Bitcoin Is a Hideous Monstrosity Made Out of Computers and Greed

Only decent link I can find on this is from 13 years ago with 33TWh:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...

Despite you making them rhetorical demonizations of crypto, the answers are actually “maybe? we don't know, what does Forrester and other market research firms say, do they have that data?”

(Other times when this is pointed out, people typically reveal that they view everything else as more useful than crypto - which naturally would then include gurus and affiliate programs - so their market size and country size emissions doesn't actually matter when this point is more accurately challenged. Just wondering if you had a more articulate argument or a more predictable one)

You get tokens for putting money in the box. You can sell the tokens on an exchange later for cash. The cash comes from exchange participants, not box people. All the box people receive the tokens they expect. They don’t receive tokens from new box people.

If it’s 1995 and Toys R Us is giving away Beanie Babies to the first 250,000 Elmo buyers, that’s not a Ponzi. If somebody buys lots of Elmos to flip Beanie Babies knowing 250,000 Beanie Babies are going to hit the market, they are delusional. It’s still not a Ponzi. It’s a bubble.

However, given that Bitcoin is jn the process of monetizing and may become the world's base layer of money, it stands to gain a lot of value the long term compared to the melting icebergs of central bank and commercial bank created fiat currencies.

If this doesn't make sense, please read "The Bitcoin Standard" and "Inventing Bitcoin" to understand this technological advance.

One can prefer sundials to watches, but reality was changed when the watch was invented.

There are no underlying assets.

You are literally conflating one tokenomic example to the entire space.

Going back to the topic of the "most vulnerable", a bank that you and I take for granted is a luxury in many of Africa's nations. Bitcoin is a permission-less banking system. Does it have technological hurdles for the average person to overcome? Yes. But this is all being worked on right now by people I talk to every day. The same way that most people have no idea how SMTP works, you won't really need to understand behind the scenes of Bitcoin. There are various levels of autonomy and people will fall on the spectrum of where they are comfortable, with the level of privacy / security that most fits their Bitcoin education.

You might find this short video interesting (only 10 seconds or so): https://twitter.com/HODLneverSODL/status/1518134911244320769...

M-Pesa only works in some African countries? And it relies on the benevolence of Vodafone Group and governments?

34 > 30

is that much adoption?

Bitcoin makes no such promises. It routinely had >80% drops in price.

Look up % of world population living in hyperinlationary environments to get your answer. The post-debt driven economy is one where a handful of people cannot devalue your labor with a press of a button.

> Whats the use case here exactly? Freedom from corrupt governments that debase your currency into oblivion, only to adopt another currency which suffers from the same ultimate fate. Financial inclusion is the use case. It's broad, it's ambitious and ultimately to entrepreneurial interpretation.

Bitcoin solved the Byzantine generals' problem in adversarial network contexts, by its innovative deployment of proof-of-work. Thus, bitcoin invented thermodynamically secured property rights, and property rights are a fundamental building block for human flourishing. Bitcoin provides a decentralized trustless source of truth, and none of the other cryptos do that because they're not nearly as widely adopted.

Bitcoin is a strong base layer that faster more anonymous payments can be based upon, such as Lightning or Liquid, and things like CoinJoin and PayJoin, which are trust less and noncustodial. You can't start with a squishly base layer and then build stable systems, but if you start with solid fundamentals, privacy and better user experiences can be built on top.

Bitcoin is also currently solving the natural gas industry's problem of flaring methane... portable mining rigs use the methane to generate electricity to provide network security to the Bitcoin network, while making natural gas extraction cleaner. Bitcoin mining is also incentivising and paying for the production of clean renewable energy on larger scales than anyone had figured how to fund. And some people use bitcoin mining to provide home heating in the winter. No other crypto is doing those things.

Care to explain how one can come to this claim based on first principles?

Maybe I'm misinterpreting this sentence of yours. I read it as: a hard money paradigm will inevitably lead to a very undesirable wealth distribuation (Gini coefficient --> 1) and there's no way to fix/prevent this other than moving from hard money to soft money.

I'd refute this claim. There are completely obvious ways to prevent Gini --> 1. Effective redistribution from wealthy to poor. The only hurdle to that is political systems, voters, governments or monarchs deciding to and then enacting it. Absolutely possible.

The Fed itself directly created 8T USD since 2009 (QE). Some of it in the past two years even went straight to consumer's pockets via the Treasury in the form of stimmies and forgivable PPP loans (helicopter money/MMT).

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...

That's a non-trivial amount, 41% of total M2 and 61% of the increase in M2 since 2009:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

Where did the rest of the increase in M2 come from? Fractional reserve lending by banks -- at interest rates artificially suppressed by Fed policies specifically to encourage lending/money creation.

Before the Fed was created in 1913, USD was created by fractional reserve lending by banks at market determined interest rates and the marginal increase in monetary gold and silver from mining output (typically 1-2%/yr).

This historic monetary system was dynamically unstable as mining output was uncorrelated with natural business cycles and unbackstopped banks were subject to runs during downturns. The Fed was created to solve these problems, specifically the panic of 1907.

Over time it's mission evolved from being a lender of last resort to actively targeting employment and consumer prices. Since the 1987 crash however, this official mandate was effectively replaced with one targeting asset prices - primarily stocks and houses (wealth effect targeting).

Normal business cycles were now increasingly distorted by the fed Fed responding to (or not wanting to hurt) asset prices for fear it would psychologically affect consumer and business spending and eventually employment.

This lead to a new instability: bigger booms created or exaggerated by easy Fed money, followed by bigger busts during the tightening phase.

Each boom/bust cycle led to more micromanagement by the Fed and thus more instability. Since 2008 (QE), and especially after 2020 (helicopter money) they have gone completely off the rails as seen by the M2 chart above and soaring consumer prices. "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon - Milton Friedman"

Exactly. This is a problem. It can be so advanced that almost nobody understands it.

Now take a look at how advanced Bitcoin is:

  Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins. It'll be distributed
  to network nodes when they make blocks, with the amount cut in half
  every 4 years.
  
  first 4 years: 10,500,000 coins
  next 4 years: 5,250,000 coins
  next 4 years: 2,625,000 coins
  next 4 years: 1,312,500 coins
  etc...
  
  When that runs out, the system can support transaction fees if
  needed. It's based on open market competition, and there will
  probably always be nodes willing to process transactions for free.

  Satoshi Nakamoto

People should ask "whose design?" then. Who's the beneficiary of this design?

What do you think is more likely to be true?

A. The wealthy/influencial/powerful/elites use their (disproportionate) power to influence the design of fundamentals of society - such as the monetary system - in a way that benefits/stabilizes their position at the top.

B. The wealthy/influencial/powerful/elites just let the design of fundamentals of society - such as the monetary system - be in whatever way it's shaped by society or political processes.

They think they have deep insights when saying "banks create money out of thin air", or "there is not enough money in the economy to pay down all debt". They also use the word "fiat" as if it's bad that a currency is backed by a government.

All the above are strong indication that there is something fundamental about the monetary system that someone fails to understand.

A lot of crypto has been bought because the buyer were under such illusions.

Bitcoin, with its Austrian hard money roots, stands head and shoulders above the crazy scammy mess of all the centralized altcoins (or "crypto" if you lile) that you right to criticize. Please don't lump real technological and computer science innovation in with a the crypto rug-pulls.

Not sure how SEPA helps an immigrant in the US trying to send money back home. Or a million other situations not involving places that have SEPA.

Your other options are greedy corporations. Wise wants $7 to transfer 1000 bucks to Europe. Bitcoin will continue working if corporations fail, change policies, arbitrarily decide not to do business with you, or jack up prices. Bitcoin is not subject to the whims of a single private organization.

Government sponsored options are also beholden to all sorts of invasive inspection as well. If you want to send more than $10k it can be a lot more work in some places.

So what crypto adds (beyond a hypothetical store of value) is the ability to keep your assets and transactins invisible (or nearly invisible) to the government.

There is no room for discussion here, and it's depressing to see how many people want to throw the baby out with the bathwater; instead of asking for it to be regulated in a sane manner they want to outright ban the use of said technology, which I would define as barbaric... imagine banning fire because people got burnt!

The blockchain, smart contracts and NFTs are amazing technologies that could do wonders for mankind if properly used, but too many people, including tech literates, refuse to dig into it after seeing folks being defrauded out of their life savings and ruining their lives because they took a loan for hundreds of thousands of dollars on a jpeg of a badly drawn monkey.

For them crypto is bad, period. There is nothing else to talk about because it's an absolute truth, what subject should there be to discuss? Might as well argue about the possibility of God not existing with religious extremists.

But the popularity of the criticism is increasing with its recent price drop.

First we start with scammers and crooks, then fast forward a little, and suddenly now we are doing civil forfeitures?

Either something is permissionless, or it isn’t.

You do instead point them to the big pieces of the pie chart.

Here's a good overview but anyone who wants to can find such info lying around everywhere: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/carbon-costs-quantifie...