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Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

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Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#241
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to use it to buy things from people I trust who don't trust me 1. That makes you sound actually crazy. 2. I didn't say you could get a credit card that doesn't allow chargebacks, I said the regulations don't prohibit payment mechanisms without chargebacks. See for example cashiers cheques and bank transfers. There's a reason people avoid them, and a reason popular payment methods support them. The fact is th…

> That makes you sound actually crazy. I don't see why this is so difficult to understand. You have a merchant with a sterling reputation. I'm a customer. They don't know me from Adam, but they know that a lot of their customers are unreliable. Suppose the product is bespoke or controversial, so they have a lot of problems with people placing an order and then backing out and refusing to pay after the work is already…

I'm sorry but the history of world has shown over and over again that merchants are the side of the equation that needs to be regulated and kept in check. Saying "I want no protections" marks you out as weird and historically somewhat illiterate.

For your contrived example, a bank transfer would work just fine, and can be done online in seconds. Good luck if the 'trusted' merchant decides to cash in their 'trusted' reputation by taking a lot of people's cash and skipping town, or if their business just plain goes under before you can get your items, though.

> In other words, things that are de facto prohibited through inconvenience or risk.

This is not the same as prohibited.

> And disclosing your bank routing number would allow the merchant to withdraw more than agree

Why would you be exposing anything? Sending a bank transfer doesn't allow anyone to withdraw anything. A cashiers cheque even less so - it comes from the bank, not your account.

Re: Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare

#242

What's the energy cost of a financial sector that takes a ~3% cut of all retail transactions, puts up physical bank branches to manage money, empowers a federal reserve to manage the value of currency with more or less competency... Comparing BTC energy costs to some mythical world where we just burn free lunches for heat is not honest.

There is nothing about BTC that deprecates the issues you present.

BTC trivially avoids, eg, chargebacks. It is effectively the only money transmission mechanism that verifiably does do.
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