[roenxi]

We have a perfectly good system in place for punishing people who waste energy - it is called "the economy". It applies constant pressure to people who waste things.

If crypto manages to run that gauntlet, there is a good chance that someone with a track record thinks it is socially useful. People confidently declaring that it is useless are in the same bucket as people confidently declaring that the internet was a fad in the first big tech bubble - lacking humility. The truth is we don't know if this (likely outrageously large) bubble is a complete waste or masking something transformative.

[onion2k]

We have a perfectly good system in place for punishing people who waste energy - it is called "the economy". It applies constant pressure to people who waste things.

That's a good theory, but it doesn't seem to be working. Because, well... gestures broadly at everything

[AussieWog93]

I think the problem here is that "the economy" is not punishing miners but rewarding them.

Only a small minority of people who buy crypto genuinely have a considered belief that it's socially useful. The overwhelming majority are simply speculators who believe that they can sell it for more than they bought it for.

[roenxi]

> ...speculators who believe that they can sell it for more than they bought it for...

Which, assuming that the individual speculators are intelligent and rational, has the emergent property of providing something that is socially useful. And if they are stupid and irrational, it'll bankrupt the lot of them so that they can't waste that much money again.

The economy is a cruel beast, but it is much better than you or I at deciding what needs to happen to get people what they need. If something like bitcoin really is just a money burning exercise with no redeeming property, sooner or later it'll go bankrupt and disappear back into obscurity. It can't be a hot new thing forever. And "speculators" only have power when they are consistently right. If they routinely make big gambles and get it wrong then they don't get to speculate for long.

[randalluk]

As the article says

>Libertarianism's attraction is based on ignoring externalities, and cryptocurrencies are no exception.

The economy as currently regulated doesn't correctly price in externalities such as the ongoing cost of global heating generated by burning fossil fuels.

[roenxi]

I'm all for including externalities. My usual argument is if you look at positive and negative externalities, fossil fuels are a massive win.

People seem to struggle with positive externalities so the argument usually falls flat, and the situation is too clear to me to be able to spell it out easily. But without fossil fuels, 40-80% of the modern world would have been all but impossible. The knock-on effects of abundant cheap energy (and precursor materials to plastics) aren't being priced in.

[munch117]

The 'positive externalities' of fossil fuels are already accounted for in our economic system: When mining for raw materials, the price that the miner is paid in the first sale is payment for that. And ditto in every subsequent sale: The benefits to the buyer goes into setting the price.

I am not an expert on economics nomenclature, but ISTM you can't really call that externalities when it's already being rewarded by the current economic system. Wouldn't that be an "internality" or something? They are already included.

Unlike the negative externalities from pollution. In the absence of something like a carbon tax, they are not included.

[roenxi]

I've never bought any oil directly. It is beyond question that if oil & gas producers disappeared I'd be much worse off (it'd be physically quite difficult for me to get food, for example, and I'd likely starve to death). That is the informal definition of an externality right there; my entire lifestyle is being enabled by a deal that I'm not party to.

And even if I've got the definition wrong, the oil and gas producers are creating huge amounts of value that are being captured by other actors in the economy (like me). If we fairly evened out the harms and benefits, they deserve subsidies rather than taxes. Obviously nobody sane is going to advocate for that, but if we want to price in externalities that is the logical outcome.

This isn't obscure logic. People often point out that the measurable value of what blue collar workers produce is far in excess of their pay and follow it up with the idea that we should force the market to pay them more. It isn't a good idea but it is logical in as far as it goes.

[randalluk]

There surely are positive externalities, but the very useful things we burn fossil fuels for are reflected in the price - cheap or no. Those primary reasons for burning fuel will have all sorts of externalities, positive and negative. And one would expect similar externalities from the work done by renewable energy.

If your position is simply that we are fortunate our planet was/is abundant in fossil fuels, I don't disagree (ideally there wouldn't have been enough to completely wreck the climate we depend on, but...). But the issue is whether we should trust the market in respect to cryptocurrency mining specifically. The history of human civilisation seems a bit beyond the scope.

[roenxi]

> but the very useful things we burn fossil fuels for are reflected in the price

If we imagine a counterfactual where there were no fossil fuels, double-digit percentages of the world's population wouldn't exist.

There is no way that the oil and gas producing companies have made money on the same scale as the value they've created by enabling billions of humans to exist. No way at all. There is obviously something very powerful happening that is more than offsetting the notional damage that they will theoretically do at some point in the future to a relatively small percentage of humans.

If we balance out the harms and benefits that the coal and petroleum miners have caused to the rest of humanity, the ledger is overwhelmingly in their favour. I can't even estimate the numbers involved but based on the fact that I'm not slaving away for a fossil fuel company double digit percentages of my life I can tell it isn't close.

[ericd]

Sure. Bring on the carbon taxes.

[derac]

This is flawed libertarian thinking. For example, if a scammer called your grandmother and got her to send them her life savings, it wouldn't be a good thing just because she is "too stupid" to have the money.

[roenxi]

The logic does break down for criminal activity. But:

(1) Mr. Wog93 was talking about speculators, not criminals.

(2) If any of my grandmothers were still alive then they could be scammed in any asset class. Bitcoin is riskier but, frankly, anyone crazy enough to "invest" in bitcoin is probably going to lose all their money regardless of whether they get scammed or not. So this grandmother test is a bit of a wash in my eyes.

The only thing that makes me special is I'm humble enough to say maybe I'm completely wrong in my opinions so other people should be allowed to take risks I think are stupid. There is a fair-enough system that will sort out who is right and who is wrong based on evidence.

[AussieWog93]

>Mr. Wog93

Thank you for using my correct title.

[inter_netuser]

>Only a small minority of people who buy stocks genuinely have a considered belief that it's socially useful. The overwhelming majority are simply speculators who believe that they can sell it for more than they bought it for.

Replaced crypto with stocks, how does it read now?

[Swenrekcah]

You can also replace it with tulips.

When someone makes an argument of the sort that just because there is a market for something then it magically becomes useful, it tells me they haven’t heard or understood this quote:

“The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”

[inter_netuser]

Sounds like you have to read up a lot more on tulips.

Also, strange how such prominent tulip story never resulted in adoption of tulips by any country? So weird, why is that?

And yet with Bitcoin, we see adoption not by one, but by several G-7 countries as a valid payment mechanism, one small country as legal tender, another small country preparing a bill this year, and Russia signalling it will regulate Bitcoin as currency, not property?

Strange, that.

[Swenrekcah]

Yes it’s strange indeed.

But anyway, here you actually presented some arguments and explanations for why bitcoin can be useful.

Now, I don’t think bitcoin will actually end up anywhere useful in the end because it doesn’t really solve anything that fiat doesn’t (except perhaps for people in the illegal payments market) but we can disagree on that.

My point was about the previous argument, that there was inherent usefulness or value in bitcoin just because there are people speculating on it, that is fallacious.

[inter_netuser]

If Bitcoin, or something like it, can ever become the only monetary asset - this would probably be an amazing achievement for humanity.

This would mean much cheaper commodities(including gold and silver), much cheaper land, much cheaper housing, a lot fewer bubbles in the stock market. Much more healthy fiscal environment overall, with other stores of value "demonetized" and devoid of the monetary premium. A stretch goal for sure, but maybe can be eventually approached asymptotically on a longer time scale.

However, a pure monetary asset doesn't need to have any intrinsic value. It just needs to be a widely accepted store of value (and preferably, but not necessarily medium of exchange).

As such, it would seem that an entirely speculative asset would be one of the greatest achievements we will ever make.

Seems contradictory at first, but if you really think about it, I see nothing of fundamental importance that comes even close to it today. Especially today.

[meheleventyone]

Pretty spot on, it’s a fairly popular criticism of the stock market that it’s disconnected from providing much social utility. For example that some companies have massively outsized valuations.

[inter_netuser]

small people invest money in hopes of being less poor. They never get truly wealthy doing that.

The ultra-wealthy deploy or deny capital to mold the society to their views.

"Social utility" is just this mind virus the ultra-wealthy spread in everyone's mind to make their rule-by-proxy feudalism palatable to the peasant class.

[meheleventyone]

If that were the case we'd all think the stock market had amazing social utility because it literally benefits the ultra-wealthy the most.

[inter_netuser]

Stock markets are tiny compared to private equity and privately held biz and real estate.

but to your point, you are exactly correct. Stock markets is a game, designed to methodically transfer wealth from the peasant pockets to the ultra-wealthy that write the rules of the game.

One, and most common, game is to have peasants as suckers of the last resort and have their pension funds buy all kinds of garbage because "mandates". Why would anyone want to hold negative yielding debt? But they do.

[lariati]

You obviously don't understand the pricing mechanism and utility of basically a decentralized equity valuation engine. I mean that is what the stock market ultimately is.

These articles are pointless. No one is going to bother reading Brian Arthur of all people to have any clue.

Just the same dumb conversations over and over and over.

[AussieWog93]

>Replaced crypto with stocks, how does it read now?

It reads like a false equivalence.

I do own stocks in companies such as Woolworths (retailer), BHP (mining company) and Westpac (banking company). The fact that they produce goods or services that they can sell at a profit was a huge decision in my decision to invest (and a big reason why I didn't invest in crypto).

I don't have data, but I suspect this is how most stockholders think. They accumulate shares over their lifetime and rely on the dividends to pay for their lifestyle during retirement.

Yes, Wall Street Bets exists, but the average person with stocks is not a day trader leveraging themselves up to their eyeballs to gamble on some crazy contracts.

[inter_netuser]

and all of your investments did worse than Amazon or Tesla, that haven't been particularly profitable.

Amazon hasn't been profitable on paper for decades. Tesla took until 2021 to make a profit.

You'd underperform terribly if you were to wait until they make a profit, as markets are forward looking and you are paying attention to trailing indicators.

Profits today for an organization size of Amazon is execution of a plan put in place 5 years ago.

If you are about to dive into value investing: Berkshire made most of their money from Apple, which was a side bet made by a hired portfolio manager, not Buffett himself.

[bluecalm]

The system doesn't work because crypto currencies (and thus energy they use) is used directly to bypass laws of regulations we have.

It's like saying that we perfectly good system called economy and thus drug cartels are the natural results. Who knows, maybe their bloody rule will result in something transformative as well. Still I wouldn't be happy just accepting the state of things.