janoside's comments

The Bitcoin network is a global energy buyer with properties unlike any other. It will continue to bid for stranded and excess energy that cannot be used for other applications. With last year's Chinese mining ban the network has become more distributed than ever and is likely to be very resilient to US domestic energy-price swings.

PoW is the solution to an important set of interconnected problems, and as long as the network has value, PoW will keep bidding for energy to secure that network.

It's been said, correctly IMHO, there is only Proof-of-Work and obfuscated Proof-of-Work. Rephrased, nothing is cheaper than Proof-of-Work: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

Your view on currency exposes your extremely elitist bias.

Are you aware that a large portion of the population is unable to purchase assets? What do you say to these people? What do you say as the dollars they earn pay less of their rent? Less of their healthcare? Soon...less of their groceries?

What's the point, you ask...

Here is Ross Stevens, CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, describing "the point" for an hour:

https://www.microstrategy.com/en/bitcoin/videos/bitcoin-macr...

It sounds like you've made up your mind about Bitcoin, but I believe you've missed the big picture. The above video, if you watch it with an open mind, will help you to glimpse it. Hint: it's not about cappuccino, it's about living in a world of competitively devaluing currencies and resulting asset inflation.

In many cases this is incorrect. Bitcoin's mining network is the first global energy market that unlocks stranded energy (energy produced too remotely to be profitably inserted into any grid) and brings its value to society.

Natural gas producers are TODAY starting up miners to burn excess gas that would otherwise be flared. The concept has been productized - https://www.upstreamdata.ca/ - and is live.

Rather than a case, how about a framework to evaluate going forward: the market. Given enough time, I'm pretty sure the market will root out the "real value" of bitcoin and keep assessing the "real value" of gaming.

Let's watch for 5-10 years. If you're right about bitcoin, I bet its price will be much lower and you can gloat. If you're wrong, I bet its price will be much higher (because I agree with the basic assessment that gaming "feels" much bigger today). Luckily, we can both place our bets based on our best assessments of the future.

How confident are you that you can present a substantive case against bitcoin that matches the diligence that Ross Stevens has done for years? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lczPTYf_tvA

Via Tesla, bitcoin is now implicitly held by all investors in the S&P 500, including, very likely, you. You are now a benefactor of bitcoin's growth, whether you're aware of it or not. This trend, where bitcoin quietly confers benefits to growing constituencies of people who remain completely unaware of the fact, will continue.

And, at the same time, there are many people, in less fortunate circumstances, for whom the benefits of bitcoin are felt much more acutely: https://twitter.com/gladstein/status/1357757736394444800

The "minuscule percentage" you quote (without reference) is very likely already clearly incorrect and will continue, over time, to become more incorrect.

Nic Carter's rebuttal to a Bloomberg comparison between Bitcoin/Visa, including assessments of total and per/transaction energy usage:

"First of all, Bitcoin and Visa are fundamentally different systems. Bitcoin is a complete, self-contained monetary settlement system; Visa transactions are non-final credit transactions that rely on external underlying settlement rails. Visa relies on ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, the global correspondent banking system, the Federal Reserve and, of course, the military and diplomatic strength of the U.S. government to ensure all of the above are working smoothly.

Any energy comparison must take the above into account – including the externalities from the extraction of oil, which implicitly backs the dollar. As those who make this comparison inevitably fail to mention, the dollar’s ubiquity is partly due to a covert arrangement whereby the U.S. provides military support to countries like Saudi Arabia that agree to sell oil exclusively for dollars. It’s worth noting that the grossly oversized U.S. military, whose presence worldwide is necessary to backstop the international dollar system, is the largest single consumer of oil worldwide."

https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...

Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer of the Human Rights Foundation, someone who spends a lot of time and energy trying to help people in economically repressed circumstances, clearly disagrees with your assessment:

https://time.com/5486673/bitcoin-venezuela-authoritarian/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1340836877595594752.html

My guess is you have no idea of the underlying dynamics because you haven't done your research before deciding for yourself and stating confidently "can be explained by nothing else than..."

Here are a couple of threads describing the dynamics in play. Feel free to agree or disagree after reading but, contrary to your statement above, these can explain the price increase:

https://twitter.com/Croesus_BTC/status/1319734166557081600 https://twitter.com/real_vijay/status/1143070383261638656

Here's Lyn Alden, regarded by many to be one of the best macroeconomic thinkers working today (who is now very bullish on BTC), playfully echoing the same idea from above:

https://twitter.com/LynAldenContact/status/13458545139457065...

And, just in case the tone of Lyn Alden's tweet confuses you about the caliber of thinker you're encountering here, this is a recent article of hers with relevance to BTC macroeconomically:

https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/

And another covering several BTC misconceptions:

https://www.lynalden.com/misconceptions-about-bitcoin/

As I started: I believe you have not done your research to understand what you're looking at. This would be an excusable situation 5 years ago, but the BTC space is now teeming with high quality, pre-digested material that you can use to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding.

I believe you'll regret your hubris...sooner rather than later.

Culture evolves slowly, often only changing dramatically across generations. Multiple generations in USA (which is a dominantly exported culture globally) have adopted the "drugs"-are-bad idea as a core belief (it's also worth noting that core beliefs tend not to be very nuanced or discerning, as in this case there's very little ability to discern between different types of "drug" substances).

Culture evolution slows further when large institutions (primarily "the state" here) adopt the same beliefs and make them concrete (by being codified in many laws in this case). This particular effect worsens when the core belief is that some thing is bad and can be outlawed/fought because you get droves of self-righteous politicians who want to make a name for themselves piling on against this Bad Thing.

Those processes need to be reversed and unwound to move past the erroneous core belief.

Bad ideas do die, but they almost always survive much longer than they "should" because of a litany of flaws in human nature/culture/information-flow.

No, it doesn't. Money, perhaps more than anything else in human society, exhibits network effects that incline it toward winner-takes-all dynamics. Every money implicitly competes against every other money.

I recommend taking a look at something like https://bitcointreasuries.org/

And don't just glance at it - try asking some probing questions, like "What does this mean?" and "What might I be missing concerning the underlying dynamic at play?"

You can also try reading The Bitcoin Standard for a good analysis of the dynamics and history of competition between different forms of money - the central thesis being: History has shown that you can't protect yourself from someone else holding money that's harder (better) than yours. Bitcoin is better money than anything else we have or have ever had.

I appreciate your perspective. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills these days on HN concerning BTC. This idea (early rejection, re-justification) is a helpful heuristic for understanding some of it at least.

The "market" is always active and always looking to select the best of everything, including money. Bitcoin isn't be-all/end-all magical money - but it is a massive, order-of-magnitude improvement on history's greatest "hard money" (gold). The markets of the world are slowly coming to understand the value of this "best reserve asset and best collateral asset ever seen" (Raoul Pal).

A new digital, internet-native asset with the greatest monetary properties in history is monetizing before your eyes; meanwhile you're relying on your understanding of an old world to convince yourself it doesn't matter and the people who see something deeply interesting are kooks.

As a tech enthusiast on a forum heavily populated by people interested in disrupting aspects of the world through technology, you are missing a big, big boat here. And I'm not even referring to the possible investment opportunity - rather just the opportunity to watch with open eyes as some of the foundational facets of human society are disrupted. I find the anti-BTC tone of the discussion here very disappointing but also very interesting (I can't figure it out except through intellectual arrogance).

I offer the perspective: you hold a set of deeply held assumptions that are being actively questioned and poked at by this technology. The level of your reasoning is not up to the task of understanding what happens, even long after the disruption has happened. I recommend investing in education on this topic.

A recent podcast episode worth listening to: https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/what-is-bitcoin

We cannot expect any actor (human or otherwise) to act against their own best interest. Google/Youtube, an entity with incentives, will act to maximize it's share of your time spent with them - it cannot function any other way, lest a competitor does that job better and they are destroyed/bought. We can wish for the underlying dynamics to be different, but they are what they are. All of society is currently lost in hopeless battles, fighting the "tides" - in this case underlying incentive structures.

You can wish for legislation to save you from your outrage - to shatter these companies into little pieces. But legislation doesn't change underlying incentives. In fact, legislation nearly universally distorts incentives further from what you wish them to be. For example, in this case, fear of legislative action against "Big Tech" having too much power/influence/misinformation-potential, is likely the underlying cause for their inclination toward censorship.

The classic Walmart South Park episode is a nice visual syllogism for this idea.

I offer no solutions at the level of "society", but at the individual level I offer you to consider that "outrage" is a waste of your time and your emotion. Easier said than done, I know.

Part of me (the emotional part) agrees with you. But without offering a human-nature compatible monetization mechanism to replace ad monetization, I'm sure you'll lose many things that you deeply value without acknowledging or understanding how they depend on that money.

It could probably be argued that "people in general" are willing to pay for services they value and that a few current generations have just been irreparably "mis-trained" to expect free services, but in any free-ish market economy businesses will be incentivized to offer services with costs as hidden from the user and as externalized as possible.

1. This is a common criticism, but probably shouldn't be. It would be nice if the activity of folding proteins offered the same proof-of-work, security attributes as, for example SHA256, but sadly it doesn't. As in all systems there are engineering tradeoffs involved and the mining functionality of a cryptocurrency, which literally secures that network, should probably choose the security-first sides of any tradeoff. Additionally, if the network has "value" (however you might like to define it...they clearly do as denominated in USD), then the activity of securing that value should not be considered a "waste", even if it doesn't also provide some other, secondary value.

2. As in any market, the early risk-takers (who, by virtue of being early in an unproven market, are also the biggest risk-takers) will be those granted the biggest reward if they are "right" (the market/product has value).