[disruptalot]

This thread is nothing new. This exact sentiment has been repeated over and over for the last 10 years.

From the angle that bitcoin is useless, it's easy to dismiss it as waste. The reality is that you live in world where people have different understandings and values than you may have. So advocating against Bitcoin is no different than advocating against air travel. You see no issue in the huge amounts of energy consumption for "seeing the world" and "business travel" but maybe I do.

Use resources the way you wish and so will others. Free markets will decide where scarce resources work best.

[meheleventyone]

The last sentence is the entire problem. It ignores the externalities of whatever it is you’re doing. Which in turn (amongst other things) makes the claim of efficient distribution questionable.

Huge energy consumption would be much less of an issue if it wasn’t also causing huge long term problems.

[atweiden]

> Huge energy consumption would be much less of an issue if it wasn’t also causing huge long term problems.

Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels and animal products are two far larger, far more pressing issues than Bitcoin's carbon footprint.

I would additionally rank “bullshit jobs” far above Bitcoin's carbon footprint in a ranking of things causing widespread social ills.

If Bitcoin became global reserve currency, all things would decrease in absolute price, disincentivizing consumerism. As the pace of technological innovation increases, and vendor competition increases along with it, absolute prices in BTC terms will go down even assuming everyone already transacts in BTC exclusively. Higher amount of available products/services, same amount of money, equals lower absolute prices. Assuming 1% annual "growth", that's 1% you gain. This isn't outside the bounds of inflation policies today, and keep in mind those inflation targets skim off the top after haircutting GDP growth — a 1% inflation in an economy expanding by 2% equals the central bank skims the 2% growth plus expands by 1%. In a Bitcoin world, that would be 3% gains for simply holding onto your coins.

As such a deflationary global currency could cause a global economic slowdown, which might be completely necessary to save the planet's natural ecosystems.

[imtringued]

Bullshit jobs are a product of low interest rates and low yield government bonds driving capital allocation elsewhere.

If CPI inflation is high that means there are not enough workers to do the most valuable work. Workers reallocate to more productive jobs and earn more money.

Interest rates usually follow CPI inflation. If interest rates are near 0% then you get lots of people starting stupid businesses. That's fine if everyone is unemployed and thus would prefer a bullshit job over a productive job but once the pandemic is over it won't be true anymore.

High interest rates force a company to be profitable enough to at least cover the interest payments. In theory the Fed should raise rates to at least 1% just to match current inflation but the economy is now full of bullshit and that bullshit is going to fail once the cheap money dries up. We can't afford to do that during a pandemic but once it is over it is necessary to cull the useless zombies.

I may or may not have conveyed this in a dramatic way but don't take this as a call to action. If you are invested in the stock market you should always make sure that you don't put too much money into dead companies regardless of how well the economy is doing. Timing crashes or whatever is futile. Your personal goals (risk tolerance aka financial security and when you want to withdraw money) are more important and should be planned well in advance.

[crumbshot]

The climate catatrosphe that looms upon us all has been caused by individuals and organisations using resources as they wish.

What we've ended up with is a planetwide tragedy of the commons - and free markets aren't going to solve this. They can only continue to exacerbate it.

[imtringued]

Carbon taxes are a market based solution and pretty much everyone agrees.

Unregulated pollution is basically like having unregulated crimes. Criminals obviously want to keep committing crimes because they benefit personally.

Imagine if you could just go and mug a random CEO and get $10k out of that and the police won't stop you. The CEO and even those who hate the CEO would agree that muggings are bad. The only one who disagrees is the criminal. Therefore regulation is actually necessary to have a well functioning free market in the first place. Heck, punishing net negative behavior is compatible with the free market. The only question is how that punishment is implemented.

Without CO2 taxes you basically have people legally dump waste into the atmosphere which is shared by everyone equally. It's pretty obvious that there is nothing free about this. You can consider the act of pollution to be a forced transaction between the polluter and every other living being on earth. It's like you are mugging a tiny fraction of a cent off of millions of people.

The obvious idea is to just do the same thing we did with garbage disposal. Just charge a fee that covers the damage. That way the polluter has to weigh the damage he does. In some cases the damage outweighs the benefits, in other cases the benefits outweigh the damage. As a society we only want the latter.

The only real problem with CO2 taxes is that every nation has to agree on them. That's what the paris agreement is for. Dismissing CO2 taxes entirely because of global competition doesn't make sense. Global competition merely puts an upper bound on how high domestic CO2 taxes can be without introducing special tariffs or other means of global enforcement.

I prefer a token amount over complete denial because at that point you can just point out that the price is too low instead of pointlessly arguing about which policy to implement or whether to implement a policy at all.

[antpls]

> From the angle that bitcoin is useless, it's easy to dismiss it as waste.

The debate is not about useless/useful, it is about : can we solve the same needs with a lot less spend energy?

> Use resources the way you wish and so will others. Free markets will decide where scarce resources work best.

That way of thinking leads us to the carbon catastrophe the entire world is trying to reverse right now.