I disagree.

Bitcoin is hugely wasteful. Estimates on the power usage of the Bitcoin network have it using more energy than Sweden.

Now that might be fine if it provided more than a modicum of utility but it doesn't. The only use case I've seen is to bypass laws on where money can be moved. Some of this is moral (eg totalitarian governments with capital controls on the poor) but most of it isn't (eg scams, ransomware, otherwise illegal gambling, drugs, child abuse material and so on).

I'll agree there's probably a little schadenfreude here because of how many Crypto Andys have pumping crypto so hard for many years pretty much for no other reason than their own gain.

Most don't believe in any utility here. It's just a get rich quick scheme. AGain, that would be fine if it wasn't so horribly wasteful.

the proportion of criminal activity with crypto is estimated to be an order of magnitude lower than the conventional economy:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2021/01/19/the-fal...

most crypto is actually not well suited to criminal activity. it is pretty appealing as a savings and transaction medium when your alternative looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/JcaAbC4.png

So you're saying crypto is not good for anonymity, privacy, decentralization?

with the exception of privacy coins most of it is not good for anonymity/privacy by default (a wallet address is effectively a public psuedonym with a social graph), but that has no bearing on the decentralization of crypto protocols, which ranges from fraudulent to extremely strong, depending on the project.

there are ways to use bitcoin with very good privacy, like chaumian coinjoin, but they are not the default behavior of the protocol. nobody describes bitcoin as anonymous besides local news anchors and other low-information audiences.

I also have no horse in this race, never owned any BTC/crypto, but I feel like the wastefulness is made to be too big of an issue. Seems like it can be solved eventually.

So if it wasn’t wasteful, my question is, does a decentralized currency provide any real value? From my limited perspective it seems like it would solve some problems with things like inflation, free market transactions — but it also probably creates new problems. I guess my question is, would the world ultimately be better off or worse off if a decentralized currency was the predominant world currency?

Probably better—one nation wouldn’t need to maintain its currency as the world’s reserve currency. Demand would drop, increasing that nation’s export competitiveness and reducing inequality.

I know that’s what bitcoin proponents would say, and this appears true to me on the surface. I also see huge incentives for governments, banks, payment companies, tax companies etc. to NOT want this to happen. Some for self preservation and immoral reasons and some for legitimate humanitarian reasons and to prevent anarchy. It’d be nice if someone could paint the unbiased vision of what the future world would look like in that scenario.

It’s energy usage is indeed terrible. I’d love to see it move to a proof of stake model.

Is Bitcoin is as wasteful as say, poor zoning rules where N million Americans have to commute to job centers from suburbia, burning Y gallons of gas per year? We often talk about the environmental impacts of Bitcoin but look at how grotesquely wasteful we are in virtually all aspects of our living in the west. It's like when someone is hotly critical of a $10B portion of the >$2 trillion dollar national budget. I get you have to start somewhere but eliminating crypto alone won't solve any of our environmental problems without other material changes to our way of life.

Strawman much? Bitcoin, and most other cryptos, are both designed to be wasteful and also are directly competing with systems that are many many orders of magnitude more efficient (and useful).

Bitcoin isn't competing against commuting. Bitcoin is competing against governments & ACH. Against PayPal & Visa. Against wiretransfers & banks. And it's horrendously destructive at it. People commuting don't change that. Proof of Work is an environment disaster. Pointing at other environmental issues is just whataboutism, not a defense or excuse.

> Bitcoin is competing against governments & ACH. Against PayPal & Visa. Against wiretransfers & banks

You're not making it look bad :)) They're all oligopolies that use their power to make obscene amounts of money and stifle any innovation that threatens their oligopoly. You want to blame somebody? Blame exactly those actors since it's directly due to them that we even need such a convoluted and horribly expensive alternative. From a strictly technical PoV you could implement micropayments in a week in a garage without any fancy blockchains.

Bitcoin is not destructive compared to fiat currencies. Inflationary monetary policies are now causing a global recession, resulting in insane amount of human suffering. There's also climate catastrophe, wealth inequality, and all kinds of other economic and social issues directly caused by fiat currency. It's time to put stop to destructive fiat currency.

I think the environmental argument is the easiest one to make against crypto, and the easiest one for crypto fans to discount (“proof of stake is coming in X months!!”).

More importantly, though, it’s mostly a way for already-rich people to extract money from poorer people.

The people who “invested” in 2021 are almost all under water today, and they’re largely people who couldn’t afford to lose their investment.

Most people who invested in a peak were "under water" a year later. That's what a peak means.

It is still wasteful. There are other wasteful things but this is new technology which is not solving the problem but creating new one.

How do you solve decentralized store of value without random people competing for its legitimacy?

What a nice piece of whataboutism. The argument is not that nothing else is polluting and/or wasteful.

It's funny how when somebody is asking "Compared to what?" he doesn't get any answers, but gets downvoted to oblivion. Yey for being the right tribe, I guess.

Because it's a bad faith argument, quite deliberately so.

Why? Because it's an effort to distract from an issue with butwhataboutism. It's a really common tactic to derail an argument. Politicians use it all the time. Consider Chuck Schumer's opposition to removing a bizarrely low tax rate (15%) for hedge fund managers, called the carried interest tax credit [1]:

> But in his conversations with Wall Street executives about the tax proposals, Mr. Schumer said, he has told them that he would oppose a tax increase as long as it did not also apply to other industries, like energy and real estate.

If Bitcoin energy wastage is bad (which is my argument) then it's bad even if there are other bad things.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/washington/30schumer.html

Is it bad faith? I mean, you yourself used a comparison. Even as an order of magnitude, I'd like to see some numbers. Somebody talking about numbers and alternatives should at the very least not be silenced.

> I have no horse in this race but it seems like a lot of people are rooting for as much pain as possible for Bitcoin as that justifies/makes people feel good for missing its bull run.

I for one am a supporter of progress in finance, no matter the medium, but the crypto fandom is so incredibly insufferable, full of snobs, tech-, environment- and money-illiterate folks that I might as well watch the bubble burst and cheer.

Money illiterate folk are generally poorer, with fewer job options. While the gifters deserve what befalls them, I find it hard to laugh at the misfortunes of those with fewer options that have been conned into this scheme.

I had plenty of opportunity to "get in" on the bitcoin - I did some trades back when it was in 1000$ range and thought it was an interesting peace of tech with potentially great future.

I even did a POC of a smart contract back when ETH was <100$.

Ever since then I've seen very little practical applications and soo much bullshit - I would never "invest" into anything crypto related even if the payout was guaranteed - for the same reason I wouldn't go work for a betting company, hack people for money or run scams - that's not how I want to make money, and I do feel contempt for that entire "movement".

You feel contempt because you got “justed” like all the other high earners here. It’s “just” a decentralized database.

Most startups on AngelList are a waste of space, time, money, and employment. No different with blockchain.

>Most startups on AngelList are a waste of space, time, money, and employment. No different with blockchain.

One huge difference - crypto had the time and money to find it's market. I was optimistic at first - but then it turned out to be a toxic cesspool fueling speculation, gambling, money laundering and other illegal activities, causing HW supply disruptions, burning insane amounts of electricity.

Getting into it just because I might randomly get rich goes against my ethos.

A lot of people are rooting for Bitcoin to crash so it will stop pumping carbon in the atmosphere like a middle sized country.

I think it depends on your perspective. If you believe the options are bitcoin goes down or bitcoin goes up, then you're rooting for more pain if you're rooting for bitcoin to go down. But if you believe the options are bitcoin goes down now or bitcoin goes down later, then bitcoin going down now is minimizing pain.

I bet I could've made a lot of money as an early adopter in Herbalife or Amway too. I don't care that I missed out and I'm not jealous of those who did get in. I don't want to be near it and I hope they collapse too.

> as that justifies/makes people feel good for missing its bull run.

That is the same argument that 'people wants to reduce inequality because they hate the rich'. It appeals to feelings but it is a not very realistic nor useful explanation.

> The entire US and European stock market is absolute garbage too (housing showing cracks as well)

If my house losses it's value, it's still my home. If bitcoin losses their you just got a very long number.

If your house loses its value to zero as you suggest Bitcoin to become a random number, your house is in a terrible condition that no one can live.

> seems like a lot of people are rooting for as much pain as possible

No, some of us are very pro-Bitcoin, but we love seeing the bubble pop so that it can return to its correct use-case: as a currency, not a speculative risk asset.

Unfortunately for you, Bitcoin will soon be neither.

Personally I'm not /rooting/ for it to go to zero. I just don't see how you can value it. The fact that it's worth $20k is as arbitrary as $60k.

When it was a toy and people were buying pizzas with it I can sort of understand that as a bit of fun, but beyond that I just don't see the value. And if there isn't value it's just pure speculation hoping there's a bigger fool than you so you can take a profit.

Housing and stocks at least have something tangible behind them. You may disagree about the correct value, but it is most of the time non zero.

>The entire US and European stock market is absolute garbage too

When markets grow by 20-30% a year, it's "wonderful". When they get corrected by 20% it's all of a sudden "absolute garbage".

Markets finally get back to a resemblance of sanity. Why people believed that double-digit growth without creating added value is somehow the new normal is beyond my understanding.

It's not about the money, it's about a scam finally unravelling and preventing a scam from doing future harm.

Even if someone missed the Bitcoin bull-run, they could have easily joined the stock market bull-run.