Hermio's comments

"we all" references here my parents, my siblings and probably all people around me. I don't mean to use like as love, but no one complains about it.

When i talk about crypto, people do prefer to have their money at the bank where they can use it versus in bitcoin where it could just disappear by loosing their wallet.

I have never heard of banks stealing money. Do you have a src for this? I'm aware that there is a bank insurance for your money as long as you are in the EU (around 100.000,- Euros protected by the central bank) but in Germany i never heard of money gotten stolen from banks?

I personally don't have debt and i do think its a good think to be able to get debt when investing it in something like a house. But i can't follow your argument here again, how would that be gone with bitcoin? People would just start borrowing bitcoin, or not?

The big issue still is here: for Bitcoin we produce currently co2 from producing and consuming over 100twh. Bitcoin has a higher energy consumption than googles datacenter. We are now trying to get our co2 output to zero 2050 or so which we have to do. Everthing which produces more co2 adds to the issue. We have to invest in renewable energy without bitcoin and germany did this a few years back. Right now solar energy is the cheapest energy you can produce and on the other side, there is now a power plant in NY which runs 24/7 because it can mine for bitcoins and before that it was not feasable and no one is forcing those people doing this to reinvest their earnings in removing that additional co2 again. They probably consume more as they just spend it

I want to clarify, that i argue against Bitcoin and not against cryptocurrency. I can imagine a world with a Crypto-Euro which doesn't has any gold equivilent anymore and works on some blockchain technology but is controlled / signed through central banks (like every central bank of every european country) which would also solve the energy issue.

Your transparency argument, while flaws have been shown from the other person commenting on it, is too much transparency. No one wants to have all transactions publicly available. It could make sense to use it for public funds.

I argue against Bitcoin itself as an independent tool and the power consumption of bitcoin and i don't think we need to spend that much Energy on Bitcoin right now to do further research on blockchain and crypto currencies.

I have never thought about how to write my arguments shorter as no-one every brought it up. But online also makes it quite hard to have a common ground. I will try to be more aware of this.

I reference bitcoin against 'normal' markets like Gold, shares or normal currency.

But its true its value quadrupled in the last 6 month.

I do hope though that the pressure on Bitcoin increases based on co2 consumption alone.

But also all governments and law things are slow. Like if start a lawsuit today, something like this can take years right?

To trust whom instead?

How would a world, realisticly speaking, look like if we ever reach a dystopian level where we all stop using the currencies of our own countries?

Srsly, if i stop trusting in the Euro, i can't imagine how our whole economy has to look like. I think we might have a lot of bigger issues at this point in time as bitcoin and probably not enough resources anymore to run bitcoin.

I think its currently popular because its new and highly volatile and unregulated.

Our society is quite busy with corona and while bitcoin uses a lot of energy already, the market size is still very small. Core reasons why i think we don't hear more about regulating bitcoins.

Popularity doesn't correlate to real value.

I brought arguments. It should be easy for you to take part in this discussion by using my arguments and showing they are wrong.

I have no clue why you would see my writing as 'deliberately wordy' if you could just counterargue them? I'm also not a native speaker, not sure if my style of writing is just different.

"who crafts his arguments not to inform but to waste the time of people engaging him" I'm lost. You make it really easy to do the same as the other commentor. You don't reference anything i wrote, you don't bring any examples or showing any issues in my argumentation.

I see you stoped caring about real arguments because its to much effort for you to read through them and trying to argue against them.

Sure, lucky enough, i'm arguing on hn also to make sure that comments and articles dont' scew the image of bitcoins being bad for the environment and happy enough, you stop arguing about it, does exactly this.

You have not shown a real scenario how bitcoin could work without an energy armes race.

The power consumption is NOT arbitrary: Everyone who owns bitcoins has to be motivated to keep bitcoin alive. More people having bitcoin means more people need to make sure that mining is happening.

The second point is, bitcoin mining requires a certain amount of distribution to work as intended which leads to: you need a critical mass of people doing the mining as you can't just trust 3 people mining it for you and you trusting them. Especially as bitcoin is often mentioned as being 'free'. Therefore you can't just go to a bank or country and let them mine it with nearly no power consumption.

The third point is: Mining has to be motivational enough and therefore it will hover between being worth to do so in countries like USA (for distribution reasons) and gambling (gambling provides high margin with high risks and i think that could be a good UPPER resource consumption limit).

Forth: Bitcoin mining always needs an incentive which makes it competitive: If everyone can mine unlimited and there is no factor to determine who can mine more, than it just doesn't work anymore.

We now have a system which ALWAYS consumes resources and its critical to understand 'consume'. That resources is gone. Otherwise your proof of work wouldn't work anymore.

A global economy is easy able to destroy something like bitcoin: China can just ban it, countries can put pressure on other countries like USA and partners do with North Korea. No country has a benefit of allowing bitcoin. A country has control over their currency and they like to keep the control.

"the new world economy" what? Do you think we have our current financial system just for fun and we all move to bitcoin? Our current financial system is build and has grown over a long period. We all LIKE that current system. I like to be able to go to my bank and show my passport and get my money. I like to know that untaxed money is harder to hide. I like the knowlwedge that you can't transfer high amount of money from left to right without an external party looking over it for money laundring. Those systems are beneficial for every normal human being.

Don't throw in garbage statements like "old man yells at cloud". Either argue or don't.

Oversaturated financial markets perhaps?

Who the fuck invests in bitcoin? People with too much money and the habit of gambling.

No one can tell me that there is a logical argument without flaw and a ton of assumptions that the bitcoin market is in its current state anything than gambling.

Because bitcoin is so active and new makes it so interesting for gambling :(

What is our problem? The problem is creating/producing co2 is a problem for our planet. Can we agree on this?

If we agree on the co2 production problem, lets take a look at what bitcoin is doing:

It converts a lot of energy/resources of our planet into co2. It does that by the asic's someone has to create, and by far the direct energy consumption. What does bitcoin produce? It produces transaction security right?

1. That value bitcoin is creating, is basically necessary to allow bitcoin to function. Without energy consumption, no transaction. Right now, we have a system which is able to create secure transactions, its called our current financial system. Our financial system is optimized for cost, speed and trust. Trust by regulations on different levels (state, world etc.). We have a global financial system.

That financial system is not perfect but bitcoin is also not perfect right? Okay so what is the advantage of bitcoin? People say its open, i can invest in bitcoins without regulations and i can send money to people like who are in a regime (in theory). Is that true? Is Bitcoin making sure that if your country decides to stop money transactions to North Korea for good reasons, that bitcoins stop working there? No it doesn't. All those mechanism, which are there to protect the normal people more than the tax fraud people are gone in the bitcoin system.

Therefore, the big advantge Bitcoin actually delivers (unregulated financial system) will be regulated as hard as our current system as soon as it hits a relevant size. And its not even hard as long as Bitcoin doesn't have any value. It doesn't has any real value as it is not a currency, its only a crypto currency. It doesn't has a country behind it. That it works as it works right now is just due to speculations/gambling.

We have to make sure that investing in batteries, other storage options, dump load with usefullness (pre heating water, using an EV, producing hydrogen, smelting more metals on high demand time, enabling technology to flip on and off devices like washing machines) is actually more reasonable INSTEAD of having to fight the Bitcoin gambling market.

Googles Datacenter are using 10times LESS energy than bitcoin https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-power-consu... and every single server/service on a Google Datacenter adds more value to our society than any bitcoin transaction ever will.

All of our datacenters are only using 80twh more energy than bitcion and all those datacenters give us as a society values like entertainment, banking, building, simulating stuff, doing research like cancer research etc. etc.

BITCOIN is the worst invention in our society so far as it is the only invention i'm aware of which has such a high impact on resource consumption with no real value to our planet :(

Sooooo how does that equilibrium should look like which stops the energy race?

Everyone can calculate bitcoins with equal effort? Or is it still an arms race on who can gather more resources (energy/asics)?