Comment by NicoJuicy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NicoJuicy | Hacker News Reader

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While David Gerard has been very critical of El Salvador ( and mostly Bukele), he is giving information/insights about it, that you won't see elsewhere.

I wouldn't dismiss it as a hit piece. He's obviously spending a lot of time researching what's happening in El Salvador with the Chivo wallet.

As far as i checked/found, all the information he gave, is factually correct. But yes, he is very critical of the usage of Crypto for many use-cases, but that's no reason to dismiss his research. For me personally, i like it as an alternative view of what the crypto/defi proponents are claiming.

Eg. Mentioning that it's nuts to mine BTC while they could have used the geothermal energy to lower electricity costs in the country ( since they import 20%), makes more economic sense for it's citizens.

If you want additional facts about all the hacks that are happening, you should check out https://rekt.news . You'll be surpised about the amount of hacks in Defi/Cryto land.

Is this the same Gerard who has a bizarre hatred for Scott Alexander and harasses anyone on twitter who talks about him?

He's pretty open about it that he's opinionated and he mentions it:

> (I must note that Alexander and I know each other a bit, and don’t have a high opinion of each other — so read this post with a dash of salt. I won’t use his surname here, ‘cos this post isn’t really about him. Though Alexander is a slight crypto fan.) [LessWrong]

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/07/03/coindesks-ne...

> Eg. Mentioning that it's nuts to mine BTC while they could have used the geothermal energy to lower electricity costs in the country ( since they import 20%), makes more economic sense for it's citizens.

I think the point is that crypto mining finances the building of power generation in areas where it was not profitable to do so due to lack of electricity transportation infrastructure. This is great for very poor countries that cannot develop low-hanging fruit power generation opportunities due to their nonexistent grid, no paying customers, etc.

Author here. What you describe would be nice, but it's literally not what's happening here.

It turns out you can't just arbitrarily declare "we're setting up geothermal here", as Bukele did - it's complex and susceptible to dangerous screwups.

e.g. the LaGeo plant mentioned in the piece opened a new 95 megawatt well in June. That was the result of years of careful planning, and there's already concerns that it's screwing up the local groundwater - a serious concern, given a lot of the local villages around Berlin don't have running water and rely on the groundwater.

His points, which are valid, would get a much broader audience if he was able to keep his normative judgments out of his reporting.

author here. This piece turns out to be doing the numbers big time as far as Foreign Policy articles go, so I'll accept my editors' judgement that I'm on the right track so far.

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