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by bradwood 1679 days ago
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.
2 comments
paulgb 1678 days ago
> 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.

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bradwood 1678 days ago
> 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.

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paulgb 1678 days ago
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?
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boc 1679 days ago
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.

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int_19h 1679 days ago
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.)

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oblio 1678 days ago
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.

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int_19h 1677 days ago
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".

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bradwood 1678 days ago
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.

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bradwood 1678 days ago
> 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.

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