disruptalot

Wow this is perhaps the best critique of Bitcoin yet.

In summary, Bitcoin is bad because it allows money laundered using the existing financial system to flow into it. Forget the property, energy and hardware providers for accepting illicit funds. Bitcoin is the real problem.

Your arguments are just a whole load of strawmen. You don't address the central point. Bitcoin exists, and banks don't do it what it does. Hence the energy cost comparisons as rough and silly as you make them are not a conclusion to bitcoin's value.

You only need to look around for a moment to find an example.

There are people living under governments that don't allow their citizens access to the global financial system (i.e. capital controls) and are often living in high inflation environments. Storing their wealth in an unseizable asset, even $100 worth, means that they are decoupled from their government financially and can escape their hell hole with their wealth in tact.

Central banks don't do fixed supply money. Investment banks don't do payments and financial products that don't involve a middleman.

Bitcoin is a censorship resistant, neutral money and payment network. Banks don't do that. Banks don't consume "kWh of power" by the way. From the endless wars to protect the US (dollar) hegemony to 50 floor buildings draped in marble. Thats all cost + energy.

Why should anyone pay for your consumption and values when you aren't willing to pay for others?

This is one of those "Freakonomics" type ideas.

On the surface this sounds like bitcoin's PoW use will simply stop. It's actually the entire opposite.

When governments ban it, they go after sizeable, identifiable organizations running these operations, that is their only choice. These operations are optimized in their energy usage, because it's only in their interest to reduce their consumption relative to the value of the coin they mine.

The moment these operations are shutdown, there is a massive sink in the hash rate, smaller operations and hobbyists will rush in to fill it. Hash rate gradually climbs back up and instead you have 10x the energy usage because you can no longer run the PoW in a scalable way.

The issuance is exponentially decreasing every 4 years. If you're a miner and have hardware investment, increasing your issuance contrary to the expectation of the market is essentially taxing the holders.

It's besides the point though, you can certainly benefit from holding power of the protocol but the reality is that there is very little of this dynamic.

A system being open to abuse is to an extent a property of the system.

Of all the years in which you could make this argument, this year is probably the worst.

In the "well functioning democracy" U.S. You have:

- Mistrust in institutions

- An insane asset inflation bubble fueled by the biggest fiat printing spree ever

Sure, the state hasn't failed. But are you really surprised people want to expose themselves to a new paradigm with different fundamentals for money and finance, this year?

Nope. The point of consensus is that when you opt in to rules, they don't change under you.

Who has the highest amount of power in Bitcoin, and why haven't they done anything, for example increase the issuance?

It's not designed around mistrust, it's designed to not require trust. There's a big difference.

Why would you want trust where it's not needed? Trust is a barrier, not a feature.

You forget the payment network without a third party.

Now imagine comparing child pornography (and other things) in mediums before the internet and after. These comparisons are not useful for exponential, paradigm changing technology.

The only reason I mention that you should mind your own energy uses is that you seem concerned about externalities and distraught bitcoin is doing the opposite of your thesis. Discuss away but it's not working. Your best bet is to regulate what you have influence on, your own uses of energy.

> What you cannot verify is how much you can exchange it for.

Yes the price of assets are decided in a free market. So what point are you making exactly? Clearly in every other aspect, bitcoin is superior. In fact, bitcoin is one of the only assets that can be traded in the most free market environments possible, next to cash.

> Transacting via custodian has literally never once gotten in my way. Has it for you?

Yes it has. And it has for hundreds of millions people around the world. I come from a country that's under heavy sanctions, banks will refuse to bank you or will shutdown your account for no apparent reason. You're marked as a risky client anywhere you go that touches money and have to put up with extra checks.

Whoever you bank with has never had outages? They've never kept funds on hold pending checks? You haven't had to chase up a every department because your wire transfer didn't arrive? The list goes on. If not then good for you, but you're in the absolute tiny minority.

And the exact same proposition for any use of energy. That you don't find it useful does not mean it is not.

Mind your own uses of energy and leave the market to decide what is really valuable.

The property you're asserting is physicality not reality or usefulness.

That's strange, how do you know it's real and you own it? With my bitcoin, I can verify that I received it and that no one except myself has access to that specific portion of the supply. And then I can even transact it whenever I like without the involvement of any custodian!

So I take it you are not willing to accept bitcoin for free since it's not "real and economically useful"?

Commodities don't have a fixed supply, they are not transportable, you can't actually own them. You can't verify them. You can't transact them easily.

Real and economically useful, bitcoin or commodities. which is which?

I should clarify, Ethereum isn't merely "Blockchain technology", it's a more programmable Bitcoin (with other trade offs of course). In that sense, it's useful for the reasons you mentioned. The point applies more to projects that think they can replicate some form of this success by just hashing a block and stringing them together.

"Blockchain" is close to useless unless it is coupled with being public, permissionless, borderless among other things. The companies that jumped on this "Blockchain" "DLT" nonsense bandwagon to this day do not understand any of the fundamentals. Just using a distributed ledger does not provide any benefits that they try to borrow from likes of Bitcoin. Distributed ledgers have existed for decades.

Anyone that holds bitcoin is using it everyday as a store of value. It's unnecessary to go into all the reasons Bitcoin makes sense in this thread, plenty of resource out there. Suffice to say that by any measure, market determined or otherwise, Bitcoin's usage has constantly (or even exponentially) increased since inception. Either this hoard of people are getting more and more wrong every year, or perhaps you're looking at it from the wrong angle.

I've been hearing this for 10 years straight.

Thus far the only successful examples of Blockchain technology have been based on digital currencies and Bitcoin has done nothing but continue it's success.

On the other hand, there is not one example of "Blockchain technology" put to work on anything that needed it.

> It is not comparable to hashing random numbers for proof of work levels of useless.

Bitcoin exists because there is no alternative decentralised, self sovereign currency. PoW exists because there is no other method to achieve that. It is by no means useless. You are not the user.

Bitcoin, nor how it's implemented is useless. You just don't understand it. And it doesn't matter, you don't have to. People value and understand the world differently.

Is there really an objective definition of useless? Media consumption, games and movies are pretty close to useless in my opinion. That does not however give them any less of a right to consume energy.

The reader will find dozens of suggestion in this thread about how coin X is more "efficient".

Note that efficiency would mean producing the same properties but with less resources. Not merely using less resources. While experimentation is certainly desired, it's a fallacy that any coin has actually reproduced bitcoin in a more efficient way.

To name a couple,

- Bitcoin had what some call an "immaculate conception" where there was no expectation that such a system would work in the first place and where the founder was anonymous. This creates a very different history in comparison with the founder led, pre mined, frothy market launches of today.

- Bitcoin has stood the test of time. With each year in production that passes, there is more confidence that the system and specific implementation is sound.

Once these other coins have stood in the market for 10 years straight and continued to retain the confidence in their protocol, the comparisons can start.

Maybe with the simplistic perspective that Bitcoin has a value that you can calculate.

Energy usecases are worth what energy they use. Energy exists in a mostly free market and that's the best way to determine value. Everything else is conjecture.

That they hold Bitcoin instead of accepting USD denominated in BTC? That's possibly the most legitimizing development in the past few years.

One of the most used critical points about Bitcoin has been that it has not been suitable as a medium of exchange or currency. When critics mention this, they point to merchants pretending to accept Bitcoin but in actual fact enrolling a payment processor to instantly convert it to fiat. In other words, they never received Bitcoin.

Not only are Tesla directly accepting Bitcoin here but:

- They do so using their own Bitcoin infrastructure meaning they trust the network

- Don't convert to fiat, meaning they trust the asset as a store of value/medium of exchange

Unbelievable. Is it really worth boiling the oceans? It's critical that we move to text only internet that has a per site cap of 100kb. That would cut the energy usage by 99% with virtually no difference to the experience.

I think you'll find both USD and the internet are much better vehicles for that.

Which is an entirely subjective position. You could argue that porn is not only useless, but also harmful. This is the same logical question for any use of anything.