El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender

it's part of the larger argument: proof of stake systems give up explicit and transparent cost of decentralized permissionless currency for obscure and hidden costs of centralized and permissioned currency. and that cost is generally higher, because proof of work is the most efficient known (or possible) solution of such problem.

I'm not a monero folk and think it has no real world application outside of criminal dealings.

Monero is being used as a currency though which is relevant because bitcoin used to be used as a currency too before the first bubble/speculators got a hold of it. It's critical to any conversation with claims about bitcoin being a great currency (it's not)

Block space isn't the point. The price of a Bitcoin is. Raise the price, and mining will naturally spend more energy on it. Therefore, anything that raises the price of Bitcoin contributes to Global Warming.

> There's also a strong (IMO) argument that energy-intensive crypto-mining can make renewable energy more competitive

If this is true then the goal is to create a mining algorithm that focuses on being as wasteful as possible.

> by only mining when renewables are producing excess power.

This is simply not true. There is no such thing as excess power, whatever is not used should be stored or sold to other countries.

> (which can be damaging to power grids).

Excess energy production has always been a thing and there are mitigation efforts in place much better than "lets put a server farm that wastes energy"

> I'm not trying to downplay El Salvador's vulnerability to climate change. But actual solutions to climate change - or even just mitigating its effects - is going to require considerable capital and other resources. If using BTC gives El Salvador an economic advantage, then more power to them.

The problem here is El Salvador is basically burning its clothes to keep itself warm. any cryptocoin would've been a better solution. hell even dogecoin would've been a better choice.

This is where we are all headed.

https://www.rt.com/business/524923-iran-bans-crypto-mining-s...

> Can you explain how this is better than e.g. Wise (formerly Transferwise), PayPal, or some other international money transmitter?

The short answer is that Bitcoin works and TransferWise and PayPal don't. I looked into TransferWise a couple of months ago when someone else asked about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26657391

I can't get an Argentine bank account, and you need a bank account to use either TransferWise or PayPal. It's probably also the case—though I don't know for sure—that such transactions would happen at the "official rate", which is to say, you get 62% of your money, and the other 38% gets taken by the Central Bank to subsidize imports into Argentina and vacations abroad by Argentine tourists. I know that sounds too crazy to be true, but that's really what happens with bank transfers. Western Union doesn't do this, and if they did people wouldn't use them.

> Bitcoin does not solve the “cash to people without a bank account”.

This is not correct. It does. I can't access a bank account and I get paid in Bitcoin. It's true that I pay Bitcoin transaction fees in order to do so, but they are generally tolerable.

> If the idea is, that people should instead transfer money to each other via the Strike app, when they pay for things, I fail to see how this is different from e.g. sending money to each other with PayPal.

PayPal is exposed to a lot of risk of fraud because of being connected to the banking system, and it passes that risk along to its users.

A friend of mine had his laptop stolen via PayPal (in the US). He received the payment on PayPal, a woman came to pick up the laptop, and after she left the payment was reversed. He disputed the reversal, but because he couldn't produce a shipping tracking number, PayPal automatically rejected his dispute.

There are several cases of conferences that have done conference registrations through PayPal and then had all their revenues confiscated because PayPal decided that their pattern of transactions looked like a high risk for fraud (new account, lots of incoming money, no shipping tracking numbers). Linking your bank account to your PayPal account means that PayPal can, at any time and at their discretion, take all the money in your bank account, and this is also a thing that happens.

And of course it's widely known that PayPal discriminates against prostitutes and porn models and people associated with them, closing their accounts without notice when it discovers them, and sometimes confiscating their money.

These risks don't get smaller when your customers are the unbanked; they get larger. And passing those risks along to people who are living hand to mouth is unacceptable: temporarily losing access to your money is a much bigger deal when you can't afford to fill the gas tank more than halfway full because you don't have savings to cover gas for your car. Or food for your kids.

I don't know anything about Strike as such, but using Bitcoin itself eliminates those risks, although while you're holding Bitcoin, it does create cash-like risks of its own—exchange-rate volatility, seed phrase loss, and theft by trojans. Good people tell me the Lightning Network design has a similar risk profile to Bitcoin itself, but I don't understand it well enough to make such assertions on my own.