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Delmololo | 1 year ago
Yes Bitcoin consumes a lot of renewable and often limited renewable energy. Like water energy in Canada or solar panels etc. Just because they consume renewable it's not helping us.
The amount of free or cheap energy we have around the globe is limited. Your Bitcoin miner makes more money than anyone who just needs to consume it.
And the natural gas plant in NY IS NOT renewable!
Regarding my example in Texas, you not just ignored my natural gas power plant which got turned on again for Bitcoin you also ignore that for the Texas grid having to PAY Bitcoin miners to stop is horrible for consumers.
There is no inherant motivation for a Bitcoin miner to play nice. The opposite happens even if they just consume random energy they just use even more because they don't move that heat to someone to heat with but use AC to blow it out of their buildings.
Bitcoin is not stable. It moves around as any speculative asset. When inflation was low, prices spiked because people started to gamble. As of now Bitcoin has not proofen to be stable in any way. It's therefore NOT helping the poor as you suggest.
You say Bitcoin is a great alternative for Visa and co. Just that 1. Bitcoin fees vary and I have payed plenty! Of fees. Often enough more than I ever paid for visa. Your argument is again invalid.
And sure let's create a proper digital us dollar to optimize it. Why not? But Bitcoin is not doing this at all!
Btw do you also know what visa does but Bitcoin actually can't? It does insurance and fraud protection. Bitcoin has none if it. If I transfer super securely Bitcoin to a seller and the seller doesn't give me my goods, I will not have anything.
The way smart contracts try to solve this is ridiculous: I would need to block the same amount of value on a smart contract and get it after the transaction. A rich person could literally bankrupt a poor person.
Guess what a solution for this would be? Escrow. What is escrow? Trust. What is trust? Proof of stake.
No one wants to change the inflation rule. No normal person should ever be able to control this. The expertise for it is a sub field in itself. If everyone would vote, everyone would get cheap money until the system breaks...
What the central banks do is critical and has not been magically be solved by Bitcoin at all.
An exchange is not the same as a bank. And normal Bitcoin bros tell you to NOT use exchanges. Why? Because everyone will run to the same few, which then again need to be regulated as we have seen . You basically would then replace the existing finetunes and regulated banking system with an regulated and finetunes exchange system. You wouldn't have won anything.
I'm traveling around the world too. I have not seen anyone accepting Bitcoin in the last 20 restaurants at my current rural France holiday. Where do you do holiday? Srsly? Tell me at least 5 places which took Bitcoin directly.
The current fiat system is not perfect but it's the best proof of stake system with a ton of features, it's finetunes by all of us for over a century now and it works.
I exchanged my euros in Iran for their currency. No one of those people had a smartphone to do Bitcoin transactions.
And no the third world person can't just exchange their 'not so good currency ' easy nilly into Bitcoin and no as long as Bitcoin is unstable as shit it's not a good way to get your salary in it.
My friends in Ukraine (8 years ago) were very very happy to have a stable euro income in comparison to their local currency
lrvick|1 year ago
We -should- make laws here to ensure miners are pushed to energy sources that are not harmful. If they can afford to build warehouses full of miners, then they should also be able to help build water/solar farms to power their objectives as well.
There are always going to be people wanting to use a lot of electricity for things you personally do not value though. The Las Vegas strip is an example where the casinos wanted a lot of power and water to make money, and the local area could not supply it. They had to help fund improving the infrastructure for the whole city in order to meet their profit objectives.
My point is the greedy miners can become allies of public infrastructure and grid improvements if we legislate correctly. This is not a new bitcoin problem as much as it is a classic human and political one.
> You say Bitcoin is a great alternative for Visa and co. Just that 1. Bitcoin fees vary and I have payed plenty! Of fees. Often enough more than I ever paid for visa. Your argument is again invalid.
Bitcoin is more of a replacement for gold, which formerly backed the dollar. It is much easier and cheaper to store and transport bitcoin than gold. Both of these have been used directly for commerce but it does not scale. Visa in the end took on providing a credit system on top of the dollar (which was based on Gold).
In the Bitcoin system the "Visa" is Lightning, though that will take a while to get mature and widely adopted. Still, it uses lines of credit to provide instant transfers with no fees.
> Btw do you also know what visa does but Bitcoin actually can't? It does insurance and fraud protection.
Things provided by private companies that have nothing to do with the underlying currency. This comes with maturation, sure, and it is happening.
You are talking to one of the people who built arguably the first insured, SOC2 certified, and multi-party accountable, custody companies for Bitcoin and other cryptoassets.
Do not assume none of us in this space care about such things.
> And normal Bitcoin bros tell you to NOT use exchanges.
I am not what most would refer to as a "Bitcoin Bro". There is a lot of ignorance on both sides of this for sure.
I have helped build several regulated, tax paying, custody systems, some of which with actual banking charters.
I am on the side of building the infrastructure to ensure cryptoassets can be transferred with all the safety of traditional financial instruments. I hope to see a Digital Dollar use that same plumbing some day too. From there it is up to the public to decide if they want to use inflationary currency or not, with all other things being close to equal.
> No one wants to change the inflation rule. No normal person should ever be able to control this. The expertise for it is a sub field in itself. If everyone would vote, everyone would get cheap money until the system breaks...
So a special few know better than the public so they should make all the rules for us, and be trusted to make those rules with benevolence to benefit the poor and help everyone become successful. Benevolent authoritarianism never lasts, and always ends up benefitting the few over time. Look at the endless graphs I posted. The economy has gotten worse by endless metrics since 1971. The few authoritarian leaders of money screwed over the public in major ways by breaking the gold standard, and we did not get to vote on it.
Bitcoin is fundamentally a rebellion against authoritarian rule of money.
If the end game is we end up with a digital dollar that the public manages democratically to meet the needs Bitcoin does today, great. Until then, Bitcoin will continue to fill that void.
Every user of bitcoin is voting against inflation.
> We have the perfect system
Became
> The current fiat system is not perfect
I will at least take that as one good outcome from this discussion
Delmololo|1 year ago
Nonetheless of what you build or not. You still ignore arguments I brought up in our discussion.
Right now in my opinion you deflect.
As I said before: Bitcoin doesn't even solve the trust problem. The only thing it does it makes sure that one value gets transferred from one crypto endpoint to another.
And the only thing existing are coins. The creation of these coins have fundamental problems:
1. There are very little of them 2. Very little of them get created
Whoever owns Bitcoin right now have in theory such an first mover advantage that no one in their right mind will ever start to transfer over Bitcoin.
And because new coins are not just getting created so slowly they will even become less. In 4 years only 1-2 coins will be made every 10 minutes.
This alone will breaks Bitcoin neck sooner than later.
Changing this would create big value changes for Bitcoin. Whoever owns Bitcoin will experience huge inflation if anyone going to fix this.
All the math just doesn't make sense for Bitcoin at all.
El Salvador Shows how stupidily hard it is to use in real life.
And you argue by wanting laws for Bitcoin? The magical decentralized anonymous crypto? You already want what most don't want.
No one ever wanted crypto to be regulated.
All of this will just incorporate (if even) crypto into our current fiat system.
And no not a single country and me as a citizen want crypto. My family and friends have no clue how crypto works.
Just because you build some company whatever doesn't make you an expert in economics of Bitcoin.
Start arguing my points