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Comment by user-the-name | Hacker News Reader

Good. Bitcoin needs to die. It is destroying the planet while helping criminals, extortionists and scammers.

The discontent with the existing banking system that made Bitcoin seem like a better solution isn't going away.

Fine. Come up with something else then once we eradicate Bitcoin.

I'd rather destroy the corrupt banking system first. Human rationality will bring down the price of whatever replaces it. I have sympathy for your position, I do, but you can't take that hard a line and not sound like you're simply defending the current set of monopolies.

Case study in replacing something bad with something worse.

I agree [0]

[0]: https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-...

Now tell me your thoughts on cash.

Better on every single front than Bitcoin.

Even how it's minted and by whom?

It's been minted by the state since the Bronze age - since well before the invention of either the modern state or modern banking - and this seems to work?

I am yet to meet anyone who is so rabidly anti-crypto and is not from a developed/stable country.

Check with people from Argentina, Venezuela, anyone that lived in the 1980's Brazil, Ecuador, Turkey, Lebanon, Greece... see if they really think if relying on the State and their financial systems is a good idea.

No doubt.

What I don’t understand is why you go from not trusting the state to trusting a different currency which the state you don’t trust could just ban outright at any time.

Black markets were a thing in the Soviet Union.

Not trusting the State does not mean that the State is able to exert absolute control over people's lives. In fact, I'd say that the less trust the people have on the State, the more "illegal" activities people practice.

Newsflash: They don't think burning the planet to do two transactions per seconds is a solution to those problems they faced, either.

Yep.

So is just about every other technology you can imagine. Namely air travel. Maybe you have clearer points. Probably they've been debunked 100 times over.

How do you even define "debunked" here? It's a subjective conclusion as to whether the immense energy costs are justified by the net value added to society.

Personally, I'd tend towards air travel being a net positive, while Bitcoin is well into the negative.

Nothing on the planet has anywhere near the same ratio of criminality to utility, or planetary destructiveness to utility that bitcoin has. It is way, WAY off the charts. It is unimaginably bad.

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