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Comment by atweiden | Hacker News Reader

> And what is there to show for all this waste?

The safest safe haven asset: a global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms.

Essentially the author posits Earth’s ecosystems don't have room for another Argentina. But they arguably don't even have room for half of the current human population. Particularly a human population that exploits nature to the tune of millions of acres of clearcut forests and billions of animals per year — the latter almost entirely for their value to our taste buds alone.

Perhaps it’s time one of these systems came to an end.

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Anyone have any data on how much waste is associated with Nasdaq, NYSE, credit card transactions, call centers to support credit cards, websites to support credit cards, ads that support credit cards, tv and radio commercials that support credit cards, etc. (for comparison)?

What do Nasdaq and NYSE have to do with this? Are you proposing using Bitcoin to track ownership of companies?

I think the point being BTC is only one aspect of a financial system which surely uses more energy than BTC alone.

sure!

bitcoin: 0.1% of all electricity, 7 transactions per second

THE ENTIRE REST OF CIVILISATION AND EVERYONE IN IT: 99.9% of electricity, a heck of a lot more than 6,993 tps

you're welcome!

(notice how 0% of coiners who raise this point ever provide a number)

More safe havens for wealth are the last thing a world suffering from vast economic inequality needs. "Safe haven" isn't a positive thing, it's another way in which Bitcoin makes the world worse, along with funding ransomware and other crimes and burning more electricity than Argentina to conduct as many transactions as a small town.

And in response to the list of of Bitcoin's negative impacts, the only defense is that it might protect someone's wealth, which only reveals how little its proponents care about anything except their own wealth.

> More safe havens for wealth are the last thing a world suffering from vast economic inequality needs.

Hard disagree. The problem with inequality is that too many people have too few assets. Increasing the security of property is a powerful way to mitigate this by giving people safe havens in which to store their wealth.

People don't have too few assets because there aren't any secure assets to invest in. There are plenty already.

People have too few assets because they aren't paid enough for their labor to be able to save, and another class of wealth won't increase the value of labor.

Bitcoin won't make that worse, either, but what it will do is impede democratic efforts to redistribute wealth to the poor, thus "protecting wealth" ... from the people.

> People don't have too few assets because there aren't any secure assets to invest in. There are plenty already.

People have too few assets because they are constantly forced by society to support parasites.

> People have too few assets because they aren't paid enough for their labor to be able to save

Yeah, between zero percent interest rates and quantitative easing, the government and the oligarchs keep eating the fat out of their wages and they don’t have any money left over. Of course this is the point of monetary policy so we invented bitcoin to provide those people with a save haven.

> and another class of wealth won't increase the value of labor.

It makes wealth accessible to labor.

> impede democratic efforts to redistribute wealth to the poor, thus "protecting wealth" ... from the people.

You misspelled “oligarchs” as “poor” and then again as “people”

Once upon a time the world used money whose value the oligarchs and governments couldn't easily manipulate: gold (and gold certificates).

The outcome? Widespread poverty, depressions, wars, etc.

What makes you think that wouldn't happen again with Bitcoin?

> Once upon a time the world used money whose value the oligarchs and governments couldn't easily manipulate: gold (and gold certificates).

Why do you think gold certificates can’t be manipulated?

> The outcome? Widespread poverty, depressions, wars, etc.

You’re missing the part where you substantiate your opinion that “poverty, depressions, wars, etc.” are the result of a stable currency.

> What makes you think that wouldn't happen again with Bitcoin?

I’m not sure “again” is warranted given that the invention of government fiat has done nothing to mitigate “poverty, depressions, wars, etc.”

Also I’m not claiming that bitcoin will end war for all time. Just that governments/banks can’t currently print more than 24 million or so.

> You’re missing the part where you substantiate your opinion that “poverty, depressions, wars, etc.” are the result of a stable currency.

It's not a fringe view:

Economists, such as Barry Eichengreen, Peter Temin and Ben Bernanke, blame the gold standard of the 1920s for prolonging the economic depression which started in 1929 and lasted for about a decade.[35][36][37][38][39] It has been described as the consensus view among economists.[40][41] In the United States, adherence to the gold standard prevented the Federal Reserve from expanding the money supply to stimulate the economy, fund insolvent banks and fund government deficits that could "prime the pump" for an expansion. Once off the gold standard, it became free to engage in such money creation. The gold standard limited the flexibility of the central banks' monetary policy by limiting their ability to expand the money supply. In the US, the central bank was required by the Federal Reserve Act (1913) to have gold backing 40% of its demand notes.[42]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard#Depression_and_W...

> I’m not sure “again” is warranted given that the invention of government fiat has done nothing to mitigate “poverty, depressions, wars, etc.”

I don't agree, from a US perspective, based on comparing the depressions, poverty, and wars we had before and after the end of the gold standard in 1971 (say, in the 50 years before and after).

> It's not a fringe view:

It still needs to be substantiated.

> In the United States, adherence to the gold standard prevented the Federal Reserve from expanding the money supply to stimulate the economy, fund insolvent banks and fund government deficits that could "prime the pump" for an expansion.

Argument by authority combined with argument by assertion.

why do you think that devaluing people’s money and inflating the price of assets that the wealthy already own is going to help poor people feed themselves? Per Krugman, the point of quantitative easement is to decrease wages in real terms while keeping the same nominal price.

Anything more than citations would be too much for a HN comment. There's more depth in the citations for the excerpt I linked.

To oversimplify: Bitcoin has a limited supply, the majority of which is already held in too few hands, many of whom have a HODL attitude that prevents circulation. It also has transaction fees and technical obstacles that prevent circulation.

How can Bitcoin ever be widely adopted as money without strangling the real economy? Fiat isn't perfect, but at least it allows concentration of wealth to be countered by issuing more fiat money, even if too much of that goes to the rich.

And if Bitcoin won't be widely adopted as money, how is it going to be anything more than an speculative asset traded from one hand to another, with any profits extracted from a new speculator (sometimes called a pyramid scheme)?

> Fiat isn't perfect, but at least it allows concentration of wealth to be countered by issuing more fiat money, even if too much of that goes to the rich.

This leads to greater concentration of wealth. Since people don’t seem to understand that, we have this feedback cycle where policy leads to concetration of wealth, which cause people to advocate policies that lead to further concentration of wealth, over and over again. People need to break the cycke by realizing that printing money causes assets (held by the rich) to appreciate, and wages (earned by everyone else) to decrease in real terms.

> Perhaps it’s time one of these systems came to an end.

You mean the USD?

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