Hacker News Reader

Comment by wufufufu | Hacker News Reader

I think believing this (the title in particular) is even more partisan and more wrong than not participating in Bitcoin because it's "bad for the environment" which I read as "I feel I missed the boat, so I'm going to criticize".

I would rather suffer the environmental damage that Bitcoin incentivizes over having central banking control our currency (not saying it's that simple, but that is how I think about it in broad strokes). No government can print Bitcoin at will to fund military spending or generally increase social inequity, which I think printing new money usually ends up doing.

I think there are far worse things for the environment than Bitcoin. Have you seen our land and water usage?

View on HN

Would you rather knowingly see the biosphere of our planet pushed to a point where it cannot easily support human civilization in the form we have known it, just to temporarily uphold an ideological point like "no central control of our currency"?

OP takes a silly stance, but it would take a hell of a lot of bitcoin mining to destroy the biosphere!

On its own, sure. But we're already seeing the effects that herald that destruction: rising sea levels, changing weather patterns, etc.

The modern capitalist civilization we've built is actually extremely fragile precisely because it has optimized so carefully for the current circumstances, throwing away safety measures, buffers, and redundancies as inefficient wastes of money. So if, for instance, the droughts in California continue to worsen, we may see a huge chunk of the almond industry literally dry up and blow away. And you might not care about almonds specifically, but it's just one more warning sign that the whole system is running close to its limits, and more and more parts of it are going to start to fail if we don't show some damn responsibility and stop wasting, just as a for instance, hundreds of terawatt-hours every year on something whose sole practical purpose is to enrich a bunch of Silicon Valley tech bros.

> hundreds of terawatt-hours every year on something whose sole practical purpose is to enrich a bunch of Silicon Valley tech bros.

This describes many companies, also.

Why, yes. Yes, it does.

Agreed on all points, though would like to point out that capitalism merely allocates resources. We have a ton of people with sky-high standards of living, and not a lot of deployed green tech yet. Pollution is inevitable, at least for now.

Taxing externalities like carbon, microplastics, topsoil erosion is probably the most efficient way forward.

Bitcoin is really neat but probably isn’t saving a single frog or leaf anytime soon.

It’s worth noting that cryptocurrency might in principle be able to help a lot of people who are locked out of the financial system to transact and take part in the online economy. This includes many/most people in the third world. This has nothing to do with hodling though.

> I would rather suffer the environmental damage that Bitcoin incentivizes over having central banking control our currency

What multiplier do you have to add to the environmental damage to get to the point where Bitcoin meaningfully supersedes central banking instead of providing a funky niche alternative to it, and how do you feel about it then?

> No government can print Bitcoin at will to fund military spending

I can think of a few state actors that could take control of 51% of the network, and one with rather capricious views on private property rights that could do so just by seizing the mining hardware already operating on its soil.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com