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Comment by DethNinja | Hacker News Reader

What about ecological impact of fiat currency/current state capitalism? Why not compare that with ecological impact of bitcoin?

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Bitcoin is an invalid comparison and has a laundry list of cons without very many (if any) pros. Comparing dollars to bitcoins is useless. I don’t have a single bill I can pay in bitcoin and if there was, the fees would be worse than current options. I don’t want to have my salary in bitcoin as its “value” is in a quantum state. Regardless of how loud proponents keep using the same 3 arguments, bitcoin usage will never be the norm.

If you can't think of a single pro of Bitcoin, you may not understand it very well; that's ok , it's complex and new paradigms can take a while to propagate.

To be clear, I want people to stop using Bitcoin. There are better cryptocurrencies which don't rely on energy burning to secure their networks, which have negligible fees, and which have near-instant confirmation times.

What part isn't understood? What is this "complexity" that makes it all worthwhile? I have gone through the white paper and built a PoC including web-app and mobile wallets. I have masters in Math and CS and 10 years of experience in financial services. This thread isn't discussing other "better cryptocurrencies."

IMO it's not the complexity, or the "how it works" that people miss. It's the larger game theory and societal forces that push the price up.

I think it's pretty naive to think that the $1T market cap is accidental, or driven by dumb money.

I guess the "pro"s I'm referring to are how bitcoin is revolutionary. It's still 1st-gen , so it's "old" tech . Sure it's been largely superceded by modern designs, but you were comparing it to the central banking system and dollars.

I'd love to talk about the ecological impact of capitalism but criticizing capitalism goes poorly around here.

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