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Comment by ballenarosada | Hacker News Reader

It uses more energy than a medium-sized nation to accomplish nothing of use?

A thousand times this. I don't mind if they mine crypto in Iceland or Quebec where they have 100% renewables but a lot of crypto mining is done using coal. In my opinion, fixing our planet should have a higher priority than inventing a new currency. If they'd at least use the money from BTC to fish plastic from the oceans I'd be fine, but currently it's just benefiting some large mining operations and hardware manufacturers.

I wouldn't call Money Over IP "nothing of use." Goldman Sachs and other large concerns appear to share the sentiment.

The dollar's value derives, in great part, from the existence of the US military. It uses far more energy per year than Bitcoin does.

Bitcoin's energy usage seems a better deal. I doubt anyone would ever launch a war funded on Bitcoin.

IDK, we've had "money over IP" with cryptographic signatures for decades already in various financial exchange protocols, with the main difference from Bitcoin being the requirement of pre-existing trust relationships.

However, since the vast majority of people and institutions do have some pre-existing trust relationships, Bitcoin doesn't bring that much to the table, we already had the technology to wire money worldwide.

P2P MOIP is Bitcoin's innovation. I can even write my own transaction and inject it into the network at a point of my choosing.

We can't do that with classical banking.

Writing your own transaction messages and injecting them for execution to whatever banks hold your money is a standard, widely used product of classical banking, not some novelty. Ages old cash management services and accounting system integrations run off of that ability. It's not P2P, but it remains to be seen if P2P by itself is a worthwhile benefit.

You still need an agent in classical banking for that transaction, even if the agent is just the bank's server.

I'm my own agent and an international network is the bank. Classical banking can't compete with that in the long run though I'm sure they'll still be of use.

Can you elaborate why exactly can't that compete in the long run?

I'm sure that there are multiple niche use cases where being your own agent has some benefits and it will certainly be of some use, but it seems that for the mainstream usage it does not, and there are certainly all kinds of practical advantages for some centralization and delegation of tasks to another agent, so it seems quite plausible to me that the classical banking might dominate the majority of transactions forever.

> I doubt anyone would ever launch a war funded on Bitcoin.

Why do you think that? You can store a lot of bitcoins on a single sheet of paper (private keys for wallets) so stealing it is a lot easier than precious metals. If any large nation ever really starts disliking BTC they'll just launch targeted operations to get hold of a large share of Bitcoins and destabilise the system. Similar to earlier times where enemy states printed fake money to destabilise monetary systems, bitcoin makes it easier because you don't need to move physical assets.

The dollar's value derives, in great part, from the existence of the US military. It uses far more energy per year than Bitcoin does.

And...

Genuine economic activity in crypto-currencies represents roughly %0.00000000000000000000001 of the economic activity transacted in dollars. How much energy would be required for crypto-currencies in a one to one comparison?

Let's not forget the US military may in fact serve some other functions as well.

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