Comment by siwatanejo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by siwatanejo | Hacker News Reader

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> The second one is that it makes illegal activities easier, and at a larger scale. It's quite common right now for companies to be coerced pay millions of dollars to anonymous criminals, all enabled with cryptocurrencies.

For the vast majority of businesses/individuals, it is governments and banking cartels the ones stealing your money (via inflation and fractional reserve respectively) without recourse. Switching to a world in which, instead of all of us, but only a few, are stolen money, is a bit better.

> The most prominent negative effect is the huge energy waste, which doesn't help when we are trying to cut on our carbon footprint

Debunked. Sources:

* https://newmoneyreview.com/index.php/2020/09/03/big-oil-goes...

* https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-12-07/bitcoi...

* https://blog.bitcoin.org.hk/bitcoin-mining-and-energy-consum...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T0OUIW89II

* https://cointelegraph.com/news/study-over-74-of-bitcoin-mini...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5JQfZdJLjY

* https://youtu.be/nPt51vxTUFM?t=1025

Re: Money transfer - it's not clear why money going to criminal organization is better than the government. Also, since most people actually have negligible savings, it's not clear that inflation actually "steals" money from the people.

Re: Energy use - A single Bitcoin transaction is around $8 today. If you assume an efficient market, where the cost to compute Bitcoin is roughly equivalent to the energy cost, that's a crazy 80kWh in US energy cost for a single transaction (and probably more, since Bitcoin mining is done where energy cost is lower). The claim that a fraction of that comes from renewable is silly, this renewable energy could go to other means.

yes but that tranfer fee is the same for 100 or 1 billion in value, and lightning correctly implemented pushing that fee down to the subcent number.

One of the biggest misconceptions around Bitcoin is somehow that it was supposed to sort all this out before it bootstrapped to a large enough network, but we all know that´s impossible.

Energy use - A single Bitcoin transaction is around $8 today.

Depends on how quickly you need that transaction to hit the blockchain.

Anything over 30 minutes is currently 1 sat/vByte and 1 sat = $0.00019230 dollars. The average bitcoin transaction is about 250 bytes. That's $0.048075 or almost 5 cents.

> it's not clear why money going to criminal organization is better than the government.

Don't put words in my mouth that I didn't say (or rather, typed). I never said it's better. Government&banks-robbing-all is a worthy cause to fight anytime, even if it doesn't directly help the criminals-robbing-a-few problem, because actually, the latter already happens today, and will always happen (sadly). So we must fix one thing at a time.

I think if you consider normal (fractional reserve) banking “theft” it’s pretty easy to understand why you’d also consider BitCoin as a positive force.

If, on the other hand, you accept contemporary definitions of inflation and consider normal modern monetary systems as being the least bad - then it’s a pretty different picture.

These articles invariably attract the gold heads.

> These articles invariably attract the gold heads.

Are you sure? Gold is a massive problem: https://theconversation.com/gold-mining-leaves-deforested-am... (bitcoin fixes this)

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