Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet
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I think this shows how truly powerful the network effect, and being first to market is. Because without those things, Bitcoin would be nothing.
Yes, Ethereum has been working towards several long-tail projects for years. I think it's more important to distinguish that nothing good or important has come of Ethereum though, and that it is NOT money, and it is not a safe currency. The blockchain is fraught with front-ran txs, the mining is very centralized, and all projects atop ETH suffer dependency on it's success. The blockchain is growing very large which leads to further centralization on very expensive customized equipment. DeFi is a buzzword that means little but "super alpha experimental money leveraging tools" and financial instruments on the cutting edge. Ethereum is Dave & Busters tokens in comparison to Bitcoin being real money.
I mean, Ethereum has the second largest marketcap of all cryptocurrencies and it feels like 80% of the research & development either comes from Ethereum directly or close-by ecosystems.
To say that Ethereum is Dave & Busters tokens when compared to Bitcoin is funny, since every single cryptocurrency is magic internet money anyway.
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/133392262085774540...
It's pretty bad that Bitcoin still hasn't started working on it.
They would like to switch to proof of stake and plan to do so next year.
https://www.ft.com/content/8553aba7-8beb-4b48-9287-be6a08065...
That's its usage.
Every one of those "apps" is usage on Ethereum, everything from trading (Uniswap, think of it as a Coinbase competitor), loans (Maker), to mutual fund like assets (Yearn).
It's hard to convey in a few words how much better buying a house using Maker/Eth was compared to going to a bank. Everything about the process smashes the traditional system.
Taken from a Q&A with nano's creator[1] around a question of why doesn't nano implement smart contracts:
> Smart contracts can’t cause side effects to happen. They can’t move property and they can’t negotiate unforeseen disputes. When you carefully look at it, all smart contracts take the form of a prepayment and slow release of locked-up funds. People haven’t and won’t use this for multiple reasons. Economically the opportunity cost of locked-up funds means they can’t be used elsewhere while locked up. From a practical standpoint, something simple like a rental smart contract could mean you’d have to lock up your year’s rent to slowly trickle out to your landlord. People simply don’t have this much money to lock up. Smart contracts can’t sample unforeseen circumstances, something like a judge ruling in contradiction to a smart contract means it will continue to operate incorrectly given the new situation. Oracles in smart contracts will very quickly become infeasible. Consider writing a contract about a building in a remote town, who is the person that’s going to go on location, make the determination, and feed the input into the system? How are we sure they aren’t coerced to lie?
[1] https://changenow-io.medium.com/ama-with-nanos-founder-colin...
Bonus points for it being overseen by a Swiss non-profit, they fund development efforts and encourage adoption.
Who knows what the end result it, but I think the ideas there make it favorable compared to BTC and ETH. Not to mention lower transaction fees :).
However, so far it doesn't have users other than the stakers themselves. It's not all that hard to transition everything over, it's just that it's a live $200 billion economy and they're being really careful about it. Should happen next year though.
EDIT: The wikipedia article is easy to find[1]. However it is really short, looks incomplete, and has a lot of “citation needed” after each point. So I would rather ask on HN.
If a validator approves a fraudulent transaction (as determined by other validators), they lose their stake.
Staking better aligns incentives when compared to mining and most other alternatives.
Blockchains that allow protocol changes via votes are an option, and how you quantify votes is a parameter, but PoS is not tied to being a government token, and 'votes' on forks (its really not a vote as both protocols exist after a fork) are made by large and small holders alike. It has nothing to do with amount of currency owned.
Compared to PoS where the biggest incentive is to be nice.
Here is one link, and you can find several more.
https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf
Now, that is a PDF, and I do not recommend blindly opening PDFs. This is by Andrew Poelstra, who is a mathematician at Blockstream.
But how does in know which copy is the real one and not one cooked up by someone like me showing I own half the coins?
With proof of work you can choose the one with the most work in it and that's hard to fake as the real bitcoin blockchain has billions of dollars worth of computer work in.
With proof of stake it's hard. If there is no real cost, fakers can make thousands or millions of fake chains and how do you know which is the 'real' one?
There are potential solutions but it's tricky. Like if you have www.stake-coin.com point to the real one, what if someone manages to take over the domain?
Im kinda at a loss about what other vectors of attack possible, hard to find any digestible info, and pos protocol designs are really complex.
Proof-of-work works (very broadly) by computers solving harder and harder math problems to create value. Eventually, these get so hard that solving one requires either joining a pool or a huge investment in electricity and mining rigs - which is where we're at now. This isn't good for the environment.
Proof-of-stake works by individuals "staking" some of their own coins to be more likely to be randomly chosen to "validate" a transaction (which earns them a reward, similar to hashing). Validating a transaction is trivial and uses very little electricity, but the rest of the network also checking the transaction keeps the validator honest.
While proof-of-work and proof-of-stake are both a kind of "the rich get richer" game, to get more coins in proof-of-stake all that's required is a greater investment into the network, as opposed to the mining rigs and large amounts of electricity that are required by proof-of-work.
I found this video to be helpful in visualizing the networking parts of proof-of-stake.
PoS also offers something PoW does not: absolute finality, https://medium.com/mechanism-labs/finality-in-blockchain-con...
Additionally, PoS attackers can have their stake slashed, so they may never attack again. However, you can't slash PoW attackers, once attacked, they will just keep on coming back (no matter how many times you change the hashing algorithm)
Bitcoin did not have a fair launch either, there was a lot of information asymmetry between the project insiders and the public. Satoshi's stealth-mine of ~1 million BTC for example.
Nearly every other bitcoin fork can suffer a 50% attack because the network is sufficiently small that one can rent enough hashing power to attack it (see Bitcoin Gold).
Alternate coins absolutely need some other mechanism to secure their chain that doesn't require a critical mass.
Like really - did your friend owe you $200 and you wanted to make sure he couldn't pay you something over square and then call his credit company and say his card was lost?
Like are you a shop online and you wanted to make sure ALL of your customers are paying in Bitcoin so they can't claim someone stole their card?
Are you a party to a lawsuit and the judge decided to oversee the other party pay you (the fictitious plaintiff in this scenario) $50000 with a check and you're worried he's calling his bank afterward and cancel the check?
None of these scenarios would be made better with Bitcoin:
Transaction costs
Some online stores ARE scams and it's better to have a real money trail - especially the ones involving bitcoin
The last scenario is easily solved because the judge would be able to provide much harsher realities for the check canceller.
From a practicality standpoint every time someone talks about irreversible transactions I just eyeroll at the actual logistics of that working in our world of 7B people.
When you notice that multi billion dollar transactions of Bitcoin are made every blue moon you might not be scoffing at what its security protocol is providing it.
The first line of the whitepaper[0] is "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another"
In practice some "third" party (bank, paypal, square, venmo, etc) will still be involved in most transactions because of the scenarios you have described. But this would be because they are helpful and add value not because they are necessary.
Do you mean to tell me you just cannot understand why some people want money with total finality to use with anonymous people across a network? I mean, at this point I have no argument with you I just can't understand your line of thinking. Cryptocurrency, or digital cash, digital money was an idea for a decade+ before Bitcoin finally solved the problem. It's an obvious money with many obvious use cases. Many thousands of folks around the world are using Bitcoin on a daily basis. It's like the phony fees story people spread about Bitcoin, while those of us using Bitcoin daily can send any amounts of money we like for payments to folks around the internet for a couple dollars.
Let me be totally blunt with you since you are acting clueless as to how people use money on the internets.
I pay people ALL THE TIME, in Bitcoin, for codebase work that they perform. I do not want banks involved, I do not want to know their real life identity, I do not want them to know my identity, etc. Therefore, do the work, I pay you. We have a Web-of-Trust (Something folks here in general just seem ENTIRELY clueless about) and we trust eachother just as far as the Web of Trust and our online chat history and trust level allows. Do people get ripped off at times with payments? Sure. You lost $50 bucks, or whatever. Maybe you'll learn not to trust that party again. It's very simple. You don't need to act clueless. It's money, and if you use it correctly it just works. It's not reversible. If I were paying someone who ran off with my cash, it's the same shit.
The reality is that consensus only requires people to agree on something. It does not require burning tons of energy or military action.
Prisoner's dilemma is only a thing if you consider finite games, ie. played for your immediate benefit. If you consider an infinite game (for example the good and survival of humanity in perpetuity), it can be clearly shown that there is better solution and it is for people to grow up and just agree on a protocol that does not require burning energy or military action.
Do you think people will cheat each other given chance? That may be true when there is good chance of not getting punished for it. But if you ever lived in a small community where people rely on each other for survival (ie. infinite game), you would notice people will not cheat each other when they know they will have to rely on the community until death.
Now, what you experience isn't necessity.
Think why you decided to write you only trust "select few"? Aren't these the people you plan on interacting with for a long time like family, friends or coworkers?
That's because when you plan to work with somebody for a long time, your game changes from finite to infinite. It suddenly makes other than altruistic sense to invest actual resources into fostering the relationship and avoid damaging this relationship by cheating.
Every project has its own strengths and weaknesses, but it's hard to argue that Bitcoin isn't the best on many of those measures. It's all about which of them you as an individual value most.
- transaction times
- energy consumption
- scalability (BTC currently does 7tx/s)
- security (BTC is getting more centralized over time, increasing the risk of a majority takeover.)
- fewer fees as possible (ideally 0)
BTC only has first mover advantage, and security...for now.
Other coins might sound good on paper -- adding new features but introducing serious design errors that have yet to be discovered because they're not a big enough target.
Monero is exclusively private and ZCash is opt-in private.
Seems pretty easy to me. What is Bitcoin best at apart from having the largest market cap?
* Largest network by nodes.
* Largest network hashrate / Most energy consumed.
* Simple Satoshi Codebase.
* Most accessible - blockchain delivered via satellite!
* One can run a node on a RPi. Requires 351G storage for full chain. Eth is TB's (and growing), requires SSD, fast CPU, etc.
You are not running ETH nodes at home.
* Most decentralized
* Most reliable
You gain nothing from using a system that's 12 year old over one that's 6 years old. Also more nodes just dont add any usefulness anymore at some point, it just more not better.
Reliable is useless without comparing it to something else. BTC had unintentional forks and many small possible double spends and all that stuff in the last 12 years. Its overall reliable, sure but at what metric. Incidents per time? incidents per Tx? Or just the fact that it didn't die in the last 12 years?
I'm a fan of Bitcoin, and I'm not sure why the random need to criticize Ethereum here. Bitcoin has enough reasons to be useful, no need to be insecure about other projects being useful too.
Are your running a full archival ETH node on a RPI with a 3TB+ SSD attached?
"Payment Freedom" and "Choose your own fees" are both things that no longer apply to Bitcoin.
The reality is that if your fee isn't high enough, it stays in the mempool until it expires, never being sent.
+ offline transactions should be possible (allowing sync with the chain whenever), but also I do not think any have that.
A good crypto-currency is like cash, with a nice physical gauge theory (allowing offline transactions) guaranteeing security + any transaction processing rate.
Every single cryptocurrency now is still a research project first.
If you have a good idea here, it might be possible to implement as a second layer on a chain with smart contracts.
describing offline transactions.
Without this and usage for criminal purposes bitcoin would be worth a fraction of it's current worth and as such likely not worth mining for.
This also means IMHO that Bitcoin as currency not just already failed, but did so pretty hard.
As a non currency speculative investment/mony parking product it didn't fail. But it wasn't meant to be such a think.
Furthermore the massive environmental problems it introduce by having a high such a absurd high need of energy and other economical problems (drain of currently limited chips without producing "general" economic benefits, usage for criminal activities if combined with mixers etc.) makes it a highly flawed product.
It should be noted that this is Bitcoin specific. Other cryptocurrencies have this problem much less by neither having absurd high energy costs, nor having absurd high purely speculation/money parking based prices.
Sure there will always be some drain of energy and some drain of chips and some usage for criminal activity. It's just that for Bitcoin thinks have gotten out of balance and besides availability through the network effect there is no reason to use Bitcoins for normal (legal) payments. It's just too costly, slow and price unstable (due to speculative investments always forming a bubble) to be used for normal payments IMHO.
Exceptions can be countries with a "broken" economy, but even then other crypto currencies would be normally preferable as far as I know.
Is there anything definitive on this? I've heard/read that less than 3% of bitcoin was used for illegal purposes but I don't know if they include tax evasion in that.
There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.
In the case of cryptocurrencies, as soon as a cryptocurrency has any important percentage of use, these transactions are not confirmed in seconds anymore, and transaction fees starts to grow up. No one is really using PoS right now, so let's wait and see if this solution actually works when Ethereum officially switches.
Lightning Network is similar. It's been perpetually 6 months away for years.
Frankly, I'll be impressed if the current power structure within PoW cryptos doesn't find any way to hamstring PoS, mostly because they have a vested interest in keeping everything the way it is now.
But until then, we can't really say that Ethereum is 100% PoS, although one pre-alpha project is.
I use C++ everyday and I am still shocked about how user-hostile it is. I don't buy the usual "backwards compatible" and zero-cost abstraction canned arguments. I identified a lot of missed opportunities for simplification... I wonder how much energy we wasted by trial and error while writing/compiling useless C++ programs /s
None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers.
The thing about money is that I can hand it to someone. Possession of the money is possession of the money and third parties don't need to get involved in every transaction. I can hand someone dollars and take a sandwich and walk away, transaction done.
The problem with a digital currency, of course, is that when you hand someone a sequence of bits, they don't go away from you, so you can hand that same sequence of bits to another person.
The "solution" people came up with to this problem was to not solve the problem, and instead solve a different problem, how to have a distributed ledger.
Which is like, neat and all. But also infuriating. We don't have crypto-currencies, we just have crypto-banks.
Why do you even need physical cash? I can carry my countries currency around with me easily enough but i generally don't bother as i don't ever need to.
Honestly don’t know if you’re trolling or just old.
I used paper money once last year. To buy weed. Because the federal government has determined I am not responsible enough to use or own weed.
No one I know uses physical cash anymore. We’re moving away from physical items where possible, not toward it. I would rather have my currency on a public DLT than controlled by the government.
https://www.npr.org/2020/02/06/803003343/some-businesses-are...
Besides, even without cash, you're still going to get robbed. They'll just take merchandise instead of cash.
My understanding is that Europe has strict limits on credit card fees, and as such, most cards in Europe don't have rewards.
Moving to America I was horrified to learn that in order to get applicable for loans (including home loans) I had to “work up my credit”, which includes maxing out on credit cards and then paying it back. As a teenager I made it my philosophy (experiencing second hand stress from the people around me) never to get a credit card. Now if I want to have a realistic opportunity to buy a house here I’m forced to abandon this philosophy and to the thing that kept my mom in constant state of stress. This credit system ought to be abolished.
From my personal perspective, credit cards are a systematic way to bamboozle the working class into over-consuming and keep them in constant state of dept. And to reward the wealthy for the same behavior, which only serves to shove it in the face of poor folks that the rich get away with everything. This system ought to be abolished.
And that's why plenty of businesses still only take cash. Casinos want cash for chips. Peter Luger's still only takes cash. When you buy something like a dog from a breeder, it will be in cash. Any transaction where person on the other end has little recourse if your payment didn't go through will be in cash. Or if the business is popular enough to force it (in the case of Luger's).
When I hand cash over to someone, I know how much is leaving and coming back right then and there. When I fill out a payment form with my card details I'm handing over my entire balance into the ether. I could be sleeping and quietly money is leaving my bank account, which happened. So cash is king still.
Plus it's generational. If I said walkman's are the best I would guess you have a different response, more digital based I imagine.
It's also hard to have silverfish eat your bank account balance, or have your credit card account catch fire and disappear.
https://pestrepublic.com/do-silverfish-eat-money-how-to-keep...
But here is my PIN **
This is the same misleading argument as when people claim that BTC is in practice equivalent to USD as most people just keep it on exchanges (same as USD in banks). Yes, but BTC/crypto also gives you one new option, i.e. not keepign money on an exchange ("being your own bank"). You're free to take that option, or not - but it exists.
But physical cash should always be an option. You can't have a truly free society without it. Some intermediary could always have control over your transactions.
I think arguing that control over crypto transactions is more likely than the devaluing of physical currencies is a little far-fetched since we've seen plenty of the former without much of an example of any centralized power being able to control users actions on the internet.
Just think of all the wealth changing hands on the internet today against the will of governments.
No need to be ageist. It's a fair perspective. There is a quality of independence and agency that comes from being able to purchase things with cash.
Ironically, your weed transaction is a perfect example of that. I am a little confused by your argument though. Are you saying that you used cash because you couldn't pay legally with a debit/credit card or something? How come you didn't you use crypto? That aside, even with cash you were able to come to an independent accord (without the gov) and trade value for value. You could almost call it a barter, if you really consider cash to be a relic.
Despite having laws against this, society is mostly okay with some gray area around "off the books" transactions - which is why you can brag about it online and no one really cares, much like jaywalking.
More options for independent transactions don't necessarily hurt, but they do muddy the waters. The thing about cash is, since it is so commonly used, people generally understand what it is worth.
If I sell a TV for $100 on Craigslist, I take my $100 and I have a good idea of what I can buy at the grocery store with that. Offer to trade me 0.0020 BTC (~$100 right now) and I'm less likely to engage in the transaction because I don't understand its inherent value. You could even offer me 0.0022 BTC ($110) and I'd pass. How much gas can I buy with 0.0022 BTC? Do any gas stations around me take BTC? Do I need to convert it? I don't know. Add even more cryptos and it becomes even less clear...
I'm not against more options. More crypto options = more ability to barter. You and your dealer can decide to transact in Pokémon cards and no one's going care. But I do not see it being some sort of fix-all for the downsides to cash.
I’m sure there are ways to use cryptocurrency to do the same.
The fact that lots of people in India have had serious issues because they were unbanked does seem to indicate that there's a sizable population of people using cash for everything*. I'm curious if there's any research into whether that's for tax-evasion reasons or for some other reason.
My personal belief is that the number one use is for money laundering, and that people who are using it that way would be willing to pay taxes on the money they are laundering from some other illegal activity. For instance, there are all-cash drug dealers who pay taxes on their drug money. I'm sure Al Capone wishes in retrospect that he'd paid taxes...
Have you ever experienced a natural disaster? One thing you realize quite quickly is that your debit card is useless. That doesn’t mean transactions stop, people are still buying and selling, those with cash at least. If there’s runs on banks, infrastructure outages, etc, those relying entirely on debit and other payment cards won’t be buying food!
That's like $1.2 trillion in boring, normal, law-abiding cash transactions each year.
Also, for the record, I have been in and responded to a number of natural disasters in the "first world". With the exception of a few hours here and there, using cards was never a problem. If the infrastructure is so wrecked that cards don't work, food/water is coming from people in high-vis vests.
Try a hurricane, or something serious enough to be registered as a natural disaster.
Lets say for the sake of argument that you are right, and the no. 1 use case of cash is to evade taxes. Then the people getting payed for their tax-free labor will need to use this cash somehow. The easiest (and cheapest) is simply to circulate the money while buying regular goods and services. So buying of regular goods and services would rise to be at least as popular use case of cash as tax evasion is.
Also note that there are plenty of people willing to pay tax for their transaction, but the transaction is made illegal by their government and hence they cannot. Then the reason to use cash is not tax evasion, but illegal transaction, (note that this includes paying and receiving salaries for people not allowed to work because of immigration status). Tax evasion then becomes a happy byproduct of the no. 1 reason for using cash, illegal transaction.
But I honestly doubt that either illegal transactions, nor tax evasion comes even close to why most people use cash. Convenience. Though I could be persuaded if I saw some data pointing to the opposite.
* If I want to get payed quickly for a quick job, cash is the preferred payment method.
* If I immigrate to a country where I am not allowed to work legally, cash would be my preferred payment method.
* If I’m buying something illegal (including labor from a person not allowed to work in my country) cash is the preferred payment method.
* I can use cash to pay for products in the farmstand across the street without any transaction fees or 3rd party apps.
* I can use cash during a week long blackout.
* I can use cash without an internet access.
Parent might not personally use cash. But for many people around the world cash is by far the most convenient payment method. And for many less privileged people cash is the only payment method.
Crypto-currencies don't provide a way to transfer value peer-to-peer, online, just a third party that is (hopefully) neutral.
With crypto all of this is taken care of by the network, and with the truly decentralized networks (not all of them are) anyone can be part of the network. No one "owns" the ledger. In my mind this has successfully created something that is more free (as in speech) than any previous form of "money" other than gold.
Fiat is also moving in this direction. Credit cards, are just exchanging bits, and in Asia, with Alipay and WeChat pay you are just scanning QR codes. At least with (good) crypto currencies is you can remove the third-party from the equation.
There still remains the problem of having your transaction broadcast to the entire network, but I think that is also a solvable problem.
That's only true if you discount the US government as the third party (at least for USD$) who are involved in every transaction, by virtue of them needing to exist for the $ to have any value or for the seller to accept the $ in the first place i.e for them to know it will still be worth something in 3 weeks when they want to spend it.
What good is selling food for dollars if you can't spend those dollars next week? Better to swap the food for another good which can be used or exchanged.
This seems like a strange guarantee, I think it's incorrect, and I would have absolutely no way in a zombie apocalypse to hold you to the guarantee. Which is, inherently, why I think it's incorrect.
What resources does Bitcoin allocate? Isn't Bitcoin merely glorifying the concept of currencies but without anything to justify its existence? Since when did we ever talk about the USD (or any other currency) as being an end in itself rather than a means to an end?
there are many problems with bitcoin but this really isn't one of them. most dollars aren't real either. dollar transactions bounce all the time.
and there will always be some kind of cash counterpart to any electronic payment system. how else would people buy contraband or work under the table?
This is the same when people's net worth is discussed though. To the average individual that hears a net worth it almost feels like they think it's cash money. But it's on paper, as in sell all the shares of businesses and assets to cash it in.
Perception is the mother of all great products and marketing.
Alice has never given Bob her bank account, more like created another account just for Bob
There's a similar problem with handing someone the private key to a wallet with a pre-set amount of money as an offline transaction. Besides not being able to verify the amount in the wallet without checking with the central ledger, you also don't know that the other party isn't handing out the same private key to multiple people.
Paper money or even metal money can be counterfeited, sure, but in low-counterfeiting environments individuals transacting can verify the authenticity of the script locally with reasonable confidence, without consulting a (distributed, decentralized) third-party to verify.
Take an example of burning $100 bill. You aren't destroying more than the piece of paper, because the destroyed value is instantly shared between every other unit of currency.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
This is why it will be very handy for African countries where no-one has a bank account but they do have cell-phones.
> The "solution" people came up with to this problem was to not solve the problem, and instead solve a different problem, how to have a distributed ledger.
And what would be, at least intuitively, a solution to the "you can copy bits, give them away but also keep a valid copy for yourself" problem which is a problem for currency but also the default way digital information work?
If you had access to a near-perfect money printing machine, you would have just the same problem, we are just "saved" by the implementation difficulty. Just the same as with the ledger approach.
Fundamentally, what folks are trying to get to with crypto is a trust-less system, one that can operate regardless of whether or not there are bad actors involved (including and most commonly as the central authority, aka banks). Historically, it's been a lot easier to build systems that don't account for bad actors, and it's been continually problematic for society because that assumption is so obviously and blatantly false.
Maybe crypto, as we know it, isn't the solution, and certainly proof-of-work has serious negative drawbacks. However, with the advent of automated computational devices, the possibility of evolving past our many-thousand year old system of bartering is too enticing to just ignore. We know there's a better way, and the odds we'll nail it on the first try are nearly zero, so I personally welcome any attempts that lurch us forward in the meantime, even if they're not the end destination.
I sold most of my crypto because it's too risky/sketchy for me now.
Turns out, virtually nil, because it's been around for 8 years and nobody is using it, because there is no real-world use case for contracts written as software.
That's laughably wrong, go look up how much revenue the Ethereum network is bringing in with smart contract fees.
- Speculators buying ETH to ride the bubble
- A revolving door of Proof-of-concept startups with backing from starry-eyed VCs and no viable business plans that pop up, use a bunch of compute, and then fail, every couple of months.
Ethereum mining conglomerates don't even use Smart Contracts, they just cite "a long history of successful payouts", trust, and old-fashioned promises written in vernacular English.
A few other use cases: DeFi (mainly crypto backed loans), NFTs (so far not too interesting to me), distributed ETH2 staking pools, distributed betting markets (the coolest one in my opinion).
DeFi is used almost exclusively as margin for speculation. Since smart contracts have no legal force, the only way lenders can be guaranteed their money back is by demanding collateral that is greater than the value of the loan. When is the last time you needed a loan of $10,000, for which you were happy to put up $15,000 of your own dollars in escrow as collateral, other than securities gambling?
NFTs are just cryptokitties by another name, ETH2 staking pools are just private equity firms but without security because millions of dollars are stolen out of them every year, and crypto distributed betting markets are patently illegal.
Which brings us right back to where these conversations always end: the only things blockchain has or will ever be useful for are speculation and obscuring criminal activity.
Those are two wildly different claims but I'll bite anyway:
Your argument against DeFi could be made about Schwab, or any brokerage providing margin so I don't find it very compelling. Is selling margin to gamblers not a "competitively successful commercial activity"? Your original claim was that there were no users.
> crypto distributed betting markets are patently illegal
That's like saying self driving cars are patently illegal. Of course they are (more illegal than grey market sports betting), but it's a nascent technology and it's not obvious that it will stay illegal.
> semantics
Every competent English speaker knows that the phrase "nobody uses X" is never meant to be taken literally. When I say "nobody uses PowerPC", I mean that its market share is miniscule and the industry has moved on, I am not claiming that there does not exist some nerd somewhere who maintains a 20 year old imac as a hobby, and finding that nerd is not a disproof.
> margin trading
Margin accounts are not commercial activity. When you buy or trade securities, whether on margin or otherwise, no new value is being created, no workers are being paid, no commodities are being traded, no products are being consumed.
The entire market could vanish overnight and nobody would notice, because it isn't doing anything, it's just making increasingly complicated guesses at what other people will do.
> betting is like self-driving cars
Self driving cars are new technology. Online betting is not, it has been around since the beginning of the internet. Blockchain is doing nothing but helping the illegal gamblers to hide from law enforcement.
Well that's bad analogy, because unlike PowerPC there are more users of Ethereum than ever before, and Ethereum is generating more revenue than ever before.
> Self driving cars are new technology. Online betting is not, it has been around since the beginning of the internet. Blockchain is doing nothing but helping the illegal gamblers to hide from law enforcement.
I think you're being obtuse. Ethereum is the new technology here, that enables a distributed betting platform that was previously not possible. Self driving cars are a new technology that enable a type of transportation (existing market, like betting) that previously wasn't possible.
Nobody is using the compute power, though. Can you point to what they are using it for, if you have an example?
Having trouble finding the total smart contract revenue, but this article has examples of the top few, and gives an idea of their usage patterns: https://medium.com/@vikati/ranking-ethereum-smart-contracts-...
The only people using smart-contracts are enthusiasts and proof-of-concept startups that have no traction in the market because smart contracts don't offer any advantage over any other computing system.
"Crypto is 'backed' by the value of the sunk cost of the energy used to mine it."
...which is to say: nothing.
But for as long as collective agreement persists, there is volatility. And where there's volatility, there are profitable trades.
The natural question becomes "Why does, and for how long will, the collective agreement persist?".
For that, I have no answer. :)
If the moment you stopped mining gold, it began to sink into the earth again, would the amount of mining you did in the past have value in the future?
Crypto ain't even backed by that.
Usually, we commonly agree by coming to consensus on what to do and not to. But here the consensus, sometimes, can get hijacked by the third parties which lot of people don't understand how it happens (read historical events). 2008 banks bailouts is a good example to begin with.
As Satoshi mentioned, in the OG Bitcoin paper, that cryptocurrencies will be attractive to Libertarians. That's a fair assumption as one would start to notice a lot of activities involved in being part of cryptocurrency, atleast currently, requires lot of individual responsibilities, especially maintaining the wallet's credentials. Not to say that they can't be automated away.
Coming to terms with taking individual responsibilities in general is very hard. Most people want others (Government) to do it.
only because the US Gov didn't classify it as money for tax purposes...
Many of the other comments have pointed out how money doesn't have this quality either. This comparison is a wash: buy gold if that's your goal (at least until we find/mine a gold-laden asteroid).
The other comparison is who you have to trust to insure the value of that currency. In the case of cash, it is your government/Treasury. In the case of cryptocurrency, it is mathematics. I am originally from Zimbabwe and have much to say about trusting the government with insuring the value of cash...
That's why I have a small clutch of proof-of-stake.
Have you ever thought about how to boost the economy and thus the ability to exchange zimbabwean dollars for more services and goods? Because that is what is necessary to get the zimbabwean dollar back in order.
Anything whose price is going up is scare and its domestic production must be expanded.
My main point is that fiat currency implies trust in some entity. Zimbabwean vendors have chosen to trust the South African and US governments.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp
Kinda like you waking up to a brand-new bank account, with proof! The only thing stopping 51% on BitCoin is the cost of mounting one: were it a smaller crypto currency, it would be at risk. (I'm pretty sure I got that right, but I'll be corrected if I didn't!)
Historically the events that caused this mode of exchange to be locked in were out of the hands of anyone but key economic players - world leaders and top advisors and the like. Some of them are still alive and have vested stake in the continuance of their own power.
The reset away from this depends on the incompetence and failure of institutions that otherwise permeate every aspect of modern civilization. Financial capitalism's fall will be a very big problem in its own right.
I mean, you're not wrong, but this is where the cryptographic elements actually take place.
The double spending problem is not a problem; it was solved already with BTC. You can always have your crypto on a physical drive, which kinda makes it like cash in the sense that you can have it in your hands like cash.
As a side-bar, a major role of money is to allow the government to easily collect taxes from their citizens and so governments have to be careful here as they must ensure that there are no challengers to their primary form of taxation payment. Bitcoin was very carefully crafted to survive government attack and finally the government accepted it by considering it a taxable commodity. While the early crypto-is-cash people are annoyed by this, it was the only possible outcome in a match between the government and crypto currency that doesn't end in outright warfare on crypto.
Now that digital currencies have moved from theoretical to a proven model people can move on to solving newer problems rather than just getting it off the ground. Now we have privacy coins which attempt to solve the problems of getting anonymous transactions among other desirable features. But wait there's more, now that we don't have to prove that electronic cash is a workable system we have decentralized finance coins now. If people thought the government hated bitcoin, just wait until the banking system realizes defi is coming.
Why do they have to be careful? Are they going to magically going to have to start accepting Bitcoin instead of dollars?
> Bitcoin was very carefully crafted to survive government attack and finally the government accepted it by considering it a taxable commodity.
They still doesn't mean you can pay taxes with it.
The second one is gone because control of money supply is gone and as far as the first one the govt can trace funds in your bank accounts but it's going to have a really hard time if someone holds crypto currency and is intent on not disclosing their real wealth.
There is zero chance bitcoin with it's current network is every going to be used as money. What might happen however is that more and more transactions could move towards other networks like nano or various stablecoins that are built on top of smart contract platforms.
If governments end up issuing a currency that is only useful for tax payments then they have effectively lost control of the monetary policy. And in any case banning crypto will only help towards redirecting monetary flow towards other countries. So in many ways governments' hands are tied in this.
I think Monero failed at the name. Bitcoin's name is self defining to some degree which I think helped make it gain a lot of popularity. It's also impersonal, bits and coins, there's no real branding there to get twisted up with. When people first hear "bitcoin" they already have constructs in their head about bits and coins and it elicits free advertisement as the imagination tries to create a working theory on what a bitcoin is.
Monero makes me think of some kind of failed sports car nobody has ever heard of. I'm not counting it out, but if it's really better on the technical side then it needs some prominent evangelists spreading its use.
Regarding proof-of-stake for example, I'll defer to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25007874
So you just demonstrated the problem that the OP was talking about.
For example, you can sell roughly 5 million USD worth of litecoin on the Bitfinex exchange until you push down the price by 0.5%, but for Bitcoin this figure is roughly 500 million USD (~100 times greater).
The greater the liquidity of a currency the less value is lost when exchanging back and forth between it and e.g. USD.
I'm just someone who sees the failed promises made by Bitcoin (fast, cheap transactions) against the horrendous damage it is causing the environment.
There has to be a better way.
Fast and cheap transactions have been around since long before Bitcoin. Bitcoin's innovation was to make those possible without a trusted centralized intermediary. Therefore, decentralization and security are arguably the most important properties when evaluating cryptocurrencies. And Bitcoin is king on that front. Cryptocurrencies that promise faster, cheaper or "more energy efficient" transactions pretty much always have to compromise on that.
But as an end user, you probably wouldn't know that. That's why I'm frustrated with people who authoritatively claim things like "there are so many better crypto-currencies" while not disclosing that they're merely commenting from a "user experience" point of view.
Picture bitcoin in its final state, where central banks trade in and out of Bitcoin to weaken or strengthen their respective currencies. Bitcoin is the only solution, and other cryptocurrency is fit for the task.
As mining complexity grows, surely this problem is only exasperated, since you need a bigger investment to be able to mine effectively, which would presumably result in an even smaller group of more powerful miners?
PoW can be as simple as checking a hash (in addition to the basic block rules). PoS has a lot more rules, for example Eth has a lot of PoS rules and includes features like slashing which improve economic securities. https://docs.ethhub.io/ethereum-roadmap/ethereum-2.0/proof-o...
When rules aren't by implemented correctly it causes situations like Bitcoin's 2013 fork https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2013-03-11-chain-fork
Bitcoin value is that it is extremely hard to change, especially when it comes to fundamental properties, like 21m hard cap.
You can actually rely on Bitcoin's monetary policy to be fixed forever.
Moreover, those "better" solutions are mostly operated and promoted by founders with questionable profit incentives, they also control the rules of those crypto-currencies.
Bitcoin shines due to its fixed Rules, unknown founder, best incentive structure.
That's the sole actual quote attributed to Bill Gates in that article (which doesn't even link to any source). The rest is the author conflating their thoughts with Bill Gates's.
It's one of those article we point to when we complain about the media's lack of credibility.
People attribute "greed" to the rise of bitcoin's usage, is that supposed to be a moral high road they're taking by avoiding "greed"? People love woke-shaming people into not doing something. Isn't this problem of "greed" going to be present in every system that needs to be bootstrapped from the scratch?
At this stage, it is like in the late 90s when people said that "The internet was very unsafe" because Internet Explorer 4/5 were crappy insecure. Yeah, everybody with the least amount of computer knowledge knew how crappy Explorer was.
Even arguments about renewable energy being used to mine BTC are moot, because they don't consider the opportunity cost of what could be done with all that energy instead.
I truly believe in a decentralized means of exchange, but Bitcoin is the Encarta equivalent. There already is a Wikipedia equivalent, all it takes is a little research. Once you find it, you will know. I won't shill here, as I don't want that to dilute the points of Bitcoin's increasingly problematic issues due to its growing scale.
That being said, the cryptoverse is drowning in sh*tcoins, and I completely understand anyone even remotely mentioning an alternative to Bitcoin being inevitably categorized as a shiller and therefore not worth listening to.
If I launch a BTC miner into space and use a star to power it, will you worry about what else could have been done with that energy?
The more remote the energy source, the higher the cost to deliver it to a centralized grid, meaning it will probably be wasted anyway if it can't easily be converted into an easier to transmit form, BTC. Rather beam internet through space than attempt to beam energy.
Well first of all you used a ton of energy to get it to space. But yes, I would definitely worry about it. There are a ton of other CPU intense jobs you could do with a rig like that that would be more beneficial to humanity. Medical research for example.
It doesn't matter where you do the computation, that energy could always be used to do something more meaningful.
The same is true about a lot of computation that is done now. But bitcoin is far more "wasteful" of compute than most other things.
Renewables are infinite, we are constrained by our ability to capture them efficiently enough to beat fossil fuels.
There are probably other factors at play that prevent this from working in reality though
Unless BTC somehow manufactures more solar panels or provides more natural resources, then any resources consumed by BTC are resources that aren't used for other purposes.
Ultimately, we are always limited in how much we can accomplish, and devoting resources to BTC necessarily takes away resources from other uses. The only question, then, is if BTC is a better use for those resources than other things.
Eg if we need to manufacture 100x more solar panels than last year, the cost per solar panel will drop dramatically, and the efficiency will rise due to the volume of investment in solar panels.
We are not limited in how much we accomplish as technology provides efficiencies that allow us to grow, it’s not a zero sum game.
No. If demand rises, so do prices. Not the other way round.
See battery tech and solar panels lately.
Only if we hit a hard resource and tech barrier will we not be able to move forward.
Furthermore, all bitcoin transactions involve many 3rd parties. The key feature is that you don't have to trust the third parties, not that they don't exist.
That argument itself is not great either because it assumes the fixed pie fallacy.
So no, BTC != USD
There are ~150MM people working in US, so let's say that only these 150MM need to perform financial transactions (get paid, pay others, etc.). How many of these 150MM will be direct participants in Bitcoin? If not all of them are miners, there will be some necessary centralization.
Why should anyone trust the 10,000+ Bitcoin miners? Do I as a regular user have more freedom when dealing with these 10,000 miners vs the 4,000+ US banks?
We very well might have Coinbase, BlockFi etc. act as crypto banks, and BTC whales as the new rich. That's reward for their work and belief. What do you think is the threat vector from BTC miners? The protocol nullifies such threats.
What would be bad is if a central authority could confiscate your work output at its leisure. That's the real battle here
However, the BTC mantra is "not your keys not your coin". So if you leave it on Coinbase, you are welcoming attack by nation states to confiscate your cryptocurrency. This isn't an imagined threat. The confiscation of gold by FDR was a very real event that forced citizens to sell gold to the Government at a fixed price (of USD that the state printed at a whim) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
If BTC miners band together to cause inflation, then people migrate to ETH or <insert other crypto>. BTC loses value, and them miners have 1. not gained value even with the extra 1M BTC per block, and 2. lost value because their mining rigs generate less value per energy unit.
Not to mention, they literally have $ millions in vested interest in the success of BTC by virtue of setup and mining costs. Such a move, even hypothetically, unless it is justified somehow, will cause loss of faith in the value of BTC and the fall in the value of BTC will make them lose value in mining as they earn these in BTC as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat...
It might be intractable to confiscate bitcoin by attacking the math, but why wouldn't governments just put people in jail until they pay up? With adequate control over the internet, governments would be fairly able to track who's transacting.
Moreover for the vast majority of people on earth would still have basically zero money relative to the emerging bitcoin oligarchs. It would be a grossly unequal society, where there would need to be some non-math-based approach to getting money from the wealthy to redistribute to the less fortunate.
And even if they imprison you they won't be able to access your money:
https://amp.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3120852/germa...
Those oligarchs won't be able to print more bitcoin or exclude (sanctions) their political enemies from conducting trade. Seems fairer than the current system.
Sure they would. If bitcoin continues to exist much longer, you'll likely see the larger governments define a set of rules for domestic miners, perhaps including requirements to only process transactions from registered accounts or signed by specific keys, or otherwise authenticated. Any international agreement on such a system reaching significant hash power would fork the ledger into legitimate and illegitimate versions, and generate obvious consequences
But if by "escape government control" one means a currency that the government cannot interfere with to censor/stop transactions, or a currency that cannot be debased on the government's whim, the public ledger is exactly why bitcoin can do what it does.
Completely agree. It's like something straight out of cyberpunk. Governments everywhere are just printing money like it's nothing and we're supposed to just accept this. Cryptocurrency doesn't systematically rob people via inflation.
When he made billions in a society which values making billions above (almost) everything else
I also don't understand the attacks on his academic credentials. He had been working in his field since he was 13, he's published in CS, and he was taking graduate level classes at Harvard as an undergrad before he dropped out to found Microsoft. So yes, he has spent decades studying a field. The man is unarguably a credentialed engineer, and anyone in this field should know that you don't need a B.S. in CS or a PhD in C.S. for that.
I think it is reasonable to think that bill gates has some idea what he is talking about, especially because in this case he is essentially saying 2+2=4. Still, he is not the definitive authority on crypto.
Separate money and state and you get closer to a state where the Government has to streamline its operations. We will see behavior truly good for the planet then, because the Government won't be able to spend trillions on military interventionism and research, and will have to focus inwards on streamlining its own self. Increasing taxes will cause a mass exodus leaving the Governments in a bad shape. Bitcoin can't be confiscated. Holders will just migrate to a country that is good with BTC being used as a store of value to guard against money printing.
This is a revolution against nation states. BTC Energy consumption is negligible compared to the incumbents but nobody talks of those so here we are.
Edit: I am surprised at the number of downvotes and would encourage you to comment so I can address your thoughts on the matter. Meta comment - also surprised that the HN crowd is so divided on the matter.
In modern times, the global financial markets seem to be somewhat playing that same role since nuclear wars isn't a palatable option, with only a few "outcast" nations not participating in that system (Iran,Russia,NK,Myanmar,etc...).
Taxation systems, being the mechanism by which governments are able to build power bases, themselves compete against one another as individuals and companies avoid taxation by moving resources to low/no tax states within that same system.
This human system is a constantly evolving chaotic system that's changing more rapidly than most of us perceive, and crypto is just one aspect of that.
The dystopia I see in your words: government as an efficient service provider providing for and competing for the patronage of the ultra-wealthy holders of cryptocurrency: the monopoly on force is broken because wealth is forever exempt. Socialized, societal wealth of all forms - roads, healthcare, police, defense - discarded. The underclass of every nation left without recourse to the power of government to redistribute wealth, and a global oligarchy is ascendant.
Government's first calling should not be efficiency. That's a misapprehension of its purposes.
The state is a double-edged sword for sure. But denying its ability to raise revenues seems like a great way to hasten dystopia.
In a world where resources are constrained, you will not have SF county spending $61k per year per tent for the homeless. The state would die if they spent with such unconcern. https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-...
What society would undertake moonshots like DARPA... or going to the moon... if it could not invest with debt collateralized on a future generation's produce?
The reality is that the world, companies, people and nation states do not care about that. The current divide is due to the "system" being non-inclusive (only some people are in) and given that the system carry on to exclude more people while giving more privileges to the incumbents, the crypto tension will continue to rise.
Cryptocurrencies are not challenging banks. They are challenging governments, but they are too slow and bureaucratic to understand that.
BTC doesn't concentrate power, it tilts the balance in favor of a just system where value isn't plundered at a whim.
> BTC doesn't concentrate power, it tilts the balance in favor of a just system where value isn't plundered at a whim.
No, the value is "plundered" by a democratically elected government. You don't like it? Vote against it. Or work to fix your system of government if it's too broken for that. But don't try to make the policies you don't like impossible.
And yes, unlike BTC operates on the basis of one-person-one-vote, or somehow prevents concentration of wealth, it does not prevent concentration of power.
I suggest reading the history of money. The current system is an aberration. Historically, with gold as the currency/gold standard, nation states couldn't inflate money away.
> I suggest reading the history of money. The current system is an aberration. Historically, with gold as the currency/gold standard, nation states couldn't inflate money away.
I'm not a reactionary and I don't think you are either. So how is this an argument? We got rid of the gold standard for good reasons.
Yeah, when the US increases taxes on me, I'll just move to Korea. Oh, what's that, it takes a minimum of 5 years and learning the language to get a citizenship? And I still have to pay the IRS in USD in the meanwhile since they're still taxing me until I revoke my US citizenship (which I can't until I get a korean one in 5 years).
Not to mention I left behind my family and friends, many of whom can't emigrate due to not qualifying for a work visa or other category.
My point here is that the free market does not apply to governments as you imply it might. Consumers can vote with their wallet for things like different brands of food and other commodity goods, but people can't change citizenships easily. People can't vote on their favorite country easily due to massive social effects and how limited immigration is.
There are far more people who live in a country where they think their government is worse than another one, and yet don't move, than there are people who do change countries for such a reason.
There's a business here that helps managing citizenship: https://nomadcapitalist.com/
I don't know what the future holds. We shall see :)
Inflation is good for the rich. I would much rather be rich and hold assets that go up with inflation, and invest on leverage because inflation makes it easy to pay back my loan. The rich hold most of their wealth in assets, the poor hardly have any assets that go up with inflation and are left behind with whatever cash they have which loses value continuously.
Taxation is a method that can theoretically target the rich more than the poor. Inflation steals from everybody equally in theory, but from the poor more than the rich in practice.
Gates has nothing to do with Bitcoin, his opinion here is worthless.
Or so I thought, the amount of people taking offense at Bill Gates saying the uncontroversial is impressive.
Now there's a lot of people attacking Bill Gates for lending his image to the arguments. It could be that there's a majority of Bitcoin believers here but they don't usually care for arguments and just do "he he miner goes brrr" until a celebrity billionaire appears.
Meanwhile, we've got many people(and many of whom I think are extremely hypocritical) piling on the BTC hate mob and using Bill Gates to feed into their viewpoint. Gates is a smart man, but I don't think it's reasonable to believe that his opinion on BTC is worth much more than someone whose net worth is a minuscule fraction of his.
Think of how carbon intensive the concrete, steel, manufacturing, power generation industry are. Not to mention the population boom beyond our earths carrying capacity needed to perpetuate our ever increasing monetary scheme requiring never ending growth where deflation can never exist.
Now, to the article. This is a write up response to a comment one of the world's richest men said on the app, Clubhouse. These are the articles worth discussing with this audience? Look at the final sentence of the article. Seriously? "This currency is not good for Green Planet." Yikes.
We're all on our own journey an in time all roads lead to Bitcoin. This is not a technology story, or an energy story, but a human story. The story of Bitcoin tells about people working with machines to accomplish something that seems impossible to most of us.
Bitcoin frees the slaves. Literally, not figuratively. If you have to sell your time, sweat, and blood to earn money, it is unacceptable to allow corruptible central planners to create that same money out of nothing. This is a power that no group of people should have over others, and certainly one that future generations will look back on find it laughable that a society would entrust people with control over the money supply after time and time again history has shown what happens.
Bitcoin is ending the monetary enslavement that central banks have been desperately clinging to. Issues around central banking, inflation, and money supply manipulation are not new in the story of human history. The current chapter is unfolding to see Bitcoin demonstrating an incorruptible money and it is growing up rapidly.
How much energy do you feel is appropriate to put toward abolishing central banking and freeing humanity? Personally, I feel blessed to have discovered Bitcoin while it still consumes less energy than small countries. What a time to be here!
They have been bashing Bitcoin for a long time, and they still don't get it. They downvote and fight whoever tries to bring some different perspectives to the discussion.
HN people are the types who believe they're "saving the planet", and they're fixated on the idea that Bitcoin is evil due to its energy consumption.
Let them learn the hard way. If they get any clue on what Bitcoin is, there's the risk they may get rich and attain some power in the future, which will only make matters worse.
I wish for you bashing Bitcoin to keep all your wealth allocated in assets associated with fiat currencies.
I also wish that you spend lots of time running political narratives in order to stop a decentralized piece of technology from growing.
Good luck trying to reach out the Bitcoin CEO in order to ask him to shut down his "environmentally damaging operations".
In 5 years time, however, once the US dollar has lost 50% of its purchase power, you'll be begging your employer to pay you in Bitcoin.
By that time you'll conveniently forget the narrative about energy consumption.
You'll even claim that Bitcoin is one of the most important technologies ever invented, and that you always believed in it.
In a bad case scenario, the block reward doesn't keep a large fraction of available hardware online.
You misunderstood (or possibly were confused with the ethash "ice age"). PoW difficulty follows daily dollar emission, which is proportional to the product of price and block reward. In Bitcoin there is a large lag (up to 2 weeks) though between changes in the latter, and changes in difficulty. Miners who can't turn a profit will stop mining Bitcoin, causing difficulty to drop. It will always be profitable for the most efficient miners.
The question is how much non-crypto "conventional" currencies cost the planet.
That being said, BTC probably isn't the "best" cryptocurrency. I'm not sure about the details because I don't know much about this space now, but other commenters have pointed out that it's more efficient for ledgers to record proof of stake rather than proof of work.
Gold became a valuable barter item because of it's convenience.
Store-of-value is the worst trait of gold, the incentive of sitting on a pot of gold is better than in investing it in a productive endeavour.
Gold simply cannot fuel the rapidly growing modern economies, neither can bitcoin.
If you you have savings, of course it's better for you to have it hold value. And if you hold debt, it's better for you for that to fall over time. But we are not discussing whether "everyone is in debt" is good/bad, we are talking whether money is good/bad for the money's purposes. Also, Bitcoin flows over wires and gold does not.
Speaking of debt, if "it's good for society" for a lot of people to be in debt (because how else would ppl prefer assets to depreciate so they are stimulated to get rid of them?) then how do you avoid fewer people being creditors? In my view, more ppl with savings and fewer ppl in debt is key to a democratic/decentralized society w/o dangerous concentration of power.
Why is this noteworthy? I don't really disagree with his assessment, but his words are being given undue importance here.
I'm not sure whether to think it's just lack of options, or whether this a programme by the rich to build & establish one of their own as someone to listen to. Nicely in the category of "owns a world-spanning super-empire" but generally pretty benign & non-aggressive for over a decade. Has taken some licks & no longer feels like a juggernaut.
Anyone who has used a NeXTstation with 32Mbytes of RAM and an 68040 CPU, which did not even have accelerated video, can certainly understand how bloated and wasteful of resources all the various Windows applications and operating systems have been over the years.
How many resources does Xbox use? It's not essential either...
There are better solutions.
As long as Bitcoin is there and works it will have a price that seems inflated to someone that can buy and sell anything form their chair on a first world country.
My student job in college was helping to maintain a large-ish high-throughput computing cluster (https://chtc.cs.wisc.edu/), and that 1000+ node server cluster...and even all of the servers around the world connected to the Open Science Grid (https://opensciencegrid.org/), pale in comparison to the compute power that is wasting time and energy computing bitcoin hashes.
What a shame.
Thank god computers and digital networks are so important that we recognize the importance to keep mining these limited resources to build and sell more computers and digital networks and places to store Office yearly subscription receipt pdfs.
That said, something like 40% of all bitcoin are in just like 1000 wallets.
If bitcoin were to suddenly fossilize into the world's currency the distribution of wealth would be even more inequitable and concentrated than now with national fiats.
Can you please point out which previous ponzi scheme / bubble / tulip mania has gone through so many cyclic wave pattern and held up it's value despite all the crashes?
"Bitcoin is going to crash" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg
Fiat currencies and their forced entrenchment has a giant carbon footprint with its wasteful banking system, militaries and layered machinery to ensure its value is never challenged. The FX market trades about $6 trillion DAILY, with an infrastructure that doesn't produce any real goods and services. It'd be fair to compare the energy cost of bitcoin with the legacy fiat system, but how do you even begin to measure the latter. We live in an artificially over financialized world, where a big chunk of knowledge workers is not engaged productively. Bitcoin may in fact become the great definancialization that would boil the system down to essentials [2].
Nic Carter does a great job addressing the energy concerns of bitcoin [3]. Consider specially the idea of the non-fungibility of energy and how BTC miners absorb energy that'd otherwise be curtailed. I know it will sound crazy and totally non-intuitive but there is an argument that bitcoin might end up being the biggest incentivizer of clean, cheap energy, and in the end be a net positive for the environment.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/the-e... [2]: https://unchained-capital.com/blog/bitcoin-is-the-great-defi... [3]: https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co...
I know I am being hyper-cynical but this is how I feel very often. When I read about human endeavor of settling at Mars, I do commend the engineering skill but I also see the irony that the same human race couldn't protect the most suitable and hospitable planet.
[0]https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/flow-graphs/total-energ...
Even so, let's say Bitcoin is extremely inefficient and should just be abandoned as a failure (I'm of the opposite view though obviously), what's happening with Ethereum is far more interesting. I've been in the space for a while and the kinds of innovation that's happening on one layer on top of another - ALL on a soon-to-be efficient Proof-of-stake system is absolutely amazing.
I'm actually very surprised I don't see enough discussion and threads on HN regarding the various things happening at such a fast pace (DeFi, Dexes, NFTs, Layer-2 and Sidechains, Eth2 Validation and sharding, other interesting Dapp use-cases).
Given all of these developments, it would be fair to say at least on Ethereum that such "energy inefficient" narrative is soon going to be obsolete. I would love to hear Bill Gates' thoughts on the tech then.
Bill is the one that persued Warren Buffet and tried to get him onboard with Tech companies. I'm surprised it's Bill Gates that now needs someone to get him on board with this massive new emerging field.
The fanboys ruined it. I think we all got sick of posts claiming blockchains will change everything. Blockchains and the things built on top of them are somewhat interesting, but unless there is something truly innovative in that space no one is going to want to repeat the same arguments we've been having here for like a decade.
The inability to move / be more versatile is the reason why Ethereum came to be in the first place. I guess Bitcoin's main USP is "You can be sure Bitcoin will be Bitcoin as you know it for a long time".
Also there's one section of the community that thinks Bitcoin mining will actually help move to greener tech faster since it incentivizes you do so.
> too soon
In today's terms, a decade of existing but somewhat mediocre results means it's time to move on. It's already proven useful; at the same time, already proven non-disruptive/revolutionary.
That is, if I agree that mining is wasteful and bad for the planet, who do I call about that?
As bitcoin has descended into a new culture war, I'll mention that I believe decentralized payment systems are a huge step in the right direction, but I'll also mention that I do not think this comment should be used as part of the bitcoin crusades. Take it on my word that my opinion is nuanced and that I don't own any cryptocurrencies.
This article is a culture war article itself that does not say anything appreciably new. My opinion is that once everyone knows what side of the culture war they are on, discussion about the topic becomes meaningless.
Since the complaint tends to be "A huge amount of energy is wasted for a single transaction", why don't we try to inflate the value of Bitcoin as much as possible, so one Bitcoin is worth $10 million or something like that, then we can fit more USD value in one transaction, and the energy impact is now lower of that transaction, I guess, when compared to the traditional financial system.
Might be a stupid idea, but eager to hear what you all think.
Actually, to see a good reason why some countries are struggling to meet their energy needs, you need only look here: https://hindenburgresearch.com/ormat/
I'm more concerned that Mr Gates has inadvertently (accidently on purpose?) constructed a straw man that draws attention away from the rather more egregious effects of corruption on energy supply.
Maybe as a storage of wealth it produces fewer emissions than mining gold but it's not the solution to the money problem.
Why it's still no 1 cryptocurrency? First mover advantage, a few die hard believers, many speculators and lots of FOMO.
Even I am reluctant to sell my 0.01 share of a bitcoin. What if...
When a much better solution comes people will sell it but for now the fiat-alternative market is too crowded with not much differentiation - to my best knowledge.
Everyone keeps saying it’s bad but surely this differs between coins/tokens?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
What's really bad for the planet is the rest of us have to put up with his bull.
Edit: Downvoted in less than 30 seconds. That must be my new record!
Poor people are much better for the environment than rich. Not even considering private-jet flying super rich.
I think BG has no business telling others what's good/bad for the planet.
:)
* https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/how-bad-are-billionair...
Does his impact offset the pollution caused by the GPUs running full throttle in every one of the millions of Xboxes?
Or is GPU use only a bad thing when it makes people easy money and it suddenly becomes fine when the same processor is used to render RDR2 so someone can pretend to be a cowboy.
I've always found that argument presumptuous.
How do you know that someone in this comment section isn't researching a revolutionary way to generate clean electricity? How do you know that the next Elon Musk isn't lurking around here? Maybe that person will have a bigger impact than Bill Gates? Maybe that person is financing their studies thanks to Bitcoin gains? How can you possibly know all of that and just say: Only person X has a pass to be wasteful because no one else here has a net positive impact on the environment.
for using bitcoin, I either need to mine or to buy. now lets say I choose to buy, here comes the problem.
Over the last 36 months , the lowest value of a bitcoin is $3k and highest $57k. If i had bought 1 bitcon at 57k i would have lost 7k by today, again, to buy bitcoin you need to use existing currency. Not everyone can mine and this is my first problem.
Next, how do I use this to buy anything? a $100 bill is worth $100 regardless of what, doesn't matter what I buy or where I keep or when I use, it will still be $100, can you say same about bitcoin?
this is all speculative and the exponential factor is scaring me out of bitcoin.
If anybody's interested, here is a fair analysis of Bitcoin's carbon foot print (2019), I found recently: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
TL;DR: While there is this "energy consumption of Argentina" number in circulation implying Bitcoin's carbon emissions equates that of a whole developed country, in reality this number is closer to that of Kansas City.
their OS filled with malicious stuff and who knows what kind of backdoors is when exploited by hackers, they blame it on China rather than taking responsibility of putting users at risk with vulnerable OS
and as Linus Torvalds simply put it decades ago: that these people are out there to make money and not make world a better place even if they pretend .
I think MS made computer adaptation over the world significantly faster, but I'm not sure about it.
>their OS filled with malicious stuff and who knows what kind of backdoors is when exploited by hackers
You're going to need some citations if you're going to claim windows server has intentional "malicious stuff and backdoors". That's a bold claim to make without evidence.
We spent the entirety of the late-90s/early 2000s complaining that MS didn't force updates on users, so these massive worms were infecting half the internet with exploits that were patched YEARS earlier.
It took moving a mountain to get MS to enforce patching of consumer systems, to sit here now and claim that's malware is both irresponsible and ridiculously short-sighted. Without mandatory patching, I can say without exaggeration that the entire internet would be less safe. Anyone spewing that nonsense is either too young to remember how horrible things were, or too stubborn to acknowledge it was the right thing to do whether they personally agree with it or not.
most infosec community knows the answer. if you know yours well, good. I am not convincing anyone, anything. I just meant, there is value is looking at things objectively than reading some news articles or opinions said by some bigwigs.
it's well known fact now, it was all the FUD by microsoft that this was not widely accepted previously. Do you think they have any incentive to be transparent about that? why does everyone have to pay forcefully for windows that comes with every laptop by default?
"Bitcoin is bad for the planet" - fact(?)
I don't see how this logic is useful.
And to really rub it in at some point the master key to all transactions will be released.
So sadly, in a proof-of-work scheme the secure steady state is only when miners are fiercely competing, and that means maxing out their hardware and electricity usage.
The whole point of BTC is that you cannot trust each actor. If we could coordinate a population of trusted ledger managers, there wouldn't be a use for a blockchain in the first place.
Green tech.
get a tor browser and discover monero being used in the wild.
Let's be honest. It is obvious that the majority of HN users are anti-Bitcoin for a few reasons:
1) They see early adopters profiting mightily and have a zero-sum, envious mindset.
2) Silicon Valley promotes centralization. People have invested their careers in organizations that promote the centralization of the internet and technology, and Bitcoin is a threat to that.
3) Silicon Valley, once teeming with innovation because of diversity of though, is now completely monolithic in thought. The powers-that-be (i.e. Bill Gates, among others) are anti-Bitcoin, as it threatens their centralized power, and so Bitcoin has become out of fashion in Silicon Valley.
4) Politics. Bitcoin is decentralized and empowers those that privately and independently own it and transact with it. This is generally a libertarian concept. Silicon Valley, being very politically on the left, realizes that the independence that Bitcoin brings goes against their ethos of governmental and bureaucratic control. You cannot "cancel" or prevent someone you don't like from using the Bitcoin network - even if you disagree with them.
HN used to be great, in my opinion, and I hope things improve. My comments are sincere.
Now, prepare for my comment to get censored by a flood of downvotes in 1, 2, 3...
Money is just a medium, it's an accounting tool. Civilization doesn't work without regulation or when things are too volatile. Society requires stability.
The answer to the banking crisis is not more liberalism and anarchic technologies (that allows hackers to launder money), it's regulating the banks.
Edit: I should clarify. I am saying that the status of the USD as a reserve currency has led to lots of US military action.
Notice how displacing some military force usage by changing the motivation or capability for intervention (for example to maintain a currency advantage) might be in itself a Good Thing (tm) and how it does not require replacing armed forces entirely.
That was literally a quote from the post being responded to.
Bitcoin doesn't solve, for example, hate crimes or something like this.
I am also doubtful of PoS but perhaps there's a way to make a greener coin using some amount of trust and regulation?
Many projects and tokens use it by now.
Conversely, if all money suddenly become Bitcoin, military force and police would still be needed, in mostly the same amount they are today.
My post was referring to how the US has killed lots of people to keep strong dollar. I think its feasible that a true global currency (possibly bitcoin) could prevent violence like this.
If Bitcoin would become a risk to that status, would the US government just give up and admit defeat or would it outlaw usage of it?
Or it could become highly regulated and be much less useful for trade due to onerous compliance requirements. For example, how do you prove that wallet X that one is sending money to isn't going to someone who's in an embargoed country?
I think that's a gross possibility, and I hope no governments take this measure, but I don't think it would be difficult.
From that perspective, it seems to follow that most governments would want to regulate cryptocurrencies, and probably not in the way that Bitcoin bulls would like it to be.
I could definitely be wrong on this though. I thought in the past that the ad model of Facebook and Google would go nowhere, and look where they're at now.
Are there any other benefits? If not, wouldn't adopting bitcoin be an easy solution to monetary policy while avoiding this issue? Or am I missing something?
One example of having monetary policy out of a country's control is the EU, which has both strong economies (eg. Germany) and weaker ones (eg. Greece). A strong Euro works well for Germany, since they get more effective purchasing power out of their trade surplus. For Greece, a strong Euro means that their exports are probably not competitive price wise.
If these countries had their own currency, the Deutsche Mark would be a strong currency (making their exports relatively more expensive) and the Greek Drachma a weaker currency (making their exports relatively less expensive), giving them a push towards a more even trade balance. As citizens tend to transact in local currency, this also encourages Greek citizens to seek more local goods (eg. Greek tomatoes grown on Greek soil with Greek labor) as foreign goods are more expensive, hence further stimulating their economy.
The promise of violence is free until realized though.
Did everyone forget that the best goal we can achieve with power usage is by reducing consumption outright? Just because some of the mining is done on greener solutions doesn't mean it's a net positive.
Global warming isn't exactly going away if we keep this experiment up.
What's the utility of that?
Bitcoin does none of that. At its very very best it's a way to buy hallucinogens on the internet with massive external consequences.
At best its an alternative finance system that works around the captured, corrupted, and rent seeking finance systems of the world.
The reality is there is no consumer demand for crypto as a means to purchase things.
I feel sorry for anyone that expects bitcoin to actually be anonymous. Given that we can use statistics and timing to determine the memory contents and instructions run on different cores in a CPU, anyone that uses a currency that keeps public global transaction log and thinks they can anonymize themselves by just mixing their money in a pool is in for a rude awakening at some point. For any useful amount of usage, my guess is they're just kicking the de-anonymization can down the road a few years.
(Also, the slightest movement in those coins would likely cause a massive drop in the value of bitcoin, as rational people realized a huge cache of previously assumed out of play coins might start being sold and everyone using it as an investment rushed to exit ASAP to avoid beat that).
Edit: As suspected, it's not a silver bullet.[1]
1: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoins-taproot-upgrade-wont...
The industry is growing like crazy as well.
Bitcoin was 122 twh/year I believe.
Both gaming and bitcoin kill the planet and are not necessary until global warming under control.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285396475_Taming_th...
If game consoles/PCs get more efficient, they use less power for the entertainment value delivered to the world. Or, if renewable tech makes energy cheaper, the fixed amount of energy gaming uses becomes less of a big deal.
If ASIC miners get more efficient, difficulty and hashrate goes up, and they use the same amount of power for the same amount of security delivered to the blockchain. Or, if renewable tech makes energy cheaper, miners will use more of it.
The "W" in PoW means work but it could equally mean "waste". The whole reason it's secure is that you look at the total hashrate of the network and go "wow, that is so expensive, nobody would ever burn so much energy just to double-spend some bitcoin". No matter how good hardware gets or how freely available energy gets, it must always be incredibly costly to operate the network, because that's the premise its security is built on.
As opposed to elephants or sea urchins? How can humans not be the cause humanity's biggest problems?
The Buddha taught there are three kinds of dukkha [usually translated as “suffering”]. The first kind is physical and mental pain from the inevitable stresses of life like old age, sickness, and death. The second is the distress we feel as a result of impermanence and change, such as the pain of failing to get what we want and of losing what we hold dear. The third kind of dukkha is a kind of existential suffering, the angst of being human, of living a conditioned existence and being subject to rebirth.
https://tricycle.org/beginners/buddhism/what-did-the-buddha-...
Because I would like to believe that this capability will only ever be used to protect the Earth from them, but our history says otherwise. Anything that can be used as a weapon will ... well, at least enter the arsenals, and only fear of devastating retaliation will stop people from actually using it. Or has, so far.
Preagricultural peoples exerted reproductive control so they were not vulnerable kind of population crunches that affect other species.
Diverse food webs were also more reliable and nutritious than what was available to the early agriculturalists, as you say.
It certainly seems plausible to me, but I'd be fascinated to review the data and how it correlates to time and geography.
I know a couple books[1] that suggest life prior to the agricultural revolution wasn't nearly as famine-stricken as we tend to think it was. These books claim hunter gatherers were quite proficient at finding enough sustenance.
Obviously starvation was still possible and likely, but was it the primary cause of death? Is there some more evidence that humans were suffering from starvation before agriculture? Wouldn't populations thin out and stabilize accordingly if starvation was such a problem?
[1] - _Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind_ and _Sex at Dawn_
How happy are we who have never experienced that! How would our ancestors envy us!
Would our ancestors envy us or be happy for the fruit of their effort? There are setbacks and frustrations about the slow state of progress sometimes for certain. Maybe they would also be sad for the material orientation of many people and the loss of spirituality that gave them much hope and fortitude.
I for one think, this is a subjective question.
> "The bones of 'domiciled' Homo sapiens compared with those of hunter-gatherers are also distinctive: they are smaller; the bones and teeth often bear the signature of nutritional distress, in particular, an iron-deficiency anemia marked above all in women of reproductive age whose diets consist increasingly of grains"
from Against the Grain
see also: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/
The linked article addresses famine more specifically.
Think in simpler terms, like a technology used at work, or a tool used at home; I've been in enough changes in the former that tell me many people believe a new thing will be better than the old thing, even after going through that same process several times.
The introspection needed to understand that people will break the process if they want or need to is hard to come by.
That's a pretty good indicator of a civilization's state. For an advanced one, the answer to your question would be "it's nowhere near the top worries". All human-made horrors (war, climate change, etc.) would be left far behind.
If we were as smart as we think we are, our biggest problems would be rogue asteroids, solar storms and aggressive aliens, not human geopolitical bullshit, poisoning our water, or destroying our own ecosystem.
It's only after we barricaded ourselves in towers protected by walls that we started to find predatory animals cute (and even made children's toys in their image)
I don't think that's entirely accurate. Dogs were domesticated well over 10k years ago, possibly close to 30k years ago. I see no reason to think that people didn't find puppies cute then as well since the reasons why we think of baby animals cute seems to be related to the same pattern recognition that causes us to recognize those attributes in human infants and think they are cute. The version of animals we find "cute" are all represented with infantile portions. There is something to be said for removal of danger as a prerequisite though (I doubt most people would have been receptive to the teddy bear in the 1920's if problems with bears were still frequent).
Or maybe the aliens are all holding hands in a circle singing kumbayah?
The disruptions to equilibrium that we witness are almost always man-made. But there have been others, caused by new species, ice ages, asteriods, the Great Oxygenation Event, etc.
Alien civilization might be at equilibrium. Or, if we meet them, they may more likely be in an expansionist phase.
But I think a civilization that harnesses its conflicts - as we try to, with competing businesses, scientists, olitical parties, sporting teams - will have greater long-term success than a destructive, exploutative culture, by definition. It's not that competition is "good", but they we have aggressive aspects seeking dominance, and we are better off shaping them than having tribal warfare, raiding parties, etc which is more our natural state. And something like it is part of the nature of life itself.
Maybe we made it in a lab, or even if we didn’t, maybe we should have been much smarter about preventing or containing it.
It’s not like an alien virus we never predicted and can’t understand. Experts had been warning about this exact thing for years.
That doesn't mean humans were responsible for the pandemic, though. That means humanity might bear responsibility for not as effectively containing the pandemic.
If an asteroid strikes the earth, and causes a mass casualty event that doesn't mean humans caused the asteroid strike (even if we maybe should have invested more in preventing the asteroid strike).
I think it's reasonable to expect more effective human preventative measures, without confusing the disaster for ones caused by human activity.
These “problems” are opportunities to serve.
Except humans. More humans die each year due to other humans, or due to things other humans have created (for example humans ignoring mask mandates).
Point is, we are the only specie who has become its own worst enemy.
Idk, what am I saying? I think we can improve eachother's lives quite a bit if we just kick out the assholes from power.
Ganging up to kill seems to be mostly a primate thing.
Male lions will kill cubs fathered by another male without remorse. It is not the same as our primate instincts of war, but remarkably close to ethnic cleansing.
What other species creates scalable, global solutions to large scale problems? Example (not real, but realistic) - a group of scientists in India create a vaccine that a company in Germany manufactures, so that people in the US can avoid a deadly virus.
Only one I can potentially think of is Fungi, as they appear to have large scale symbiotic relationships, but nothing is comparable to humans.
Dinosaurs' biggest problems was asteroids. There are plenty of externalities outside of human control, or that humans are only marginally responsible for (asteroids, gamma ray bursts, volcanic eruptions, famine due to crop diseases, pandemics, etc).
Also Bill Gate's opinion is based on Bitcoin offering almost no utilitarian value but consumes a ton of energy, nothing to do with monetary policies.
Bitcoin has negligent utilitarian value. It does nothing besides reward people who can consume energy the fastest.
BTC might have no short term utilitarian value, but in the long term the utilitarian value is to create a globalized monetary policy.
1. BTC is speculative because it may not actually achieve the goal of a single globalized monetary policy. Some other crypto might become the defacto denationalized currency instead, or maybe nothing changes.
2. A single globalized monetary policy may not be useful. However, no one really knows. People investing in any crypto seem to believe that a denationalized monetary policy will be better functioning.
Speculation alone doesn't imply no long-term utilitarian value exists.
Could we do this without burning more energy than entire countries?
> If and when we have a globalized monetary policy, how do we run it without burning more energy than entire countries?
1. You could get all entities governing the market / governing the globalized monetary policy to perfectly trust each other. Seems impossible given the Prisoner's Dilemma is exponentially more difficult to solve as the number of actors grows.
2. It is outside my domain of expertise to know how we can make a trust-less ledger efficient to run. The engineers behind ETH and Nano seem to believe it is possible.
However, given 1. is an impossible problem, and every unique entity that governs the globalized monetary policy will be competing with each other for control. They will all compete in an arms race to control as many crypto nodes as possible (i.e. a war of energy production).
It seems like the amount of energy needed will always be larger than most countries use because otherwise any one country can spin up a 51% attack very easily.
This doesn't mean crypto energy consumption will spiral to infinite as the world's super powers compete. Because, the world's super powers already have to worry about "mutually assured destruction" and as such can "trust" each other not to trigger a 51% attack because that would be treated as a global signal to launch nukes[0].
And like nuclear de-armament, there will likely be a push for the super powers to consume less energy while protecting against a 51% attack. There will be some interesting equilibrium. My guess is the equilibrium will probably be around the energy consumption of the p99 country sorted by energy consumption.
[0] I've never thought about this before, but a 51% attack could be an automated signal to launch nukes. I hope no country removes the humans from the launch process.
Based on my (arguably poor) ability to predict the future the answer seems to be a "No, crypto energy consumption will always be more than most countries".
Other people like the ETH and Nano developers seem to believe the answer is "Yes it is possible to be more efficient with crypto mining". However, I don't know their stance on "Will the energy consumption still be more than most countries?"
Nobody accepts it as payment, because its value is too volatile, speculation-driven, and nobody wants to spend it, because it is deflationary.
And that's not even considering the fact that it can only be transferred at around 6 transactions per second, less than 1/10,000th of the transaction volume of Visa.
Doesn't inflation favor people having debt? Esp. since salaries follow inflation.
Fractional reserve lending are an almost perfect exploitation of humanities fatal flaws (greed, unwillingness to acknowledge externalities - i.e. selfishness).
Also, bitcoin is fiat.
Contrary to the dollar-sign-eyed bitcoin hacks, the purpose of money is to be exchanged for goods and services, not to sit in an account forever while you watch numbers go up.
Is land a bad thing to buy because they are not making more of it?
I'm sure you know you can exchange those numbers for other numbers that show up in your bank if you're inclined..
The purpose of money is not so that you can "hodl".
I swear, this speculation bubble has melted y'alls brains.
As a person who wants to buy a house but doesn't have the full purchase price in liquid dollars, the thing you want is for the government to give lenders access to low-cost money so they can then lend it to you at low rates so you can afford the principal+interest on your loan.
As a person with savings to invest, you want to know that the bonds you're buying will be paid back with some interest to balance the risk of higher-yield stocks/bonds.
If you see educational costs, at one point in the 70s I think, the govt decided to offer loans so that students wouldn't need to do a job on the side to fund their education. Now it's ballooned to become such a mess..
The home ownership rate in the United States is 65.8%. San Francisco. Is. Not. Normal.
Some more questions... So let's say BTC is greed - the many financial instruments out there, derivatives, credit default swaps, funds of funds, the crazy options stuff going on ... and you drew the line at BTC?
"It's that old SF-trope that the cause of many of humanity's biggest problems is humans."
Fitting for a city known today for its vast outdoor tent cities of homelessness.
I don't have exact data, but my gut feeling tells me that 99.99% of the people buying cryptocurrencies today are driven by greed instead of innovation.
> and you drew the line at BTC?
Not really, if you look at the perspective that we already have enough instruments for financial manipulation and greed, why introduce another one that consumes so much energy?
>Fitting for a city known today for its vast outdoor tent cities of homelessness.
I mean...you know that's a completely man-made problem right?
Greed or fear. More fear than greed at this point.
Bitcoin is far too volatile to be a widespread, standard currency which seems to be the "reason" people say it's worth as much as it is. But it will never be a widespread currency until it has stability. So it's a chicken/egg situation, one of the two has to come first for the other, and both ideas rely on each other.
Most people that hold bitcoin today are doing so because they think it will increase in value, NOT because they care about the stability or viability of currency. That's pretty selfish insofar there are plenty of developing nations that would benefit greatly from a stable currency. Bitcoin might still be more stable than some countries, but that doesn't negate the issues.
So, because many people look at bitcoin as a wealth generator that produces tons of heat and waste, and it starts to look like a perfect marriage of shitty human behaviors.
Banks and hedge funds put money into cigarette companies and arms manufacturers and all manner of scam companies.
Their decisions are based on estimated risks and rewards over different time periods.
Taking a position in Bitcoin doesn’t imply anything about it’s nature or long term prospects.
Only that there is a perceived path to potential gains over a time period known to the investor, and not to us.
Banks and hedge funds don't inherently care about currencies. They care about the currency that governs their lives but beyond that everything is an investment. Banks don't provide mortgages because homes provide a stable economy or a stable currency. They do so because they will make money back on what they lend through interest. The fact that you store your dollars there is just one way for them to collect tons of assets for lending (among other things). This doesn't means banks care much about the volatility or exchange rate of the currency itself.
Hedge funds would only care about currencies insofar that it's an investment vehicle and investing in currencies can be a good investment. Bonds or other currency investments can increase over time without the volatility of BTC. A hedge fund is literally just an investment group, so it's pretty obvious they don't NEED to care about BTC stability or any stability at all.
Now, the question could be why would banks and hedge funds be willing to invest into such a volatile currency when they are usually risk adverse (banks more than hedge funds). And that would be a good question, except BTC has kept going up and now crypto as a whole is just another ETF market. So there are plenty of safe ways to hedge your bets on BTC or crypto generically without actually believing in the underlying philosophical justifications.
EDIT: Also, I don't think that it's impossible to have a crypto currency that is viable and stable. I think Ethereum has a fairly logical approach to their core issues that could solve the issues down the road. We'll see. I do think it'll be hard for BTC to become a viable currency because of how pumped up it is, and people treat it like an infinite money machine. Until the systemic issues of the BTC ethos are solved, I don't see a promising future for BTC as a widespread currency. But, it might have value in setting up the infra that the future crypto that IS viable will use.
It's not tulips and 100% useless. A digital currency is interesting to explore. It's interesting enough that institutions are stuffing their cash into it because they are fearing inflation, and the old school explanations of why we won't get inflation are now being questioned.
Don't ask me to forcefully argue for or against, there are many other people on this thread to argue both positions. But you can't say it has NO utility.
I've never done it, but when I lived abroad and I had to transfer money, I got fleeced by banks and then (a few years ago) there weren't really any alternatives. I don't have any skin in the game with Bitcoin, but I guess that left a foul taste in my mouth.
There've been other comments about Bitcoin that are a bit more nuanced and interesting, in one case there was a gentleman from Argentina making an impassioned case for the use over and against the polices of his government.
I think there's an element of institutional mistrust that Bitcoin claims - maybe wrongly, given how centralized it is - to solve.
That seems like you are putting words into the GP’s mouth.
Nobody is saying these other instruments aren’t also ‘greed’, just that Bitcoin is no better.
That’s relevant because one part of the Bitcoin narrative is that it is actually better in some way, and not just another speculative instrument.
"Greed" is neither good nor bad, but instead it is a pathological optimization. Optimizing for profit, by definition, is an "unwillingness to acknowledge externalities", as stated by the GP. Optimizing for profit resulted in many bad situations for Americans (see the Love Canal and the Cuyahoga River) and it was the reason the United States created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), so that negative externalities could be converted into dollars.
To bring into the discussion "Teslas" and "rockets that land" changes the argument from the demonstrable "bitcoin is bad for the planet" to a morally relative argument of "yeah, but it got us rockets and Teslas", which does nothing other than prove GPs point: to say that that Teslas and landing rockets are worth the price of Bitcoin is to ignore or disregard the externalities!
And it's hard to imagine that the GP "drew the line" at Bitcoin; to take that as the position is making a straw-man argument. Instead, an interpretation that would lead to valuable discussion should be adopted, like the position that Bitcoin both demonstrates the flaws of greed and that it does so in a way that is simple to understand and demonstrate, especially when it comes to externalities. Financial instruments are complex and opaque on purpose, designed to confuse and obfuscate greed. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has a much simpler equation: money versus power consumed versus pollutants produced.
Finally, a suggestion to all: avoid acronyms, or at least spell them out on first use. It's highly likely that "SF" meant "Science Fiction" and not "San Fransisco". Knowing the correct definition of an acronym can help avoid embarrassing situations.
Don't tell people what their motivations are. The original comment talked about greed, my comment questions our definitions of greed.
Edit: Can't you just reply and make a point about externalities instead of being essentially passive-aggressive?
> Finally, a suggestion to all: avoid acronyms, or at least spell them out on first use. It's highly likely that "SF" meant "Science Fiction" and not "San Fransisco". Knowing the correct definition of an acronym can help avoid embarrassing situations.
Wowzers. How about you design the guidelines for conversations, and we can defer to you if there's ever any ambiguity.
As recently as 2012 I was going around the office, before leaving, turning off the monitors left on because Windows did not default to doing that itself. On CRTs it was even worse.
But it is not a competition. Bitcoin and Windows together are clearly much worse than either alone.
Presuming Satoshi did this out pure altruism, I wouldn't say perfect. However, if Satoshi still has 10% of the Bitcoin supply, then I couldn't agree more. Given the fact that most of us don't know, we're simply projecting whatever believe we have on that particular matter, which definitely votes for "an almost perfect exploitation of humanities fatal flaws"
But that's how I look at it :)
The beauty of Bitcoin is that no human can increase supply to address short-term interests, like central banks can. The energy is not wasted. To the contrary, it is used to ensure that the supply is distributed in the prescribed manner and that it is capped. There is no other way of creating a decentralized system that has this feature.
In what future world are we not trying to create more Bitcoin?
10x price increase equals 10x mining expenditure, mostly on energy.
And he's right. Bitcoin is terrible for the planet and our future.
if sending someone a dollar through venmo costs $0.0000001 worth of electricity and sending someone a dollar through the bitcoin network costs $1 doesn't that communicate everything you need to know?
Only if the transactions do not have any fee. If they have a transaction fee, this indirectly increases the difficulty of mining future blocks (since the miners get more Bitcoin per block, they can use more energy per block before their expected net return is negative, and they are incentivized to do so through competition with other miners; the Bitcoin difficulty adjustment then notices the increase in hash rate and increases the difficulty).
Think of all that electricity wasted because people could not get their work done, they had to stay longer in the office wasting water, electricity, getting frustrated, etc.
And that's all because Bill's mom was working in IBM management.
it's like when USD was backed by the price of gold. Now BTC is backed by the price of USD. Ironic?
"In short, human traffickers do use bitcoin as their primary asset."
I'm saying Gates is absolutely entrenched in the current economic system. He's won it. Why would he want any change?
The idea here seems to be that Gates cannot be trusted on BTC because BTC would somehow harm him and he has a large interest in the failure of BTC. But this seems to make no sense to me.
BTC won't change the structure of wealth, even if it is wildly successful.
Mining is all about greed.
The energy consumption of BTC is 'very bad' , full stop.
It has nothing to do with Gates or the fact that he said it.
Plus, there is obviously an argument to be made that he has had a negative overall influence on the world & therefore shouldn't be trusted.
That is not only not obvious, but - even with his philanthropy efforts alone, the opposite would be obvious.
It's just that Bill Gates is legendary for the amounts he reads and his recall ability, and his contributions to many topics outside of just managing MS (state of the art algorithms, erradictinc malaria, nuclear energy etc). I thought everyone knew this, but apparently not. So you can see how funny it is when a random guy on HN says "just because he's a billionaire" :D
First you said "Just because Bill Gates is a billionaire, doesn't mean he knows what he's talking about"
Now that you've learned that most likely he DOES know what he's talking about, you changed your argument to "Other people think other things, so it's uninteresting" (What? WE're not talking about random people here.)
Lets just say it: you already arrived at the conclusion you want, now you're grasping for arguments to support it.
in all seriousness - i'm actually very bullish on crypto - but I don't see any reason bitcoin will be the winner for all of entirety. to me I think all major countries will eventually invent their own digital currencies and a new coin will arrive which is simply a fixed price tied to the prices of all digital currencies.
https://www.banking.senate.gov/hearings/the-digitization-of-...
* Then it hit $10. "That's not worth my time".
* Then it hit $100. "Just games for internet people."
* Then it hit $1000. "Silly worthless digital tulips."
* Then it hit $10000. "Its obviously a bubble".
* Then it hit $50000. 'Its using too much energy! This is unethical".
It will hit 100k, 500k, 1M. You will run out of excuses eventually.
Why do we continue to bend the mindshare knee to the guy behind the Windows Registry?
If you want something gold-backed, just buy gold.
China is developing digital yuan so i am not sure what will happen to bitcoin that you own if the country deems it illegal.
You could argue Gold is still a good alternative, but owning, transferring gold is problematic unless you actually store it yourself. Any "title" to gold somewhere else can inevitably be seized by a government (or your house raided). Encryption keys are much harder to seize if taken care of properly.
Venezuela, please. Bitcoin is never going to replace the ability of a sovereign state from issuing its own obligations. And as always it is the credibility of that sovereign state that will determine the value of those obligations.
And yes, I'm well aware of many such meaningless """cryptocurrencies""".
Also, I suspect Bitcoin at some point will migrate to Proof of Stake once aspects of that set of algorithms are addressed:
* Problems with bonding and checkpoints
* Problems with being fuzzily forgiving about slashing
* More rigor needed by doing rigorous proofs somewhere, in some way
* Some systems introduce a central party that rubberstamps the latest block (e.g. Peercoin)
* Existence of such a coordinating party costs the system its censorship resistance
* Since stakers have to hold funds in the system to author blocks, it's difficulty to have a fair launch of a PoS system. Many PoS systems get either started as airdrops, ICOs, or a proof of burn auction
* Staking requires some representation of the private key to be online at all times, which may mean that it is easier to redirect some of the staking power (in early PoS systems it had to be the actual private key, so not only staking power but actual funds could get stolen)
* Some systems require coins to have a certain amount of confirmations before being allowed to be used for staking, so spending funds interrupts your staking revenue
* Some people expect that staking revenue will be taxed differently than mining revenue
* Some PoS systems can be gamed for profit by trying a vast number of block candidates to cause the staker to get blocks more often than their stake should qualify them for. Such an incentive may turn such PoS systems just into PoW schemes under the hood
* Some researchers argue that "by depending only on resources within the system, proof of stake cannot be used to form a distributed consensus, since it depends on the very history it is trying to form to enforce loss of value".
These are not problems I came up with, they are from various sources, such as Bram Cohen.
For full disclosure: I have Bitcoin, Cardano, and Ethereum, in that order of holdings.
I hope someone will help me out by pointing out why my comment was low quality, so I know what not to do next time.
You probably got it from conspiration theories, the same people that believe that Gates put a microchip inside Covid vaccines.
Stop giving so much credence to every utterance that comes out of this guys mouth.
The article doesn't compare electricity usage of other transaction methods and their relative qualities on balance to energy consumption. This makes it difficult to evaluate Gate's claim. Maybe he said more in Clubhouse but as it stands its an assertion without evidence.
For example, my assumption is that paper checks would have relatively high overall energy consumption and that society has thought the costs worth it.
In the larger picture, the article and Gates apparently see electrical utilization as waste, which seems short-sighted. For example, computations performed with geothermal energy available in Iceland can support people around the world. Or similar to a co-generation plant bitcoin mining could be performed to soak up base load that must be used during off hours.
[1] https://bitflate.org/post/2021/02/05/the-bitcoin-price-parad...
And before you, commenter to this post, say anything, no, your Eth/Doge/Xrp/Monero/Tether/scam-ipo-of-the-day is not more valuable. NFTs are worthless. No, being distributed does not make your favorite token useful. No, mining contributing to the chain's security is not useful, because there is nothing useful on said blockchain. No, you're not more free with your coin when nobody wants it. No, you're not free of central banks when you all decide to dump it all in Coinbase and Kraken anyways.
Just ban these worthless wastes of energy and time.
You want to kill bitcoin provide a real alternative else it is most definitely not "worthless" as you say?
You mean like M-Pesa[1] but much slower, much more expensive, much more wasteful and much more hyped?
If people want to gamble with their money and get something out of it, that is their right.
I just wish people with money had a little shame and didn't spread this fairytale of these crypto currencies being anything other than a lottery ticket. The question 'how much is enough' from the movie Wall Street often comes to mind every time I see some rich scumbag like Chamath promoting bitcoin on TV. Haven't you got enough fucking money? Apparently not and so it goes.
And if people want to ruin the air for everyone else by wasting energy on some libertarian wet dream, that's their right, too.
No, I won't share my use case with you. You have to find it for yourself. There is plenty written about it if you have an open mind.
I agree. Bitcoin is basically a religion. It relies on your faith and the faith of others.
We will spend as much energy as is needed to secure the bitcoin monetary supply - the economic prosperity of the planet is at risk!
For all those folks out there begging for PoS bitcoin, it will never happen. Your misinformed opinions of environment/energy and your demand that I choose to spend energy in a way you approve of is oppression by the ignorant. PoS coins are worthless rubbish. There is only bitcoin.
That is quite a huge claim. You need to give some arguments for this.
I trust physics over human behavior any day. Human psychology is the weak link in any system.
In the next year, we will see a further consolidation of funds towards traditional finance (they have the capital to acquire the floating btc). We do not want tradfi in charge of coin emission. Proof of Stake is reinventing existing power structures. Bitcoin as PoW prevents this hostile takeover by legacy forces. If tradfi and governments want a say in how coins are transacted/emitted, they better get mining!
What I doubt is the security model of having large ether stakers in control of emission/tx inclusion.
If large stakeholders, like the largest banks in the world, have a say in how this works, the value of a decentralized, antifragile peer to peer money fails.
I think it's clear that the electrical use of proof of work will become a serious issue if Bitcoin (or similar blockchain) becomes widely adopted. Do you have a suggestion on how to address that issue, or do you believe it's a non-issue entirely?
One can make an argument about transmission efficiency, and generation materials (and how renewable sources are more efficient), thus profitable for both the planet and the miner. But the actual use of energy? Get out of here. Tired arguments that I thought died years ago.
Bitcoin will get destroyed eventually by the free markets because of how inferior it is to many alternatives. One being its usage of energy.
Lets see who is correct in 10 years?