[nmj]

You managed to cram so much wrong into a post it's unbelievable. Let's start with your 'off by one' address scare tactic. Bitcoin addresses contain a built-in check code, so it's generally not possible to send Bitcoins to a mistyped address.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address

Ecological concerns? A global, nacent value exchange system uses a little more than the total electricity of holiday lights. In fact many miners use cheap unused energy that would be otherwise costly to build infrastructure to sell normally.

https://icenter.co/chinese-hydroelectric-crackdown-herald-de...

Too confusing? Seems familiar. Here's a video from 1994 with some talk show hosts confused about 'internet'. Just watch this, please.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg

[scottnyc]

Fair on the first point (thank you, good to learn). Still doesn't make me feel better if I send something to the wrong (yet) valid address that I have no recourse to fix that. Or if I lose my key there is no institution who would be there to help me.

Hydro may be cheap for now, but does that make it okay? If Bitcoin keeps going up, at some point we'll exhaust those more convenient resources. The comparison to holiday lights is misleading because I never said that wasn't bad for the environment either. I'm not sure I can trust a site like icenter.co given it appears pro-bitcoin, but many people are analyzing the environmental impact of bitcoin and it's not negligible and only growing. You're right, it's nascent, and that's the scary part given how inefficient it is.

I stand by too confusing, especially when it comes to financial products. Try to explain proof-of-work to a non-technical person in less than 30 minutes. Explain hard-forks, segwit2, lightning network, double-spend, network attacks, and why the recommendation is to never leave your bitcoin on an exchange.

Our current system of money and banking isn't great, but this is not an improvement.

Edit: Now you've sent me down this other rabbit whole of educating myself on China's Hydro power. China's overbuilding of Dams may be in itself be a big problem (methane release, destruction of biodiversity, 300k deaths). I'd hate for Bitcoins popularity to contribute to the demand side of this equation.

[ryanwaggoner]

Average person on the street knows almost literally nothing about how money of any kind works. They don’t understand fractional reserve banking, marginal taxation, compound interest, present / future value of money, marginal utility, double entry bookkeeping, annuities, amortization, dividend yields, etc, etc, etc. It’s exactly the same with technology and cars and on and on. Seriously, people do not get it. And yet the systems mostly work. We’re actually pretty good at taking complicated things and making them usable. Do you think people have the foggiest idea what happens under the hood with Apple Pay? There’s no way that the future of mass market cc will look anything like it does now.

From where I stand, there is zero reason that crypto-currency couldn’t be the backbone of all money in a few decades. It’s starting to feel inevitable.