How many wars started, how many countries destroyed, and how many livelihoods and families ruined for the USD?
No one wants to talk about that, yet we are supposed to wring our hands in grief over some extra computers left running. Give me a break.
That is a huge issue, and I'd love to talk about that. The more people see the world for what it is the better. I don't see how this redirects criticism away from BTC, or how BTC would be immune to the same kind of incentives. The horrendous things that have been done to prop up the USD aren't an inherent property of fiat currency, if an entire nation state had a large stake in BTC would it really be any different?
> yet we are supposed to wring our hands in grief over some extra computers left running
So the fact that we're using as much energy as an entire developed nation to produce <10 transactions per second isn't concerning?
The reason why the US government is willing to take drastic measures to protect the dollar is not because they own lots of dollars, but because they can exert geopolitical influence and control the international redistribution of wealth through the dollar and its associated payment networks.
In fact, the USG does own a nice stack of Bitcoin from the Silk Road seizure, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the intelligence agencies have a secret stash, too. But just owning the asset doesn’t mean they can use it to boss people around. Bitcoin’s payment network is open and free, and its inflation schedule is fixed. The only way the USG could stop it is by making it illegal, and no one knows what the opportunity cost of such a move would be.
Transactions per second isn’t a great measuring stick for Bitcoin. I would look at it in terms of savings protected from reckless inflation. If I just throw a number out and say that 50% of Bitcoins have been lost or destroyed, that leaves about $300 billion in value that has been rescued. Is that worth the electricity of a medium sized nation? I don’t know. What if that grows to $3 trillion? Or $300 trillion? How much wealth preserved for future generations is enough to justify the cost?
Hmm, let me think. The number of countries that were invaded to prop up the USD was... uh... zero.
The US has certainly waged imperialistic wars almost purely for the benefit of its corporations (see, e.g., the Banana Wars), but that has nothing to do with maintaining the power of US currency.
This cost must be taken into account.
At any rate, the narrative that the Somali shilling maintained its value is directly contradicted by Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somali_shilling#Modern_history
It starts with "Following the breakdown in central authority that accompanied the civil war, which began in the early 1990s, the value of the Somali shilling was disrupted" and gets worse from there. The currency became worthless and they dollarized.
The only reason the shilling is - very recently! - recovering is because they once again have a central government and a central bank.
As bitcoin becomes more popular and stable, it's "appreciation" relative the fiat currencies will reveal how much value governments are secretly stealing through inflation.
Exactly what goldbugs have always claimed about gold, since fiat currencies displaced commodity representational currencies (particularly gold-denominated) currencies.
The thing is, insofar as inflation can be said to “steal” from anything, it's idle holders of dollar-denominated assets. But it's pretty easy to mitigate by moving holdings other than for short-term liquidity into productive assets (which itself promotes real, not merely nominal, economic growth) rather than (or by borrowing against) dollar denominated assets.
Meanwhile, it benefits those with dollar denominated liabilities. Mild, slowly changing inflation (volatility in either price or inflation rate is a problem) isn't much of a problem for anyone in practice, and there's a pretty small audience that is receptive to the scare tactic (and Bitcoin fever has already fully reached that audience.)
No it has not. The "multiple countries" of which you likely refer to is in fact two: Iraq and Libya, and the declared reason in neither case involved oil. The US went to war against Iraq ostensibly because of Saddam's WMD programs (which were only later conclusively found not to exist), and the intervention in Libya was at the bequest of the United Nations following the popular revolt and civil war against Muammar Qaddafi, itself largely deriving from similar uprests started after a Tunisian set himself on fire and improbably drove the Tunisian dictator on the exile.
In neither case was control of oil a declared reason. And in neither case has control of oil ever been clearly demonstrated to be an actual reason for going to war.
This position assumes the US is completely incompetent and invaded a country for a fake reason. I’d argue that’s nonsense- they knew exactly what they were doing but the reason wasn’t palatable to the American people so they had to fabricate a “better” reason.
Just because the US manufactures some other excuse doesn’t mean it’s true. Why would you believe the invader?
https://mobile.twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/11918082011...
Yet you can divest from Bitcoin by simply not buying it.
It's the absolute perfect expression of our greed as a species. Ruining the planet for ephemeral bits. Bitcoin might as well be rebranded the "anti carbon offset". You're literally doing nothing but buying into a speculation market that is backed by only bits, and those bits are obtained at the cost of a supremely inefficient cryptographic process which has attracted massive electricity investment simply to make money. It has zero indirect benefit to society.
The electricity costs of bitcoin is the cost of countering government officials who insist on maintaining the power to inflate their currencies. The cost is analogous to the cost of freedom-seeking citizens of a despotic government. Enormous resources are used up in North Korea as the government seeks to control and restrain its population and some individuals seek to resist and escape. One could blame this cost on the Dear Leader who seeks to impose his will on the population or on the selfish individuals who resist him. It depends on your point of view.
There are any number of things with a fixed supply, and most of them are not valuable. Scarcity is not what makes something valuable, it is some intrinsic value plus scarcity.
As a money, BTC is bad and will get worse if it deflates and people want to hold, rather than spend it. If, conversely, the value collapses, it is also bad money.
Note one thing, btw, which I haven't really seen mentioned:
Currently, BTC mining produces 900 BTC a day in coinbase rewards, or about USD 40m, or about USD 100 per transaction. Once mining rewards halve a few times, and/or BTC drops, and assuming people are willing to pay only around 1 USD per transaction, it'll generate around USD 500k a day, and difficulty will adjust to support that amount of mining.
However, that amount doesn't strike me as being absolutely immune to a 51% attack, if big sums are at stake.
Because pegging your currency to gold only makes sense if you have a static economy. I'd advise you to read a bit about how well the gold standard functioned before 1934 (the 2008 financial crisis or the current recession are fairly insignificant compared to the "Great" and the "Long" Depressions). And bitcoin is several magnitudes worse than gold because it's inherently (hyper)deflationary.
The link between BTC and carbon emissions is absolutely not crystal clear. A significant amount of BTC is mined with renewables.
The problem is a dirty grid, not Bitcoin. Green up the grid and how exactly will BTC contribute to CO2 emissions?
Which could be used to replace non-renewable energy usage elsewhere.
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.
We could as well put spare energy into manufacturing hydrogen fuel cells or running datacenters instead of blowing it on specially-shaped bits.
The solution is to add more and more renewables (and nuclear), not to ration electricity.
And endless growth is suicide. We could trade absurdist oversimplifications, but the reality is that we live on a finite planet and we are currently in vast ecological overshoot. We need to live within the carrying capacity of the actual world instead of an economics textbook and the stock market that's programmed us to think in quarters and single-year increments. It sounds a lot like we don't share the same urgency about climate change. I won't accuse you of being a denialist but I would encourage you to look at just how deep and fast we need to cut carbon emissions before we just splurge energy on speculation markets like Bitcoin.
Guess you haven't heard of outer-space then.
This is some Thanos nonsense you're championing.
https://www.whatisbitcoin.com/news/bitcoin-is-an-energy-solu...
I mean, this has been happening since waaay before BitCoin was a gleam in anyone's eye. You want to take that tack, you start to sound like a Marxist (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Not everyone that buys a stolen phone is complicit of theft... but many are.
Responsibility comes with deliberate, informed choices.
The alternative to Bitcoin isn't Visa, it's bombs and guillotines. We all have a vested interest in seeing Bitcoin succeed.
I also would like to know what specifically makes Bitcoin the answer, and not some other cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin is definitely not the only important crypto. Ethereum, Doge, zCash... all have different roles to play in the ecosystem.
That being said, Bitcoin can exist without the IRS. USD cannot.
I don’t really think so, so I’m not sure how Bitcoin is functionally any different.