1. With the Apollo missions, the money being put into the project was going into research and development, so there was at least some expectation of getting new science and technology out of it. With Bitcoin,nthe money put in is going into speculation or mining, which only fuels the network. There is no reason to expect new technologies to come out of this, and certainly not any new science.
2. The Apollo project was a big consumer of money, of which there exist plenty in the world and we can create more. Bitcoin is a huge consumer of electricity, the production of which is generally accelerating global warming, the single biggest threat to our survival as a civilized society that has ever existed in history.
We already know that Bitcoin itself is not even remotely close to being a solution to the problem you're thinking about (decentralized money), even IF I agreed that this is a real problem (I don't, I believe Bitcoin is going in the wrong direction compared to fiat money). You could make a decent argument for investing in developing scalable crypto coins, maybe Ethereum or maybe something else, but proof-of-work crypocoins and Bitcoin in particular are an obvious dead end, and can be decommissioned entirely without much loss (especially if the bitcoin holders were compensated somehow).
Bitcoin is an energy currency.
If anything, bitcoin mining is a disincentive in making a more energy efficient green economy: instead of reducing waste and reducing power production as needed, we now have a way to turn excess power production into money directly. While a carbon tax could have shut down a coal plant, now the coal plant could instead get a bitcoin mining rig and power that, as long as the carbon tax is lower than the (extremely volatile) value of bitcoin.
To avoid the most apocalyptic effects of global warming, we have to close down most fossil-fuel based energy generation today, literally. Bitcoin is actively working against that by driving up the price of electricity to fuel a speculative bubble.
Not a currency, but a digital asset that wastes enormous amounts of energy.
It's in the top 20 or so of world currencies, and it's still in its infancy (thus volatility etc).
My question, then, is how do we go about drowning Baby Bitcoin in the metaphorical bathtub?
What do I do with my profits from mining bitcoin? Send my kids to college, buy groceries, remodel my bathroom, etc. It's an entire ecosystem, speculatively mining bitcoin by consuming electricity is just as evil as driving 1.5hrs to work because you're too lazy to find something near your house for example. People expend trillions of dollars in energy "mining" fiat.
Sure, the monetary value of that energy may be getting stored, but we can't buy lower temperatures with money, unfortunately.
When you store energy by pumping water for example, you can later let that water flow to get back the energy itself (with some inevitable waste, of course). When you're converting energy to bitcoin and later require energy again, you have to use the bitcoin to buy more energy (either from the market or by building a new power plant or something), you can't just physically convert the bitcoin back to energy.
I now see some holes in my Apollo analogy (also government vs individual spending). I am lucky there is always someone on HN who will make a better point :)
Bitcoin gives users a trustworthy decentralized store of value today that they could easily move to another cryptocurrency in future using some kind of decentralized exchange based on smart contracts. It provides liquidity for all future cryptocurrencies.
The Apollo argument was more compelling because it didn't require any value-judgement of the end-goal (but it was less appealing to me for the reasons I outlined). It is an argument about the process, regardless of the results (in the end, the lunar landings in themselves were a symbolic victory more than any great advancement of science - the science happened on the way).
We can go into arguments on why I think the end-goal of crypto-currency believers a la Satoshi would be a net negative, but others have covered it pretty well (deflation, fraud, money laundering, having your life savings destroyed by a hack etc).
https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1348094702550216707
Proof-of-stake coins are one obvious counterexample. Would proof-of-stake technologies have been developed if proof-of-work didn't come along first to incentivise development and build trust in cryptocurrencies?
Furthermore it's possible that a purely proof-of-stake currency would have never gained the widespread trust that proof-of-work did at a time when cryptocurrencies were a new idea. Or maybe not... but people did have ideas about proof-of-stake quite early on and it took much longer for those ideas to gain the same level of acceptance that proof-of-work did.
For example, I happen to believe that decentralized coins are a horrible idea in and of themselves, even without proof-of-work also helping to increase global warming. So, from my point of view, any adoption of a crypto-currency is a net-negative, and I would be happy to know that the technology exists, but is staying abandoned as long as we have no use for it other than non-centralized money.
Sure, but that is a much different argument than proof-of-stake vs proof-of-work.
With the assumption that having a successful proof-of-stake cryptocurrency is a net good, then what I am saying is maybe our usages of proof-of-work up until the future widespread adoption of proof-of-stake actually will contribute more positively to that end than negatively.
So I stand by my original point - the resources going into bitcoin are not fueling technology research.
They may be fueling PoS Ethereum adoption, but that is another argument entirely.
Simple logic.. Billions of dollars in miners are bought by speculators, Bitmain orders new 5nm chips from TSMC... TSMC uses money for R&D.
Either you're being willfully ignorant or you're trolling us.
I'm not sure that's true. Proof-of-stake is established as a concept but there is still lots of room for technological improvements in the implementation and user experience. New proof-of-stake coins can compete more effectively because of the trust which Bitcoin established.
Change how exactly? To me bitcoin seems like this:
Expectation: the world ditches banks, dollars, euros, etc. People switch to bitcoin and everyone lives happily, paying for everyday stuff with bitcoin.
Reality: people do not use bitcoin to buy groceries. In fact, people do not use bitcoin per se - people are only interested in buying and holding (speculating).
We are still in the very early days of decentralized finance.
As a dictator, my goal is to fill my bank accounts for when I get deposed. In most cases, countries who have their resources fleeced have lawful means to go after former dictators. Bitcoin removes that.
Source? Africa has mPesa which is vastly superior than BTC
Look it up. It's real.
I'm not arguing anything about the current system of doing financial transactions. But the environmental disaster that is BTC has to die.
If there is truly a need for innovation in the digital currency space, it should be replaced with something less wasteful. Too bad all the pundits and hodlers are too invested to admit this.
We need to focus on decomissioning coal/gas power plants and combustion motors for transport. That will get us at least 60%.
Bitcoin is actively working against that. By increasing the energy demand from the network, it makes it harder to simply stop producing energy. It doesn't matter if miners are directly buying only from renewable sources (as some claim), they are still likely out-bidding someone else, who then has to go to a fossil fuel plant for their electricity.
Blaming and cancelling insignificant activities leads nowhere. And it's absurd, considering the main CO2 contributors are elsewhere - it is the transport and power plants which need this attention.
If we are talking about affecting CO2 production via electric energy policies, more just way (and more effective way) to introduce "CO2 sanctions" on various activities is to factor the damage in the energy price. That way everybody feels the pain proportionally, not just few random scapegoats like BTC. I agree that price does not need to be the same for everyone. Maybe BTC activities should pay much more for electric energy than a normal (non-BTC oriented) household does.
First part: bullshit. Shutting down BTC would be highly consequential.
BTC is the perfect peak shaver to have on your grid. This is what makes it so perverse. With a mining rig, you can shave excess production peaks on any of the energy markets: long-term, cover intraday swings, or frequency stabilization where you have to react in seconds.
If BTC ceases siphoning green energy away from hydro plants, etc, the grid operators and their governments will be forced to look into storing surplus production instead of turning it into waste heat and crypto hashes.
Storage of energy was and is very small / non-existent because of large investments needed to build it, and little profit to be gained. It's not BTC's fault.
We learned about blockchain, we learned cryptocurrencies are possible. Now it's continuing to burn tons of rocket fuel for no further benefit... Saturn V served it's purpose, there is a good reason we don't continue building rockets this way. We learned a lot from Bitcoin, critically, we learned it is _not_ the solution to a sustainable decentralized digital currency.
If we could have gone to the moon at a fraction of the cost, but people had still insisted on doing it the expensive way, just because the expensive approach came first, that would be a better analogy.
Better ASICs that do nothing but calculate sha256 hashes? Easier money-laundering? New venues for tax evasion?
I guess censorship-resistant online value transfer is worth something, but I'm not sure it outweighs all the negatives.
For their wicked thirst for power, some will do anything. In our age there is an unholy alliance between the worlds greatest power ever and its military industrial complex, where the incentives for government leaders is to wage war in strange faraway lands, and to bribe the population at home with dependence on the state, in exchange for votes. This is all funded by printing money - inflating its supply. In effect, this is devaluing the salaries and savings of anyone who earns their living, and who can not do anything about it, as they are forced to trade in this currency created by fiat.
By creating Bitcoin, Satoshi took gold to the internet, and we can now trade in a currency which no one can inflate to fund wars, or to in essence steal productivity from every earner.
A sound system of ethics must contain the right to ownership of your property - you body, your money, and other possessions. Bitcoin practically gives us this in the Information Age.
> By creating Bitcoin, Satoshi took gold to the internet, and we can now trade in a currency which no one can inflate to fund wars, or to in essence steal productivity from every earner.
Utter bullshit. The power of the US government doesn't stem from its ability to print money. Rather, it's the other way around essentially: its ability to print money stems from its power. The US government controls the most successful economy and army in the world's history, by far.
If it had a reason to, the US government could, with resources it entirely owns, out-mine the entire bitcoin network and print its own bitcoin as well, in violation of the protocol. What's more, assuming it were done publicly and with a commitment to maintain it, people all over the world would use the newly printed US-bitcoin.
More realistically, it could easily lend bitcoin that don't exist yet and create a fractional-reserve system right on top of bitcoin.
The problems of today's economy stem much more from "free market" systems like the officially-sanctioned speculation happening every second on Wall Street. Workers are hurt much more by so-called "free trade" agreements that allow US companies to own other parts of the world and exploit those for cheap labor at the cost of both US workers and the foreign economy. And wars get started not because the US has money, but because the US doesn't allow enough democratic control of its workings.
HN is such a rare place on the internet. I am writing in good faith - let’s not fall so low as to speak like this.
The power over currency and the power over arms go hand in hand.
The “officially sanctioned” exploitation you speak of - who is the “official” in question? The sins you and I refer to stem from the monopolistic use of violent force by the state. “Wall steeet” is far from a free market, and so if the dollar, euro, pound, and other state currency markets
With regards to tax evasion, my opinion is that it will simply force taxation to occur in other ways like VAT. People are quite capable of evading taxes in the present system, so wide adoption of online value transfer would simply democratize access to tax evasion (and force governments to rethink how they collect taxes).
Money laundering makes me think of the dangerous flip side, where anyone can covertly accumulate and use resources without scrutiny - e.g. Ali Alexander using Bitcoin to finance the transport and lodging of groups that took part in the January 6th riot.
Besides, the seignorage revenue is pretty tiny in western economies..
Bitcoin? I'm not so sure. Bitcoin definitely stands to change the world, but I'm not sure for the better. Bitcoin would:
* By design, have exploding deflation
* Allow insane inter-generational wealth accumulation and disparity
* Block most of the controls used by central banks to stabilize the economy
* Allow a disk failure or hacker to wipe out someone's life savings
... and so on.
I'd actually liken it to the /early/ fascist, communist, and democratic regimes, which had a lot of good ideas for how to replace monarchies, a lot of bad ideas, and perhaps a 25% hit rate. The US worked out fairly well, at least once it got past the Articles of Confederation bit. France didn't work for a long time, but eventually worked out okay. Fascism and Soviet Communism /appeared/ to work better than what came before for a few years, and then imploded into horrors. The jury is still out on where the Chinese form of government lands.
At this point, we don't quite know which track we're on with Bitcoin. I was optimistic at the beginning, and now I'm more pessimistic, but it's too early to tell. In either case, we've learned a lot, and we could probably design a better system without many of Bitcoin's flaws.
I see this call to destroy it as akin to the 1969 Apollo mission protests, when civil rights leaders argued that the space mission resources would be better used on Earth.
https://www.history.com/news/apollo-11-moon-landing-launch-p...