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Comment by whoisninja | Hacker News Reader

let the market decide then, step away- don't mine, don't use Bitcoin if you prefer

gold mining uses tons of energy we knew automobiles will pollute the environment, why didn't we stop using them altogether?

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The market won’t decide optimally because the costs (climate change) are socialized across the whole population but the benefits are not.

It’s basically saying if you don’t like pollution don’t pollute, which is flawed in ways I don’t have to explain.

The Personal Responsibility Vortex is a decent explanation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjNRtrZjkfE

ya then debate about it, write about it, learn about it

may be you are right , may be you're wrong

just don't be too sure that you know better than most

But then again, gold actually has legitimate uses that benefits most people (electronics).

Automobiles pollute, sure, but the vast majority of people benefit from vehicles.

But what, if any, benefit does bitcoin offer to the public - other than being a speculative asset?

We have several times more bars of gold than the amounts used for industry/jewellery, we could have stopped mining it decades ago if that was a serious argument.

yes, keep learning

gold is not that useful in utility sense tbh, less than 10% is industrial use.

Being able to store their wealth without being affected by the endless money printing is the benefit.

We should spend money creating public transit infrastructure to reduce the useof cars in urban areas. Not only is it more efficient in terms of transportation, it wastes much less energy and emits much less CO2. The fact that we haven't is a policy failure.

Incidentally, why would we ever let the market decide when the market consistently throws externalities under the bus?

I will agree with "letting the market decide" on the energy expended in Bitcoin when there is an effective and globally enforced carbon emissions tax that adequately compensates the potential damage caused by these emissions.

Other industries and activities, such gold mining, automotives, food production, tourism, etc., must of course also be covered by said carbon tax. However, what makes Bitcoin particularly noxious compared to them is that it intrinsically carries a financial incentive to expend more energy as time moves on.

The market is deciding. It is destroying our world. But for market winners there is no problem for a long time to come, while 'the market decides' ever more in their favor.

We are lazy.

The original Model T could run on ethanol (not perfect, but better than gasoline in many regards for pollution, and back then IDK if they would have noticed) and Henry Ford was fond of the idea of biofuels; at the time I think he was fond of Potatoes for the purpose.

I wouldn't attribute this to only laziness. At the time people weren't yet aware that burning fossil fuels would cause climate change. It's also pretty cheap to just pump fossil fuels out of the ground. On the other hand, people back then did know that fried potatoes taste quite good. And you can turn them into vodka too.

The problem with biofuels derived from crops in that era is that people were actually starving to death on a regular basis.

Capitalism always seeks a very local optima of maximizing profit with absolutely no question about the cost of "externalities". I put that in quotes because on a finite planet (that at the dawn of industrialization felt infinite) there's no true externality.

Energy is how our society is able to maintain its existence and current quality of life. If you over extended that energy usage you are looking towards total collapse of that system. That's what "unsustainable" means, that the system cannot be sustained in it's current state indefinitely.

We already rely on fossil fuels to over extended the carrying capacity of the planet for humans by nearly and order of magnitude. Ignoring climate change and other sustainability issues, the inevitable end of fossil fuels would mean billions of lives lost, even if we were able to stabilize the current global population.

I suspect, ultimately we will learn that humans are no different than bacteria in a petri dish: completely unable to do anything but consume all available resource even at their own eventual peril. But if you have any hope that we as a species can avoid the fate of any other species placed in a similar situation, then you, at the very least, have to recognize that "markets" can't solve this problem.

What you are talking about is a typical Malthusian understanding of reality. At some level, there are physical limits that cannot be exceeded. On a practical level, those limits are vastly beyond what we can currently comprehend or use, and the entirety of human history is a testament to doing more and more with less and less. (With blockchain technology being a notable exception of always doing the same amount of stuff with more and more resources)

Also, as a small aside... the concept of an externality is not about pollution or waste. It is about a cost that is imposed on people other than the individual responsible for the cost. The finitude of the planet is immaterial to the existence of externalities.

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