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Comment by halpert | Hacker News Reader

I feel like you shouldn't complain about bitcoin if you drive a car or have been on an airplane in the last year. Or if you have received goods manufactured overseas. Or live / work in a building that uses concrete. Or consume beef. Or consume factory farmed food. Or eat fish. Or...

Just to add some numbers: bitcoin is responsible for 0.1% of global carbon emissions, and will decrease (as a %) as CO2 emissions of other sectors grow: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/bitcoin-...

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Announcing that your tire-burning scheme produces "only" 0.1% of global carbon emissions is not the win that you seem to think it is.

I’m not pro Bitcoin. I’m just pointing out that your tire burning scheme is the other 99.9%. You like those tires, but not these ones.

Maybe it isn't obvious, but even the most egregious excesses in our current economy produce material and economically advantageous (if far from optimal) outcomes: a jet flying from NYC to London physically moves a human being and their possessions between two continents.

It's not clear what bitcoin is providing, other that a self-sustaining speculative market. As such, even 0.1% of global emissions is particularly egregious.

> It's not clear what bitcoin is providing

It's pretty clear:

1. A way to store value without it being stolen by governments.

2. A secure way to pay without the fees and limitations that banks and governments impose on us.

3. A way to freely speculate

In summary: It's providing financial freedom. If you prefer financial slavery, that's fine, you can still have your fiat money.

If emissions are too high, then let's increase emission taxes.

> 1. A way to store value without it being stolen by governments.

I've never understood this. You're still living somewhere; the government can knock down your door and gently rubber hose[1] you into handing over your supposedly state-proof cryptocurrency. Indeed, there's probably a strong positive correlation between "legitimately afraid of the government taking my money" and "my government wouldn't bat an eye at torturing me to get my bitcoins." But for the average bitcoin user, it's more of a LARP than a reality.

I think there's ample real-world data against (2), and (3) is, well, the problem.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis

> the government can knock down your door and gently rubber hose

Yes, but that requires more effort than just saying "hey bank, freeze that guy's account" or saying "Hey central bank, just print money like there's no tomorrow"

> Indeed, there's probably a strong positive correlation between "legitimately afraid of the government taking my money" and "my government wouldn't bat an eye at torturing me to get my bitcoins."

I don't think the correlation is that strong. Government taking your money, or shenanigans like the Argentinian corralito (against 100% innocent people, mind you) can happen even in democratic countries, but it's stranger, and requires more resources for the government to torture you, including psychological torture.

For some reason, I always thought that people (well, mostly jwz) were exaggerating when they said that cryptocurrencies contributed to climate change. But 0.1% of global emissions is an insanely large amount for the value that cryptocurrencies provide.

What are you comparing against when you call it insanely large?

Do you know what is the carbon footprint of choosing an SUV when a compact car would suffice summed over everyone who did that? Frankly, I do not know, but I suspect it is more than 0.1%

21.6% of global emissions come from cars, compared to 0.1% from cryptocurrency.

Cars are actively harmful to society [1] while cryptocurrency provides free exchange of value unhindered by authoritarian governments.

The hypocrisy of those suggesting we ban cryptocurrency while they use cars is staggering.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSSNlM3Au1A

Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.

Gold & banking contribute more

"You wish to improve society, and yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent."

I don't wish to improve society. I'm just highlighting people's hypocrisy. No one in the west can complain about climate change. Our entire lifestyle is so wasteful in every way.

https://i.imgur.com/gPllQYY.png

Your funny comic doesn't make you not a hypocrite

> No one in the west can complain about climate change.

This is a thought terminating cliché and not only obviously wrong but dangerously so.

You don’t get points for looking like you’re next-level. Your lifestyle is most likely at least as wasteful as mine (I’d wager more so), so what you’re doing here, is finding an excuse for it.

I'm not finding an excuse. I'm just accepting that my lifestyle is a huge source of carbon emissions. I'm also accepting that the last time the earth was more-or-less carbon neutral was prior to the industrial revolution. No one is clamoring for a return to that type of lifestyle, especially because doing so would require a massive decrease in the population. You can rattle your saber about Bitcoin all you want, but it's not going to change reality: there is no way to sustain this many humans with our quality of life and be carbon neutral, let alone negative.

> Just to add some numbers: bitcoin is responsible for 0.1% of global carbon emissions, and will decrease (as a %) as CO2 emissions of other sectors grow:

Just so you're aware, the link you've posted is pointing out that Bitcoin could grow from 0.1% to 0.9% of total CO₂ emissions.

Bitcoin may be one of the very few sectors that doesn't have any sort of plan for decreasing CO₂ emissions in the future.

My house protects me. Food feeds me. My iPhone from China does many many things that I find useful. Bitcoin hopefully allows me to accumulate wealth but otherwise adds no value to my life.

Doesn’t seem like an appropriate comparison.

Food feeds you, but many people choose to eat food that is wasteful. Your home protects you, but many people live in large homes in climates that require heating and cooling. Your iPhone from China does things you like, which really is what this comes down to. You like iPhones. You don't like Bitcoin. There is nothing more to this argument other than preferences.

Seems more like your initial point slipped quite a bit into farce since you made it.

There’s no argument that people do things and use things that are wasteful, but what does Bitcoin do? What utility does it currently provide?

And yea, I’ll keep my bitcoin holdings under one percent of my overall investments if I continue to hold it at all. At this point I only have it because of FoMo.

I don’t know why people are so obsessed with “Bitcoin’s utility.” So many things in our life have little utility other than being pleasurable. Many people get on planes to go on vacation purely because it feels good to get away. They don’t ask themselves “what utility does my vacation have?” Even if Bitcoin was just a speculation market, that would still be a considerable amount of enjoyment for people. Many people love to gamble after all. And of course, we know Bitcoin can be used as a store of value, used to transfer value quickly across the globe, and used to implement smart contracts.

Because they're looking for some reality-based reason for its value, so as to judge whether it's currently over or under-valued and can rate, like with stocks listed on the NYSE, whether it's time to buy, hold, or sell. There are exceptions in the market eg Tesla, with it's P/E of ~200, or GME and the WSB nonsense, but most other stocks have a P/E ratio based on fundamentals. Fundamentals that bitcoin utilitarians are looking for in cryptocurrency and are coming up short.

Investors might want to understand Bitcoin's utility for that reason. I don't think this applies to Bitcoin's critics, however.

Permission-less transactions and wealth storage are an unprecedented technology, people living outside of authoritarian regimes struggle with this concept.

No you don't get it, they use those things, so they're OK! They don't use crypto, so it must have no usecases, and must be banned!!

lets do a bad thing because other things are bad and we do them isn't wisdom.

In this case, I'm not trying to impart wisdom. I'm just trying to show what a hypocritical position it is to criticize Bitcoin for being a waste of resources when the entire western lifestyle is predicated on waste. In many ways, it's a form of armchair activism. Like, "Hmm, how could we solve global warming? I know, let's start by banning this thing that doesn't impact me at all, even though my wasteful lifestyle is a much larger contributor to the problem by many orders of magnitude."

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