political implications aside, it still seems so crazy that here we're just burning 10 million barrels a year on doing nothing useful at all

>political implications aside, it still seems so crazy that here we're just burning 10 million barrels a year on doing nothing useful at all

The Iranian people impoverished by sanctions would beg to differ (no pun intended).

hence "political implications aside". this could also be solved by the US lifting their unjust sanctions

If only we could all get along and sing Kumbaya together, we could solve all the world problems. In this context of human conflict and geopolitical power struggles, does bitcoin make any sense to you?

only as much as other means of money laundering, which tend to be more energy efficient

I remember reading somewhere a few years back that they have to keep pumping it in their antiquated infrastructure otherwise it causes problems to the infrastructure/wells. I tried to google it but it's hard to find.

It isn't unique to Iran, in general stopping oil wells is a risky thing. There's no guarantee it will start back up, and even when stopped it can leak combustibles.

Think about the barrels burned by the tanks and planes in the middle east. The proof of work for the petro dollar is the military.

useful is subjective

They're securing the network and being rewarded for it. You might not like it, but it's hardly 'nothing useful at all'.

What has the network produced in the real economy?

It’s possible bitcoin may produce something someday. But look at it from an outside perspective: a bunch of people, motivated by an idea, have got together and commissioned the burning of coal and oil on a vast scale.

Bitcoin more or less operates as “proof of carbon”. Imagine if a crypto network operated by “proof of art burned” or “proof of buildings destroyed”. And people got together and directed capital towards buying up art and burning it, or buying real estate and knocking this down.

And this secured their currency network. You’d have to have some very good output from the network to justify such waste.

Because proof of work is proof of waste. That’s how it’s set up and secures the network. Unlike existing systems it is antiefficient. And currently it is setup to waste carbon and GPUs.

> What has the network produced in the real economy?

Well according to this article it has allowed a nation state to avoid international controls and restrictions. Satoshi himself would be proud, it pretty much what he was imagining.

According to the article that accounts for 4.5% of it, so the other 95.5% of it is waste.

> What has the network produced in the real economy?

It has lessened the impact of economic sanctions imposed on a nation. I think that's direct proof of how valuable cryptocurrency is. People should be free to trade without some country imposing bullshit sanctions on them.

Someone should tell them about Monero.

I don’t know much about cryptocurrencies; how is monero different from bitcoin in this context?

Monero transactions use ring signatures and are very difficult to trace. Each transaction is signed by at least 11 keys and there's no way to tell which key is the source of the coins. The source and destination addresses as well as the transaction amounts don't show up on the block chain. Even if they did people can just make new subaddresses to make correlation extremely difficult if not impossible.

The US treasury tried to sanction a Monero address once. They ended up sanctioning a transaction identifier.

https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt

> Digital Currency Address - XMR 5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207887e2af87322c651ea1a873c5b25b7ffae456c320;

Note the lack of a 0x prefix. Here's the transaction on a block explorer:

https://localmonero.co/blocks/search/5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207...

Bitcoin is a public ledger of all transactions: if I know your wallet address I can see how much money is inside it, and I can see how much money you’ve sent to other wallets, what wallets you’ve received from etc etc

Monero anonymizes all this, no one can see how much money is being sent where.

Like a security guard for a mall with no stores inside.

It's a cost/benefit ratio problem. Other crypto currencies can achieve the same goal for a tiny, tiny fraction of the energy costs.

As well, what major difference would there be to the world if bitcoin vanished overnight? What real-world value is it providing to us?

I don't see the costs of bitcoin being worth the benefits.

Something something Bitcoin solves all world problems, brings world peace etc.