[the_gastropod]

This article is basically like arguing: “Sure, using the Infant-Chipper 9000 results in the deaths of infants. But it’s a rounding error if you consider how many infants die in the world every year!”

Bitcoin purposefully wastes lots of energy to provide something of extremely dubious value.

[willcipriano]

It's literally an infant chipper insofar as it enables the sale of (and thus the production of) CSAM.

[ardme]

Yet obviously, some people find it useful. Who are you to tell people how to live their lives?

Maybe you should stop flying on airplanes for the rest of your life?

[red-iron-pine]

The people finding it useful are overwhelmingly moving money illegally, such as how you can peg BTC shifts to Xi's anti-corruption crackdowns in China, or MBS in Saudi. Or moving drugs. Or hyping something to sell more made up money to rubes.

[ChainOfFools]

When how people live their lives depends on them shoveling millions of joules s of externalities onto my environment and that of my kids, in addition to propping up a rube goldberg Ponzi scheme that has a non-zero chance of ensnaring people I care about either directly or indirectly through financial mismanagement, you better believe I'm going to tell you how to live your life.

I'll tell lots of other people how you live your life is hypocritically contributing to a massive increase of financial leverage on the part of "rationally self interested" sociopaths and criminals at everyone else's expense( in direct opposition to its putative purpose of undermining predatory central bankers, yet is simply shifting the power to predatory anon-ish ransomware purveyors and sex traffickers and bullshit gambling token insta-twit "influencers" seeking to exploit the naivety of children for their own financial gain), and generally promoting the enshittification of everything that touches the internet, and should be mocked and discouraged at every opportunity.

You don't like the free market of ideas when it turns against you? tough.

[crtified]

"When how people live their lives depends on them shoveling millions of joules s of externalities onto my environment and that of my kids, in addition to propping up a rube goldberg Ponzi scheme that has a non-zero chance of ensnaring people I care about either directly or indirectly through financial mismanagement, you better believe I'm going to tell you how to live your life."

This is no defense of Bitcoin/crypto, but the above paragraph relatively concisely describes how I feel as part of the underclasses in the traditional world. Except that all the fears it encapsulates have already occurred for my family, generations back.

There are people in this thread who get a yearly payrise (which translates to increased selfish expenditure on plastic toys and air flights and fancy petrol burning machines) that's greater than my entire household's income, and I'm just an ordinary person in a western country. How many household bitcoin miners does that equal, environmentally speaking? For that one person?

The hypocrisy embedded in fervent hatred of crypto, as though extravagant & hugely unbalanced wastage of resources wasn't practiced by us all daily, implies a moral distance that, imo, barely exists. Bitcoin and crypto are mere reflections of the wastage that we as a species have normalised, and still do, via our lifestyles.

It's "industry" and "business" that have fucked this world.

[ChainOfFools]

I'm not advocating for the "industry" side as if it's a dichotomic industry against crypto, or banking against bitcoin. I'm specifically criticizing crypto and especially Bitcoin because the entire ideological mission of the project is to disrupt and disintermediate all of these well-known predatory Industries, when it has done none of this whatsoever. In fact has actually contributed both to incumbent disproportionate inequality of wealth, as well as creating new classes of disproportionate and malignant, aggressively unaccontable wealth. It has backfired in the worst possible way and all the fallout is on the people that was supposed to benefit.

And the and the relative handful of people at the center of the so-called decentralized crypto world are well aware of this and don't give a flying f**.

[crtified]

I wonder that we couldn't say similar about the TCP/IP protocol.

It's the human behaviour, what our species turns the protocol to, that we're really complaining about.

[ChainOfFools]

The tcp/ip protocol didn't have a white paper and accompanying ideological promotion and narrative expressly stating the purpose was to wrest power to create money from sovereign central governmental authorities that had ostensibly abused it, back to regular people in a decentralized manner. And instead resulted in a cartelified cabal of people who go out of their way to be unaccountable by obscuring their identities, which is actually a step down from people who you can at least in theory remove from power or hold accountable through democratic means.

It sure doesn't help that the earliest adopters went on the social media of the time crowing about how they were the new wealthy elite.

[the_gastropod]

“Some people find the infant-chipper useful. Who are you to tell people how to live their lives?”

<insert improve the world somewhat meme here>