Erlich_Bachman

> useless crypto "currency" that literally doesn't do anything

You are very disconnected from reality of millions of people. Can you not try to see that? Can you not respect their opinion and their values? Do you just consider your opinion of Bitcoin the valid and truthful one?

How exactly is that different from someone who hates porn and calls it "useless time waster that doesn't do anything"?

> use more energy than everything you just described combined globaly

Pretty sure you're orders of magnitude wrong about that.

Also there are very specific, actionable and already growing things on the roadmap to sustainability:

- Green energy/proper carbon taxing of energy production

- Lowering of block reward to stabilize the transaction fee and find the proper price, with relation to how many miners we really need vs how much people are willing to pay for transactions.

- L2 solutions making bitcoin a payment network and not only a store of value. Like Lightning network which works today, as we speak, is stable, and is still only going to get better and better because it's very early in the lifecycle of that technology.

> Bitcoin is considered by nearly zero of anyone of any actual note to be important to our future finance system.

How can you even be honest with yourself with that line, when it nowadays rarely goes 3 weeks between each consecutive All-Time-High? What is your theory behind that?

I don't know if you have noticed, but people actually make use of Bitcoin as well. Just because there are some speculators doesn't mean that there aren't millions of people using BTC and sending transactions every day. Also the fact that USD/Visa is much bigger right now, doesn't either mean that there aren't millions of people who use crypto.

This is a very important question. But shouldn't we be asking this of every company and every consumer of all electricity everywhere? What does it have to do with mining. This has to do with electricity production, its regulation and proper taxing.

How much energy does watching porn consume? Playing video games? Watching a movie? Browsing Facebook? Using a ski chair? Visiting an amusement park? Going in vacation? Cooking your favorite type of food? Making ice cream? Driving to your friends? Listening to music? Concerts? Having a party? Banking? Casinos? As a species we use energy to meet our goals. Those goals may be situated anywhere in our hierarchy of needs. Some are essential, some could be considered trivial. But they are all important for their consumers.

Bitcoin is now considered by some important for our future finance system. While not everybody agrees, this may be more important than countless other ways we use energy, for much more trivial reasons.

Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.

There is a well-thought out and well-designed process for all stages of this. You can read up on that on the https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/

That's not what they asked.

> a social contract

Just like the rest of the cryptos that require all the participants to use specific protocol and software and agree on specific rules.

That's just not an accurate nor truthful account of what happens in practice.

The example you gave has nothing to do with changing the PoW function to counteract ASICs. Both Bcash and bitcoin classic were forked because of completely different reasons, and had people who believed in those reasons defend the new forks and run the node software etc. For example XMR has been doing ASIC-deterrent forks for years now with great success.

The freely-printed, non-gold-backed flavor of USD?

Not sure if it is helpful to reduce every issue to a one-dimensional scale of capitalism/socialism. Particularly this specific issue is about privacy culture, corruptability of big tech, government and use of technologies, surveillance, etc... There are so many more societal and just plain epistemological axis than just socialism/capitalism.

That's still incredibly sketchy.

What any sane engineer would do is to keep testing these cars with a safety driver and gather anough information/miles to claim higher statistical safety than a human driver, while keeping track that those miles were really in fact driven without intervention/(or with predictable and managed intervention). Once they would have those numbers, then they would know for sure that the car is safe and they could release/manufacture hundreds of thousands/unlimited number of units to the market. If they didn't - it means either the car really isn't tested or it doesn't do what they claim it does.

Releasing a 100 vechicles just doesn't make sense, unless the claims are somehow shady or misrepresentative.

> There is no freedom of opportunity without societal context. I am, as a man, legally free to wear a skirt in my country, yet I've never done and I've also met almost none who did - because of the socials costs this would incur. And skirt wearing is obviously 100% culture, 0% genes.

I see...

You need some serious twisting of the objective reality and ignoring a lot of things to arrive at that "skirt wearing is 100% culture" conclusion. But if you do believe that then of course it's easy to see how the rest follows from it.

I do not see it at all the same way.

Skirt wearing, as well as other clothes, especially "beautiful/sexu" clothes, is very related to the sexuality of people and the differences of how that sexuality plays out different in males/females. It has physiological differences, visual differences, ideological differences, practical differences in sexual selection, etc. To say that all that is just societally constructed is basically the same as saying "gender is purely a social construct", which, IMO, is 100% military-grade bullshit. It is used by ideologs to split the society and promote certain political agendas, it does not come from science.

I can imagine a society where it would not be about skirts per se, but it would be about some other very similar piece of clothing, that would similarly demonstrate female features, and signal things like health, sexual proclivities, sexual availability, age, sexual preferences etc. Those clothing pieces would also talk to the same centres in our brain that understand beauty, symmetry, healthy body shapes, etc. Most of those things are rooted in biology or deeper, even if there is a thick societal layer of covering on top of that.

> this by itself is a contradiction. what makes a country egalitarian?

No it's not.

What makes a country egalitarian is set of laws and practices that give people most possible choice and regulate on a legal level the amount of prejudice the people have to face.

In other words, the amount of freedoms to choose that people get.

In the western developed countries, the more freedoms a country gives to people, the farther apart genders become in their self-expressed (self-chosen) occupations and intersts. Explain that.

> maybe let's wait a generation or 2 more before concluding women biologically don't like math.

Well it's been exactly more than two generations and all the data is moving in the wrong direction from your hypothesis. A lot of people feel like they have waited enough to make these conclusions.

Just calling someone a quack is just not a good argument, you need to show your reasoning instead.

> where gender equality was officially mandated and thus stronger than it is even now in Germany

How do you build that argument? If it was equality of outcome that was officially mandated, that is exact opposite of true freedom of opportunity.

Also I'm not sure why you are talking about math grades, when the discussion was specifically about interests, - ie, how many of those girls then proceed into careers in mathematical disciplines. Just because someone gets good grades in school in a subject, doesn't mean that the person is going to choose (ie, is intereste in) pursuing that subject as a life career path.

> f that’s the case then it’s still a problem we created

Why? Why can't there just be innate biological differences in what people are interested in, between the genders, as a lot of data suggests.

Also if that is your hypothesis, how do you explain the data point that shows that the more egalitarian (free and fair) a country is, the higher the differences between the gender interests?

Also JBP is simply quoting the research in the social and psychological and psychometric fields that already exists, and is being done by a lot of other scientists. Isn't that the exact opposite of being "a hack"?

I don't understand your criticism, it doesn't seem to make much sense.

They have done exactly what you are proposing, in that they don't require users to provide KYC to use the browser. KYC is only required to use an additional, optioal feature inside the browser. It works well without any private information, and it even allows some wallet features like redistributing your tokens to content creators you like.

You do understand it's based on regulation, right? That there is no way to do what they are doing legally without KYC for withdrawals? What exactly does your implying use of the word "hostage" mean? That you don't like the laws of the countries Brave is operating in?

Yes, and the variety that you get will not look like 50%/50% gender spread in every single field and profession, because there are innate differences between genders that come to the surface the more you remove social pressure and tyranny. That's literally the core argument of what Jordan B Peterson has been saying, and he has been getting a lot of flak in the mainstream media for that. So it's a controversial topic for some reason.

> Did you understand me?

I probably understood even more than you were willing to share: your level of knowledge about this topic.

> gender role trolling

What does gender has to do with anything? You brough it up, not me. Also where did I "troll" you? The word "housewife"? Not sure why you would take offence in that, for me it is not a negative or lower-value term, it simply refers to a person that has chosen and has had the possibility and privilege to spend most of their time at home taking care of their family. I could just as easily have used "hairdresser" or "bricklayer", those people have equally likely little to do with crypto and have the same level of knowledge about bitcoin that you seem (assuming by that spelling, in which I could be wrong of course) to have. That's why I wonder, where did you pick that up? That spelling? Nobody in the industry spells it that way, that's all.

On a somewhat related note, I just wonder for my personal interest, why do you write it that way? "BitCoin". You are just signalling everyone that you haven't done any deep research, you have not read any meaningful amount of articles or books or studied it in depth... It is spelled "bitcoin". "BitCoin" is how a housewife would spell it (no disrespect or negativity towards housewives, it is simply an example of a person who does not know much about bitcoin and has just heard the name on the tele or something).

But did you really include Lightning Network in your mental calculations? If so, care to elaborate on what exactly would stop it from working? (I mean it already works now, there is nothing technical that is going to stop it from scaling)?

Pretend that someone is really reading and trying to understand for a moment ;).

What do you see in Cardano that makes it a poor candidate for a future blockchain? Governance? Functionality? Algorithms? Investment?

Your point could be truth in theory, and/or in the future.

However, in practice, it seems that it almost works the other way around.

To mine on BTC, you cannot enter the game with 10$ to your name. You can't buy a mining rig, it is way too wasteful to mine on your existing CPU, etc.

However if we look for example at staking in Ethereum, there are decentralized (no trust required) pools that allow you to stake however little amount of ETH. The chain itself will require at least 32ETH to run a single meaningful staking contract, but through pooling this is directly practically accessible to anyone with even small amount of ETH.

Maybe try reading the post again? I have no affiliation or even opinion about that coin, but it is painfully clear for that post only that the proposed problem of value is

"valid consensus mechanism that scales of PoS and PoW networks".

Half of the comments on this page complain about how Bitcoin uses too much energy and how PoW is wasteful. This is a direct (allegedly, if what they write is correct) solution to exactly that.

There are millions of people who use it, trade it, store their value in it, program more software for it etc. They see the answer, they get the point.

Can you please just answer this - do you suppose they all halt what they are doing and wait for an undeterminate amount of time for you to also get it, before they can go on with their businesses and lives?

Not sure where you get your news but LN is implemented and functional. There are wallets, services, software, etc, downloadable, functional, used every day. If what you mean to say "get all the marchants that support BTC to accept LN", then yes, there is still some progress needs to be done.

That's not the point. The point is, it hypocritical to complain about bitcoin energy consumption without also complaining about the energy, material and human deaths consumption caused by for example US military, which is in essense what is required for something like a USD as a reserve currency to function.

> It’s not beyond the reach of governments to ban unwanted trade

Yeah, right, it worked so well for alcohol... It DOES (/s) work so well for drugs in the US right now... And hey imagine whether it's easier or harder to ban something that doesn't take any physical space in your suitcase and can be transacted with only internet connection.

> That does not make it less true that money does not have magical properties and bitcoin will not create a new world order.

Is anyone really claiming that? The OP's post doesn't seem to be in this spirit anyway. It's more like "Bitcoin has true usefulness, it will keep some meaningful value for a long time, enable other use cases that didn't even exist before.". Nobody is saying that it is going to replace all other forms of money.