[arithma]

Just a question, isn't all criticism against bitcoin applicable to gold?

Money/Currency/Value in general can't be reduced or derived from first principles. You always have to take into account human nature, economic activity, and most unfortunately: psychology. So all criticism about how bitcoin inherently being pointless, sounds like off-tune. I want good reasons to/NOT-to buy in.

First-world country citizens kind of trust their governments to at least behave lawfully, or at least be eventually accountable. There are systems in place for transactions and accounting, and "everyone" has access.

The "Value" of bitcoin, coming from a struggling third-world country (Lebanon), is in the ability to be independent of a currency that is inflating quickly, being able to transact with the outside world (even if only in bulk) without being under the mercy of a failing financial system that is lurking around to take a share in every which way possible.

The energy consumption needs of bitcoin are an obvious drawback. But I don't think it's fair to brush away the whole thing for only that reason.

Disclosure: I own an embarrassingly small amount of bitcoin (~0.4BTC).

[three_seagrass]

Gold isn't controlled by a handful of miners in China, the way Bitcoin is.

The whole decentralization-as-design principle of Bitcoin has shown that, given few constraints, anything of value naturally centralizes on the select few with the means to control it anyways.

The block size debate, and the tragedy of the commons that it shines a light on, is a prime example of that.

[93po]

Gold is controlled by small handful of nations, which are in turns controlled by a small handful of people.

[dumbfoundded]

One person used to control a lot of gold too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa

[quattrofan]

How do they "control it" exactly?

[three_seagrass]

By design, any changes to update the Bitcoin protocol need to be accepted by the miners with the majority of computing power - a.k.a. a hard fork.

For many reasons, such as stealing electricity and having access to chip manufacturers, there are a handful of miners in China who have the majority of the computing power for Bitcoin. They can mine bitcoins at a cost that is less than for everyone else.

This creates problems because there are updates to Bitcoin that are needed, such as allowing the Bitcoin network to process more than 7 transactions a second (for reference, Visa does 40,000 a second). Unfortunately, this small block size rate means people have to pay extra fees to prioritize their bitcoin transactions to happen in the next 20 minutes.

The miners get to keep these additional fees, so they are incentivized to keep the network slow and people paying more. This is why the Chinese miners have rejected any updates to improve Bitcoin transaction rate, meaning bitcoin is slower and more expensive for everyone but the miners extract more money from the network. It's tragedy of the commons.

[Taek]

"By design, any changes to update the Bitcoin protocol need to be accepted by the miners with the majority of computing power - a.k.a. a hard fork."

This is incorrect and a common misunderstanding about Bitcoin. Hard forks require users to update, and it doesn't matter what the miners do. It also doesn't require a majority of users to upgrade, anyone who does upgrade will be on the new network, and anyone who does not upgrade will be on the old network.

Bitcoin (and other blockchains) are structured so that miners have as little power as possible. Pretty much the only thing miners can do in practice is choose to censor transactions, and that would be considered an attack. Networks have recourse like bricking all mining hardware, which typically acts as a sufficient deterrent to such attacks. Miners can also double-spend (a form of creative self-censorship), but the same network recourse applies.

In practice I don't think there are any examples of miners intentionally making a blockchain slower and more expensive. Miners pretty much always fit every possible transaction into every block, and any throughput restrictions are determined at the protocol level by protocol devs, not by miners.

[three_seagrass]

Semantics. Any hard fork that majority of miners do not accept and support becomes it's own branch and a separate crypto.

This is why I reference the bitcoin block size debacle. Bitcoin Cash was created as a hard fork that miners ultimately did not accept and is now just a dwindling alt coin.

[Taek]

It's not semantics, it's an incorrect worldview. Miners follow revenue. If miners had chosen to mine Bitcoin Cash, all that would have happened is they would have lost a ton of money competing with eachother while the miners who stayed on the original chain raked in hundreds of millions in additional profit.

Segwit2x had 80% hashrate support at the time it was proposed. It also had the support of most of the exchanges and major centralized players in the space. And yet, Segwit2x did not succeed.

Miners don't control Bitcoin.

[lifty]

As far as I remember miners favored the block increase while a critical mass of validating users didn’t.

[DINKDINK]

Producers are subservient to consumer demand. No amount of production can force a consumer who refuses to change their consumption into buying an alternate good. If a town demands exclusively kosher bread, bakers cannot survive by baking non-kosher bread to sell to them.

Block producers (miners) must find buyers for the blocks they produce, if they don't find buyers, they go bankrupt.

>changes to update the Bitcoin protocol need to be accepted by the miners

You've got it backwards, changes to Bitcoin need to be accepted by block consumers (node operators). If they don't demand those changes, blocks with those changes don't get produced.

Demand and supply are fundamental components to economic action. The steal man version of your argument is: "While consumers induce production, some consumers' demands might be flippant -- They signal they will only buy kosher bread but they'll accept an alternate good. Though production switching costs are practically zero in SHA256 PoW, and entry into production is non excludable, an adversary has enough funding to pay premiums to producers to forego market demand, for the good they produce, longer than consumers are willing to refrain from consumption -- inducing a consumer-demand shift."

In game theory and economics its not a dominating strategy which is indicative of the many failed attempts to cartelize SHA256 PoW

[three_seagrass]

>Block producers (miners) must find buyers for the blocks they produce, if they don't find buyers, they go bankrupt.

In a buyers market. With the small block size, bitcoin is a seller's (miner's) market and refusing to upgrade preserves their market power - hence the tragedy of the commons.

>You've got it backwards, changes to Bitcoin need to be accepted by block consumers (node operators).

The number of bitcoin nodes has been dropping for years. The rational actors who are incentivized to support the network are making the decisions right now by choosing which forks to support.

[DINKDINK]

>In a buyers market. With the small block size, bitcoin is a seller's (miner's) market and refusing to upgrade preserves their market power - hence the tragedy of the commons.

The produced good (SHA256 hashes and the transferable UTXO set of bitcoin nodes) is an excludable, rivalrous good. Hence it doesn't suffers from tragedy of the commons problems. This is the foundation of excludability in economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excludability

"seller's" or "buyer's" "markets" are weak concepts that don't control which goods are produced. If an agent market sells or market buys that doesn't dictate which goods are produced.

Again, no amount of production nor no amount of consumption can get a consumer or producer to shift their consumption or production to a good they do not want.

[ARandumGuy]

This is one of my big issues with Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies. It's not a democratic system, it's controlled by whoever has the most investment in the currency (either through mining power, or amount of currency).

This means that the people who get the most decision making power are incentivized to only make changes that help their investment. Any change that would help a majority of users, but harm these top users, is basically a non-starter.

[tromp]

With some crypto currencies, the developers are invested only by development efforts, holding negligible mining power or amount of currency (which they have to buy like anyone else). They work like a meritocracy, with those who contributed most to the design and coding have the most decision making power.

[albroland]

VisaNet actually is a bit faster than that; they claim current capacity for about 75k/s.

[kharak]

I don't follow Bitcoin, but after first hearing abort how it would be a decentralised network, all I could think was "have you ever heard of the power law?".

[jayd16]

>Just a question, isn't all criticism against bitcoin applicable to gold?

Gold fluctuates a lot less. Its hard to swallow "ok ok bitcoin is useless but it can still be a stable currency/safe asset" when the price is booming and crashing every year.

[proverbialbunny]

Fluctuation has to do with volume. (eg, penny stock) In the 1700s the stock market looked a lot like bitcoin.

[keymone]

Bitcoin isn’t useless, it’s useful for storing or transferring Bitcoin in a permissionless way.

[cj]

Gold is something that exists IRL.

It has value even in the absence of a market to buy/sell it. It can be melted down and formed into jewelry, as a simple example.

The reason I won't buy into crypto is it's impossible to make informed investment decisions because, as an investment, the price is driven too highly by unknown market forces (at least unknown to me...).

Perhaps it's a good investment if you truly feel you understand what drives the price of bitcoin, or have insider knowledge that you know will affect its price that others don't.

[SparkyMcUnicorn]

I've never really understood the argument around gold being better because you can melt it down into jewelry. If there isn't a market for gold anymore, then the jewelry wouldn't be worth more than costume pieces, right?

I guess the argument is that you can still make pennies on the dollar if there isn't a market for it anymore?

Your other arguments I can understand, although I do think the use of cryptocurrencies will keep growing whether I like it or not.

[keymone]

Bitcoin exists IRL - you can write down you private key on the piece of paper and that piece of paper suddenly is worth however many bitcoin is behind that key.

The informed investment decision is that crypto is entirely new asset class and bitcoin is king. There is redistribution happening between asset classes and especially this year when 30% of all USD in existence was printed, there will be large inflows into bitcoin. Of course it will be volatile for a while.

[Siira]

Jewelry is even more useless than ledgers.

[zadler]

The point is that it’s not going away. Many times it has been pronounced dead but it has maintained enough utility to keep growing. This gives people confidence in it over time.

[jariel]

There are parallels, but gold has a 5000 year incumbency. It's outlasted not only Empires, but eras. It's valued by cultures that have no relationship with one another and no common past, totally independent.

It's physical so it can't be 'cracked' and people like physical things.

It's universal in how it is understood. Bitcoin is 'well understood' by basically 0.0001% of the population arguably not even most it's traders.

[jcranmer]

> It's valued by cultures that have no relationship with one another and no common past, totally independent.

Actually, not really. In historical terms, the gold standard is historically limited to cultures that existed in (direct or indirect) trading relationships with the Mediterranean culture. Notably, China (and correspondingly East and Southeast Asia) instead used a silver standard, while the New World cultures eschewed gold or silver for monetary standards.

[Auracle]

In the age where we might see asteroid mining in our lifetimes, or possibly even economically transmuting elements, gold seems like a bad investment to me.

[dumbfoundded]

The power requirements for transmuting elements would probably significantly out do the power needed for mining bitcoin.

In the case of asteroid mining, it'd likely go the way of the diamond. Diamonds are not rare and easy to create in labs yet still retain high values due to monopolization of the supply. No company that mines asteroids will want to flood the markets. Instead, they will monopolize the supply and find a balance of introducing supply and maintaining prices.

[beefield]

> Just a question, isn't all criticism against bitcoin applicable to gold?

Pretty much. It is insane that gold mines pollute the environment while central banks hoard double-digit percentage of ever mined gold in their vaults. And I see also no difference in the stupidity of central banks supporting gold price or cryptocurrency price.

(There is a small difference, though, as a noble metal, gold actually has some utility outside inves^H^H^H^Hgambling and illegal trade)

[blacksmith_tb]

Gold is not just a store of value, it's a material with many practical uses (like all the electronics that make having this conversation possible). Even gold's decorative value gives it a serious advantage over BTC in my book (though I like silver and platinum better, to be honest).

[dumbfoundded]

Most of gold's value is attributed to speculation just as bitcoin is. Bitcoin uniquely offers a way to spend money without the government knowing about it. Ransomware, moving money out of China, buying drugs online were all extremely difficult without bitcoin. Of course Bitcoin isn't completely anonymous, but it can be. Buy bitcoin with cash to a new wallet and then send anywhere.

Gold is just the physical version of that. Just like all money is made up, the value of bitcoin and gold are pretty much imaginary.

[epmaybe]

That’s literally more money than I have in my bank account lol

[throwaway-8c93]

Gold is a material with certain physical properties that cannot be replicated: it's attractively shiny, rare, dense, and chemically inert. These properties make it ideal for an international store of value across time. Moreover, those properties are independent of the current jurisdiction. Regardless of society's conventions, iron will never be worth more than gold.

Although Bitcoin's current implementation limits the supply to 21M BTC, the idea of a cryptocurrency can be replicated ad-nauseum and is 100% fungible. For all intents and purposes, it has no intrinsic advantage over, say Ethereum or Monero. The fact there are perfectly fine alternatives for it makes the value proposition much more shaky than gold. If people en masse, for any reason switch to other cryptocurrency, the existing tokens are rendered useless. And there are many scenarios in which this can happen - government action, protocol attack, untangling of distributed trust, breaking SHA256, BTC no longer fashionable, transaction cost creep,...

[rgifford]

> Just a question, isn't all criticism against bitcoin applicable to gold?

Gold has limited value as a commodity and widespread usage in central bank reserves. People I know who value Bitcoin highly do it on the expectation that either high net worth individuals will start to hold some small part of their net worth in BTC OR central banks will adopt it as a reserve currency.

How viable those two outcomes are determines whether you view BTC and gold similarly.

[webinvest]

Gold doesn’t become more expensive to transport as the price goes up.

[627467]

Only if you don't care to insure for transporting your gold. If you do care, it definitely would be more expensive to insure a more valuable cargo.

But more crucially, if you need to use extraordinary quantities of gold to settle a transaction (ie. When nation states buy something with their gold reserves) the gold likely won't even move: most of it are stored in "trusted" first world nation central banks like the bank of england.

But then again, with bitcoin you don't need "trusted" central banks.

[staplers]

Yes it does. Security always comes at a cost.

[batmanthehorse]

the energy consumption is my biggest criticism, so the answer is "no" (even though you try to sidestep that). buying a pack of gum with bitcoin could power a whole house for 2 months, that's awful and irresponsible.

[Taek]

The main purpose of Bitcoin is not to buy a pack of gum, it's to provide a sovereign store of value with a stable monetary policy.

Bitcoin's energy bills are paid for by its users via transaction fees and inflation. It's a weird form of gatekeeping to single out Bitcoin as 'a waste' when plenty of people create economic waste buying large houses, buying makeup, buying meat instead of grains, etc etc.

If you are concerned about the environment, regulate the creation of energy, not the use of energy. Restricting Bitcoin on environmental concerns will just result in people using more energy elsewhere. But if you mandate that power plants must be X efficient and Y sustainable, the market will naturally figure out how to best allocate the limited energy.

[rodiger]

How much energy do you think the current financial system consumes? Eg paying for a pack of gum with your Mastercard

Edit: This wasn't intended to be a hypothetical- I agree BTC uses significantly more per transaction, but I'm curious how it compares to the entirety of a system like Mastercard divided by number of transactions (including all employee/office space/commute/etc energy consumption). There are clearer/fewer inputs for Bitcoin for sure but that doesn't mean we shouldn't account for the total environmental cost of a behemoth like Mastercard.

Bitcoin can never and should never replace our current payments network as it simply cannot scale in its current form. But, I do think people simply look at the cost to run the technology itself and assume that's the total environmental cost of a system.

[yunesj]

> I'm curious how it compares to the entirety of a system like Mastercard

You should also include the cost of running all of the world's central banks.

US Federal Reserve budget is about $5B. Assuming 328.5k BTC mined per year, no tx fees, $20k BTC value, and mining at break even, mining energy costs are about $6.57B. It seems like they're on the same order of magnitude.

I am more concerned about the misaligned incentives for PoW, and to a lesser extent for PoS.

[jpsalm]

Significantly less energy per transaction, which is the only metric that matters.

[zadler]

Lightning network will also scale to millions of transactions per second and consume much less than each Bitcoin transaction.

[jpsalm]

Yes, non-blockchain transactions are much more efficient. But then what's the point of using blockchain if transactions happen off-chain?

[jcranmer]

The total energy cost of paying a pack of gum with your Mastercard is probably on the order of running your computer for a few seconds. Maybe as much as a minute, I don't know to what degree the financial system uses replication.

[aplummer]

Less than the cost of the transaction fees + terminal and merchant fees amount of energy

[elefanten]

orders of magnitude less

[paulryanrogers]

Nice to know I'm not the only one weighing these costs.