see a lot more organizations have them soon.

It consumes more power than Switzerland. It's bad for the environment.

It's just a bubble and can be popped anytime.

Not to mention that it is just unusable for actual legal transactions on a regular basis.

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#23

Post by dmitriid »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #10
tomerico wrote: post #4

The problem with Bitcoin and is that it creates real negative effects, with little positive effects to show for it. The most prominent negative effect is the huge energy waste, which doesn't help when we are trying to cut on our carbon footprint The second one is that it makes illegal activities easier, and at a larger scale. It's quite common right now for companies to be coerced pay millions of dollars to anonymous…

"with little positive effects to show for it" It's an efficient store of value. Here is a dilemma - you have 10 million dollars. You need somewhere to park your money. Do you follow the Chinese businessman pattern and buy real estate in Toronto? That seems complicated - picking a property, being subject to the real estate market, etc. Often these houses sit empty, since you are on the topic of wasted resources. Do yo…

> It's an efficient store of value. Here is a dilemma - you have 10 million dollars

It's not a dilemma. At all. If you have 10 million dollars just lying around, chances are, uo already know what to do with your money.

So your entire premise is based on a combination of assumptions that make it entirely laughable:

- that if you have 10 million dollars, you have a problem with storing them

- that in order to defend bitcoin you have to come up with an example involving no less than 10 million dollars

> Do you buy gold? Gold is useless. Buy stocks? How do you pick them? Of course USD is going to deflate.

Ah, I feel so sad for people who have 10 million dollars which they have to just "park". How did they ever manage to do that in the past?

Oh, right. Stocks, property, securities, bonds, investments, diversified portfolios.

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#25

Post by [deleted] »

weare138 wrote: post #20
seibelj wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The settlement layer is purely peer to peer. Governments can enact laws to make actions illegal, and tougher for centralized entities like banks and corporations from using it. But there are addresses out there known to authorities with hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen bitcoin - and there is absolutely nothing they can do to prevent it from being moved. If you have the private key, you own the coins.

> If you have the private key, you own the coins. Until you get arrested and the government just makes you hand over your private key. https://www.wired.com/story/feds-seize-billion-stolen-silk-r...

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#27

Post by FruityCoconut »

It's invaluable if you are involved in grey/black market trade. I was briefly involved in a legal-yet-taboo industry years ago, and being able to instantly receive private payments from people on the other side of the world without permission from anyone (indeed, while payment processors were limiting and closing my accounts) was phenomenal. It made sense then.

In fact I became a bit of a Bitcoin evangelist in my circles, especially as it aligned with my then-libertarian worldview. (However, the questionable leadership of the core Bitcoin fork has mostly eroded that enthusiasm over time.)

Now, as a regular taxpayer, Bitcoin makes no sense to me either. And I say that as a fortunate person with a significant stake, and a retirement fund increasingly grateful to all the dumb money being poured into it.

Its popularity and exchange rate is not a function of its utility, but rather an indication of a disillusioned and frustrated middle class looking anywhere for financial relief. Cryptocurrency is lottery tickets for people who consider themselves too clever to buy lottery tickets. (Especially all of the new, more volatile cryptocurrencies popping up each day.) Governments would be well-advised not to deprive their taxpayers of this distracting fantasy.

You'll know when you need it. Until then, if you want to take a gamble at timing your exit better than the next guy, thanks very much.

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#28

Post by postingpals »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #10
tomerico wrote: post #4

The problem with Bitcoin and is that it creates real negative effects, with little positive effects to show for it. The most prominent negative effect is the huge energy waste, which doesn't help when we are trying to cut on our carbon footprint The second one is that it makes illegal activities easier, and at a larger scale. It's quite common right now for companies to be coerced pay millions of dollars to anonymous…

"with little positive effects to show for it" It's an efficient store of value. Here is a dilemma - you have 10 million dollars. You need somewhere to park your money. Do you follow the Chinese businessman pattern and buy real estate in Toronto? That seems complicated - picking a property, being subject to the real estate market, etc. Often these houses sit empty, since you are on the topic of wasted resources. Do yo…

I disagree with the 'store of value' argument. I got into a similar argument with someone on here before, and I believe it is an insufficient economic principle to justify a currency. A good currency serves as a medium of exchange or a standard of value.

Are people using bitcoin to replace USD in general? No, not really. It's not a very good medium of exchange not because of the illegal stuff but because no one knows how it works and it's messy, that's why no one buys stuff with it. They also don't know how much it's worth on average and therefore struggle to use it, bringing me to my next point...

Are people using it as a standard of value? No, if I tell you a car costs 15k USD you know what that means. If I tell you it costs 1 BTC, you have no tangible idea of how to relate that to the real world because BTC's value changes sporadically. I am sure this will stabilise as crypto matures, but i dont think people should invest this much effort into something that is just going to be used as a value measurement.

So back to the 'store of value' thing, why do I want people not to invest their money? Is wealth hoarding not a problem now, or do you believe that just by virtue of it existing as BTC, it's doing something good?

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#29

Post by roenxi »

immigration311 wrote: post #9
tomerico wrote: post #4

The problem with Bitcoin and is that it creates real negative effects, with little positive effects to show for it. The most prominent negative effect is the huge energy waste, which doesn't help when we are trying to cut on our carbon footprint The second one is that it makes illegal activities easier, and at a larger scale. It's quite common right now for companies to be coerced pay millions of dollars to anonymous…

Making (certain) illegal activities easier is one of the primary positive effects.

Although true, philosophically speaking the governments of the world take on powers that exceed what is reasonable.

The US, for example, will happily assert its ability to intercede when Iran and China trade. It isn't at all obvious why that should be the case, and it is profoundly unclear why China and Iran should cooperate. It is plausible that countries should be trading using a decentralised system like a bitcoin-style cryptocurrency. US law really should stop at the US border.

Re: Bitcoin still makes no sense

#30

Post by sesuximo »

ridaj wrote: post #18
sesuximo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, stamps don’t use our resources enough to move prices for energy/chips/etc

Right. It's scaled up. I suppose that if people became suddenly interested in old stamps to the tune of billions of dollars, stamp-dealing would also start competing for resources with the rest of the economy.

I think that’s wrong for a few reasons....

- a stamp uses a small amount of resources no matter how many stamps you want (more stamps may even be cheaper from economies of scale).

- Bitcoin inherently relies on expensive computation to provide safety

- each Bitcoin is more expensive than the last due to increasingly difficult nonces.

- (dumb edge case) you can’t make old stamps so it’s hard to image using a lot of resources to find/make them. Obv not true for other products

Post reply on HN