[woodruffw]

I don’t think we have to agree on a single metric to see that running a coal-fired power plant for the sole purpose of cracking hashes has marginal, if any value to society. And that’s before we even factor in the ridiculously negative externalities manifest in digging coal out of the earth and burning it.

[scottiebarnes]

I think a decentralized network that is permissionless to participate in, pseudonymous and censorship resistant is very valuable to society.

I think an asset that can be secured, transmitted, and stored in self custody cheaply that allows people to escape hyperinflation is quite valuable to society.

I think understanding central banking and monetary policy and history of money are not strong points on HN. Everyone here understands that a memory leak causes your app to crash given enough cycles. Being able to print unlimited currency is a memory leak.

[woodruffw]

> I think a decentralized network that is permissionless to participate in, pseudonymous and censorship resistant is very valuable to society.

Any or all of these things can be true! But you're going to need to show that Bitcoin satisfies each of these conditions.

Last time I checked, it's a public, immutable ledger that anybody (not just officials with warrants) can track. The senses in which the Bitcoin network is "permissionless," "pseudonymous," etc. are all adaptive (and mostly non-formalized!) properties of behavior on the Bitcoin network, each of which has spectacularly failed in well-publicized ways.

> I think understanding central banking and monetary policy and history of money are not strong points on HN. Everyone here understands that a memory leak causes your app to crash given enough cycles. Being able to print unlimited currency is a memory leak.

I think I understand both central banking and monetary policy well enough (as a non-CS-but-educated layperson) to not require silly computer analogies. Conspicuously absent from this analogy are deflationary spirals, one of which Bitcoin currently is in. You don't need to be an economist to understand that the defining property of currency is its ability to provide liquidity to transactions (i.e., serve as a medium of exchange); deflationary assets are famously poor mediums of exchange.

[scottiebarnes]

> The senses in which the Bitcoin network is "permissionless," "pseudonymous," etc. are all adaptive (and mostly non-formalized!) properties of behavior on the Bitcoin network, each of which has spectacularly failed in well-publicized ways.

In a closed system, all you see are public keys sending/receiving from other keys. If you want to identify or censor a person or their transaction, you need external information linking them to a particular address. New addresses can be created on the fly simply by creating a new wallet, which is software that can be run on any device anywhere in the world, thanks to open source code.

> Conspicuously absent from this analogy are deflationary spirals, one of which Bitcoin currently is in. You don't need to be an economist to understand that the defining property of currency is its ability to provide liquidity to transactions (i.e., serve as a medium of exchange); deflationary assets are famously poor mediums of exchange.

I don't know how deflation plays out with Bitcoin, no one does. But in 100 years if we want to change it, we can, because its an open source protocol that can be forked and forced to compete with other ideas.

[woodruffw]

> In a closed system, all you see are public keys sending/receiving from other keys.

Sure. Now show me a human economy that's a closed system! We meat-sacks love our groceries, movie tickets, &c.

> If you want to identify or censor a person or their transaction, you need external information linking them to a particular address.

As we've seen with every single legal exchange, this isn't true: you only need to identity the coins themselves as having been laundered or obtained from/otherwise mixed with the produce of a crime, and nobody will accept your money. Bitcoin cannot solve the Big Man With A Stick problem, and ignoring the problem makes it strictly worse than fiat.

> But in 100 years if we want to change it, we can, because its an open source protocol that can be forked and forced to compete with other ideas.

"Just change the protocol" has worked out famously well for every cryptocurrency so far ;-)

[scottiebarnes]

> Sure. Now show me a human economy that's a closed system! We meat-sacks love our groceries, movie tickets, &c.

Yes, you're not required to identify yourself when you purchase those things. So a transaction between two parties for the exchange of goods would be private. I can send money to my mom and you'll never know.

> As we've seen with every single legal exchange, this isn't true: you only need to identity the coins themselves as having been laundered or obtained from/otherwise mixed with the produce of a crime, and nobody will accept your money.

No one can stop an address from receiving from another address. You can implement tracing and enforcement to make it difficult for a particular transaction within a particular jurisdiction, but this is a function of social implementation, not the network. And if you want even more anonymity, look into Monero.

> "Just change the protocol" has worked out famously well for every cryptocurrency so far ;-)

Not sure what you mean by that. I think the proliferation of competing ideas and forks is a good thing. Most projects are bad, but over time only the strong will survive.

[ben_w]

Eh, I’ve had responses from pro-crypto people to the effect that the cost is the point, those particular individuals seem to believe that is both a necessary and a sufficient way of making the thing secure and useful.

I was unable to convince them to the contrary on either regard, the necessity nor the sufficiency, despite the existence of all the currencies that work even better without PoW/PoS.

[woodruffw]

That's the wonderful(?) thing about profit motive: Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) are making a handful of people ludicrous amounts of money, and it's easy to ignore just about anything that falls out of that as long as the gears keep turning.

When people succumb to that kind of profit motive, it becomes our responsibility as disinterested outsiders to make a non-compromised evaluation of the state of affairs. That's the evaluation I'm interested in.