Also, it does not take into account the potential for value being removed from dollars (denominator and subsidizing currency of big oil, big war, big agra, etc.) and being given irrevocably to the proletariat who are actually concerned about climate change.
Yes, a currency that is so hard to understand that even seasoned technocrats can't figure it out is perfect for the proletariat.
Cryptocurrencies are yet another example of wealth transfer from educated elite to another educated elite. There is nothing "democratic" about it.
It requires a tech expertise which 95% of the planet doesn't have to even accept/make a payment. Forget about "mining" it - 99.5% of the world's population doesn't have the knowledge or the resources for it.
We can do this all day. You don't need to understand anything other than downloading a wallet, storing your coins there, and being able to send them anywhere instantly.
The transactions are also non-refundable and pseudo anonymous, unlike the payment methods in your wallet. This is not a feature.
Making analogies with computers and smart phones and wallets doesn't mean Bitcoin is guaranteed to be successful or mass adopted.
The thing about currency is that if people lose their money they might suffer and die. So it should be easy enough to understand that they can't easily be ripped off, and transparent enough that nobody can accumulate system-changing quantities without that being pretty obvious to everyone else. I've been interested in Bitcoin for years but understanding the Bitcoin ecosystem seems like a full-time job. You can't have an economy entirely based on financialization and trading, and if the people who specialize in handling the currency are sure to end up with the largest amounts of it then it's hardly better than what it's replacing.
I'm not saying there should be no rewards for specializing in currency work, but I'd like to see some sort of self-limiting mechanism. I'm reminded of a humorous Stanislaw Lem story in which a wicked king is tricked into replacing all the currency in the kingdom with uranium coins, so that his insatiable desire to accumulate as much as possible in the royal treasury eventually leads to criticality and his subsequent destruction.
Sure, it requires some tech expertise right now. But so do ALL emerging technologies. Bitcoin will probably not be the dominant cryptocurrency forever. I foresee whichever one is able to be quickly and secured transferred and stored on smartphones changing the global economy. Think about how many people in developing countries have phones and need a way to securely transact and store currency.
Really? Where is this mass distribution taking place? I don't think most of the proletariat has ASICs and my attempts to mine bitcoin on a CPU some years ago were fruitless. I think I have half a BTC somewhere on my hard drive but but I don't have any Bitcoin software installed right now because having an active wallet seems to require handling massive blockchain files, and I really don't enough about security to be sure it isn't some kind of explosive payload.
I guess I could dig up an older computer, put a minimal operating system on it, and dedicate that to being my bitcoin wallet. Or my Dogecoin wallet. Or my Ethereum wallet. There's >100 cryptocurrencies now and I have no way of knowing which ones are subject to Tulip mania and which (if any) are being created in the public interest; they all seem to be their own raison d'etre (rather than having positive externalities that I'd want to invest in), they all seem to be speculative, they all seem to reward hoarding.
At least Ethereum seems aimed at offering utility beyond simply being currency, but so much of the hype is speculative that it's drowning out more proletarian considerations like real-world utility. I'm not trying to be snarky here, I'd love to hear which cryptocurrency you think is best for regular people and why.
By 'regular people' I mean people who don't have lots of capital to invest and don't want to restructure their lives around mining or something. I'd be particularly interested to hear of any currency that was designed to limit concentrations of value and instead prioritized transaction velocity.
the traditional government control on value is only starting to erode though, and who knows what the future looks like.
How is the government going to stop me from using Bitcoin? Buy bitcoins locally, store them in your wallet, memorize your passphrase, and delete your wallet. Now what? How are you going to know I have coins? All you can surmise is I bought 'something' for $X which could have easily been chips I bought with cash.
Used to work for a popular bitcoin wallet. LOTS of Vene users. Even talked to some personally who used ETH/BTC to pay for goods.
Alipay and WeChat are free and convenient in China, relying on simple QR code scans to pay contacts. They are free. Other countries have similar things (LINE?)
PayPal is so close to being this too but it's just so clunky and relies on input of your friends' email addresses.
If I remember correctly Visa tried doing their own thing in the UK some time ago (Visa V.me) but it didn't really catch for whatever reason.
It happens at the transaction level.
You now don't have to pay 30 dollars for a wire transfer. You can send money anywhere in the world, for 1-30cents, depending on your cryptocurrency of choice.
If someone learned how to make a barbie doll which used 1% of the current electricity usage, a couple extra dolls would get created, but electricity usage would drop a lot.
If someone learned how to make bitcoins with 1% of the current electricity usage, _miners would just mine 100x what they do now_. Fundamentally, the amount of electricity that will be wasted on bitcoin mining is driven by the price. So as it gets more efficient, it becomes worth it to waste more to match the price in the race for mined blocks.
It's horrible, and it's incredibly dishonest to compare it to any other kind of manufacturing.
There are also 2 factors to control the growth of miners, reward halving and the end of this weird period of high fee transactions. After transaction fees drop down, a lot of older mining hardware will be unprofitable and come offline.
It's a familiar pattern by now - someone criticizes Bitcoin, and the reply is that some other thing is bad too. You are essentially changing the subject, not addressing the criticism. Are you hoping I'll get distracted, or something? Surely you can't be hoping I'll suddenly start thinking Bitcoin is wonderfully energy-efficient, for example.
Reminding me that Ted Bundy was really bad, is not going to convince me that Jeffrey Dahmer was a great guy. (I almost went "full Godwin" here with you-know-who's next-door neighbor as the example, so, you're welcome.)
Are there any rhetoric experts out there who can properly categorize this "argumentation technique?" The best I can do is some combination of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evasion_(ethics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
Anyway I call it "A full and glorious admission that you can't argue the point on the merits whatsoever."
Also boom/bust cycles and the increasing mainstream sentiment of crypto as a safe-haven asset.
And are you saying boom/bust cycles are a good thing? For pretty much any average user of money, they're not.