71–80 of 188 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can't this be said about literally anything? Not at all. Lots of businesses make money by turning materials and/or labor into products. Other businesses make money solving problems for people or other businesses. However, crypto (and most of the rest of the financial sector) burn shit tons of energy, materials, time, and human effort generating wealth; wealth expressed in either bitcoin that doesn't really exist, o…
Crypto mining produces a service, which is maintaining a ledger of payments that works in a certain way. This specific problem — settling transactions — is an industry amounting to billions. Think of BTC like a MasterCard or Visa competitor, albeit a unique one.
As a whole people we should include these externalities in the value prop of services despite the fact that businesses and individuals don't because it's a cost we collectively pay.
Trash is my biggest pet-peeve example of this. As an individual I have very little power to control the amount of trash I produce because goods I buy come with so much stupid packaging that I can't give back or recycle and there is no incentive for the people in the position to affect change to do anything about it because they don't bear the cost.
In a similar fashion carbon taxes help to capture the negative externalities of energy use. And if the article is true then collecting that tax would make it so that bitcoin mining is (right now) unprofitable. This is to be expected since such a collection would be sudden increase in the cost of mining when the market has pushed margins thin. The market would adjust, transaction fees would go up, and miners would find non-carbon producing energy sources and we'd probably reach a new equilibrium that is profitable for everyone involved again.
"The value of Bitcoin is negative if we applied a carbon tax to it" (paraphrased). Can't this be said about literally anything? Bitcoin and cryptos in general are actually worth more than $0 because people are tired of seeing their cash devalued on the whim of politicians and bankers.
Inflation serves a purpose. The cash is devalued not on a whim, but to prevent collapse. Bitcoin indeed prevents that. Fortunately it's just a fringe market. Lets hope it stays that way.
I'm very conflicted about this. On one hand, I have a little bit of Bitcoin and am happy about some of the gains I've gotten (not life changing in any sense, but more than I expected). On the other hand I hesitated for a long time to buy any because I knew of the large environmental impact that its energy use has (yes, I really did avoid buying Bitcoin for a long time because I roughly knew of the environmental/energ…
If we've decided that we're happy producing X much electricity as a society using nuclear, wind, solar, coal, etc, we shouldn't get caught up on who ends up using that electricity or what they are willing to pay for it.
If we think that the energy we are producing is harmful, we should regulate things at the production level. Ban power production that doesn't meet certain standards, put a cap on the total amount of coal burning per year, etc. And then let the market decide the best use for the energy that remains.
Funny trend: solar and wind power are now cheaper than coal. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/11/Price-of-electric... Here's a hot take: Bitcoin subsidizes clean energy development. Miners buy cheap energy; clean energy infrastructure gets profitable return. Cost of development and manufacturing lowers further because of scale; pollution and externalities reduced; humanity wins. Bitcoin saves humanity?
>Miners buy cheap energy; clean energy infrastructure gets profitable return. This true in China where most mining happens?
How does someone measure the potential value of "being a pain in the ass to those who seek to control the supply of money"
For them, someone actively controlling the supply of money is probably a good thing. Anything they have is pretty safe in a bank and somewhat covered by the government. Their taxes pay for police, sewage, the bins to be taken away, their roads to be repaired.
I love the idea that people are seeking to do incredible things in the crypto space, but all too often it seems to be lumped in with people's desire to transfer money across borders (again, useless for the everyperson) or avoid taxes - which if we all did would probably be a big negative. Assuming the government didn't step in pretty quickly, because what government wants to lose control?
As soon as you start talking about cryptocurrency with oversight to protect my mum and dad, where people aren't just trying to get rich quickly and make sure taxes are paid - people seem to dial out pretty quickly.
So much anti-Bitcoin sentiment on HN lately, recycling decade old strawman arguments. Does the Occam's razor apply here? Are people just salty they didn't buy a few back when they first heard about it, now trying to justify themselves?
So if you have a problem or comment on the article in question, please make it, we're all ears. But responding to valid criticisms of Bitcoin with hand-wavy "oh HN is so anti-Bitcoin" is not discussion, it's tribalism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>while that is true, you could also argue they deserve it because of the risk they took. they didn't take any risk though, they just "mined bitcoins", which were more abundant then.
Well if the price increased at 1$, and you didn't sell any, you risked it going back to 0$. From that perspective, there's a risk holding on to it.
What value did they create?
If the underpinnings of an economy accrue value purely to speculators while devaluing (in BTC-relative terms) actual assets and value creation, it has a major incentive problem.
What’s the one and only thing Bitcoiners want you to do with Bitcoin? Buy. That’s it. Any other use, including spending, is actively discouraged.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can't this be said about literally anything? Not at all. Lots of businesses make money by turning materials and/or labor into products. Other businesses make money solving problems for people or other businesses. However, crypto (and most of the rest of the financial sector) burn shit tons of energy, materials, time, and human effort generating wealth; wealth expressed in either bitcoin that doesn't really exist, o…
Crypto mining produces a service, which is maintaining a ledger of payments that works in a certain way. This specific problem — settling transactions — is an industry amounting to billions. Think of BTC like a MasterCard or Visa competitor, albeit a unique one.
I'm optimistic that there is a better way to store a ledger as you describe. Perhaps a database?