Bitcoin as a Nonviolent Tool Against State Financial Censorship
doria.fi
doria.fi
What? The entire point of being a tool against state financial censorship is that, by definition, it's illegal.
From "Letter from Birmingham Jail":
> An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. An unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because they did not have the unhampered right to vote.
As for criminals, they have learned that authorities understand blockchains a lot better than they used to, and that there are professional firms tracking crypto movements. It's all public after all. Unless they're in a jurisdiction where they're safe from prosecution because they have state backing, it's not really used illegally much any more. So these cases are more state terrorism, where countries like Russia or North Korea intentionally hurt businesses in enemy states, or at least turn a blind eye in the latter case. In those cases it's ultimately the internet that enables it.
So you're saying, all of that CO2 has been "invested" into our atmosphere, where it will continue getting the planet hotter (can we call it "hot storage"?) until somehow removed (someone else's problem!); in order to enable continued speculation, while the ridiculously overprovisioned infrastructure is not even doing much anymore, in terms of processing actual transactions?
Future of finance.
They're all 9x % proof of waste ... to prove wealth/"social" status.
The world used ~ 176000 TWh of energy in 2021, now it's likely more. [2]
Now let's say all the Bitcoin mining equipment (ASICS, ..) require another 50 % of the continuous electricity consumption of mining to be produced (random guess, no source), that'd be another: 65.5 TWh/a
So according to this, Bitcoin uses less than: 196.5 / 176000 = 0.11 % of total worldwide energy consumption.
According to this graph [3] the energy sector makes up 73 % of global greenhouse gas emissions. The three sectors beneath "energy" there being: a industry (coal/oil/gas), b transport (gasoline/diesel) and c buildings (heating oil/gas). All of these three mostly use fossil fuels as their energy inputs: coal, oil, gas, whereas bitcoin uses an electricity mix which has a non-negligible proportion of renewables in them.
So Bitcoin's climate footprint should be significantly smaller than 0.08 % of global emissions. That's less than 1/1200.
Now compare that to any of the stupid consumerism behavior we have in the rich parts of the world, where someone buys 100s of kgs of useless plastic crap each year, buys a stupidly over motorized pile of metal to drive around the block and show off, boosting their ego blowing exhaust into their fellow citizens' lungs and has a weekly barbecue session at their AC cooled suburban 1000s of sqft home.
These uses of energy add up to 100s more emissions than Bitcoin.
Sure, not everyone thinks Bitcoin is useful.
But do I think all these stupid plastic collectors figures and all other plastic crap is useful? Hell no. And do I think that a Hummer or Landrover Defender or your standard US pickup truck is a useful/reasonable vehicle? Hell no.
While Bitcoin makes just a tiny dent in global emissions, this other useless stuff makes not a tiny but a huge dent in emissions.
You can criticise Bitcoin all you want for this and that, but if you're honestly trying to make a point and suggest where emissions can be reduced to help the climate and you then point to Bitcoin .. then you're obviously either falling for anti Bitcoin narratives or your thinking doesn't work all that well.
[1] https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
The metric to compare bitcoin to is energy per transaction compared with EXISTING forms of digital finance with which it is competing.
The argument that "bitcoin may be bad energy-wise but are other things are too, so therefore don't worry about" it is a bad one. It's like saying, "sure child abuse is bad, but war causes way more suffering and there are still wars so no need to do anything about child abuse, at least until all war everywhere stops first. Oh and if you do try and stop child abuse while war exists then you are a hypocrite.". Bad premise, bad logic.
Completely irrelevant. Because other uses of energy (that me and lots of other people consider wasted or even harmful) are orders of magnitude larger and thus harmful than Bitcoin's.
Either you accept that not every person on the planet agrees upon which uses of energy are useful to them individually. Or you're basically saying "my opinion on which energy uses are legit and which aren't is the only one that matters", at which point we can stop discussing altogether because I don't really care about "discussing" with people who have this standpoint.
Those are the only two options? How about the one where I agree with you that there are other massively wasteful energy activities out there but that fact is not an argument for tolerating them or allowing for more. Bitcoin is crazy wasteful compared with other financial tools which can do the same thing. You seem to be saying that because some people can drive giant trucks when really all they need is a small car or better yet take public transport, that you should be able (and without any criticism) be able to burn a mountain of energy to get a transfer added to a public ledger. You are both being wasteful and its not ok!
If you care so much about having less harm done to the ecosphere then why are you currently debating about "tiny slice of greenhouse gases" (Bitcoin) that other people arguably find very useful, instead of focusing on the "bigger portion of the emissions pie" (perpetual consumption of unnecessary new stuff in the post-modern consumerist society)?
I have a hard time believing you care more about the environment than about trying to blow the supposed evilness of Bitcoin out of proportion.
> Bitcoin is crazy wasteful compared with other financial tools which can do the same thing.
Good, which are these?
The one financial tool that somewhat comes close is gold, and because the latter implies orders of magnitude slower transfers than Bitcoin and because it's harder to secure and comes with a few more downsides on top it's still far from "same thing".
It's not either/or, it is possible to care about both (calling on the previous analogy, you can be against both child abuse AND war). Also, sometimes the way to solve a big problem is too deal with all the little ones that make it up; for example, trillions of watt-hours so people can be conveniently paid when they put ransomware a hospital's computer system.
If this were the case, it would have been fitting for you to have written quite a few (maybe a few hundred) texts, discussing the problem "carbon/ecological footprint of exaggerated consumerism" if for the sake of simplicity we take length of text as a measure of effort invested in solving a problem.
Yes, it is possible to solve several problems in parallel. But putting a (hugely) disproportionate amount of effort into different problems when we're dealing with a set of problems of which some are arguably existential due to their order of magnitude, while others are absolutely not existential due to their order of magnitude .. well, doing that doesn't appear to make much sense (to me) and it makes me question whether the goal of solving the existential problems is really a shared goal.
False. Bitcoin might have originally been envisioned as "p2p electronic cash" but that's not really what its use/goal is anymore. Even though throughput and cost of transactions is not irrelevant to Bitcoin at this point, it is definitely far down in the list of priorities. The much more important aspects are now security and suitability/reliability as a store-of-value.
> It's like saying, "sure child abuse is bad, but war causes way more suffering and there are still wars so no need to do anything about child abuse, at least until all war everywhere stops first. ..
Wow, that's really just an astonishingly bad comparison.
What would you estimate? What proportion of people in the world would support the statement "child abuse is bad"? 99 %? 99.9 %? 99.999 %? Probably significantly more than 99 %, I'd guess. Why? Because the statement is kind of philosophically fundamentally true. The word "abuse" practically implies "bad". You'd sure have to search a long time to maybe maybe find a single person who'd say "child abuse is not bad" and who'd even be okay with "child abuse" having happened to them individually. And you'll have an even harder time trying to find people who'll publicly go on record stating "child abuse is a useful tool for society".
And you compare that to a technology where many people argue that it'll be a useful tool and society will benefit from it and they can even give arguments for that?
That's just ridiculous.
Now, of all people in the world, how many of those that know Bitcoin will support the statement "Bitcoin is bad"? Maybe 50 % or 70 % or it might even be 90 % (from perpetual campaigning against)? Whatever the number is, you'll find hundreds of thousands if not millions of people on the other side who'd be willing to publicly say "Bitcoin is useful" and give reasons you could then try to debate. You think you'll find even one person on the planet who's going to state "child abuse is useful and thus I'm going to make sure I'll have some for my children"?
Your comparison is so far off, it's completely meaningless.
A better comparison would be ... quite obviously ... gold.
You could say: "Gold isn't useful enough to legitimize the harm that's done through its mining even though many people like it. It is just a small dent in the carbon footprint worldwide but still. Compare that to steel production which is much more important for keeping society running but it also produces orders of magnitude more emissions and environmental destruction than making gold bars."
Now that'd be a somewhat legit comparison I'd be willing to discuss, but your comparison to child abuse, that's just absurd.
Maybe try this another way, if bitcoin used 1% of worldwide energy would that be too much? Where's the line where you would admit that its been crossed and bitcoin energy use is out of proportion to its utility? 5%? 50%?
There is no consensus for "Bitcoin is bad use of energy" as you're implying.
Energy/electricity use isn't inherently bad. All the different uses of energy cannot be classified in a binary way as either good or bad. But they can be sorted along a spectrum according to their usefulness. Their subjective usefulness to individual people which can then be summed up to some total.
Energy is limited so people/states/businesses prioritize some uses of energy over others in order to optimize their goals. When other people's energy use appears wasteful to you, you're free to point it out and even try to convince them, you might even try to sue them because their use case expels toxic chemicals that you'd rather not inhale. But just calling their use case bad "because it uses energy" sure won't convince them. Because practically everything humans do consumes energy.
At what exact percentage of total energy use the acceptable consumption of Bitcoin lies, no single person can/should decide. As with all purposes it should and will be decided by people collectively (through politics, consumption decisions, cultural discourse, ..) be it 1 % (which I'd say is ok, were Bitcoin to continue functioning for the next 100 years) or 5 % (which I'd personally deem too high for Bitcoin and thus wasteful).
Anything appears wasteful if you don't appreciate the reward it provides.
Ultimately the market will decide. The bitcoin network pays for the energy it uses, just as the gamer community pays for the energy it uses. If bitcoin isn't worth it's energy use, then it will use less energy as people won't be willing to pay the transaction fees and the miners will be paid less.
In a dictatorship run by a warlord who is printing money, extorting people, and generally should be resisted, Bitcoin is good.
for me it highlighted the relativity of “illegal“ When it comes to capital flows
should I respect any nation’s rationale for a capital control?
any nation’s rationale for freezing a custodial bank account or asset they know of? even in an individual nation with distributed enforcement, its not always respected or even an intended outcome
is arbitrarily “dirty” bitcoin automatically cleaned because any sovereign country seized it for their arbitrary reasons? could any random municipality/state/nation state offer cleaning as a service? can chain analysis software even consider that or are merchants and exchanges going to be stuck flagging deposits automatically because it hit a silk road address 10 years ago, 100 hops back?
Just now I tried opening an account at a few random Canadian banks, and they all say I need to be living in Canada. How is an average joe supposed to work around those requirements?
I'm not saying it should be easier either. When you're dealing with state-issued currencies there are reasons for those restrictions. But the draw of bitcoin is that it's politically neutral and you don't need to jump through the hoops of any particular country, or hire a lawyer to navigate foreign laws. Just download an open source app and you're ready to go.
Really solved a Euro banking issue I had for legitimate incoming SEPA transfers
I even used a US LLC and got a Euro bank account that European clients felt familiar and comfortable with
A lot of banks stopped servicing Americans due to the paperwork with FATCA treaty, but that was 12 years ago and some have stepped in to fulfill the niche
If you enjoy the protections, privileges and rights that nation affords you then yes. You have an obligation to follow the rules, or strive to change them through political means, just the same as everyone else.
There’s so much whining about rights these days, but so little talk about responsibilities. Every freedom you enjoy is a consequence of someone else taking on a responsibility for it.
the financial system is based on whitelisting transactions based on what the other countries say is legal or not
I personally have never done anything remotely morally controversial with cryptocurrency. All taxes paid, no drugs.
But I've almost certainly engaged in "money laundering" because it doesn't seem to be a well defined concept. It seems to me that the idea is that normal peer to peer interaction has to be regulated and reported. We need passport scans and logs of previous transactions and all of that stuff.
I wouldn't even say that I don't agree with that - I just don't do it. I'm yet to be given a real explanation for why AML and other nonsense should exist beyond "that's just how it is".
(especially DDOS criminals.. they are the reason some sites switch from plain servers to Cloudflare, which is pretty bad for anonymous browsing.)
It adds a little bit of friction to everyday users. It's not like the only way to derive benefit from money is to spend it in a regulated manner.
This may not matter much if you are talking about small amounts of money, but ransomware is not small.
"I made a $10 million from ransomware and safely spent it on new house and luxury car, with little fear of anyone" is has a very different risk/benefit value from "I made $10 million from ransomware and had to deal with a various illegal dealers to cache it out (who now know my name and the fact I have millions of dollars). And I cannot spend it on new house or luxury car because IRS might get interested".
(Granted, it is not perfect, I am sure there people with lots of illegal connections, as well as whole countries without AML laws. But nothing is perfect, and I am sure the AML laws do a great job at discouraging people from becoming cybercriminals)