201–210 of 361 posts
I still think war and oil are dirtier and don't see a way to wean ourselves off that consumption and impact. I do see that cryptocurrencies are moving toward energy reduction through things like proof of stake and L2s. https://susanfsu.medium.com/think-btc-is-a-dirty-business-co...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inflation (at levels that it happens in developed countries) is good, as it forces people to spend on goods and services or invest in productive enterprises. It is actively bad for the society if one can just sit on money. Taxation is as voluntary as it can be in democracy given that you elect the government which sets the rate and then pay into commons. You can’t rely on purely voluntary contribution as then people…
You will have your money's value stolen from you through inflation. You will be forced to consume. And you will be happy.
There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One wa…
> Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. What is this even supposed to mean? Strict state controls on economic activity are more within the realm of authoritarian regimes, rather than democracies.
This is a wildly extreme viewpoint, given that every single country has strict controls on economic activity, where almost every transaction of size needs to be reported.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression. That's an interesting way of describing open source software, whose existence depends on nodes willingly adopting and agreeing to a set of protocols. I'm guessing its far easier to fork a chain and convince people to join a new…
It's not about the software, it's about the currency and the people who own it.
Either way, the only way a coin or chain has value is by people participating in it, whether that's buying, transacting, mining, hosting nodes, or developing.
In fact, the system is so open to competition, you can fork a chain and take all its existing data to support your new network. You can't do that with Facebook, Uber, or Paypal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about commercial cruise lines? Do people need to go on cruises? The cruise industry uses over double the emissions of the bitcoin protocol[0]. Furthermore, millions would be affected if bitcoin were to go offline tomorrow. Particularly people living in authoritarian states[1], or people who do not have access to traditional banking services. [0] https://twitter.com/gladstein/status/1414065840157347840?s=2... [1]…
Most of the discussion about "eliminating" and/or taxing cryptocurrency are about trying to reduce the use of cryptocurrencies within developed countries where they are not needed. Nobody here is trying to stop people in authoritarian states from using crypto. Bringing up the authoritarian states is just a strawman.
I am a bitcoin owner. That said, I agree that the PoW mining reward is excessive. Right now, a 51% attack on the network costs upwards of $2M/h[1]. That is an obscene amount. I argue this comes from the very high growth not being expected by the creators. Most of the miner rewards right now come from inflation (in spite of inflation being less than 2% per year). This was intended to allow the network to grow permissi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not wrong, the the middle class has far more savings than the poorest quartile. Is it this you disagree with?
I disagree that the middle class is hurt the most. Whoever can leverage the most debt for assets benefits the most under an inflationary scheme. This tends to be banks and generally wealthy people. Stated inversly the poorest are hurt the most as they are least a part of this wealth generating scheme. Cash savings is largely irrelevant. Most Americans are net negative cash wise via credit cards. So stating the middle…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> most people are forced to consume practically all of their income to keep their family fed and to keep a roof over their heads I'll take a guess that you be living in USistan.
The majority of people in Europe have no consequential savings to speak of. That's also true of Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, why would they be less spendy when they can just take your crypto escape away by physical force?
Can they? If people buy P2P without KYC, how can force be applied? Further, is there the will to have people's property confiscated via violence? If so, where are we democratically? Where does state power end? Why does state power make sense against non violent non consenting citizens, but not against true oligarchs manipulating our political system? At some point it becomes obvious the whole system is a farcical pow…
...yes?
This has been a fairly common practice since the dawn of civilization. If you do bad things, you get your stuff taken away.
The idea that this can be circumvented by creating cryptocurrency, whether or not it can ever be made a de jure currency, is libertarian techbro wishful thinking of the highest order.
There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One wa…
> Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. What is this even supposed to mean? Strict state controls on economic activity are more within the realm of authoritarian regimes, rather than democracies.