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Comment by labster | Hacker News Reader

Please explain how video games and porn don't serve a useful purpose. I'm thinking it's possible that porn contributes to a lower birth rate, which would more than offset the amount of power consumed to produce and transmit pornography.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-sex/200904/do...

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I don't actually think they should be banned. I'm making a facetious analogy to prove a point. Bitcoin is at least as useful as video games and porn.

Ugh, sorry. In the Age of the Great Orange One, it's almost impossible to tell joking from earnestness.

How is Bitcoin even remotely as useful as video games or porn? It's 99% speculation and 1% buying drugs online.

Tell all the Chinese that successfully expatriated money how useless Bitcoin is.

Just curious: who's taking the other side of those trades (BTC for yuan) and what are they doing with all the yuan?

Bitcoin has the culture of hodling* so I doubt how much of the pre-existing coins go into the market. So mostly the local currency (yuan/etc) would go to cover the mining costs and salaries of employees and owners. Don't know the impact of closing down of exchanges in China some time back.

* - holding but culturally called hodling, perhaps some Grame of Thrones reference(?)...Satoshi did not move their coins and that carries on. So far it has been very resilient. Exchanges hacked and it carried on. But fear remains of some black swan events e.g. Suddenly Satoshi coins on the market etc.

So you have an argument for porn being useful (not that I disagree), but you can't find a single reason for why cryptocurrencies would be useful? Or even Bitcoin alone?

Bitcoin could adopt a proof of stake system if the core devs and users thought there's no other way for Bitcoin to survive. The Bitcoin ecosystem seems to be very conservative and they only make big changes when they are under high outside pressure.

If Proof of Work was banned, Bitcoin would still be here tomorrow, is what I'm saying. Perhaps it's a good idea to ban PoW, but it will not have any significant (long-term) effect on Bitcoin's adoption.

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