Look at the mess we're in now! who's laughing?? Cars pollute and need roads, we had to build so many roads and gas stations. We even had to go to war to make sure we have enough oil.
Because yes, cars have made the world materially worse, not because horses are better, but because dense urban development, public transit, walking, and cycling is better.
Cars are enormously wasteful, much like bitcoin is, not only because it uses way more energy than is necessary for the task it is performing (~90% of the energy used by cars is spent to move the car, not the cargo or people), but also because it takes up space that could be used for more useful things: the average American city has 8 parking spaces per car, that means that each car on the road represents an entire ~1600sqft house that can't be built because a car needs places to park.
Unless you mean that the volatility doesn't matter if the asset appreciates so much that the volatility becomes irrelevant, but that's not a property of a store of value, that's a property of a speculative gamble.
Opposition to cars, like opposition to bitcoin, isn't rustic ludditism. There are modern solutions to transportation that are superior to cars, like rail, frequent busses, and bike infrastructure, but lose out in funding and hype because they're not prestigious and utopian like cars are.
Likewise, Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction network technology can't solve, but it gets all the attention because it's flashy and new and utopian.
And if you think cars aren't utopian, tell me the last time you've seen an automobile ad that showed somebody being stuck in gridlocked traffic in the lincoln tunnel inhaling gas fumes for over half an hour. I will contend that there does not exist a single automobile advertisement that shows the average car owner's typical experience of driving, certainly never in an urban setting.
I see Bitcoin as the Model T of new currency models. Decentralization is the future of currency and contracts, even if Bitcoin itself is wasteful and inefficient as a v1 product.
The real harm of cars is in how they forced cities to spread out, putting miles of asphalty moonscape between every destination, forcing people to spend thousands of dollars a year on vehicles that they shouldn't need, driving greenfill development that doesn't raise enough revenue to support itself, forcing cities to develop ever more automobile suburbs for the immediate revenue to fulfil their maintenance obligations on the old ones, going into massive debt to keep up appearances on what is effectively a ponzi scheme, not to mention the human cost of traffic violence.
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Decentralization is not an advantage for currency and contracts. The problems that decentralization "solves" were never problems in the first place.
Nobody was asking for a new way to store their money that doesn't have any identity verification besides a single digital key, which doesn't have the ability to dispute or undo transactions, and which takes multiple minutes to clear transactions.
To quote Kai Stinchcombe
> There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve that problem, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast. ...
> Nobody went out and did a survey about whether most credit card users would be willing to give up their frequent flyer miles in return for also losing the ability to dispute a transaction.
As for the decentralization aspect: I think a lot of people in countries outside of the US would disagree with you that trust is not a problem with the banking system. Not everyone out there can just get a credit card with 2% cashback that's backed by the rule of law I enjoy in the US.
I think you've also sidestepped the issue of inflation. Just because the American public hasn't yet learned that their money's value is being printed away doesn't mean that they're not going to be the ones feeling the hurt in 5-20 years, particularly if UBI et al don't keep pace with their decrease in purchasing power.
I saw another one of your comments allude to the idea that democracy is a solution to this, but I don't ascribe to the idea that we should shirk technology solutions because political ones might exist. In many cases, technological innovation drives demand for political action. I don't want to debate the merits of Uber as a company, but I think it's hard to ignore the idea that the introduction of car-hailing apps created demand for governments to completely rethink taxi monopolies.
Ultimately, I'm not trying to make a case for Bitcoin. I'm trying to make a case for the idea that the adoption of and furor around Bitcoin is going to significantly influence the vNext of our banking system, even if that just means e.g. that the near-instant clearing of large Bitcoin transactions is showing folks that ACH is garbage, or that T+1 stock settlement is achievable.
The reason monetary policy is inflationary is not because there's a shadowy cabal of evil people who want to make your money worthless. Inflationary monetary policy is necessary to incentivize commerce and investment.
If money increases value at rest, then everybody will just hoard it, which is exactly what happened during every deflationary period of American monetary history: the economy ground to a screeching halt because everybody with money to spare stopped spending.
I feel like the bitcoin speculation bubble has led enthusiasts to forget what currency is supposed to be for. No, the purpose of money is not to be a number on an account sheet that goes up and makes you happy.
Nowadays it's a lot easier to just use a bank-sponsored method, and cryptocurrency transactions have gotten pretty expensive, but there definitely was a use case that made me like cryptocurrency.
Venmo does not make cross-border payments.
Venmo does not allow me to take a loan or to borrow money to anyone that has any kind of collateral.
Venmo can seize my funds.
Venmo (or Paypal, Stripe or any payment system) won't accept to work with me if I sell things that are perfectly legal but deemed risky.
Venmo (or Paypal, Stripe or any payment system) won't accept to work with me if I sell things that are perfectly legal but deemed immoral.
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Okay, I get that the standard crypto "enthusiast" keeps talking about it like it is going to replace everything and that therefore they will get in to become quadrillionaries.
That's a naive view. Crypto is important even if doesn't replace all of the existing institutions. It is important because it increases optionality. If a centralized system works for you, great. But for some people it doesn't, and these people still need a way to invest, save, make commerce, etc, etc, etc...
Air pollution is still a significant harm, even if the space wasting harms also exist.
That's probably not a good example, considering that electric cars predate gas powered cars. By the start of the 20th century, 40% of the cars in the US were steam powered, 38% electric, and 22% gasoline.
And even if my specifics are wrong, my point is that some technology may be impossible to leapfrog because we build on the innovations and rollout of past technology in order to innovate further.
And again, you can debate that modern electric cars could have been more capable earlier if we had distributed more towards innovation than to rollout of old tech (e.g. would a carbon tax on gas cars 20 years ago that went towards battery research have accelerated us towards our current position more quickly?). But my uber-point is that gas cars were probably required for some period of the last century. Maybe even to make, like, internet, smartphones, and all kinds of stuff
I've got a 20 foot fishing boat sitting in my backyard. I want to take it out on the lake.
I'd like to visit my in-laws who live on a farm in a rural town without bus service, 200 miles away. The temperature is a few degrees above freezing and it's raining.
I can't use a car, either owned or rented. What superior transportation solutions exist that allow me to do them?
I don’t think this is as ubiquitous as is suggested here - there aren’t really any tunnels in a lot of places, and New York has one of the best park and ride systems around if you have to make that trip regularly and want to avoid this scenario on the daily.
> I will contend that there does not exist a single automobile advertisement that shows the average car owner's typical experience of driving, certainly never in an urban setting.
I think it all depends on where one lives and their lifestyle. There are plenty of places, urban or otherwise, in America at least, where the picture painted preceding this quote is not a regular experience for people. I would venture to suggest the urban traffic grind is probably not the experience for a large majority of people. A ton of people drive in rural or suburban areas and run local errands and things as is depicted in many car ads.
Overall, I understand the importance of alternative means of transportation, but cars are one of the most personally efficient modes to get from Point A to Point B directly.
Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers; mass transit is less flexible. So they aren’t strictly superior.
> Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction network technology can't solve,
How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?
Mass transit in much of the world is perfectly acceptable. You build cities around transit, walking and biking instead of giant chasms between buildings. This is not a problem that exists in Europe.
You don't have to get rid of all cars, just most of them. And the best way to start is by getting rid of free parking, which is a regressive tax on the poor.
> How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?
That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets. So long as wages keep pace with inflation, which they do, this is not an issue. In fact if you purchase your necessities on a credit card the 0% APR until your bill comes due makes inflation work for you.
Literally anything you buy is 100% inflation resistant. Literally. Anything. Shoes, gum, dryer lint, stocks, real estate, crypto. Once you're not in fiat currency the only thing that matters is ROI, not inflation.
Anything offering you 15% APY for "no risk" is a great way for you to go bankrupt because obviously something hasn't been priced in. If the benchmark interest rate is 0% ask yourself why on earth you're getting 15%. If someone offers you something that seems too good to be true it absolutely is.
DeFi is decentralized 2008.
The site guidelines are available for your reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What you seem to be saying is that the market participants are idiots and are in a state of mania, and that you somehow "know better" than them. This is equally bad, maybe HN rules should add this in too, because the condescension is tiresome.
I'm not sure why you felt the need to "caution" me about the way I write my posts on here and point me to the rules, but I'll have you know that the "fake points" I gained were a (large) order of magnitude greater than the "flagged" posts.
Have a nice day.
Speculative mania doesn’t mean participants are idiots it just means they’re playing musical chairs, and once the music stops whoever’s left without a chair is left with nothing. And yeah some people get swept up through confirmation bias, seeing number go up and convincing themselves there’s something where nothing exists. Those will be the ones most likely left without a chair.
As for “knowing better” I have my theories which I back with evidence.
I’m not into keeping score here just saying net karma of 0 is not the objective per se, I’m pointing out your post was clearly not in the letter or spirit of the site rules, this isn’t Reddit.
It’s been 13 years now and even the most hardcore blockchain enthusiasts have been unable to point to a single measurable concrete thing achieved better with blockchain that a classical solution. Not one and no path in sight. Only number go up and money laundering? 13 years of time from some of the smartest most ambitious and optimistic folks in all of the tech world. And nothing.
This is ill informed and not in the spirit of HN. I don't even want to argue against this because you haven't done the bare minimum in terms of "research", speaking of confirmation bias, have you considered that you may be confirming your own biases by spouting things like "number go up and money laundering"? really? bitcoin is probably the worst way to launder money. You are yet another irrational critic.
Who's "everyone" exactly? My comments are broadly speaking applicable to a US audience as I don't have sufficiently deep first-hand knowledge of other markets. If you don't have money, then you don't have anything to invest and it's not really a problem. If you do have money, you shouldn't have any trouble with services like Robinhood, Acorns, Betterment or Wealthfront.
In lower-income countries, a $20 fee may be as much as 10% of GDP per capita, and therefore totally unsuitable.
Do you challenge that assertion?
> Moreover and in regards to your arguments no the wages of lots of people do not go up with inflation like have you ever talked to anyone that isn’t in the software industry?
This is tracked by the BLS. [1]
> Lots of jobs don’t do that and that set of people want to be saved against inflation if inflation is not a problem for you that is one thing but it sure is for a lot of people
Which is why we need meaningful social policy changes, such as a $15 minimum wage and one that's indexed to inflation. Changing the currency to one that doesn't inflate will simply lead to a flat or reduction year over year in nominal wages. What matters isn't the units, it's how much of what they represent that people get to take home.
You need to make social policy changes, not monetary ones to achieve your goal. Your cause is noble but your target is off.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
Lots of workers don't get inflation adjustments to their wages. And even if they do, you'll still lose money because a larger share of your income will go to taxes unless the tax brackets are adjusted for inflation very frequently, which they're not.
Thats a good demonstration of ignoring the interests of everyone who doesn’t share your opinion, but it’s not how representative government is supposed to work.
> That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
Then you can go back to ignoring bitcoin.
> Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets.
Again, this is not an answer for the problem, and pretending it is just ignores the reality that billions of people live with every day.
No, not really. Democracy relies on the idea of majority rule. Frameworks for ensuring minority rights aren't trampled on are created but for the most part it is in fact the needs of the many that take precedence. That is mass transit, not individual transit.
> Then you can go back to ignoring bitcoin.
I'm actually short CME Bitcoin futures from 56,000, so I'm paying a lot of attention. Don't wanna end up on the wrong side of that one, it's a spicy meatball!
> Again, this is not an answer for the problem, and pretending it is just ignores the reality that billions of people live with every day.
This assertion is completely unfounded. Generally folks who have no money spend all of their income on necessities as they receive it. Folks who have money have access to places to park it.
Apparently the many disagree with you, and like their cars.
> This assertion is completely unfounded.
You can keep pretending that things you don’t like don’t exist.
Many people were into CFC refrigerants. Many people are into coal. Many people are into fossil fuels. An idea that enjoys a lot of support isn't automatically a good idea. We need to be prepared to argue ideas on their merits without appealing to the status quo.
> You can keep pretending that things you don’t like don’t exist.
You can keep not citing your sources ;)
Ahem, European reality begs to differ.
> That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
The distributed ledger isn't even secure. Just look where the cheap electricity is, create a network partition and all the other transaction will vanish after the network partition doesn't exist anymore.
My e-cargo bike with a trailer can hold more stuff than my sedan ever could. Did an Ikea trip with it last year, carried home a filing cabinet, a desk frame, and a small table.
> mass transit is less flexible
frequent mass transit is plenty flexible. If a bus comes by your stop every 5 minutes, you never need to worry about planning.
> distributed
multi-node database. Done.
> resistant to inflation
Not something that sane people should want. Economies grow from commerce and reinvestment, not people jealously hogging every dollar they can find so that they can stash it under a bed to be used at higher value later.
I never once missed my car when I lived in London. Pop along to the end of the street for a bus every 5-10 minutes, or just a little bit further away and I was at a tube station where I could be on a train within 10 minutes that took me right across London far faster than any car could. The one or two occasions I needed a car, I could rent one, and still be better off than if I'd been paying the month-to-month expenses of keeping a car on the road (insurance, MOT etc.)
Car rentals are even easier these days than they were back then.
Thats uncharitable, and in my opinion ignorant. Inflation distorts the signals people use to make investments, leading to misallocation of assets.
There have been two major periods of deflation in the history of the US dollar. 1930-1933, and 2007-2008. When the value of money increases, people don't spend it, they hoard it, commerce stops, and the economy grinds to a halt.
Just look at your beloved bitcoin, who is actually using it to buy and sell anything (besides illegal goods and money laundering)? The price is entirely propped up by speculation and fake Tethers, and because it is increasing, everyone who has any knows they would be a fool to use it, which is the whole point of currency.
A deflationary distributed ledger has yet to prove itself as having any kind of real utility in the first place.
you just mentioned the utility right there. Is this a trick question?
Maybe you forgot "censorship resistant". I know paypal works for you or something, but not everybody has that luxury you know.
Let's see how easy this game is to play, now I only need to claim that any advantages you bring up are either irrelevant or not unique to PayPal. At least that's how every argument against Bitcoin usually goes.
Why use BTC instead of an anonymized crypto like Monero?
If you just need unfreezable funds and pseudonymity, not total cryptographically secured anonymity, you'll use Bitcoin instead of a dozen better methods (which are all crypto anyway, so wouldn't really count as a point against crypto, just BTC) because everyone else is using it.
How much would you say you spend on these markets in a month?
But I was asking how much you specifically spend per month in this way.
A single car lane can move 600-1600 people per hour while a two way bike lane of the same size can transport 7500 people per hour (https://nyc25x25.org/#report)
Also, hey! we meet again!
And of course, always a pleasure haha.
Without a car, everything transportation related has to be planned and weighed.
I moved to Tokyo 5 years ago. If I want to get somewhere, I walk to one of three train stations within a 10 minute walk, hop on the train, and am there in – usually – about 30 minutes. There's always the option to take a taxi, but they're often no faster than train. I can still drive out to the mountains if there's no train to the one I want to climb, because there are more car rental shops within walking distance than there are train stations.
Sure, there are cars in this city. They're useful tools that make a lot of sense for many people to own. But the average person chooses to live without one, because in a city designed for people instead of cars, life can actually be better that way.
With that said, more power to those people that don't want or need one, life is all about what works for the individual.
When they live outside, they get a thick coat, which is very good at isolation. Even if they get wet from rain, the water is repelled so it does not get to their skin. A good indication of this isolation is that snow will not immediately melt as it hits their fur. The only thing they need is enough to eat, as they still expend more energy to keep warm.
Source: my SO and I have 2 horses at home and they live in the open all the time. Their only shelter is a small roof as an extension to the barn, so there’s a dry place for the food.
I'm also not certain how much cars are worse for the environment compared to horses. If we had to sustain similar numbers of people without cars we would have tons of horses (I assume horses emit similar amounts of methane to cows, which I know are a major contributor). We'd also have to feed our hundreds of millions or billions of horses. That agricultural effort would probably have a huge environmental cost. We'd have to deal not only with places to park our horses but also somehow manage the immense amount of waste that would come with packing a few million horses into a city and the accompanying health problems with that.
I think cars are a pretty good invention and wouldn't be surprised if, on net, they were better for the environment.
Cars, on the other hand, are not incremental - they have locked us into an urban design pattern that will remain problematic no matter what the form of energy generation that drives them is.
Why is dense urban development better ? I could cite 100 studies why it’s not better not to mention all the people who hate living in “dense” living conditions
And if cars were primarily used as an enthusiast pursuit (like horses in the modern world, actually), this argument would make sense. But cars are not primarily an enthusiast pursuit, instead they are something that we've structured our entire way of life around, and made enormous sacrifices for. Many people need a car whether they want one or not, and we all pay the consequences for it.
Human existence is meaningless and thus anything we do is meaningless. However, that also frees us up to do whatever we want since there is no universal authority telling us how to live our lives. Even in the face of an abusive police state we can still decide to resist.
The problem with Bitcoin is that if one were to maximize human potential then Bitcoin would be a really, really low bar. It's basically a premium currency for an MMO, except the MMO doesn't exist and there is no item shop and even the idea of creating such an item shop (think of NFTs) suffers from problems mentioned in the article. You can simply copy digital assets. Ownership over a digital asset doesn't protect it from being copied.
So unless you are claiming that cars are a net negative then it's not a good analogy.
It's only by virtue of history and our willingness to accept massive loss of life and limb every year that cars, driven at 100 kph by sleepy, angry, elderly or distracted people, are still a thing.
Not to mention the massive loss of life and limb from climate change spurred by cars.
You're making a solid point.
Aren't we as technologists always preaching the benefits of technological conservatism, minimalism and simplicity?
Our environment has obviously changed in such a way that it's now difficult to re-introduce equine transportation on a mass scale (where would you park them in a city designed for automobiles?), but we need to think long and hard about the world view that led us to conclude cars were universally superior to horses. I suspect the argument comes down to "productivity", and the axiomatic belief that it should be maximized in all circumstances.
I think your comment actually is wise.
That does not invalidate the point that cars _are_ highly pollutant and shouldn't be the primary means of transportation in any sustainable society.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319996 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319974 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319558
In all seriousness though, we should at least move to electric cars.
If that is acceptable we already have electric money (bitcoin), it'll fix most of our pollution problems. We don't have to worry about how much oil is being consumed to secure the petrodollar network. I've been waiting for a better argument against bitcoin for a long time, I haven't heard any yet.
Most people who criticize bitcoin don't even understand it fully. My belief is that as people look deeper into it, they will be convinced by themselves. It has been generally true among my friends, including myself. I have gone through those phases of criticism (energy usage, funds terror, governments will ban it, it will be hacked, quantum computers will destroy it). As a software engineer, I think the system is beautiful, if you are one by profession (or not), I implore you to study it.
Some recent reporting on it from NatGeo:
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel/2021/02/six-euro...
My point was that they have become adapted to a point where it is very difficult to re-adapt them to horses.
If you just replace "horses" with "mass public transit", "railroads" and "electrobikes", it suddenly starts to make much more sense.
Our cars need about 75 sq. ft each (they're on stacked up 3 levels high in the garage)
How many sq. ft. would we need for all of our horses? How many people would be needed to take care of them full time?
Actually yeah... outside of cities who'd be taking care of these horses? Because cars need mechanics when something goes wrong obviously, but likewise horses need vets.
The day-to-day stuff like refueling a car is dead easy, meanwhile you can't just ignore your horse in the stable for a week because you didn't feel like going anywhere then fill it up on the way to your destination...
Edit response because I'm rate limited:
It seems you're not joking with the tone you're taking. I feel bad for you.
Our world would be much better off if we all lived in cities like NYC. Ten years ago average New Yorker generated 30% less CO2 than the average, and greenhouse emissions from the city were trending downward as economic activity trended upwards.
But yeah, I guess you're just enlightened past living near other people and shame on anyone who's comfortable enough with human contact to live in a city.
For all your posturing it's ironic you'd balk at "living in a crowded place"... the 30% in CO2 we'd save by living in cities like NYC is more than if we got rid of all forms of transportation in the US. Meaning simply by living in a city I don't really need to play ridiculous mental gymnastics like, but it's fun to tear down a bad argument.
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You're privileged enough to have an existence where taking care of a horse is easy and "therapeutic" I'm sure all the people barely making ends meet working 2 jobs would have just as easy a time filling up their car in 5 minutes as taking care of a horse.
I wonder what percentage of Americans have and additional 2 to 4 hours every single day just burning a hole in their pockets
And let's not forget the fact a car requires operating two pedals and a wheel. We can even modify them to require less for people who are physically impaired.
Good luck with taking care of an actual horse with a physical impairment. I'm sure you'll just say it's good exercise though, and woe onto you if you're someone with something like limited mobility trying to muck a horse stall.
It's always funny how the people who lived in the most privileged little bubbles seem to think those big city sheeple just don't get it
Taking care of a horse is easy, it's therapeutic even. Besides, if you don't want to own a horse, you can always hitch a ride from a friendly neighborhood horse-carriage operator.
You are not the rugged individualist yeoman you imagine yourself to be.
I don't know how you managed to miss the point I'm making so aggressively.
Are you joking? You're not, but part of me wants to believe you are.
Is this really the USP of horses? Do they even do this?
It isn't at all accurate to say that horses don't pollute. In some respects their pollution is worse.
In 1880 NYC’s population was 2 million. Today there are 23 million in the metropolitan area. We probably still wouldn’t have a good way of dealing with 25M+ pounds of poop a day. And at least garbage disposal is relatively orderly; horses just pooped everywhere.
Decomposing poop takes time, and it's pretty awful to be around while it's happening. Also, for something to decompose into the ground, it needs to reach the ground, which it's not going to do if the street is paved.
Of course, cars as the savior is also an oversimplified narrative, but it was a fun one.
To be short, saying that Bitcoin has the right of polluting while doing nothing useful in return because there are cars, is wrong.
Would Amazon be possible without trucks? How about Walmart?
Not Walmart, but Amazon makes even more sense in a horse-driven economy: First, you don't have to ride to the store and back -- mailing a small item is much cheaper than that. Second, with the price of shipping per mile per pound being higher, there would be more of an incentive to ship items directly from the manufacturer to the consumer. Mail-order catalogs existed before the age of cars.
People crave financial stability. Bitcoin will not give it to them. I'm not averse to the idea of a distributed ledger acting as an underlying settlement mechanism for global finance, but Bitcoin does not achieve that goal either as it's zero sum (whereas economies are actually growing).
Horses are also dangerous. A friend of mine lost almost all of their teeth because their horse kicked them in the face when they cleaned its hooves.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of...
Not saying cars are great, but it was seen as the solution to exactly this problem
Horses need to be operated safely, just like cars, you need to learn how to ride them. Besides, if you can't ride a horse, sit in the carriage.
Over a million people die every year in automobile related accidents.
You can use horse manure to grow the food for the horses. It's a total ecosystem. What can you do with the pollution cars create?? can you capture it in a bag?? THINK for a second!
> We even had to go to war to make sure we have enough oil
I don't see countries going to war over BTC (or the mining pool) as they already have cornered all the fiat currencies in a tight system. All they could do is sabotage the BTC system and make it less lucrative for normal public.
I think that's the point here. Unlike BTC which is powered by Proof of Work (POW), the US Dollar is powered by Proof of Violence (POV). As a result the full accounting for the externalities caused by US dollars would have to include the cost of supporting and using the largest military industrial complex in the history of the world to protect the market for oil being denominated in US Dollars (petrodollars).
https://phys.org/news/2015-12-christmas-energy-entire-countr...
If you do have a salient point to make about the "truth," perhaps you should come out and make it. I'm sure a bunch of us would be happy to hear it.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-27/bitcoin-m...
Think about how the petro-dollar network is secured, how much energy it consumes, arguably more polluting than hydroelectricity (or another non-polluting/renewable source) used to secure a decentralized, permissionless, digital monetary network (it's not just a token, it's also the network and a store). Can you honestly tell me that you see no value in that system? if you do, what amount of energy use is justified, there has to be some number, right?
Compare it with gold, for instance, how much energy is expended in moving a billion dollars of gold from one location to another (based on distance), think about the amount of security it needs while it is being moved and stored, how much energy is expended while mining and smelting it.
Bitcoin seems to be an order of magnitude better than the existing comparable systems, there is a clear ability to choose where that energy can come from (unlike petro-dollars or gold). There's already enough natural pressure to move to renewable/stranded energy sources, a few years from now, almost all bitcoin mining will be from renewables/non-polluting sources and all this noise around bitcoin's energy use will be moot, what will you guys complain about then?
To me personally, the auditability of the network by ANYONE is the best feature, I have a node running at home that watches the network, and I can read the source code.
We tried that, we switched to automobiles.
What can I do with a bitcoin except hope to sell it for more USD later?
And then you can either try and meet someone in an alley somewhere, or go to a gatekeeper exchange just like Visa/Mastercard to try and convert those transactions back to money that can actually be exchanged for food and shelter!
I mean, let's be serious here. In theory, blockchain could allow us to build a good online payment system -- and that is a problem worth solving.
But in practice, Bitcoin in particular is completely awful as an online payment system, and I don't understand how people can reasonably claim otherwise. If the goal of Bitcoin was actually to make online payments easier, we would be using a different coin other than Bitcoin. The community would have moved on to any of the far better alternatives.
The fact that Bitcoin is still the predominant coin proves that the technology and the convenience of online payment processing is not the end goal for most people getting into cryptocurrency.
If Bitcoin isn't a payment provider, then why should I care about it? It's more expensive and slower than ACH is. It's being converted into normal currencies and tracked by the same companies that are making payment providers today. What is it solving?
All of these payment providers that are being built on top of Bitcoin are going to have the same regulations, restrictions, and problems as the payment providers that exist today. If Bitcoin isn't capable of replacing them (and there's every indication that it is not), then it's not going to have a tangible impact on how and where I can spend money online.
If Bitcoin succeeds, I don't think it is likely the average person will ever touch Bitcoin: it is technically complex to handle it securely. However, many of the Venmos and Squares in this future would likely be using Bitcoin to settle flow disparities behind the scenes.
In terms of what it's solving:
- Bitcoin has a much lower barrier to entry. It is very expensive and slow to get direct access to the ACH system (vs having your bank make transactions on your behalf).
- Bitcoin is apolitical. Banking and finance is still very much an old-boys network of after hours handshake deals. Bitcoin lets you swim with the big fish without having to worry about kissing the right asses. Similarly to claimed noble benefits of public markets, Bitcoin has a democratizing effect by not having a mechanism to favor entrenched players.
- Bitcoin is insulated from US monetary policy. This tends to appeal to gold-bug types who believe inflation is being underaccounted and will get worse.
- Bitcoin is permissionlessly auditable. I wish there was more development in this space, but I think bitcoin could be very powerful for non-profits and other organizations which want to be as transparent as possible with their finances. If an organization wanted to prove holdings or transactions, Bitcoin is arguably better than bank-money because Bitcoin txns cannot be forged, while documents being alleged to be coming from a bank could. (Similarly, I think it would be really cool for a bank to make an option for fiat accounts to have their balances and transaction history published publicly online)
* I am certainly not speaking for all Bitcoin advocates
It creates a separation of concerns: If the layer 2 service providers you are using today become abusive/untrustworthy, it would be easy to switch to different ones.
As for bank transfers, at my previous company we had to send hundreds of international payments each year and all of the transfers were finished within minutes of initiation.
And Paypal and other companies have made it possible to donate to charities without a credit card for almost 2 decades.
I sure as hell wouldn't want to be associated with a cryptocurrency that has a public ledger then if that's the type of punishment I am trying to avoid. You're just one exchange leak or hack away from being imprisoned.
When I was still in consulting, I had dozens of clients whose projects were killed when their Chinese investors could no longer get their money out of China to invest. A billion building sits unfinished across the street from Staples Center in LA (and has, for 3 years) because the developer can't get its money out of China to finish the building.
Thousands of local buyers are able to buy houses and condos in LA these past 3 years because they don't have to compete with all-cash foreign buyers any longer.
Big claim. Source?
Its non-Chinese foreigners getting deals in LA now that China is sandbagged. If you don't see all the other foreign money buying LA then I am not surprised you are no longer a consultant.
Lastly what do you think of US capital controls such as OFAC?
But the drawbacks are plentiful, even for this sort of use case. And this use case doesn't get easier with a whole bunch of speculation. In fact, it gets harder.
And there's no particular reason for such users to leave it in a volatile form. Rather, they would be rational to cash out once the illegal transaction is over.
So the real value of bitcoin should be the expected float for all the crypto-compatible types of black market transactions. Which I'm quite sure is many orders of magnitude below the current price.
So it's not just that the black market has incentive to use it, there's incentive to make it and even to prefer it over alternatives, because the operation's excess is a good front.
The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!" The actual place of decentralized ledgers is as one of several tools for designing autonomous, non-coercive communities, and when designed as such most of the overhead of proving disappears(e.g. DAG coins). Everything else is an attempt to extract rent into the coercive economy, which in due course will be trivially subverted by forking the chain or starting a new one.
The government could just look at your electricity bill and ask how you paid for it and then ask where you got all those mining rigs without a loan. If you can't find an explanation where that money came from you are in a bad spot. It's actually harder than laundering cash since cash can be spent directly without depositing it somewhere where your identity is known.
>The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!"
Yes, it's always the same boring old answer. If you could wave a magic wand and make it impossible to pay with euro it would suffer from the same problem. The value in the euro doesn't lie in itself, it lies in the ability to exchange for a service or good. Because I value the good or service I value anything that grants me access to the good or service, the euro grants me access to goods and services, thus I value the euro. Foreign currencies are worthless to me since I cannot use them to buy things, unless I want to import something denominated in a foreign currency, then the currency suddenly gains value for me.
It's laughable that Bitcoin exclusively being a store of value is somehow lauded as a benefit, as if being able to purchase goods with Bitcoin would be a bad thing for Bitcoin. It gets worse now because people insist that it is merely a settlement layer. As the price of Bitcoin goes up its value proposition is somehow getting worse over time. How is this even possible?
What can you do with USD besides exchanging it for goods and services? (Pay taxes)
There is no reason a parallel banking system with all of the same features cannot built with Bitcoin being used as the denomination. I think this future is increasing likely (probably much to the chagrin of decentralization advocates) as Bitcoin increases in value and number of holders.
efficient high-volume transfers - risky and expensive to do with cash, really requires a hawala-like middleman (often a bank)
reversibility - not true of cash, only true within the context of softer credit systems. You could build a "Venmo backed by Bitcoin" where funds cannot be withdrawn for the reversibility period if you thought there was market demand for it.
ID verification - subject to discretion of counterparty
fraud investigation - Bitcoin is likely much better than USD for this because of it's traceability.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-laws...
Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol for moving value on the internet, that is not useful enough for you sir? Is this hacker news? or lumberjack news?
Besides, Horses >>>> Cars. Horses are more useful than Cars. Cars need roads to work, Horses don't.
The manufacture of cement produces about 0.9 pounds of CO2 for every pound of cement. Since cement is only a fraction of the constituents in concrete, manufacturing a cubic yard of concrete (about 3900 lbs) is responsible for emitting about 400 lbs of CO2.
We should stop making things out of concrete, it's destroying our climate, Mud huts are more than enough to protect us from the elements. We have so much land in the US, why can't we all spread out instead of building high rises??
Edit: who's downvoting this? look at the replies below, people know this is a real problem.
https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/943cb244091d4b2fb37...
A solution for full-scale CCS has now matured that facilitates the further development of CCS in both Norway and Europe. The project has encompassed carbon capture from Norcem’s cement factory in Brevik and carbon capture from Fortum Oslo Varme’s waste incineration facility at Klemetsrud, Oslo. Northern Lights, which is a collaboration between Equinor, Shell and Total, has been responsible for the CO2 transport and storage part of the project. This part of the project comprises ships for transport of liquid CO2, a reception terminal in Øygarden municipality, and pipeline to a well where CO2 will be injected into a storage formation beneath the seabed
edit: formatting