If I buy Apple stock, I have a piece of a company that rakes in billions in actual profit by turning raw materials into useful machinery.
If I buy a US bond, I get interest, and it is guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the United States.
If I buy gold, I own a physically rare and hard to counterfeit asset that humans have valued for thousands of years.
If I have a savings account, I get interest, and the money is guaranteed by the FDIC.
Even dollar bills under the mattress don't decrease in value by 10% in a single day.
At current valuations (Shiller PEs ~40), stocks are disconnected from their income. Therefore, if the Fed tapers harder or even reduces the money supply, it will crash. This leads to a "Ponzi" musical chairs aspect where investors getting in last will have bailed out the ones before them.
> Real estate obviously
Valuations are still heavily influenced by monetary policy, but also by intrinsic scarcity. As space runs out around desirable areas, the ways to acquire are increasingly limited to buying from an existing owner.
But for the average retail investor owning stocks is the same Ponzi, no?
Freedom and democracy is taken, not given. If you ever stop fighting, the government will become complacent and leech away a large part of an economy.
Humans, and by extension governments cannot be trusted with the money supply. It is just human nature. I don’t think control of issuance of currency is even a matter of democracy — for it is not the people that elect the chair of the central banks, the imf, the bis. People have no say in the monetary policy, it is thrust upon them by the unelected. If the individual could have a choice, would any democratic candidate be bound to follow their wishes? So, instead, we bypass this. Step outside the system where it cannot be corrupted.
You trust humans and governments too much. I trust math. Math won’t let you down like humans will.
Yes, empires have historically debased their currencies during a decline. Blaming the decline on debasing the currency rather than the other way around is an argument one could mount, but the evidence either way is scant.
As far as elected governments hiring civil servants being anti-democratic goes, must every candidate for every role be voted on? At what point can the people vote for someone and delegate authority to them?
The IMF was created by elected officials and exists with their support.
You have the same say in that as all other voters; you just don’t like being outvoted and have elected to claim the rules are unfair instead.
I have developed educational materials for folks and played with this technology a long time. I will admit I don’t grok every line of the science experiment geth (ethereum client), but I do understand the math, it is the same as Bitcoin. I haven’t been keeping up with Eth client nearly as much as BTC. Running an eth full node needs some real hardware. BTC runs on a potato.
boom boom
Why not take this argument all the way?
Also, by the usage and transaction volume Bitcoin is already behind Ethereum and others, so it is no longer even top 1 and has been falling against others for the last 4 years.
https://twitter.com/evan_van_ness/status/1471643651608649728...
95% of 10 k. Coins. 66% still buys mainly Bitcoin
https://twitter.com/evan_van_ness/status/1471643651608649728...
In terms of "Total Market Capitalization", Bitcoin currently sits around ~39%[1], which feels unlikely if "66% still buys mainly Bitcoin". But again, you could be right.
I can ensure you the number looks very different in reality.
Way more than 95% of the 8900 cryptocurrencies are jokes, like CumRocket.
It is interesting that "saving energy" has been established as a dogma that does not even get questioned. I guess the propaganda by big energy monopolists about "carbon footprint" was very successful.
Currently nearly the whole world is running a economic system that is based on economic growth and leads to maximizing resource consumption. Sure using resources efficiently does increase the value society can gain from them but not total consumption. If you stop Bitcoin, people will find other means to use the excess energy.
The reasonable way to solve this is to make energy PRODUCTION stop using fossil fuels anymore. Simple as that. That is why we need to keep talking about our carbon footprints so we don't take any action that might go against the interest of certain corporations.
[1] > The data and analyses presented here show that historically, over long time periods, improvements in efficiency have not succeeded in outpacing increases in the quantity of goods and services provided.
https://web.mit.edu/2.813/www/readings/DahmusGutowskiEfficie...
Like when they say "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle; in that order" for recycling.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...
How is this any different?
(Point being, there are many, many activities people engage in that are a complete waste of energy. Should PoW cryptocurrency mining be singled out for particular excoriation? Personally I'm against it for the exact reasons mentioned along with the reality that Bitcoin has failed in its mission. But let's not pretend it's the only thing we should stop doing.)
Not to repeat it in full, but the short of it is that bitcoin's usage of energy is not for the amount of energy, but because it must expend a certain economic value of energy in order to keep the network secure. If energy becomes cheaper or more efficient, bitcoin must burn more. Bitcoin's energy usage has an adversarial relationship with efficiency. Practically every other use of energy does not have an adversarial relationship, and will accept the same total amount of cheaper energy to do the exact same work with no complaints.
A helicopter will not require twice as much gas to fly the same distance if we happen to make gas twice as cheap.
As a result, yes I think we should single out PoW.
Money has been secure for literally thousands of years before PoW was invented. Sure, PoW works, but it's the most wasteful solution to the problem of securing transactions that has ever been invented in the history of the world.
And Bitcoin will not protect anyone from non-financial inflation, such as rising energy prices causing a rise in prices for most other goods. If anything, Bitcoin would make kt harder to actually transact in this type of market potentially leading to problems of simply there not being enough money for the economy to function.
Finally, while Bitcoin may give some protection from a hostile government, it also leaves you with no protection for much more common cases of fraud, forgotten/destroyed passwords etc. Not to mention, most people transact Bitcoin through an exchange, the equivalent of a bank, which could probably be forced to cede control of "your" wallet to a government just as much as any other financial institution.
What's being "validated" by PoW mining is that someone has done a bunch of expensive, energy-intensive work on a block of transactions to satisfy an arbitrary condition (that a hash of the block be less than a target value). Explaining how this actually "secures the transactions" involves a great deal more hand-waving.
It's basically like heating your home by adding CPUs in your walls and having them compute the digits of Pi instead of running current through a resistor, because you don't want to have to trust Big Resistor.
The bitcoin network is far more centralized than traditional payment systems, many orders of magnitude slower, and it uses as much electrical energy as entire countries to achieve this.
If someone wants to give me money and happens to have it in BTC, either they’re going to convert it or I am. I might as well make it easy for them. (I’m generally anti-BTC, but if I were taking donations, I’ll find a way to take what you want to give me.)
Every time someone says "if you don't like it here, go somewhere else / home" with an anti-immigration stance (even if they're talking to people born / naturalized in that country) they're asking them to be an immigrant elsewhere.
Of course it is, since a block holds a max number of transactions. Say a block can hold between 1 and 1000 transactions. Then, mining a block takes 1 kWh. This means that a transaction takes between 1 kWh and 1Wh, depending on transaction size (number of wallets involved, other metadata etc).
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1 has been discontinued.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
A bigger problem is that it swiftly undermines an important trait of a charity which is: that it ought to represent ethical action in at least some (palatable) framework that appeals to people who would consider donating toward that work. For example, I donated to Wikileaks years before Assange's choices made that work highly questionable, and like many other observers would now never consider donating to wikileaks again. The damage to Wikileaks' credibility has hit the organisation in both financial and cultural spheres. Their ability to advocate depends significantly on their reputation.
Not every charities end up with a conundrum quite this dramatic, but it's not uncommon they face some. One example is LGBTQ charities, who are offered money by large organisations which those organisation in return use to portray themselves as more progressive. Those same orgs may still have discriminatory hiring practices or a troubled history with LGBTQ community, and where that occurs, the act of taking that money significantly undermines the charities' reputation among the LGBTQ community itself. This isn't hypothetical, I've seen this happen, both with large companies and with police, which for many decades persecuted LGBTQ people—and in some places still do.
Now if we remember that Mozilla, the company, is financially dependent on Google money for the deal of making it the default search engine, we see the much bigger ethical issue here.
Notably, I didn't actually argue above that "taking someones money means you must morally agree with that person", but instead provided concrete examples of how taking money from morally dubious sources compromises peoples ability to act ethically, and further, compromises that charities appeal to people who would otherwise consider donating.
You're also free to ignore what they want if you are dependent, and either seek other funding, reduce your efforts, or dissolve the charity.
> Having your charity financially dependent on puppy killers or (say) weapons manufacturers undermines your ability to act ethically in various situations, which you may or may not see as important. Here you might picture Assange taking Russian money (indirectly) and the ethical swamp he finds himself in when he criticising behaviour that is an assault on journalism in the west while deciding whether or not to cover the astounding number of journalists in Russia that tend to fall out of windows.
You are arguing from a point if view that where it's a given that a charity compromises it's ability to act ethically if it accepts money from an unethical source. That is the entire question. Assange for example could accept the money and simply not let it affect the content he releases.
> A bigger problem is that it swiftly undermines an important trait of a charity which is: that it ought to represent ethical action in at least some (palatable) framework that appeals to people who would consider donating toward that work. For example, I donated to Wikileaks years before Assange's choices made that work highly questionable, and like many other observers would now never consider donating to wikileaks again. The damage to Wikileaks' credibility has hit the organisation in both financial and cultural spheres. Their ability to advocate depends significantly on their reputation.
A charity by definition represents an ethical action. You are internalizing the ethics of donors into the ethics of the charity. If you do this no large charity is safe since most likely hundreds of thousands of people have donated to them. Most likely many of them having ethics you do not agree with. I'm not sure what your point with Assange is. It's an entirely different discussion separate from whether charities should accept money from unethical donors.
> Not every charities end up with a conundrum quite this dramatic, but it's not uncommon they face some. One example is LGBTQ charities, who are offered money by large organisations which those organisation in return use to portray themselves as more progressive. Those same orgs may still have discriminatory hiring practices or a troubled history with LGBTQ community, and where that occurs, the act of taking that money significantly undermines the charities' reputation among the LGBTQ community itself. This isn't hypothetical, I've seen this happen, both with large companies and with police, which for many decades persecuted LGBTQ people—and in some places still do.
Then the LGBTQ is undermining their own cause. They refuse an improvement in their situation for a theoritical best outcome. Perfect is the enemy of good. I think it's great that a company donates to a good cause. I don't particularly care what their hidden motivations are. In fact I would not ascribe any positive feelings to the company because of them donating. The only reason a company donates is because it thinks it will somehow make them money. If in the process a charity receives money because of this then I think this a great construct.
What I think is bad is that if a donor influences the charity or the charity let's the donor influence them. But a charity accepting money from an unethical donor doesn't imply that. It only makes it a possibility.
The person turning it down gets to brag on Twitter about turning it down.
At best you can feed a million people for a day (you certainly won't be curing cancer) but you will launder their reputation in the process. These kinds of charitable causes allow for people like the Sacklers to get the attention they crave from their fellow high society despite the awful things they have done, just because they flash their wallets around at a few galas. As long as nothing requires them to change their behavior, they won't.
But charities are there to do a job, if someone wants to give them money, it seems silly to refuse.
Accepting a bitcoin and immediately turning it into USD does not mean you politically support cryptocurrency.