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Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

Add them all together for the ultimate, proof of destruction: cryptocurrency backed by atmospheric pollution, fauna and flora extinction and natural resource exhaustion.

Buy it now, it definitely won't last forever! :D

Bu seriously, I still don't understand cryptocurrencies. So, your X discoin is worth Y million real money. But that's only while it's in cryptocurrency form.

If people start cashing out, the value will plummet, right? Only the first few will get close to the high value?

That seems very similar to a pyramid/ponzi scheme to me.

On that note, would it survive some catastrophic event? Like the Internet going down. A bunch of gold will. Hell, invest in power generators and batteries, those will survive and be worth a lot.

Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it?

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> Add them all together for the ultimate, proof of destruction: cryptocurrency backed by atmospheric pollution, fauna and flora extinction and natural resource exhaustion.

Make a DoomCoin! It would keep 12 difficulty counters, one for each proof of whatever, and getting farthest ahead in one of them lets you mine a new block.

That way it can distort the prices of (sorry, "effectively allocate") CPUs, GPUs, disks, ASICs, RAM... anything else you can come up with.

Sounds like a good project for a comic book villain.

>Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it?

Yes, but it may be very slow the first period, as it would be used to the pre-collapse difficulty level.

> Sounds like a good project for a comic book villain

Or a little story in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, describing how a civilization collapsed, not with weapons but by binding all their resources in a recursive speculative bubble.

Your understanding is basically correct. The "market cap" of a cryptocurrency is a meaningless marketing number - there's very little actual dollars in the cryptocurrency system.

When the bubble pops, a lot of people are going to discover they were always broke.

That’s true for stocks too.

As people sell, value plummets

That doesn’t make it a Ponzi scheme

Stocks confer ownership of a company. If Apple remained the same, but everyone went insane and started selling Apple Stocks for $0.0000000000000000000000001 and people refused to buy, I would buy every one and then collect the dividends.

Whereas if everyone sold crypto for $0.00000000000000000000001 and people refused to buy, you would gain nothing by buying them all. You can only make money in crypto if people buy it at a higher price.

Except many stocks do not, in fact, pay dividends. Amazon doesn't and it's one of the most highly valued companies in the world. Meanwhile, just as a lot of crypto does not pay dividends I could make use of DeFi platforms to get it on the crypto I do own, or simply get Proof of Stake cryptocurrencies, then you can see the staking process as paying dividends of a kind.

I get your hatred towards crypto, but you're cherry picking. If all money is BS and made up then good ol' stocks have good company with crypto in hell.

Hopefully everyone can see that there is a difference between being a 75% shareholder of Amazon, and being a 75% shareholder of dogecoin, in terms of the real assets that allows you to bring to bear. Regardless of which one is paying dividends.

Proof of stake crypto doesn’t pay a dividend. Stock splits where you hold more shares but total number of shares double are effectively a null transaction. It’s only the underlying value that matters not the number of tokens.

All companies either die or eventually pay dividends in one form or another. So, just because Amazon or whatnot has yet to pay a dividend doesn’t mean it will never pay one. People judge the probability of future dividends not just the pattern of past dividends because companies can fail, but they can also grow. Handing back money in the growth phase is considered an inefficient use of funds.

Amazon had net income of $21 billion on 2020. Were you the sole shareholder you would be entitled to collect that if you chose. Currently amazon reinvests to grow but that doesn’t mean profits aren’t there.

Meanwhile if you owned all of bitcoin and wanted to keep the current hash rate you’d have to pay in about $20 billion a year, maybe more.

From a cashflow perspective, one is certainly better than the other to own, even if you are barred from selling.

You spending time on social media or driving or eating does destroy the nature too, but you somehow justify it to yourself.

Negligible in comparison to cryptos waste, and provides a real tangible benefit.

We need to be extremely careful using this kind of argument (or, in fact, fallacy). By the same token, we all get some secondary exposure to some toxic substances, we might as well not care at all and expose ourselves more. When you think about it, exactly the opposite makes sense.

So basically if someone invented an eco-coin, that is a well-designed project fostering technologies focusing on healing the Earth (more efficient waste recycling, green energy, better air filters, new technologies for toxic and nuclear waste removal etc.), taking into account all the consequences of extreme popularity (none of the existing coins have, or they simply don't care), I'd be the first to invest in it, knowing that even if I lose, I win.

It exists: https://www.ecocoin.com/

Hey, Any way I can email you?

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