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Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

foreignpolicy.com

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Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#111
These are interesting ideas. I like the idea that coin mining's so-called waste of electricity is creating demand for geothermal energy plants that wasn't there previously.

There is an argument to be made that the reason we don't have pervasive green energy is that a) we don't need (demand) enough of power to force investment in renewables, and b) energy prices are too low to drive green tech innovation in the sector. These two points are essentially the same argument, but nobody is building geothermal plants on volcanos in El Salvador to run smelters, so you need real demand to make those plants happen. Cryptocurrencies create demand for cost efficient power generation that just wasn't there before.

Environmentalists should be happy about the increased demand for electricity instead of complaining about its carbon and climate effects, as the only thing that is going to drive the real technological change and the innovation required to reduce carbon is demand for existing resources at higher levels and prices.

Cryptocurrencies are a big part of solving the environmental problems activists identify. People for whom climate is really just a proxy for arbitrary narrative and for progress toward total centralization probably aren't happy about having the problem they're leveraging solved, but making geothermal and renewables viable by connecting their production directly to infinite demand from the velocity of money itself is how we can drive technology changes that shift us to renewables in a single lifetime.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and if I had to bet on people responding to a crisis narrative vs. having clear incentives to innovate on renewables, I would bet huge on the latter.

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#112
post #55
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect, do you see currencies just consed up out of thin air as free of the avalanche of negatives you mentioned?

No crypto asset is currency or will be currency. They're tradable assets, not unlike Beanie Babies. And I don't see fiat that way because: 1. I use if every day. It's widely usable as currency, it's inflationary, and its value doesn't fluctuate wildly. 2. Fiat only ever promised to fix the problems with gold, and it did that (in the US and Europe at least). It didn't ride a wave of hype that it couldn't live up to. 3…

"Currency" is still mostly not there, but there's things between that and tradable assets. A lot of people do, today, use crypto to e.g. send money back home.

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#113
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of hype but there's also a lot of potential to revolutionize commerce. imagine if you could pay 10 cents to read an article or tip a web site. How badly does this torpedo googles ad biz?

> imagine if you could pay 10 cents to read an article or tip a web site. 1) nobody actually wants to pay this, though; the whole set of pre-existing arguments against micropayments apply, too many to list here. My fave one is "micropayments enable microfraud", though. And if you think cookie banners are annoying wait until you see the cryptobanners. 2) you definitely can't scale this on a blockchain, and any scalabl…

1) Why do people buy "pro" apps to remove ads but would not do that for content on the web? Also the micro fraud argument is kinda funny since everyone knows the ad business is full or fraud and everyone somehow involved with ads pays a huge junk for this. I think micropayment is far move fraud resistant because all the bots pretending to be humans and clicking ads do not work anymore.

2) That true. but it doesn't have to be a blockchain in fact there is already proposed protocols to do micropayment on global scale its called Interledger Protocol (ILP). Its a protocol like TCP/IP it scales the same way. And as the name suggest it can be used with multiple ledgers including blockchains but it doesn't have to be one.

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#114
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the technique of distracting from the point by bringing in an irrelevant point that cannot be debunked. Nice try.

You are the one using the word “globalist” as a pejorative. The opposite is isolationists and FP is a geopolitics magazine. So where is the isolationist’s geopolitics perspective you seem to claim is missing?

The opposite of globalist is not isolationist. If I could coin a word, I would choose “localist”.

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#115

These are interesting ideas. I like the idea that coin mining's so-called waste of electricity is creating demand for geothermal energy plants that wasn't there previously. There is an argument to be made that the reason we don't have pervasive green energy is that a) we don't need (demand) enough of power to force investment in renewables, and b) energy prices are too low to drive green tech innovation in the sector…

> Cryptocurrencies are a big part of solving the environmental problems activists identify

No, they’re not and it’s shameful to try to promote proof-of-waste under the guise of environmentalism rather than just acknowledging that you are trying to find buyers.

There’s no shortage of useful applications for green power. Having constant competition to waste that power has incentivized keeping dirty power online and delays conversion by keeping the prices artificially high. Cryptocurrency mining operations can move quickly so they’ll soak up the cheapest green power which might otherwise encourage industrial users to relocate or accelerate personal electrification by people in the area.

Since cryptocurrency expensively doesn’t solve any real problems, that’s pure waste and obstruction at a time we cannot afford it.

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#116

These are interesting ideas. I like the idea that coin mining's so-called waste of electricity is creating demand for geothermal energy plants that wasn't there previously. There is an argument to be made that the reason we don't have pervasive green energy is that a) we don't need (demand) enough of power to force investment in renewables, and b) energy prices are too low to drive green tech innovation in the sector…

Hmm. By this logic, aren't power-efficient appliances a bad thing because they reduce demand for energy and thus reduce incentives to generate greener power?

It's not clear to me that this is how supply and demand work. While increasing demand may increase investment in new capacity, it also should drive up the price of electricity. And since in some markets renewables are cheaper than carbon sources, one would expect that increasing the price per KWH will increase the production of the costlier, more polluting carbon sources.

More speculatively, due to the high volatility of cryptocurrency, I'm skeptical that major power infrastructure investments would be driven by the (presumably) extremely elastic demand of cryptocurrency mining. If I'm investing in energy infra, I'm going to invest in markets of increased consumer and industrial demand, which have fairly inelastic demand curves. Investing more to supply electricity to Bitcoin miners requires me to effectively take a bet on the future price of Bitcoin.

I think there is a solid argument that cryptocurrency mining provides high demand for excess capacity, and thus might provide a sort of credible floor for infrastructure investment returns, but that only makes sense if traditional demand are unreliable.

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn’t. You are making this up. A BTC tx costs $0.07 1 sat/vbyte (mempool.space) right now.

I’m looking at this: https://bitcoinfees.co/

Wow. That site is very wrong. Their historical data is wrong too. It’s all the same value!! It’s about 100x off reality. It’s been known since 2020 that it is fiction. Bitcoinfees.net appears to be correct (1-2 sats/vB). https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/ Also shows vast majority in last 24 hours paid I notice that earn is also reporting way way too high numbers. The fact is you can send 1sat/vbyte right now and it will confirm. 7 cents. Anyone actually using BTC will agree with me here.

Look at the mempool. If it’s empty, BTC is super cheap. It is empty right now and frequently is on weekends.

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#118
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s plenty of fiat criticism outside of crypto, maybe you are in a bubble of neoliberalism

Not by anybody taken seriously.

I’ll take my discussions about money without the added gatekeeping, thank you.

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of hype but there's also a lot of potential to revolutionize commerce. imagine if you could pay 10 cents to read an article or tip a web site. How badly does this torpedo googles ad biz?

Crypto is not necessary for micropayments and they have been tried several times already including by Google as well. It’s not a technical problem.

Some kind of crypto IS necessary in the end. Not for the micropayment[1] itself but for funding/withdrawing. If this is done over traditional banking system it excludes half the world with access to the internet + adds fees that go to the bank.

If its implemented trough internet mega corps instead of banks they get even more power than they already have + they will take a cut too + they will fight it to ever become a thing because it directly destroys their business model. On top of that comes privacy concerts and all that. It would be horrible. We dont know anything other than crypto that would globally work and isn't controlled by a single authority.

https://interledger.org/rfcs/0003-interledger-protocol/

Re: Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin

#120
post #116

These are interesting ideas. I like the idea that coin mining's so-called waste of electricity is creating demand for geothermal energy plants that wasn't there previously. There is an argument to be made that the reason we don't have pervasive green energy is that a) we don't need (demand) enough of power to force investment in renewables, and b) energy prices are too low to drive green tech innovation in the sector…

Hmm. By this logic, aren't power-efficient appliances a bad thing because they reduce demand for energy and thus reduce incentives to generate greener power? It's not clear to me that this is how supply and demand work. While increasing demand may increase investment in new capacity, it also should drive up the price of electricity. And since in some markets renewables are cheaper than carbon sources, one would expec…

I'm saying that power-efficient appliances were an innovation that responded to high energy prices, and with the reduced rate of growth in energy demand has come reduced innovation, which has had the effect of enabling the economics of dirty and inefficient energy generation.

Energy production plants aren't public infrastructure, they're productive capital that has been mismanaged as infrastructure for the last 100 years. When you build a geothermal plant to mine coins, you are making it economically viable at every price, and you can collect or divert surplus electricity to use it to power a city. Governments could even compel power generators mining coins to send a percentage of their electricity usage into the grid as a "tax." I'm suddenly optimistic about this.

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