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Comment by viklove | Hacker News Reader

I say we should ban data centers instead. They're clearly a scam and no one should be allowed to use them because they waste so much power!

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A lot of datacenters provide substantial utility to others. Like the customers of the services that are hosted in those datacenters.

BTC mining makes the miners more wealthy. In service of the BTC network, which has what utility?

There are quite a number of criminal or at least grey market uses for BTC.

But what are the legitimate uses that are not as well or better served by the traditional payment networks?

Operating data centers makes the data center owners more wealthy. All in service of the data center network, which has what utility?

There are quite a number of criminal and grey market uses for data centers.

What are the legitimate uses of data centers that are not served by traditional pen & paper?

Bitcoin's true use case hasn't showed itself yet because it is uniquely suited to help us in case of a select few low probability and extreme scenarios, aka black swan events which we can't predict, but will probably happen.

If those events happen, do you think the infra (electricity generation and telecom interconnection) that it relies upon will still be around?

Yes. I'm talking about financial collapse, not destruction of infra.

Without details, the impact of a financial collapse is unknown. Given how BTC moves in connection with the broader market now, one would expect that the value would crash with the system, especially since BTC has no intrinsic value.

Society know financial collapse. They occur quite regularly every 5-7 years. The outcomes are roughly identical.

I'm pro-blockchain (but not POW) ... and not really as they currently exist. I see a future with UBI, and better taxation of wealthy baked INTO the crypto so that equality is a bit more fair, and everything functions more "automated" so less bureacracy.

However, I've been wondering lately what happens in a future where the grid is destroyed by a sun storm? Say the power grids get knocked off for 21 months (I read this is a very possible scenario with a big sun flare), as well as a lot of satellites.

If we move a lot of the world's monetary systems/value to blockchain, how do we use blockchain with no internet or electricity?

It's less a question of if Bitcoin has utility and more about the proportionality of its utility to resource usage. The problem is that there's always incentives to increase the amount of processing power being thrown at Bitcoin but the utility of Bitcoin is independent of that. You can change the amount of processing power in the network without affecting the rate of transaction processing, rate of minting, or the perceived value of Bitcoin.

> In service of the BTC network, which has what utility?

The safest safe haven asset. A global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms.

> There are quite a number of criminal or at least grey market uses for BTC.

Criminals the world over prefer cash. Should we ban cash?

> But what are the legitimate uses that are not as well or better served by the traditional payment networks?

A programmable, internet-native inflation-proof store of value with transparent fully-auditable supply metrics. Or to quote Elon Musk, “simply a less dumb form of liquidity than cash”.

And Xbox and other gaming consoles.

And Argentina.

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