I was going to write a comment here, but instead you, the reader can simply extrapolate The Case Against The Case Against Crypto.
TL;DR: don't use it then.
TL;DR: don't use it then.
Similar logic explains why selling your kidney is illegal and why voting systems are designed to make it impossible to prove who you voted for.
I don't want there to be a way for you to stop me from sending data, so I'm going to work on that.
All I'm going to say is, good luck. You're fighting against your entire field.
If the environmental costs of crypto mining are genuinely your concern, the best solution is to advocate an agnostic solution, like restricting CO2 generating sources of energy, or energy consumption for ALL non-essentials (e.g. tourism, video games, crypto, etc).
Singling out crypto for its environmental costs, and calling for targeted restrictions on it that exempt other non-essential uses of energy, suggests a superficial basis for your position, like a negative emotional association, or dislike of crypto proponents.
So, you're saying I should run my unlicensed nuclear testing facilities? Regardless of any consequences and externalities I may cause.
And I should have the right to sell whatever I discover to highest bidder (including terrorist organizations)?
It's a hyperbole, but Bitcoin suffer from both of those: heavy externalities, and interfacing with black market.
That is not a voluntary interaction. Nuclear reactors pose an uncontrolled risk to all those in their vicinity.
Yours is a hyperbolic analogy, and likely just a trope you wheel out whenever you encounter an opponent of your anti-libertarian "you only have the rights I agree you should have" ideology.
>>It's a hyperbole, but Bitcoin suffer from both of those: heavy externalities, and interfacing with black market.
I've already commented on how the externalities should be addressed.
As for the "black market" angle, there is a fundamental difference between designs for weapons of mass destruction, and targeted restrictions on their dissemination, and dragnet controls over all financial interactions, in an attempt to preempt a host of crimes.
The former targets a true threat, and takes proportionate measures to mitigate it. The latter rejects the first principles of a free and liberal society, in instituting warrantless mass-surveillance and centralized gatekeeping of practically all private economic interactions, in the name of preempting crime, and in doing so, creates a hyper-centralized power structure that is in itself a massive threat to humanity.
There’s a whole encyclopedia of free-market failure modes that’s worth reading up on. For example: https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ec...
>>We should try to prioritize the use of valuable and finite resources to those things we think are most valuable to society.
No, we shouldn't. People should always be free to decide for themselves how to expend their share of those finite resources. There is nothing inherently more valuable about one non-essential activity over another.
If a person wants to spend their resources running high powered gaming machines, that is not inherently more valuable than spending it mining crypto. Your subjective determination that one non-essential activity is more valuable than another is just that: a subjective opinion. It doesn't govern someone else's subjective determination.
>>There’s a whole encyclopedia of free-market failure modes that’s worth reading up on
I did not advocate an absence of government intervention. I explained how to make such intervention congruent with the values that are stated to be the intervention's motivation:
>>If the environmental costs of crypto mining are genuinely your concern, the best solution is to advocate an agnostic solution, like restricting CO2 generating sources of energy, or energy consumption for ALL non-essentials (e.g. tourism, video games, crypto, etc).
>>Singling out crypto for its environmental costs, and calling for targeted restrictions on it that exempt other non-essential uses of energy, suggests a superficial basis for your position, like a negative emotional association, or dislike of crypto proponents.
One more time: you are arguing against a strawman. I've already shown I am not opposed to government intervention in principle.
>>This means relinquishing some individual freedom of choice and prioritizing our use of resources.
No, the existence of government and the pursuit of common goals through it does not require restricting any one's right to freely interact with other consenting adults, or depriving them of their private property.
>>but living in a society means accepting that you can’t just do whatever you want, everyone else be damned.
Living in a free society means being able to engage in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults, the judgment of others be damned.
I think healthcare would benefit from legalizing the provision of medical service by un-certified individuals, as well as providing more than one tier of certification, where people who can't afford fully certified practitioners, but would like the assurance of some certification, have that option.
Instead of making it illegal for individuals who don't possess full certification to practice medicine, the law could instead require medical practitioners to disclose their level of certification, and any warnings the state provides in relation to that.
So for example, an uncertified doctor/nurse may be required to disclose not only that they are uncertified, but also the warning that the state strongly advises against using uncertified medical practitioners.
Why providing these options is critically important is that sometimes the prescribed institutions fail, and an escape hatch is a life saver. Take this case of a woman in Canada who had to wait two years to get a test that diagnosed her with cancer, because of a shortage of state-licensed doctors:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/doctor-shortage-cancer-video-...
Society has imposed heavy regulations on the most important industries, and the result is that the most important industries are the most dysfunctional:
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-3...
Look at what regulations have done to healthcare in the US for example:
https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-manageme...
>>Here's some food for thought: The number of physicians in the United States grew 150 percent between 1975 and 2010, roughly in keeping with population growth, while the number of healthcare administrators increased 3,200 percent for the same time period.
*
>>Supporters say the growing number of administrators is needed to keep pace with the drastic changes in healthcare delivery during that timeframe, particularly change driven by technology and by ever-more-complex regulations. (To cite just a few industry-disrupting regulations, consider the Prospective Payment System of 1983 [1]; the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 [2]; and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Act of 2009. [3])
[1] https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Medicare-Fee-for-Service-Paymen...
[2] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg...
[3] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/h...
What you are effectively advocating for is a massive limitation on people's rights to freely interact with others, and using their safety - as if you know better what's best for them - to justify it.
Now you may disagree with those tenets, and that’s of course your right; but people should understand why we make such rules based on history and have at least some amount of respect for what came before, imperfect though it may be.
Ideological purity doesn’t serve anyone well, because the world is a messy and complicated place. Every rule has exceptions; there are shades of gray; etc.
Those measures, which you support, are what I described:
crudely generalizing an entire class of ostensibly voluntary interactions, as "swindling", and prohibiting them all on that basis, and then handing out exemptions from that prohibition on a case by case basis, upon a party receiving approval from a centralized gatekeeper
And yes, democracy can support laws that violate of human rights. Democracies instituted slavery for instance, often justifying it with claims that it was to protect the slaves from the dangers of freedom.
>>but people should understand why we make such rules based on history and have at least some amount of respect for what came before, imperfect though it may be.
I am definitely open to hearing about the arguments for those restrictions, but I have looked quite a bit, and what I've seen is those restrictions inflicting massive harm on society on the balance. Again I am open to seeing what evidence you have of the contrary.
And this is consistently the case when I look at different industries, and the reason I believe it's a universal effect is due to basic organizational dynamics: a free-er system has a larger range of options, and thus is more likely to discover, through trial and error and the natural tendency of people to seek out mutually beneficial configurations, superior processes.
I described what I see as strong indications of that with respect to healthcare in earlier comments. I've seen the same thing when I look at venture capital fundraising:
Usury laws go back to Biblical times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury - there is plenty of literature to follow from this point.
There are still prohibitions on drug use that most agree should still be upheld due to the serious harm they tend to cause (addiction -> crime, serious health decline) relative to their benefits: heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, crystal meth, etc. Go spend some time in some majority Black neighborhoods in the U.S. like deep East Oakland, Detroit, Philadelphia, etc. if you want to get a real sense of how bad the problems are and what the locals think about it. Or spend some time in poor white areas in Appalachia or the midwest U.S.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1538-4616....
>>There are still prohibitions on drug use that most agree should still be upheld due to the serious harm they tend to cause (addiction -> crime, serious health decline) relative to their benefits
Prohibition is the reason there is a link between addiction and crime. In the absence of prohibition, prices would be as low as ground coffee, and no one would need to commit crime to support their habit.
Another example of the harm of prohibition is the effect it had on how concentrated the drugs were in the form sold. In the late 19th century before prohibition most of these drugs were found in low concentrations in the products that marketed them.
With the advent of prohibition, producers started to create higher concentration doses because such doses were easier to smuggle.
You don't understand how poor some people really are. And there are values to consider, like quality of life and justice, other than pure economic efficiency. We don't want people to be hopelessly enslaved to drugs and unable to otherwise lead productive, meaningful lives, even if drugs are as cheap as "ground coffee."
Please, I beg you, actually spend some time in the Real World instead of sitting in your comfy room and relying on Google searches in vain attempts to justify your cold academic view of the world.
>>We don't want people to be hopelessly enslaved to drugs and unable to otherwise lead productive, meaningful lives, even if drugs are as cheap as "ground coffee."
Of course, and in that case, the person can be segregated from wider society, and committed to a rehabilation center.
>>Please, I beg you, actually spend some time in the Real World instead of sitting in your comfy room and relying on Google searches in vain attempts to justify your cold academic view of the world.
I have plenty of real world experience. The real world consequence of people in the government controlling our private interactions is inefficiency and corruption, that reduces the opportunities, wealth and hope available to marginalized people who are not connected to the insiders who control the levers of power.
This discussion suggests otherwise.
An example of the latter:
A worker in one country sending half of her weekly paycheck back to her family overseas has two options presently: days of waiting (which means no food on the table for those days), uncertainty it will arrive at all (starvation, stress and pressure toward crime), and exorbitant fees taking anywhere from 15% - 50% of what she sends (shamelessly robbing the most vulnerable). By using the correct crypto alternatives, she can send the full amount, at a cost of fractions of a percent, and know with certainty if it has arrived - in seconds.
There is a reason crypto adoption is huge in poor and oppressed countries such as Venezuela, parts of Mexico etc.
There are other benefits, but this should be enough. Nothing else has been able to, nor likely could be able to have such an impact in any short space of time in these areas, and not without possessing many of precisely the same core principles shared by most crypto projects.
This doesn't mean crypto is perfect or doesn't have problems. And it doesn't mean we should ignore those problems.
But it does mean that the endlessly served-up misinformation that crypto "has no benefits", works toward harming less-fortunate people who've suffered more than anyone should have to.
For others, conduct a simple search for the name of low-income, despotic, crime-ridden nations plus "cross-border" and "cryptocurrency" to find news coverage.
Finally, look at the overall crypto market capitalisation. It's in the trillions.
It's ludicrous to think that a decades-old, trillion-dollar industry has literally ZERO real-world benefit applications.
Here's an article in Mercator's Payments Journal I found in 3 seconds:
https://www.paymentsjournal.com/a-look-at-blockchain-in-cros...
It’s sort of like BitTorrent. Does it have legitimate use cases? Sure. Is the vast majority of its use to illegally share files? Also yes. (Note that approximately zero mainstream content providers such as Apple Music, Spotify, or Netflix use BT for delivering bits to customers.)
For example, El Salvador recently made Bitcoin legal tender. In Venezuela it's in everyday use: https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2021/11/02/a-snapshot-of-c...
The "reason" I was referring to was the context of the discussion, ie, whether or not crypto is legitimately useful for anything. Well, it is - it's tremendously useful, even vital, to the underprivileged populations of some countries.
One of those uses I gave as an easy example, is cross-border payments, and indeed nevertheless I suppose it could still be argued this could also be "huge" in some places.
Of course mainstream content providers are not going to use BT to deliver content, despite it being well-suited in many ways and would save them a shit-tonne in expenses and benefit consumers greatly. The problem is its unfounded stigma, which is fuelled by precisely the same kind of uneducated hyperbole seen here regarding crypto.
Look, the simple facts are the following:
- the existing monetary system is either collapsing, inefficient, holding us back, or all three
- a new monetary system has been developed that is already replacing the worst excesses and failures of the old one. It's been in use and development for over a decade and has grown into the trillions
There are no other alternatives I'm aware of with even remotely the same level of adoption, person-hour investment, or financial backing that could possibly have a hope in hell of replacing the incumbent systems anytime soon.
Iterative updates and sad caricatures of crypto run by governments are not going to preserve your life savings when a government defaults on debt and freezes citizens bank withdrawals.
Existing crypto can do and has done that, among other things.
The government has proclaimed BTC as legal tender. Whether people will actually use it is another matter. Current indications are this move is wildly unpopular and its adoption is floundering.
In Venezuela it's in everyday use
In a country with a truly basket-case economy like Venezuela I can imagine BTC making some sort of sense.
4x supply over the past 20 years is a crude average of about 7.5% inflation per year. Even worse, it's exponential.
But not everyone subscribes to this sort of extreme collectivist mindset.
You don't have to believe I derive value from it because I don't need you to believe it. It still works.
There is nothing to refute. I mostly just find it amusing that these people think we care. They're just talking to themselves.
It's a trap for people like me to even respond to this stuff, we could be out doing things instead of arguing the toss about whether sugar is tasty or not. Like yo, I like it and it works for me. I don't care whether the health service in aggregate likes me eating sugar.