[anonporridge]

Related article on the take that bitcoin is art, https://www.epsilontheory.com/in-praise-of-bitcoin/

I think it would be more accurate to compare it a monument or artifact, specifically because of the amount of real world energy that has gone into creating it.

It's currently a half terabyte immutable linked list filled with a rich history of transactions and hidden messages/graffiti that can't be copied or changed without an commitment of energy and computation resources equal to the sum of what's gone into it for these 11 years.

That's something that starts to rival the Great Pyramids (pun intended).

[boc]

I'm very glad we're all collectively killing the planet so that we can keep a massive ball of digital detritus alive.

Crypto has gone from "It's a currency!" to "It's a commodity!" to "It's a battery!" to "It's art!" in under 10 years.

Early days it was fun to watch. Now that it's destroying the environment, I'm ready for it to end.

[bradwood]

Crypto is destroying the environment? Bollocks. The electricity of the worlds ATM,s bank branches, trading floors, etc dwarfs the electricity cost of bitcoin. And for a system that rewards those close to the money printers and fucks over the little man.

Everything has a cost. But is the cost worth paying is the question.

[paulgb]

> The electricity of the worlds ATM,s bank branches, trading floors, etc dwarfs the electricity cost of bitcoin.

Even if Bitcoin actually became a valid means of transaction and bank branches, ATMs, etc became obsolete, it doesn’t replace the need for trading floors as an interface between finance and equities/commodities, so that’s a weird comparison.

But even so, I wouldn’t be so confident that the banking sector uses more, or will for long given the current investment spree into mining. Here’s one plant that will use nearly 4x the energy of downtown Dallas:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/31/bitcoin-mining-giants-bitdee...

Mind you, the more the price of Bitcoin goes up, the more energy miners burn on mining, so if Bitcoin actually grew to the size of the fiat economy we’d be talking about substantially more energy use.

[bradwood]

> Mind you, the more the price of Bitcoin goes up, the more energy miners burn on mining, so if Bitcoin actually grew to the size of the fiat economy we’d be talking about substantially more energy use.

You are not taking into account the diminishing block reward. More and more miners are chasing a dwindling supply of coin and will eventually only earn transaction fees and no block reward. This will put a natural dampener on more miners coming in (all other things being equal) and it will plateau.

[paulgb]

Right, the energy use goes up with the value and (separately) down over time. They’re separate variables, but it’s fair to point out that they're not independent variables (the price is more likely to vary over a longer time horizon), which is I think the point you’re making?

[boc]

This is a very surface-level understanding of the concept of the economy. We could all use river rocks instead of dollars and fundamentally the economy would be unchanged. We could all (try) to use Bitcoin tomorrow and the economy would be unchanged. It's about using a medium of exchange which works best for all parties, which today is the US Dollar.

Bitcoin is just additional, unnecessary carbon and e-waste on top of the existing economy. It's fatal flaw is that it's deflationary, which in a world of rational thinkers would have doomed it from the start, but instead it seems to have attracted those yearning for a system free of "money printers".

Inflation can make things bad for an economy. Deflation utterly destroys economies.

[int_19h]

It attacted those who don't trust the people in charge of "money printers". Which, given the overall low level of trust in the government in many countries today, US included, is hardly surprising.

(Even more so in the third world, where quite a few people have personally lived through periods when government printed money like crazy, and saw first hand how it starts and how it ends.)

[oblio]

I hate it to break it to you, having lived in a country with hyperinflation, but crypto is not the answer to that.

Hyperinflation is just a symptom of other broken things in those places, and the real solution is to work on that brokeness.

You don't paper over lack of trust with a system that sort of works around lack of trust, you increase trust. Otherwise you'll be screwed in a million other ways that have nothing to do with money.

[int_19h]

I have lived in a country which suffered rampant inflation as well (not quite to the degree where it'd be called hyperinflation, but rapid enough that it was a serious consideration in day-to-day life).

It's all well and good to talk about fixing brokenness, but it's not always politically viable. Furthermore, even when it is, people still have to go around living in the meantime. "It'll be solved eventually when everything is made perfect" is not a reasonable approach, and people are well aware of that. A very popular saying where I'm from goes, "the strictness of the law is mitigated by not having to follow it".

[bradwood]

Laudable though this desire is, we live in the real world. How many politicians and unelected central bankers are trustworthy in any country?

What you want is a monetary system that is inherently trustless.

Let the policy makers deal with policy and legislation. But let's not let them mess about with our money any more. Anywhere.

[bradwood]

> It's about using a medium of exchange which works best for all parties, which today is the US Dollar.

It's also about a store of value. Which is no fiat currency in the world today.

[anonporridge]

No.

Let's do a fucking carbon tax and actually solve the problem, rather than just scapegoating an easy target and wasting political capital on attacking something many people value that doesn't directly or necessarily contribute any more to the problem than anything else.

[boc]

A carbon tax in the US just moves the miners somewhere else without a carbon tax. That carbon still ends up warming the same planet, thus not solving the problem in any meaningful way.

[anonporridge]

I agree. Any anti carbon solution needs to be global.

That's a a tricky problem since some countries, maybe Russia and Canada, could theoretically come to the conclusion that climate change will actually be a net benefit for them by way of opening up access to resources in their lands. And other countries might come to the conclusion that the benefits of burning lots of carbon fuels to develop and modernize their nations outweigh the risks of climate change.

Our ability to actually reverse the trend of atmospheric carbon seems grim to me.

[chaxor]

The environmental impact is tiny compared to that of the banking industry.

Of course, we can always strive to reduce emissions in every facet of our lives. However, this argument applied to Cryptocurrencies didn't hold any water at all, once we make the proper comparisons.

[oblio]

The banking industry does a ton of things: holds salaries for billions of people, performs payments for billions of people, holds bank guarantees for millions of people, offers loans to millions of people, offers savings accounts (not amazing these days, but they're there). They also do the same for millions of businesses, with even more complex products.

Do you think that all of that can be waved away? What do you think will replace it with crypto? Nothing? Where will I get a loan? Heaven? The Moon?

[bellyfullofbac]

Ha, what a great comparison. /s. And what percentage of the world economy runs on crypto, compared to the % that uses the banking industry?

[chaxor]

The daily trading volume of nyse was similar to that of btc even back in 2017. Banks are throwing enormous amounts in now. But if your little quip was meant to ask how the mere mortals are using it in the streets, I think it depends on the country.

It may take some years before developed nations have old ladies paying each other for wine night with some crypto. Although, it seems that companies like Venmo may be crypto in the backend, with a usd mask for the user. So, perhaps more than you think.

[bellyfullofbac]

I'm conflicted between telling you how clueless you are (and getting downvoted for being a dick) and walking away shaking my head because I don't feel like wasting my energy explaining shit to clueless people. "it seems [...] Venmo may be crypto"? Wow, yeah, you look like you know what you're talking about. /s

I guess I'm doing both. Good luck with your expert knowledge of economics!