Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin • Hacker News Board

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#71

Post by tomxor » Sun, Feb 07, 2021, 11:26 AM UTC

primitivesuave wrote: post #33

I see Bitcoin like a 21st century Apollo project. While I agree the resources appear wasted, they are supporting a revolutionary concept that holds tremendous potential to change the way the world works. Also, consider the scale of resources used by the existing financial system, with its thousands of buildings staffed by millions of people who use energy to come into work every day to keep the whole centralized syst…

Bitcoin already went to the moon and back.

We learned about blockchain, we learned cryptocurrencies are possible. Now it's continuing to burn tons of rocket fuel for no further benefit... Saturn V served it's purpose, there is a good reason we don't continue building rockets this way. We learned a lot from Bitcoin, critically, we learned it is _not_ the solution to a sustainable decentralized digital currency.

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#72

Post by jeofken » Sun, Feb 07, 2021, 11:27 AM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #39

primitivesuave wrote: post #33

I see Bitcoin like a 21st century Apollo project. While I agree the resources appear wasted, they are supporting a revolutionary concept that holds tremendous potential to change the way the world works. Also, consider the scale of resources used by the existing financial system, with its thousands of buildings staffed by millions of people who use energy to come into work every day to keep the whole centralized syst…

If we're going to follow this analogy, what are the beneficial side effects from bitcoin? Better ASICs that do nothing but calculate sha256 hashes? Easier money-laundering? New venues for tax evasion? I guess censorship-resistant online value transfer is worth something, but I'm not sure it outweighs all the negatives.

Power over other people is intoxicating. It attracts those who value it over virtue, and the virtuous reject it.

For their wicked thirst for power, some will do anything. In our age there is an unholy alliance between the worlds greatest power ever and its military industrial complex, where the incentives for government leaders is to wage war in strange faraway lands, and to bribe the population at home with dependence on the state, in exchange for votes. This is all funded by printing money - inflating its supply. In effect, this is devaluing the salaries and savings of anyone who earns their living, and who can not do anything about it, as they are forced to trade in this currency created by fiat.

By creating Bitcoin, Satoshi took gold to the internet, and we can now trade in a currency which no one can inflate to fund wars, or to in essence steal productivity from every earner.

A sound system of ethics must contain the right to ownership of your property - you body, your money, and other possessions. Bitcoin practically gives us this in the Information Age.

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#73

Post by midjji » Sun, Feb 07, 2021, 11:27 AM UTC

Yajirobe wrote: post #41

primitivesuave wrote: post #33

I see Bitcoin like a 21st century Apollo project. While I agree the resources appear wasted, they are supporting a revolutionary concept that holds tremendous potential to change the way the world works. Also, consider the scale of resources used by the existing financial system, with its thousands of buildings staffed by millions of people who use energy to come into work every day to keep the whole centralized syst…

> change the way the world works Change how exactly? To me bitcoin seems like this: Expectation: the world ditches banks, dollars, euros, etc. People switch to bitcoin and everyone lives happily, paying for everyday stuff with bitcoin. Reality: people do not use bitcoin to buy groceries. In fact, people do not use bitcoin per se - people are only interested in buying and holding (speculating).

Its also popular as a means to withdraw resources from dictatorships, basically improving private property protections at the expense of state ability to control their population.

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#74

Post by LittlePeter » Sun, Feb 07, 2021, 11:28 AM UTC

skinnyasianboi wrote: post #55

Bitcoin is the first generation blockchain. It has it's weaknesses. Ethereum the second generation. Watch out for the third. Little resources, low fees, more secure. Little hint: a few days ago we had the Ouroboros paper on the front page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25981373

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#75

Post by jonhendry18 » Sun, Feb 07, 2021, 11:28 AM UTC

yuvadam wrote: post #17

As a Bitcoin proponent who is also concerned about it's long term sustainability, this post is an embarrassing read. The author clearly has a very poor understanding of what value Bitcoin currently has in our current macro-economic situation, and why investors (and corporations) are choosing to allocate larger parts of their portfolios in cryptocurrencies. Calling out the BTC network on its energetic inefficiency com…

"Calling out the BTC network on its energetic inefficiency completely misses the point that the work put into the network is exactly the scarce digital asset, and hence the store of value."

That's no excuse for the obscene waste of resources.

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#76

Post by isoprophlex » Sun, Feb 07, 2021, 11:28 AM UTC

primitivesuave wrote: post #33

I see Bitcoin like a 21st century Apollo project. While I agree the resources appear wasted, they are supporting a revolutionary concept that holds tremendous potential to change the way the world works. Also, consider the scale of resources used by the existing financial system, with its thousands of buildings staffed by millions of people who use energy to come into work every day to keep the whole centralized syst…

It's not revolutionary. For almost every use case, blockchain solution are almost always inferior to the alternatives. As a payment system, it's sluggish, wasteful, and in 2021 STILL poorly adopted.

I'm not arguing anything about the current system of doing financial transactions. But the environmental disaster that is BTC has to die.

If there is truly a need for innovation in the digital currency space, it should be replaced with something less wasteful. Too bad all the pundits and hodlers are too invested to admit this.

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#77

Post by chill1 » Sun, Feb 07, 2021, 11:28 AM UTC

[ x ] Make provocative statements about the uselessness and wastefulness of Thing A without real evidence. But make sure to at least link to some source that provides the illusion of evidence.

[ x ] Recommend Thing B that claims to solve the problems of Thing A. But you probably forgot to mention that you have a financial interest in Thing B succeeding.

[ x ] Finish with unclear call-to-action that requires others to take insane financial risks to support your made up "movement" (e.g shorting Bitcoin - great way to lose infinite money).

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#78

Post by skinnyasianboi » Sun, Feb 07, 2021, 11:28 AM UTC

pharmakom wrote: post #28

Don’t destroy Bitcoin. Invent a more efficient alternative for people to switch to.

Have a look at Cardano Ouroboros: "An environmentally sustainable, verifiably secure proof-of-stake protocol with rigorous security guarantees."

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#79

Post by primitivesuave » Sun, Feb 07, 2021, 11:29 AM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #39

primitivesuave wrote: post #33

I see Bitcoin like a 21st century Apollo project. While I agree the resources appear wasted, they are supporting a revolutionary concept that holds tremendous potential to change the way the world works. Also, consider the scale of resources used by the existing financial system, with its thousands of buildings staffed by millions of people who use energy to come into work every day to keep the whole centralized syst…

If we're going to follow this analogy, what are the beneficial side effects from bitcoin? Better ASICs that do nothing but calculate sha256 hashes? Easier money-laundering? New venues for tax evasion? I guess censorship-resistant online value transfer is worth something, but I'm not sure it outweighs all the negatives.

From the ASIC perspective, what I see personally is a massive waste of engineering talent. Why build ASICs for boring but important tasks (especially bioinformatics) when you can cash in on Bitcoin mining while the going is good.

With regards to tax evasion, my opinion is that it will simply force taxation to occur in other ways like VAT. People are quite capable of evading taxes in the present system, so wide adoption of online value transfer would simply democratize access to tax evasion (and force governments to rethink how they collect taxes).

Money laundering makes me think of the dangerous flip side, where anyone can covertly accumulate and use resources without scrutiny - e.g. Ali Alexander using Bitcoin to finance the transport and lodging of groups that took part in the January 6th riot.

Re: Green hackers around the world, let’s destroy Bitcoin

#80

Post by wegs » Sun, Feb 07, 2021, 11:29 AM UTC

primitivesuave wrote: post #33

I see Bitcoin like a 21st century Apollo project. While I agree the resources appear wasted, they are supporting a revolutionary concept that holds tremendous potential to change the way the world works. Also, consider the scale of resources used by the existing financial system, with its thousands of buildings staffed by millions of people who use energy to come into work every day to keep the whole centralized syst…

The Nazi and Stalinist regimes also stood to change the world too, you know. That didn't make them like the Apollo project. To be clear, I'm not trying to liken Bitcoin to either of those, just to point out that there's a spectrum from good to bad. I'm glad Apollo succeeded, but I'm also glad fascism didn't succeed. French Revolution changed the world too, in the short term, for the worse, but probably had a net positive in the long run.

Bitcoin? I'm not so sure. Bitcoin definitely stands to change the world, but I'm not sure for the better. Bitcoin would:

* By design, have exploding deflation

* Allow insane inter-generational wealth accumulation and disparity

* Block most of the controls used by central banks to stabilize the economy

* Allow a disk failure or hacker to wipe out someone's life savings

... and so on.

I'd actually liken it to the /early/ fascist, communist, and democratic regimes, which had a lot of good ideas for how to replace monarchies, a lot of bad ideas, and perhaps a 25% hit rate. The US worked out fairly well, at least once it got past the Articles of Confederation bit. France didn't work for a long time, but eventually worked out okay. Fascism and Soviet Communism /appeared/ to work better than what came before for a few years, and then imploded into horrors. The jury is still out on where the Chinese form of government lands.

At this point, we don't quite know which track we're on with Bitcoin. I was optimistic at the beginning, and now I'm more pessimistic, but it's too early to tell. In either case, we've learned a lot, and we could probably design a better system without many of Bitcoin's flaws.