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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Comparing BTC to beef is the wrong comparison: we should be comparing BTC to USD. Over 95% of the USD money supply exists in digital form only; while there's no proof-of-work element to creating new USD the electricity to run all of the servers at all of the banks, Federal Reserve, Treasury department, etc is non-trivial. The physical protection of the money supply (Secret Service, FBI) also has massive cost and impact. And the ultimate environmental impact is the "full faith and credit" of the united States governement -- which translates to the US military-industrial complex and the threat of force of arms -- which causes far more environmental damage.

(And yes, we do use our military to protect the USD: we killed two heads of state primarily because they wanted to price their oil in something other than USD. Had they succeeded that would have killed the petrodollar system.)

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If you would like to compare to USD, then also compare the volume of transactions....Carbon / transaction is massively lower in USD than Bitcoin. Especially because bitcoin is rarely used to buy anything. its just a speculative asset.

If you want to drag the MIC into this, then also drag the rest of the world economy. Dollars are not used to only buy guns, just like bitcoin isn't just for drugs...

It's hard to know where to start with such an all-encompassing, weird, hot take like this. I'd like to start the bidding with "no; your slow-moving, not-suitable-for-purpose-as-a-payments-system distributed ledger is not the functional equivalent of the entire global banking system".

Ah but if we're going down that waterslide of a slippery slope

The entire planet hedges its currency against the USD. Obviously every financial system on Earth needs to be included in that comparison. With their own servers, people, armies etc

And that says nothing of the people using those currencies to execute transactions to buy things such as oil and gas, of course!

Clearly Bitcoin is the solution as the USD is "indirectly" the cause of literally 100% of environmental damage

What he's comparing to Bitcoin is not EVERY SINGLE USE of the USD, but the actual USD network (the Fed and it's member banks) and it's security component (the US military, which is the ultimate enforcer of dollar hegemony).

This is comparable to the Bitcoin nodes and the miners.

Except bitcoin can't even come close to handling the number of transactions that occur in USD.

Bitcoin is more comparable to FedWire which has very similar throughput. In a Bitcoin world, it would just be the base layer.

So it would be much the same as the fiat world for the average person. Just new masters.

Bitcoin is not at all comparable to USD - for starters if USD was as volatile as BTC there would be open revolts.

You think the USD is stable? Being the least dysfunctional currency doesn't make it a good currency. And the trillions of dollars of inflation that's happened in the last 15 years is setting us up for far more than a mere revolt.

please explain how inflation over the last 15 years has hurt you? How about the deflation in bitcoin? Have you bought stuff with bitcoin? Bitcoin is essentially useless as a currency because nothing you buy appreciates as much as bitcoin. For the rest of the economy it is much better to a stable currency in exchange terms.

Inflation hurts me every time I go out to dinner and have to pay $100 for a simple meal for two.

BTC as an asset can be used as collateral. It doesn't have to be used just for trade. Maintain your LTV and the daily swings in BTC price are less relevant over the long term, while still be an effective store of wealth.

so, you take a loan in...USD to actually transact, and then hold an asset? so, why BTC, which is backed by nothing, when you could do this with a big portfolio of stock? Bitcoin is not really unique if used this way.

edit to add: owning bitcoin as a hedge to inflation has not worked. for about a decade of very low inflation, bitcoin was deflating. As soon as inflation started to rise, bitcoin lost 60% of its value. great hedge.

Do you use credit cards? Isn't that just taking out a loan and paying it back? Can you not fathom doing the same with BTC?

How do you use stock as collateral? Can anyone do that without having to ask for permission?

The 'btc is backed by nothing' argument is old and weak. We're over 10 years into this and it is still 20,000x more valuable than when it started. Try a new trope.

LoL if you sign a future contract in Bitcoin you could get wiped out in a week just on currency fluctuations.

Inflation is one of the singularly most important economic inventions and is almost wholly responsible for getting us out of the 50 year recession that occurred in the second half of the 19th century.

All those entities you mention provide a lot of services beyond tracking transactions and balances, which is fundamentally the only thing bitcoin can do.

The crypto world ends up re-creating versions of many of these entities, and their power usage should be counted if you're going to put the entirety of the financial industry's power usage on USD.

The energy use to utility ratio of bitcoin sucks now and it's unlikely to get much better with scale.

- The comparison can still be valid. It's not mutually exclusive. - The damage wrought by BTC may be small in comparison to USD but still significant

Poisoned apples and organic oranges. The petrodollar system is explicitly underpinned by fossil fuels while bitcoin just wants the cheapest electricity.

Perhaps this made more sense if people used Bitcoin more for buying stuff than speculation.

Huh yeah except we use the military for a lot more stuff

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