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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

I disagree.

Bitcoin is hugely wasteful. Estimates on the power usage of the Bitcoin network have it using more energy than Sweden.

Now that might be fine if it provided more than a modicum of utility but it doesn't. The only use case I've seen is to bypass laws on where money can be moved. Some of this is moral (eg totalitarian governments with capital controls on the poor) but most of it isn't (eg scams, ransomware, otherwise illegal gambling, drugs, child abuse material and so on).

I'll agree there's probably a little schadenfreude here because of how many Crypto Andys have pumping crypto so hard for many years pretty much for no other reason than their own gain.

Most don't believe in any utility here. It's just a get rich quick scheme. AGain, that would be fine if it wasn't so horribly wasteful.

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the proportion of criminal activity with crypto is estimated to be an order of magnitude lower than the conventional economy:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2021/01/19/the-fal...

most crypto is actually not well suited to criminal activity. it is pretty appealing as a savings and transaction medium when your alternative looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/JcaAbC4.png

So you're saying crypto is not good for anonymity, privacy, decentralization?

with the exception of privacy coins most of it is not good for anonymity/privacy by default (a wallet address is effectively a public psuedonym with a social graph), but that has no bearing on the decentralization of crypto protocols, which ranges from fraudulent to extremely strong, depending on the project.

there are ways to use bitcoin with very good privacy, like chaumian coinjoin, but they are not the default behavior of the protocol. nobody describes bitcoin as anonymous besides local news anchors and other low-information audiences.

I also have no horse in this race, never owned any BTC/crypto, but I feel like the wastefulness is made to be too big of an issue. Seems like it can be solved eventually.

So if it wasn’t wasteful, my question is, does a decentralized currency provide any real value? From my limited perspective it seems like it would solve some problems with things like inflation, free market transactions — but it also probably creates new problems. I guess my question is, would the world ultimately be better off or worse off if a decentralized currency was the predominant world currency?

Probably better—one nation wouldn’t need to maintain its currency as the world’s reserve currency. Demand would drop, increasing that nation’s export competitiveness and reducing inequality.

I know that’s what bitcoin proponents would say, and this appears true to me on the surface. I also see huge incentives for governments, banks, payment companies, tax companies etc. to NOT want this to happen. Some for self preservation and immoral reasons and some for legitimate humanitarian reasons and to prevent anarchy. It’d be nice if someone could paint the unbiased vision of what the future world would look like in that scenario.

It’s energy usage is indeed terrible. I’d love to see it move to a proof of stake model.

Is Bitcoin is as wasteful as say, poor zoning rules where N million Americans have to commute to job centers from suburbia, burning Y gallons of gas per year? We often talk about the environmental impacts of Bitcoin but look at how grotesquely wasteful we are in virtually all aspects of our living in the west. It's like when someone is hotly critical of a $10B portion of the >$2 trillion dollar national budget. I get you have to start somewhere but eliminating crypto alone won't solve any of our environmental problems without other material changes to our way of life.

Strawman much? Bitcoin, and most other cryptos, are both designed to be wasteful and also are directly competing with systems that are many many orders of magnitude more efficient (and useful).

Bitcoin isn't competing against commuting. Bitcoin is competing against governments & ACH. Against PayPal & Visa. Against wiretransfers & banks. And it's horrendously destructive at it. People commuting don't change that. Proof of Work is an environment disaster. Pointing at other environmental issues is just whataboutism, not a defense or excuse.

> Bitcoin is competing against governments & ACH. Against PayPal & Visa. Against wiretransfers & banks

You're not making it look bad :)) They're all oligopolies that use their power to make obscene amounts of money and stifle any innovation that threatens their oligopoly. You want to blame somebody? Blame exactly those actors since it's directly due to them that we even need such a convoluted and horribly expensive alternative. From a strictly technical PoV you could implement micropayments in a week in a garage without any fancy blockchains.

Bitcoin is not destructive compared to fiat currencies. Inflationary monetary policies are now causing a global recession, resulting in insane amount of human suffering. There's also climate catastrophe, wealth inequality, and all kinds of other economic and social issues directly caused by fiat currency. It's time to put stop to destructive fiat currency.

I think the environmental argument is the easiest one to make against crypto, and the easiest one for crypto fans to discount (“proof of stake is coming in X months!!”).

More importantly, though, it’s mostly a way for already-rich people to extract money from poorer people.

The people who “invested” in 2021 are almost all under water today, and they’re largely people who couldn’t afford to lose their investment.

Most people who invested in a peak were "under water" a year later. That's what a peak means.

It is still wasteful. There are other wasteful things but this is new technology which is not solving the problem but creating new one.

How do you solve decentralized store of value without random people competing for its legitimacy?

What a nice piece of whataboutism. The argument is not that nothing else is polluting and/or wasteful.

It's funny how when somebody is asking "Compared to what?" he doesn't get any answers, but gets downvoted to oblivion. Yey for being the right tribe, I guess.

Because it's a bad faith argument, quite deliberately so.

Why? Because it's an effort to distract from an issue with butwhataboutism. It's a really common tactic to derail an argument. Politicians use it all the time. Consider Chuck Schumer's opposition to removing a bizarrely low tax rate (15%) for hedge fund managers, called the carried interest tax credit [1]:

> But in his conversations with Wall Street executives about the tax proposals, Mr. Schumer said, he has told them that he would oppose a tax increase as long as it did not also apply to other industries, like energy and real estate.

If Bitcoin energy wastage is bad (which is my argument) then it's bad even if there are other bad things.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/washington/30schumer.html

Is it bad faith? I mean, you yourself used a comparison. Even as an order of magnitude, I'd like to see some numbers. Somebody talking about numbers and alternatives should at the very least not be silenced.

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