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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Let's be real, the anti-cryptocurrency arguments are something like this: It eats to much energy so we should ban it (just like gaming! Oh wait...)

Meanwhile we suffer from a hugely incompetent global payment network that is horrible to deal with and makes some creators actually opt out of receiving donations because of the sheer annoyance and complexity of the system.

Yeah, we all want it to use less energy and perhaps we'll get there. But not by banning blockchain tech.

The fact that Venmo is free, is the problem, how can you deliver value for free... Because it's not free, the value is extracted elsewhere. I thought we were past this.

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> Meanwhile we suffer from a hugely incompetent global payment network

Incompetence is a cop-out argument because you could argue any organization or community suffers from it given a sufficient amount of time in existence. Plus, it's not like crypto companies have a perfect record either. Look at mt gox, or more currently, the accusations against Tether. If it comes out that they've been lying about their capitalization, which many have argued that they are, it could cause major problems for the crypto industry.

True decentralization has not been achieved by the crypto industry, it's merely shifting the rent-seeking from one set of parties to another.

> Meanwhile we suffer from a hugely incompetent global payment network that is horrible to deal with and makes some creators actually opt out of receiving donations because of the sheer annoyance and complexity of the system.

Chesterton's fence. Have you ever wondered why the financial systems is the way it is?

All that regulation is because of fraud. People REALLY, REALLY want to steal money and they will get INCREDIBLY creative to do it.

So someone stole a coin one way, we added a rule to stop it. They stole a coin another way, we added another rule. Another coin, another rule. Repeat a million times.

What do you expect will happen with a shiny, pristine, tech system once it faces the real world??? It's going to suffer the same fate.

We need iterative improvements to existing systems, not burn-the-world-pseudo-solutions.

> global payment network that is horrible to deal with

With proper regulation, banks can have maximum terms on holding money mid-transfer, limits (or even abolition!) of transfer and withdrawal fees, etc.

It is possible to designate a product as an essential service or utility. It's just that the US government has chosen to not apply that kind of regulation to a lot of essential products like banking and telecoms, much like it hasn't chosen to enforce anti-trust laws, remove tax avoidance provisions, deal with corporate capture or reform the healthcare, education and electoral systems.

In essence, it's a people problem all the way down. Technology is incapable of solving those, which is why blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.

You're strawmanning heavily. The energy argument is a big one, but it's not THE argument against crypto.

It’s not? To me that sounds like the only one on which basis I’d agree with limiting our freedom to do what ever we want.. because it actually may hurt others. That is, if we assume that to be true.

Is it? This is an article stating that the blockchain (and by extension crypto) is a crappy technology by some random dude. It's not Biden who wrote it, it's some random dude.

So who exactly is limiting your freedom? If a random dude can limit your freedom with a mediocre Medium article, then I'm afraid you don't really have much freedom to start with.

What I mean is: I have the freedom to use blockchain tech, or not. The only reason for me to accept the government telling me I can't use this would be if it truly had a devastating effect on the environment. I don't think this is true and I think the pros outweigh the cons. And I don't have a lot of assets, so in contrast to many people here, I'm not for or against blockchain tech because I either am heavily involved or failed to get involved early on.

Satoshi is not limiting my freedom because I can opt not to use his work. Net Freedom would be lost if I would force Satoshi to make BTC according to my vision.

I transfered some BTC around back in the day, order sushi, pay a fried, order Raspberry Pi stuff at the Pi Hut. It feels like magic so I'm a believer.

> Let's be real, the anti-cryptocurrency arguments are something like this: It eats to much energy so we should ban it (just like gaming! Oh wait...)

The real argument is a bit more subtle: with gaming (and most other uses of power), the incentive is to lower the power usage for a given level of functionality. With cryptocurrency, the incentives are to increase the power usage. The idea behind PoW is to make it too costly (and a large part of the cost is power usage) to find an alternative longer chain. And for an individual miner, the incentive is to use more power than the competition, so that a larger fraction of the fixed amount of reward goes to that miner.

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