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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

How are the highly technical users of HN still this ignorant when it comes to a widely adopted 11 year old technology. The main value coming out of Bitcoin is that it is not regulatable by any party, including nation states. You can take your Bitcoin across borders. No one can stop Bitcoin sales like they did with GME. The whole point is to cut middle men and central authorities out of the picture. There is no other technology that does this.

And don't come back with "you shouldn't want to avoid KYC and regulation" as that's a different topic. Others find those properties useful even if you don't.

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When the whole conversation starts by talking about environmental externalities, you don't get to hide behind totally-not-criminals who are happy to pay the cost to avoid regulations; we are all paying the costs.

Ok, but that wasn't what the comment I was responding to was talking about at all. An equivalent example would be me saying the value proposition of guns is not that they are pretty but that they propel objects at high speed, and then you arguing that I'm wrong because criminals use them. I'm not arguing the moral dimension at all, but the mechanism.

I'm not a fan of using so much energy, just as I'm not a fan of guns. What does that have to do with discussing how they work and why people use them?

Until you want to turn bitcoin back into useful things, you better hope whoever is on the other side of what you want accepts bitcoin. Other wise it's just a number online that you can't eat with.

Downvoting? Please, explain to me how you can eat bitcoin and I'll accept my downvote.

Yeah let's use more efficient cryptocurrency. Bitcoin was really excellent for PoC but should not be used anymore.

Agreed, but that is complete a different matter to the comment I was responding to. The point is that people don't understand why PoW is not going away because they don't even understand the value proposition of PoW cryptocurrency.

How would you make cryptocurrency more efficient?

My knowledge of this technology isn’t very deep. From my understanding, mining is essential to facilitate transactions, which in turn makes cryptocurrency a currency. Mining needs computing power, which needs energy. More energy translates to more rewards, which incentivises parties to keep mining and keep the network running. Even if you make the underlying calculations more energy efficient, miners are still incentivised to spend more energy to capture more of the reward(?).

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