[astoor]

The author repeatedly refers to Bitcoin as a "public good", "dependent" on a "volunteer-layer", like the crypto bros such as the article author are putting all their time and effort into running a public service for the greater benefit of society out of the goodness of their hearts with no expectation of profit. That is clearly the exact opposite of reality - they are trying to extract maximum personal profit in the shortest time irrespective of the damage they are doing to our society and environment.

[javert]

Bitcoin people are not "crypto bros." Bitcoin people hate "crypto." You are conflating two opposing movements.

edit: but it turns out the article author is a crypto bro, not a bitcoin person.

[jacobn]

A large fraction of the field of economics is about taking that tremendous force coming from the desire for personal gain (= greed if you will) and turning it into a public good (= the enormous abundance the markets have delivered) while avoiding some of the most egregious harms (= "externalization of costs, privatization of profits" = exploitation, pollution, overfishing, etc, etc).

What I believe OP is talking about is how the blockchain made it possible to incentivize people to mine, thereby delivering the service of the public good of the blockchain.

Sure, all of those individual points are of perhaps debatable value, but he acknowledges that while maybe mining or staking aren't quite it yet, the fundamental blockchain tech still enables decentralized coordination and the creation of a public good through private incentive.

Which is no small feat.

[trevelyan]

The miners are certainly working for profit, yes.

The P2P network consists of volunteers who are not paid for running nodes, and whose contribution is basically guaranteeing open access to all of the data flows (confirmed and unconfirmed blocks and transactions) needed for other participants to join the network and participate on equal terms.

One of the major problems in the crypto space is that people attribute to "decentralization" the properties of openness that are actually there because of the volunteer (non-profit) provision of the open network from which miners/stakers are extracting their profits.

[mattwilsonn888]

You misunderstand the meaning of volunteer in this context. It does not mean that the reason to run a full node is for "the greater benefit of society from the goodness of their hearts" (though the cost of running a Bitcoin full node is minuscule enough that many may do so according to those reasons), no - it means that full nodes are run unpaid for the good of the Bitcoin network; its actually crucial to the argument of the piece which your emotions distracted you from addressing.

But first your basic conception of Bitcoin will be addressed, since its all you opined on (why even respond if you aren't addressing the article?)

If Bitcoin only served miners it would not be around. Miners are paid indirectly by the rising price in Bitcoin, so those purchasing it are the ones who are setting that value - they are fully consenting to the simple and genius system for its economic and technological properties which they cannot get anywhere else. The Bitcoin system is very simple; if it was purely extractive as you claim people would not use it as a store of value and transaction layer. Considering large portions of users hold their coins through large price action, and have done so for the entire duration of its lifetime, they consider it useful beyond speculation. Who are you to tell them they are wrong in so few words? And if an invention is deemed valuable, why shouldn't it use energy?

And we haven't even gotten to the article yet, because you misunderstood the economic context for your preconception of a vocal subset of a community that the author is in disagreement with.

[monkaiju]

Well said

[randomhodler84]

No way, it is these things.

Do the maintainers of SMTP do so as a public good, eg: provide us with decentralized email systems? Encryption protocols? ECMAscript?

Internet protocols are maintained as a public good. The Bitcoin developers are certainly not trying to extract profits, they are trying to deliver the world an open source monetary system.

[kibibu]

Perhaps that's the core developers' goal.

What they are trying to deliver and what they are actually delivering are two wildly different things. They've built a platform that destroys the environment faster than the entire banking sector, enables scams and ponzi schemes at unprecedented scale and anonymity, meanwhile delivering a whopping transaction throughput of around 20/s - enough to support a few moderately busy supermarkets in a single small city.

[randomhodler84]

With all due respect none of those things are true. I understand that you passionately believe them, but they are not true. You should try to understand how this works and why people would be interested.

[kibibu]

It's very easy for you to check the TPS and power consumption of Bitcoin. If anything I've overestimated the transaction rate.

[drcongo]

> What they are trying to deliver and what they are actually delivering are two wildly different things

That's precisely the point of the article isn't it?