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Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you account for the damage to the environment mining gold causes its value is actually negative
I don't think you appreciate the use of gold. For one, every chip is using it. Would we better off without semiconductors in exchange for a few less mercury ponds?
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?
Cost of wind and solar was going down already. Bitcoin alone isn’t the driver. Bitcoin is, however, consuming some of that new energy generation with a new consumption: Doing useless calculations to mine Bitcoin. Bitcoin increases energy demand which also drives an increase in supply . We can’t take old power plants offline if the new hydro power is taken up by new mining operations. It’s silly that we’re going to su…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of the early adopters have either permanently lost their coins or sold it local maximums, very few people would have hold on to it that long. And you can argue that if they had that kind of strong belief, they should receive some rewards for it. It's like saying by the time a company IPOs, early VCs have benefited the most, while that is true, you could also argue they deserve it because of the risk they took.
> A lot of the early adopters have either permanently lost their coins or sold it If the balance of a Bitcoin economy relies on the assumption that certain people have lost their money, something is seriously wrong. Regardless, a hypothetical Bitcoin economy would require much further buy-in from here, making current holders the early adopters. > It's like saying by the time a company IPOs, early VCs have benefited t…
The same is the case with anything valuable that might become money, including the USD, if you consider that it was originally distributed in a manner that was pegged to gold and that gold was monetized in the same way as described above. The idea that you could materialize a money in any other way is unsupported by history.
The value of everything is negative when you measure by these standards. We should stop laughing to emit less CO2.
No, but the way we measure value is so flawed that it can seem that way. Consider how we define poverty. Suppose we discover an as-yet unknown group of people who have been using traditional farming methods to sustain themselves in the same area for thousands of years. How would you classify them economically? Are they in "abject poverty", the same as a group whose traditional means of sustenance have been destroyed…
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?
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?
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…
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?
I've seen this comment before, and honestly I think it's cheap. This article is about a clear, real problem with the current implementation of Bitcoin, namely that it requires enormous amounts of energy. I am not "anti-Bitcoin", I am anti a payment and financial storage protocol that requires gargantuan amounts of energy. So if you have a problem or comment on the article in question, please make it, we're all ears.…
"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.
> 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. How do you justify this, given that inflation is so low? (at least in the EU it's been oscillating between 0 and 2% for a very long time) https://tradingeconomics.com/euro-area/inflation-cpi Is this what people are so tired of? 1% inflation? I'm just trying to…