When you encounter your typical Bitcoiner, they'll do logical gymnastics and typically go the playbook, which is to deflect and talk about how much energy banks or treasuries use.
Who gives a shit about energy usage if it is used for a cause that could potentially help humanity overcome adversity? Granted, energy usage is important but it is a question about trade-offs.
If bitcoin helped solve cancer or some genetic diseases, I doubt anyone would say: "yea but it uses too much electricity!". The world is based on trade-offs, so why not have that electricity that the bitcoin network generate be used to solve actual real world problems?
We could also make an argument that Mark Zuckerberg could solve income inequality by tracking everyone and providing true transparency to a utopian world.
I'm pretty certain that if you evaluate mining and exchange activity, very little of it is impacting areas where it can effect real change (like Hong Kong or Venezuela).
For example, here's a report from the trenches on Venezuela:
For the disaster that is that economy, only 0.004% of global BTC volume is taking place there (yes, that's the correct number of zeroes) Put another way, it represents about 0.08% of Venezuela's GDP.
It's just unbelievably, mind-bogglingly inefficient, and no credible plans have been put forward to change that. Scaling up the current power consumption and waste generation to Visa-levels of transaction, a Bitcoin powered economy would consume 38X the entire worlds' generation capacity of electricity and yield 132 million metric tons of e-waste per year. All to replace what Visa does today. Just Visa. Not MC, Amex, UnionPay, Discover, etc.
That's because a method of solving useful work has not been discovered yet. Are you also incredulous that we don't have flying cars yet and how come Ford hasn't fixed that problem? If you're so concerned, perhaps you should start working on the problem and become the inventor of the next big p2p currency?
I'd be incredulous if someone had designed a flying car made by taping about ten thousand fans together, pointed them down precariously, and powered them with a little nuclear reactor. Also, it didn't make it more than 3 feet off the ground. Then, had many people talking about how the future of transit had arrived. It clearly hasn't and nobody can point to a single reason their contraption is actually better or does anything novel. But they're all pretttttty sure.
> If you're so concerned, perhaps you should start working on the problem and become the inventor of the next big p2p currency?
I'm not concerned because the problems identified had already been solved with money. You know, the thing already in your bank account.
I’ve read that before. The core issues are not addressed or are glossed over as of course that’s a pro bitcoin advocacy site. Bitcoin is fundamentally broken at the lowest levels.
Except I'm not an anti-Bitcoiner. I was mining in 2011, and I'm very active in online communities (obviously under a different persona). I just am a very extreme pragmatist.
"extreme pragmatism" is still an ideology, whether you admit it or not. The claim that anything can even be "pragmatist" is so meaningless to be almost absurd.
Who is not a pragmatist? Who could possibly insist on the impractical? This is ideological par excellence and the rejection of the impractical becomes, in a sense, ideology in itself. This ideology necessarily starts to reject criticism as "dogmatic" and this insistence and opposition to opposition becomes in itself a dogmatic principle.
The fact that you think greed is the reason bitcoin hasn't designed a useful work load means you don't understand the system at all. What useful workload should bitcoin calculate, and how would it work? I'll wait for your PhD thesis on the matter.
If bitcoin helped solve cancer or some genetic diseases, I doubt anyone would say: "yea but it uses too much electricity!". The world is based on trade-offs, so why not have that electricity that the bitcoin network generate be used to solve actual real world problems?