> Energy consumption in itself is not a problem
My main point on that was that the exponential function grows quickly. If it's all of Sweden today, then it's just a couple of doublings before it's literally everything. If you graph the current use this is not the far away future.
I don't have absolute proof, but you cannot hide the kind of electricity use without driving up demand noticeably, so actually people are already today paying more for electricity in order for someone to profiteer from hashing. We're all paying for this.
> 1. The energy source is not renewable
Or it displaces otherwise-renewable use into non-renewable.
Which (at this scale) of course it has.
> To sum it up, it's not as bad as the headlines say, and rapidly improving for the better.
I disagree on both points. The waste graph (and that's just electricity. Where do you think non-economical mining rigs go?) is growing exponentially.
Have you seen this guy talk about our inability to understand the exponential function? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4
> Keeping devices powered on/plugged in costs more energy and serves no purpose,
It's a problem, yes. But it's not true that it serves no function. "It's easier to keep it plugged in than not" is convenience.
I'm not justifying it, but yes actually it does have a purpose. Just like idling a diesel car outside my window while I'm trying to sleep does have a purpose.
> Bitcoin's supply is entirely predictable
Not really since an unknown amount is lost forever every year due to crashed hard drives and lost passwords.
For your medium link, it can be summarized as "an intro to bitcoin". And I'm surprised it was written in 2018, as it seems to have the naivety of a small child, with regards to both bitcoin and economics.
E.g. it doesn't motivate why we need to (effectively) get back on the gold standard. The "work" that was "proof of work" for my FDIC-insured bank balance is a combination of the value I added to my employer, and the value the market gave me for helping correctly price goods. I don't need my bits to be scarce.
> "However, because bitcoins are traceable on the blockchain, a particular bitcoin may become tainted by its use in illicit trade and merchants or exchanges may be compelled not to accept such tainted bitcoins."
Like I said. Naive. And this was written 4 years after Mt Gox, where 4% of all bitcoins that will ever exist, were stolen.
In a legal money laundering sense I would guess that maybe the majority of bitcoin out there is tainted, since tumblers actually cause 100% of their output to legally be tainted. And with it being circulated, the only "clean" bitcoin is from HODLers who have never moved it after mining.
> "Without improvements to the privacy and anonymity of Bitcoin’s network protocol, bitcoins cannot be considered as fungible as gold."
And in this very next sentence he's essentially saying "yeah but let's help the criminals hide it, and not do that tainted thing I just said".
He calls it "improvements".
> "Nation-states have shown a persistent proclivity to inflate their money supply to solve short-term political problems. The inflationary tendencies of governments across the world leave the owner of a fiat currency with the likelihood that their savings will diminish in value over time."
This is more naivety. E.g. in order to have our best future, we as a society actually don't want resting savings. I've been lectured by a friend because I have a coin jar, and that is money that isn't in motion. I wouldn't go that far, but there's some truth to the fact that money (in any form) at rest does nothing. Whereas money in motion does.
GDP is not a perfect model, but like many models it can be useful. And GDP measures the velocity of money.
So why "punish" people for hoarding cash (in any form) and not moving it? Because it's in society's best interest, or so goes the argument. This naive writeup seems to merely say (like other pro-coin ones) that taxation is theft, inflation is theft, etc...
Anyway, I think I've read this before (or it's just the same coiner dogma repeated ad nauseum so that it's indistinguishable from something I've read before).
I'm not disgusted by it. I don't get disgusted by uninformed naivety.
> As for Bitcoin being speculative, yes and no. With a long term perspective, it is predictable to a degree.
What I mean is that approximately nobody is buying bitcoin in order to actually use it. Unless they are using it to send money to ISIS, or something. No, they buy it in the hopes that someone else will pay more for it, later. That is neither payment, nor store of value.
Maybe one day it'll be more stable, and thus a better store of value. But I hope it dies way before that.
I don't disagree that these coins can be a good investment for the individual. But that's where the disgust comes in. It's profit over morals, with a spread never before seen. It's doing something evil (environmental impact), in order to profiteer from organized crime (anonymous currency). Even if you yourself commit no crime, it's you profiting from destruction[1], to fund organized crime.
You're essentially making the argument for a lottery that has (unfortunately) reasonable odds. That doesn't make it right, or good, or nondestructive.
I'm not sure why you think those bitcoin 101 links would be new to me.
[1] And I don't mean "destroying the old to create the new", no I mean literally destroying productivity and base resources. As if you could mine bitcoin by proving that you've burned medication. That is resources society had, that could be used, that you burned at the expense of others for your profit.