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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably the same way most people rationalize consuming the flesh of slaughtered animals, despite the massive negative environmental impact that has, and the better alternatives that are available.
Flesh of slaughtered animals is super tasty and nutritious.
bitcoin appears to have just become another asset that rich people on wall street are hoarding with no real attention or interest in the actual payment mechanism at all. it might as well just be some trading cards being shuffled around.
Even that is an extremely charitable interpretation. From what I can tell, Bitcoin seems largely to be an engine for fraud: fake value is injected into the system via dollar-pegged tokens like Tether, retail "investors" pile in to chase rising asset prices, and then the bottom drops out, amidst "liquidity issues" at major exchanges which prevent people from pulling out at the top. Or at least that is what happened in…
It's simultaneously described as a currency for exchange, a store of value and a speculative asset, but logically it cannot be all of these things simultaneously.
As an example, it fell quite sharply the other day while gold and stocks treaded water.
Is it going to $1 or $1 billion? I have no idea. But whatever is, it's certainly not reliably static.
bitcoin appears to have just become another asset that rich people on wall street are hoarding with no real attention or interest in the actual payment mechanism at all. it might as well just be some trading cards being shuffled around.
Even that is an extremely charitable interpretation. From what I can tell, Bitcoin seems largely to be an engine for fraud: fake value is injected into the system via dollar-pegged tokens like Tether, retail "investors" pile in to chase rising asset prices, and then the bottom drops out, amidst "liquidity issues" at major exchanges which prevent people from pulling out at the top. Or at least that is what happened in…
I wonder how these Bitcoin devs rationalize the environmental impact their ongoing work has. They've created something that started as a revolutionary innovation, but by now is an incredibly wasteful way of turning kWhs into money. Something that has outlived its fitness as a payment system, but still trundles on due to its own inertia. Like oil execs that refuse to acknowledge that the age of oil is coming to a clos…
Wasteful compared to which other network that manages money and protects property rights? Most popular place to mine bitcoin is the north-west of China where there are unused hydroplants
If I make bread and you grow potatoes, we can barter, but it’s much easier to use some intermediary to track the value that we exchanged. The intermediary facilitates this with tokens (coins, notes, cards.)
Bitcoin seems perverse. It puts all the value in the tokens themselves and at the same time I can’t even use it to buy bread or potatoes.
About the only thing I hear that you can buy with Bitcoin is USD, and even the liquidity of that seems questionable beyond a certain amount — the millions maybe but probably not billions.
The PR to revert that change is still open and locked [2] so I can only imagine what kind of direct messages he would be receiving - I doubt many of them would be what one would consider 'nice'. Not to mention any of it when stepping back seems a little incredulous.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25858901
[1] https://github.com/bitcoin-core/bitcoincore.org/pull/740
[2] https://github.com/bitcoin-core/bitcoincore.org/pull/744
I wonder how these Bitcoin devs rationalize the environmental impact their ongoing work has. They've created something that started as a revolutionary innovation, but by now is an incredibly wasteful way of turning kWhs into money. Something that has outlived its fitness as a payment system, but still trundles on due to its own inertia. Like oil execs that refuse to acknowledge that the age of oil is coming to a clos…
Crypto dev since 2014.