This is the most anti-cryptocurrency tech page that I can think of, with daily negative sentiment articles popping up. It's either bitcoin will destroy the world, ether is a giant cesspool that can be implemented with a database or the favourite Tether is a huge scam and will destroy the world. Let's not forget the NFT's are full-on money laundering scheme and LOL why would you buy JPGs if you can right click and save.
Trust me, people (as in cryptocurrency realists) tried explaining in the comments, but the sentiment is too strong. Due to the meteoric rise in value and the fact that a lot of HN somehow ended sitting on the sidelines, people can't stop foretelling the impending doom and gloom while being oblivious to the underlying tenet that all of this crypto technology brings.
I fully agree with you that articles like this turn into vacuous slinging match between camps. It's not tho because there are no concrete answers from the crypto side, it's simply due to the population on HN - it's impossible to have a constructive discussion if the sentiment is so negative. So yes, I also flag such content, because these discussions represent catnip for me and provide zero value.
Sad that it has to be like that, I view HN as the #1 place where engineers, technologists, geeks and nerds meet. Looks like they all enjoy some blockchain bashing.
As a currency? I have that already. And its stable, accepted almost everywhere, doesn't waste tons of energy and cannot be lost by forgetting a password.
As ownership verification for items? I have that as well: Contracts, Bills and Agreements. They can even be digitally signed, which has all the advantages of an NFT (integrity, authentication, non-repuditation) with none of the disadvantages.
So what tangible advantages does "crypto" have in these areas for society?
Your argument is kind of like saying your paper filling system is as good as a database. With a database your don't have to be physically present like a paper filing system. With block chain you don't need permission to access the database, it is a new thing that enables more things that centralized systems used to control and rent seekers built walls around.
My income tax is automatically deducted from my paycheck, transfer taxes and VAT are automatically taken care of.
> With block chain you don't need permission to access the database
If we are talking about databases now instead of distributed ledgers (aka. cryptocurrencies), then yes I need a permission, because if I store business relevant data somewhere, I need a mechanism to ensure that only authorized parties can access it. This is doable in blockchain-based databases of course but it's much easier in a classic RDBMS or document-store (noSQL) system.
Again, these are solved problems, and "blockchain" provides no benefit over existing solutions, but impacts usability, efficiency, scalabitily and speed.
Like a consumption tax/sales tax/GST?
So you were born (or at least live) in a country that has a stable currency which is accepted almost everywhere, and you can trust your politicians to not undermine this currency by bad economic policies and/or creating very high inflation. Congratulations! However, a large part of earth's population do not enjoy this stability. For them crypto offers a way to store wealth that cannot be debased nor easily seized by authorities in bad faith.
Some estimates are that 2 billion adults do not even have banking.
You say your currency does not waste tons of energy. How much energy would you say the financial system in your country use in order to keep a sound ledger and enforce the monetary rules & policies?
Bitcoin uses less energy than the gold industry. And gold mines wreck the environment (https://earthworks.org/campaigns/no-dirty-gold/impacts/). But you don't hear much about that even though most gold is used as a store of wealth, much like Bitcoin is.
Energy usage should also not be equated to bad energy production, though of course miners can use bad energy source instead of sustainable energy.
This is trivial to calculate. BTC alone uses more power than a number of mid-sized countries, like New Zealand. New Zealand, who run their own financial systems, payment networks, banks, insurance, industry, agriculture and .. well just an entire country off less power, providing more services to more people and higher transaction throughput while they're at it too.
(NZ's payment card transaction rate appears to be an average of around 550 per second.)
New Zealand's population is 0.06% of the world population. Best guess of Bitcoin energy usage put it at around 100 TWh so New Zealands part would be 0.06 TWh.
So I think we should really compare pro rate BTC usage of 0.06 TWh against NZ's 40 TWh. I have no idea how much of NZ's usage is spent on financial system though.
> but BTC is global
So what? It supports fewer transactions per second, by a factor of almost 100, than NZ's system uses, it doesn't provide anywhere near the range of services, financial or otherwise, and it burns more power. It's a great comparison as it is. BTC is power-hungry and comparatively low-capability.
Not really. I am saying consider that energy usage for traditional banking is also high. If you compare numbers then I believe it needs to be global or pro rata.
> It supports fewer transactions per second
I don't think this is a relevant comparison to be honest. The high energy usage of Bitcoin is not to handle transaction volume, but to secure the network and funds.
Payment cards is a secondary payment layer on top of the banking settlements. Bitcoin is more equivalent to bank settlements.
Second layer solutions for Bitcoin such as Bitcoin Lightning and crypto payment cards (Crypto.com, Coinbase etc) are more comparative to bank settled payment cards and can (and does) provide much higher transaction volumes for Bitcoin. Which also means that payment card energy usage should not be included in any comparison if done (imho).
Just as a side-note, Christmas lights in US used more energy than Bitcoin miners (at least a couple of years ago) and for sure more than a lot of countries. Bitcoin provides sound money for unbanked people all over the world. What would you rather have?
LOL, no, it does not. It does nothing at all for the unbanked.
Things are still very early so people don't know what to make of it, but stable is a not a property I would assign to the dollar. Given that one economy mutates and another doesn't, you have to realize its not bitcoin thats moving against the dollar. Its the dollar moving around the bitcoin.
This is not what I see. USD with the various other currencies I tried had 1-10% variation in the last 12 months. In each of those currencies, bitcoin varied by about 300%.
Even gold, which has zoomed up this millennium, makes bitcoin look stable in comparison.
Can you name any non-crypto asset that has had an approximately constant price in bitcoin?
And how do cryptocurrencies, fluctuating between extremes of overblown worth and deep falls at a whim solve this problem exactly?
>For them crypto offers a way to store wealth
No they don't, because the tokens by themselves are worthless, as they do not enjoy a backing entity (like real currencies) and have no intrinsic worth (like gold). Since their entire worth depends on what others are willing to pay, "crypto" is, and always will be, a null-sum-game...for every penny someone makes, someone else has to lose one.
>How much energy would you say the financial system in your country use in order to keep a sound ledger and enforce the monetary rules & policies?
I know that BTC uses up the energy equivalent of an entire nation like New Zealand. So this single crypto currency alone requires as much power as a country, which has a banking system, communications infrastructure, public services, hotels, supermarkets, street lights, air conditioned homes, foundries, factories, agriculture and transportation.
So no, I do not need to know how much energy my country spends on its banking system energy-wise to say with absolute certainty that it's orders of magnitude less than "crypto".
>Bitcoin uses less energy than the gold industry
The "gold industry" excavates, cleans and prepares a resource that has widespread applications in electronics, metallurgy and science. The device you wrote your post on most likely has gold inside it, as do most electronics we use on a daily basis.
So other than "crypto", this industry thus produces something of ACTUAL, TANGIBLE AND INTRINSIC WORTH.
>Energy usage should also not be equated to bad energy production
Yes it should, because every KWh wasted on "crypto" is energy not available elsewhere. If we took the energy equivalent wasted on it, and used it to power de-salination plants, we could probably provide clean drinking water to hundreds of millions of people.
This could be said about money in general, but in both cases it’s not really helpful for the debate.
The point is that there is massive legitimate use of traditional currencies, which makes them a benefit despite the illegitimate uses. The same is just not true for cryptocurrencies.
Also, traditional currencies have many, many safeguards against illegitimate use. Cryptocurrencies are specifically designed to prevent those safeguards.
There is a good reason that ransomware only took off once cryptocurrencies became available.
It is "legitimate" to use a cryptocurrency to buy pot. It may not be legal, depending on your jurisdiction; but "illegitimate" is a fuzzy word, expressing some kind of subjective disapproval.
I personally think it's illegitimate to criminalise drug use. But that's just a subjective, personal opinion.
What? The peak of ransomwares was during the 2000s.