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Re:S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in... by nootropicat on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:15PM (#25297376)
There's too much idle wealth in the world, or more precisely too many people with wealth have no idea what to do with it. It ends up 'invested' into negative yield assets like bitcoin (billions of dollars lost to mining per year - over 7 at the current price) or hyped companies running at perpetual loss.

Bitcoin is interesting because it's possibly the biggest actual wealth destructor from all tradeable assets. Companies can have large losses on paper, but how much of that is actual wealth destruction, and how much just redistribution to new owners? I suspect the fraction that's actually gone in the physical sense is very small, allowing wealth to slosh around for a long time. Bitcoin's proof of work is designed to actually destroy wealth in the physical sense - transformed into waste heat and devices designed to do nothing else. This means that it's eventually certain to be outcompeted even by redistribution-type loss schemes, as groups that stay away from bitcoin completely are going to be increasingly wealthier relatively to groups that buy into it.

In the short term it may not look like it, but what's happening is social redistribution of power away from people that think bitcoin is a great idea.

Re:S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in... by shawnz on Friday December 04, 2020 @08:51AM (#25302185)
What's the difference from any kind of resource extraction industry that produces waste heat in addition to the resource?
Re:S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in... by nootropicat on Friday December 04, 2020 @05:05PM (#25308815)
That the gain from resource's utility is larger than losses, increasing the total amount of wealth in the world. Even in the case of gold, majority of demand is utility demand.

https://www.goldbroker.com/media/image/cms/media/images/glob...

Re:S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in... by shawnz on Sunday December 06, 2020 @09:44AM (#25323754)
I don't really understand. If Gold didn't have use cases as jewellery or for industrial uses then are you saying it would be a net destructor too? How can it be a net destructor if the coins are worth more than the mining energy?

Would Gold become a net destructor if jewellery demand declined for some reason?