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Comment by UltraSane | Hacker News Reader

Why? BTC is not just worthless, it has negative value due to how much electricity it takes to securely mine new blocks.

It's worth around 85k USD at the time you wrote the comment

Only because it is being subsidized by 20 to 40 gigawatts of electricity. It is basically a ponzi scheme where the increasing difficulty transfers wealth from new comers to early adopters.

Did you read the paper? There exists a technology that has purely enforceable property rights. What is that actually worth? I don't know.

Yeah yeah, I've read the arguments about liquidity issues, shutting down the rails, making it illegal to trade, etc. but that's beside the point and depends on a thousand future variables to play out. So I don't know if btc will make it or not, but I do know property rights mean everything to humans. They literally determine whether not one is a slave (I am my own property). So just the ability to have a technology enables pure property rights to a world where nobody really has enforceable property rights over anything seems pretty interesting to me.

Property rights are enforced with guns.

That's why Monero is superior; no amount of guns is going to help somebody steal property that they don't know you have.

A 5$ wrench bar is enough to make you give me all the moneroj you have eventually. I won't know when that point is and will just continue using the wrench until I am sufficiently sure you have given me all.

Shame about it's tail emission and poor supply audit-ability

So is theft. Depends on who has the most guns.

> So just the ability to have a technology enables pure property rights to a world where nobody really has enforceable property rights over anything seems pretty interesting to me.

Bitcoin doesn't enforce property rights. The only thing you own is your bitcoin. The fact that I "own" my house and the land it is built on is enforced by the state with guns.

You're not getting what I'm saying. Before this technology, the concept of property rights could not be defended, depending on the attacker. This tech allows that, even if it is just for one use case.

That's like saying cars have negative value because of how much oil it takes to run them.

But cars are useful.

Cars have the benefit of transporting humans and goods around.

It's more like saying a hypothetical car which moves itself by using gasoline as a propellant rather than fuel for its combustion engine would have negative value.

Sure, using fuel (of all things) for propulsion would be one way to move a vehicle, but it would be inefficient by design.

Bitcoin, at least, was created during a time where there was no alternative to security-by-inefficency, but PoS and other consensus mechanisms are pretty battle-tested now

Bitcoin has the benefit of being the first way in human history of being able to transfer value between two countries in a way that a corrupt bureaucrat, judge, or customs official can't freeze, reverse, or steal it. That's the benefit Bitcoin brings humanity, and to me, I prefer it to having a car.

Proof of Stake is an absurd security proposition. Stakeholders are immediately centralized. In every single PoS coin, the governance immediately becomes the exchanges because they always hold the most coins. They can and have used this to guide PoS coins towards governance unfavorable to the users, like as happened with Steem.

Bitcoin consumes 20 to 40GW to process 7 transactions per second. Using 30GW means about 4 billion joules per transaction. And transactions per second don't scale with more electricity. It is the least efficient technology ever created.

Diminishing value certainly it's called depreciation

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