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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

The whole premise of burning energy just for “proof of work” is what I hate.

I work in architecture and year after year the industry is pushing to squeeze every last bit of energy efficiency out of everything. Meanwhile bitcoin is like “BURN SOME COAL TO ACCOMPLISH LITERALLY NOTHING USEFUL! AND KEEP DOING IT FOREVER!”

And the crypto people will always bring up “Mining gold just to make gold bars is a waste of energy too” but guess what I don’t buy gold bars either.

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That "nothing useful" bit is where you don't get it.

Is Taylor Swift useful? Sex and the City? Options trading for Tesla stock?

You could eliminate 80% of the US service sector for not being useful. "Somebody wants to pay for it" is the best criterion and bitcoin fits.

If people want to say “I’m a bitcoin fanboy” to justify it that’d be one thing, but there’s always this insinuation that any day it’s going to find its killer use case that isn’t already solved better by a centralized system instead of only existing to buy in hopes of the price goes up

The killer use case has existed from day 1: remove the middleman. That is banks, or goverments. That's it. There's literally nothing else to it. Speculating on its value, while possible, has nothing to do with its purpose.

And yet here we are, discussing a Bitcoin ETF, which involves plenty of corporate middlemen and has no benefit to the Bitcoin community besides increasing Bitcoin's speculative value.

You reckon it's a charity to boost bitcoin holders' wealth? The purpose of this ETF is to extract profit, the rest is unintended.

Haha, ok, all successful investments are charities.

And I’m sure plenty of other people were buying and holding in exchanges like Coinbase already, instead of buying bitcoins in direct person-to-person cash transactions like the decentralization advocates imagine they will

Its purpose is to provide an escape hatch from fiat currency that steals people's wealth, available to everyone in the world, ultimately shutting down the global scam that is central banking.

It is the hardest money that mankind has ever seen, digital, with an issuance schedule that is set in stone - no select few people have the ability to effortlessly print it, stealing the wealth of the rest and corrupting the world at its core, causing third world poverty, endless wars, corrupt media etc.

I think its purpose was to provide fresh blood to the John Birch Society. It seems to be working remarkably well, in that respect.

Yes, a common side effect of going down the deep bitcoin rabbit hole and discovering how the world really works.

I'm sure you're aware of this... but every conspiracy theorist and cult member thinks this way. A moment of self-reflection may be in order.

It's very healthy to listen to both sides of an argument and theorise about conspiracies. It's the close-minded people programmed to laugh at them who need to self-reflect.

For one, a bitcoin wallet can't be seized by fiat by any 3-letter agency of any country. A fair amount of it is speculative, but unlike a pure-speculative ponzi scheme it's rooted in some appreciation of intrinsic value.

I'm confused by this comment. What do you mean "seized by fiat"? Custodial wallets can and have been seized by government agencies. Cold wallet storage devices can and have been seized. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, only imputed value.

Nobody can order the bitcoin network to freeze assets of Johnny Wanted the way they can order banks and other financial institutions. Nobody can stop you getting paid even for non-criminal activities the way Mastercard/Visa do.

If you lose or surrender you private key - fair enough, but that's not the same.

The first two are pure entertainment and hardly a comparison to an attempt at a new banking system.

Not just mining gold - think of the security required to simply hold gold. Those Brinks trucks aren't free.

Bitcoin is doing more to accelerate the adoption of wasted energy than any corporation on the planet. It is the buyer of last resort, open to anyone.

Compare that to the fiat system, do you get to vote for who runs the Federal Reserve? Can you verify the current supply of the US dollar or the maximum limit of dollars that can be printed?

Very privileged take to assume Bitcoin doesn't "ACCOMPLISH LITERALLY NOTHING USEFUL", when millions of people are using it to save and send for 15 years, and over 100 TRILLION dollars has been settled on the network.

> I work in architecture and year after year the industry is pushing to squeeze every last bit of energy efficiency out of everything.

So is the entire bitcoin mining industry, it is built into their ROI. Have you not noticed the J/Ghash ratio over the years?

> Have you not noticed the J/Ghash ratio over the years?

This is completely irrelevant because the protocol is designed to scale difficulty with the hashrate. The only benefit of improving J/Ghash is to get a leg up on other bitcoin miners.

If my operation is earning more ROI, that's my benefit.

The post you were replying to was talking about conserving energy, not maximizing ROI in a zero-sum game:

> I work in architecture and year after year the industry is pushing to squeeze every last bit of energy efficiency out of everything.

Comparing two apples is boring, it is much more fun to throw an orange into the mix.

So the whole bitcoin network now uses less energy than when it started? As that is what efficiency means.

Its for keeping the descentralized network secure, which is of extreme value. So no, "literally nothing useful" is utter bullshit.

Architecture isn't useful, it's a waist of resources. Every building should be identical, we just need one type of each building usage type, then we can get rid of the architects.

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