Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

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> we as a society are doing insane things like burning large amounts of fossil fuels

Period. Shutting down Bitcoin won't solve global warming, and Bitcoin doesn't require fossil fuels necessarily to run. This is a tired argument that blames the ills of the world on one thing that you don't particularly like or see the benefit of. Bitcoin just likes abundant, cheap energy just like everything else in our modern world.

Technological societies require increasing amounts of energy. The issue is that fossil fuels are easier to generate electricity out of, favoured by governments, lobbies and voters alike, so renewables are more expensive. If your issue is burning large amounts of fossil fuels, you should work on this problem rather than complaining about one user downstream of the problem. It's easy to point the finger because it's easy to calculate how much energy bitcoin uses (transactions per day * energy per transaction), so it's easy to make a one-line viral tweet blaming all the ills of the world on it, while there are much more wasteful businesses whose energy usage is hard to quantify that everyone conveniently ignores.

It is so tiring to have to explain this every time on every HN thread, but I guess it's always so easy to convince oneself there is a simple solution to very hard problems. "Just shut Bitcoin down, I don't see a use for it so it's useless."

A proof-of-work system intentionally wastes energy as a means of doing a distributed spreadsheet. That's it.

When you use scale that spreadsheet to track currency, a proof-of-work system wastes massive amounts of energy, by design, all to keep the distributed spreadsheet honest.

Energy is scarce and expensive. Wasting huge amounts of it for a proof-of-work crypto systems drives up the cost of electricity for everyone.

Beyond that, all electricity generation has negative external effects, including carbon release, pollution, or even just wasting space. We are all impacted by those effects. It doesn't matter if the proof-of-work system uses "green" electricity, it's still intentionally wasting massive amounts of electricity and other resources that could be used elsewhere, all just to change values on a spreadsheet.

And just to think of the energy that you wasted arguing this tired point! It’s about trust.

You don’t see it has value because you trust in authority. For those that don’t trust in authority, they need a proof of work to prove that someone else… did the work. Dont trust, verify.

That no-trust, verify model is valuable to me. It’s a one way valve. Super useful when you can’t trust anyone around you.

Bitcoin is money for enemies. If my enemy and I can transact in an adversarial environment without relying on some subjective truth, this is valuable.

> Bitcoin is money for enemies. If my enemy and I can transact in an adversarial environment without relying on some subjective truth, this is valuable.

What are you transacting? Ultimately, you're going to be transacting in a real world "thing", rather than just something on the chain. So you haven't actually solved anything, there is still a layer of trust involved. You still rely on your enemy to either make the transaction after you deliver the "thing", or you rely on your enemy to deliver the "thing" after you make the transaction.

Sure, you can stand there with guns to heads, but then you could just do it in cash, no need for bitcoin.

You should appreciate that the trust assumptions in your example have been minimized to a point not before possible for digital transactions; in principle removing all possible third-party interference in remote transactions.

If you're going to argue about failures in practice, I'm not interested, because I agree (likely in a way more open-minded to moving forward than your mindset of giving up).

Yes, I agree, bitcoin (I'm using bitcoin as a proxy for others here) does that. But it turns out that most of the world doesn't value that property all that highly when combined with all the downsides of bitcoin.

The vast majority of transactions are from people buying and selling crypto, not for real world cases, just trying to make a profit in fiat.

We've had 15 years now, and we can still ignore crypto. Most people do. I chose not to, in case it made me rich, and it seems to be working ok towards that goal.

I don't see what you mean by "giving up", because that is still presupposing that there is a real problem that the technology is solving, that people are ignoring out of laziness or spite or something.

I'm not going to argue you or anyone should find the value aforementioned.

But I think the "it's been 15 years" argument is hollow. Clearly Bitcoin has an every-growing community of dedicated holders, and Bitcoin has surely increased the general skepticism of the monetary system.

I think you are conflating a speculative vehicle with an inflation hedge. Bitcoin is surely great for both depending on your timeline, but you strawman it a bit by appealing to the lowest common denominator who doesn't get and doesn't hold it.

It's provably scarce, it's highly locally securable (big job, but possible for most) and as a scarce asset, it's relatively cheap and easy to transfer. Yes, it failed as money (on the base layer), and that was its stated goal, but I'll readily give credit where it is due.

Thousands of cryptocurrencies are scarce. I can create a new one tomorrow which will also be scarce. That is necessary but not sufficient to create value.

It isn't cheap and easy to transfer. Tech nerds find it so, but get out the bubble and almost no-one else does.

The things I like about bitcoin is that it is indeed a trust free transaction mechanism, and provided you evade the law, there is no inbuilt mechanism to sanction anyone from using it. And yes, in theory it presents an alternative to traditional finance. I like that we have this now, as a threat so to speak.

Fantastic.

But now what? In reality, almost no-one cares. That is just the raw reality. It is too complicated, too insecure, too risky for most of society. I personally do not see any of this being overcome, and I never expect it to become anything other than a speculative vehicle in which most chain transactions are just people buying and selling it from each other for fiat money.

If you cannot describe a way to update a spread sheet with equal security as scaled PoW then your premise that it 'wastes' energy is unfounded.

> It is so tiring to have to explain this every time on every HN thread, but I guess it's always so easy to convince oneself there is a simple solution to very hard problems. "Just shut Bitcoin down, I don't see a use for it so it's useless."

It must feel tiring to you, because you're at an impasse. You clearly believe what you believe, but that doesn't mean you are correct. You could consider, you could be completely incorrect, and wasting enormous amounts of energy on a concept that achieves almost nothing.

Put it this way, if bitcoin disappeared tomorrow, the world wouldn't stutter, it wouldn't even blink. "The unbanked" argument is largely bunkum, a few anecdotes thrown together to create a moral for the bitcoin narrative.

But in the end, it could disappear, and nothing of value would have been lost.

So, there are a small subset of people (like yourself) who value bitcoin. The rest don't. When you look at it from their perspective, it is easy to see why they think burning huge amounts of energy every day for nothing is a waste. An enormous waste.

PS. For what it is worth, I am a long term bitcoin holder (well, since 2017, still relatively late). I wait for the day when I can cash out to retire in style, and I sincerely hope that people keep pretending that it is worth something other than to sell it to the next person for more fiat money.

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