Imagine living in a country that allows you to destroy the environment for a fake currency.
Your worldview is ridiculous.
Your worldview is ridiculous.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_S...
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/bitcoin-emits-less-than-2-of...
Exactly, step my step, please explain how adoption of bitcoin would reduce military energy consumption.
"Base demand for dollars is created due to taxation" [1]
Which of course completely contradicts: "The (mostly paid for by tax) army has nothing to do with the value of a dollar." [also 1]
[1] comment by 'arcticbull' on 'Hacker News'
The maintenance of the army doesn't create demand for taxes? Are you aware this is one of the most significant historical reasons for the collection of taxes?
Could you remind me again of when the Army was abolished in Japan and why, and whether the US military (which drives part of our demand for taxes) had any role in that?
Japan pays for the Army. The US army [1].
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/17/japan-us-extend-agr...
Clearly the one arguing in good faith is the person leading off calling all crypto a ponzi scheme because of several myths you misunderstand. Or given your financial literacy, probably intentional disingenuous portrayal.
I understand perfectly well which is why I’ve made the points. Your retorts are argumentative for the sake of argument, and you’re not actually making any sort of case that would address my overarching narrative.
Even if I conceded all of your points, which I don’t, my position would remain totally in tact.
When I buy crypto, I EXPECT to lose at the very least the exchange fee(~0.25%). Why on earth would I expect any gains on a currency, or expect there to be little or no risk on something so new and relatively untested versus something like gold?
>> High returns with little or no risk.
This is not a requirement of cryptocurrency. And there is no guarantee they will have a high return. There is certainly no guarantee in anything like the bitcoin whitepaper that you will have no risk to fluctuations in exchange rate with fiat. [1]
>> Unregistered investments.
Currencies are not synonymous with investments. Cryptocurrencies do not have to be peddle as investments, and only a moron would use them that way. [1, look anywhere for the word investment, interest, or appreciation -- you will not find it].
>> Unlicensed sellers.
Whether the government approves of something has no bearing on whether it is a ponzi scheme or not.
>> Secretive, complex strategies.
The implementation of a number of cryptos are both open implementation and open white paper [1]. Hardly secretive. I do agree the closed source ones could certainly be ponzi schemes, and perhaps you could also make an open source ponzi scheme.
>[edit2] So with that in mind, it meets many (but not all) of the classic definition elements.
>1. All returns are generated by bringing new money into the system. The only way someone can make money on Bitcoin is if a new person invests. That money is then distributed to the earlier participant, net of miner fees.
Currencies aren't meant to provide a return. Some people even consider currencies more useful if they're slightly inflationary. But lets examine your statement anyway. All other bitcoin holders appreciate their asset when someone loses their keys (deflation). An individual can make a return at the expense of the others by mining (inflationary creation). Or I could make fiat money on bitcoin by arbitrage and work, like selling coffee for bitcoin in a circumstance where people want it and few others are offering it except in fiat.
>2. There is no actual business underlying.
Just as there is no actual business underlying commodity money? This doesn't make commodity money a ponzi scheme either.
>3. The constant flow of new money is required to keep the price from collapsing because miners extract something like $50M in welfare from the system per day.
Not at all. A constant confidence in the crypto we examine is required to keep the price from collapsing. If no transactions are happening, then we are simply slowly inflating. Some currencies have infinite tail emission (infinite slow inflation) like monero. For bitcoin most coins have already been mined, so the amount of remaining inflation is finite. Even under the fiction that 50 million per day were extracted, it would take about 54 years for the price to collapse (care to imagine how much you would lose on USD if you stuck it in a mattress for 54 years?)
>4. The entire space is unregistered investments hawked by unlicensed sellers.
Crypto-currencies are not generically investments. Yes I know some scam artists promise returns, but this is not a necessary feature of cryptocurrency. For instance, bitcoin and litecoin do not promise any sort of returns, and thus cannot be considered investment vehicle by anyone but speculators (speculators can call anything an investment, including USD).
>It's a negative sum wealth redistribution scheme the takes money from new entrants and gives it to miners and to old entrants. The miner portion is what makes it negative-sum.
The same is said of gold, all the way up to gold miners paying for electricity and workers by liquidating some of their gold which makes it negative sum. Yet gold has been a legitimate store of value, and often currency, for thousands of years -- certainly no ponzi scheme.
Base demand for dollars is created due to taxation. As the money supply is managed via fractional reserve lending, each new dollar that enters circulation is backed by the demand for repayment of that loan. When someone borrows money from a bank, the bank enters a negative balance in its ledger and the borrower gets a positive balance in their account. This is how money is created. As the loan is repaid, the money is destroyed.
Dollars are fully backed by demand for dollars. It's really quite elegant.
> Do you understand that the reason it has value is because it’s backed by the US military, which provides peace and stability for industry to consume a vast amount of energy to produce goods that get shipped around using fossil fuel?
This is utterly irrelevant. The US military existed for hundreds of years on hard money. World wars were fought on hard money.
> Have you calculated the total energy expenditure of the entire US financial system, direct and indirect, and then compare it to proof-of-work calculations?
Sure, and as a percentage of transaction count, transaction value, or basically any other metric it utterly pales in comparison. [1]
> Don’t just parrot what the current-day zeitgeist told you to think.
Ditto the crypto echo chamber.
I get that this is working econ theory, but is that even meaningful? Do you honestly think people hold dollars because "someone can use it to.pay taxes"?
And for calling it fundamental, yes BTC requires burning lots of energy to have a transaction. Even if it goes so that day to day most transactions are lightning based you still have to burn that energy continuously to provide the security for new links in the network.
This is effectively not that different than a company dumping chemical in the local river rather than disposing of them properly. They are encroaching on my rights to a livable planet for their own personal financial gain.
There are many reasons to dislike crypto in general, but "it destroys the environment" only applies to PoW-based systems and not crypto in general.
Also, you should read the guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."[1]
I rephrased that first sentence to remove the reference to HN voting. I was simply remarking how the tone will cause people to object to it quicker regardless of the merit of the underlying thought.
So quite a bit actually. We are talking hundreds of billions in market cap at least.
Or living in a country that continuously devalues its currency, forcing exponential consumption, thus stealing from the poor to give to the rich and destroying the environment while at it?