An Ubernerd Weighs In
krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
The mathematical fallacy is that the cost of mining never adds up. The total amount of energy ever expended by all miners that will ever be produced amounts to such a small amount of total power as to be inconsequential compared to the commerce transacted. Krugman should optimize a few computer programs, and then he might understand why he's barking up the wrong tree.
Krugman misses what every nerd, uber or otherwise, sees plain as day. The mining is simply irrelevant. There will be 22M coins, give or take, and the joules to find the hashes simply do not matter. And when the coins are all found, the miners will continue to simply clear transactions, which any network needs, and furthermore still doesn't create any meaningful cost.
Bitcoin has problems, but the mining is beside the point. and his follow on argument is... bitcoin is valuable now because nerds conflate economics with technology, and will soon pop? That's insipid and unarguable - it's just an ad hominem attack on a group.
The only fallacy is when people grant that person's thoughts higher or lesser value while the words don't stand by their own merit and explanation. That fallacy is what happens. Shocking degrees of ineptitude are given enormous weight in society, often through glamor alone.
In addition to that, he _ALL THE FUCKING TIME_ writes about how recent years have shown that you cannot argue from position (in doing so often joking about "the award") but that your arguments must carry themselves no matter who you are.
So essentially, the Krugman whose blog I read, again and again states the exact opposite of the things that you accuse him and his "adherents" of.
Nothing I've written says that there aren't people who shun such fallacy and always think critically. However, there are a great deal of people who use Krugman as a crutch in thought and in citations, especially due to the prize. If you're not one of them, good for you. My underlying point is pretty simple. Here's a parallel so we're not focused on Krugman.
End-of-the-world predictors, and the like, sometimes recant about being wrong too and may joke about it. What do we take from this? Being wrong about matters that are painfully obvious is of valid consideration, especially when judging future patterns of unsubstantiated claims in the same domains. We mustn't forget the grains of salt.
This means bitcoins are not a stable store of value compared to other currencies, which makes it difficult to serve a viable replacement, no matter how good a medium of exchange the technology makes it.
People are latching on to the mining issue, and failing to focus on the store of value issue, which is really the big economic challenge for Bitcoin. I think that's the point he's making in this post.