That said, there are last-gen GPUs and ASICs going to landfills. Some people are actually getting paid to make the inputs to the otherwise-ephemeral pseudocurrency. Not to mention all of the CO2 released into the atmosphere... you can't see it but that $1.8B put it there.
In reality I wander how many former mining GPU farms are now doing AI training...
Plenty of economic activity that is not fake involves no freight.
Freight is a very poor way to measure electricity output. Both turbines and balance of plant equipment usually last 40 years (so we replace c. 2.5% in a given year) and now a days, most fuel is piped.
>Beyond that, efficient use energy production requires some place for it to be used, Generally home and industry appliances.
Yes, all of which is economic activity unrelated to freight.
He has a friend over at his loft, and while looking at pictures from his finance days, she asks, “What happened to all the money?”
His reply is a classic:
“It’s still there, it’s just in other people’s pockets.”
——
That’s all I see in crypto speculation. It’s a game that involves shuffling money between players, without actually creating new wealth.
(Also, the casino is betting against you and sometimes isn’t satisfied with their rake, so they “rug pull” and leave everyone holding worthless chips. But that is another issue.)
This is very different from, say, selling software that runs a business. Your software is not just transferring money from your customer to you, it’s literally creating new wealth by making your customer more productive.
Gold... what if this common belief can be upgraded to a better form of money?
Bitcoin is energy quite energy intense and slow in the number of transactions but gold has many drawbacks too! It's a heavy rock, can't be easily split for payments, you have to spend efforts in custody and can't be transferred digitally.
Bitcoin... what if this common belief can be upgraded to a better form of money?
Ethereum is way more complex than Bitcoin but solves through clever engineering most of it's drawbacks. Let the Market decide which form of money is best.
As to letting the market decide things, I lived through the Bre-X scandal, where the market decided to invest in a fake mine, and real lives were ruined. I believe in regulated marketplaces.
What you list as drawbacks of gold are exactly the thing that preclude it being so easily weaponised for scams/fraud/rapid-wealth-redistribution.
You call bitcoin a SoV but further down describe it as a form of money. You also have an implicit assumption about what makes a "better" form of money. I'd like to read a bit more about what defines "better" in your opinion.
> You call bitcoin a SoV but further down describe it as a form of money. The primary functions which distinguish money are as a Medium of Exchange, a Unit of Account, a Store of Value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money
> I'd like to read a bit more about what defines "better" in your opinion. There is definitely a list of features but I would argue that being hard money is the most important feature. Meaning hard/sound where the nominal amount of money does not change.
Bitcoin in definitely hard but Ethereum does even better by being deflationary. As network transactions are slowly reducing the total amount in circulation.
Other nice features of Bitcoin/Ethereum vs Gold/Dollar are: digital, non-seizable and no third party risk.
The industrial revolution demographics might be an interesting read.
Just shuffling money between players is downplaying it.
"Crypto" often just sends "value" to the bitbucket either intentionally or because of operational errors.
You can replace "shuffling money" with "shuffling commodities" and you have equally valid statement.
Commodities trades are just middleman between middleman, they dont do anything but inflate prices of goods.
Historically futures were good idea and were exchanged between producer and manufactures as a bet for more stable future (for both parties), not anymore.
People play the lotto for fun. They think hey maybe I’ll get lucky and win. Sure there are addicts , but I don’t think default behavior is “if I play this I’ll be rich “
Crypto is literally “if I trade this I’ll get rich”.
But, both are roughly 0 sum games in the end as you rightly pointed out.
Almost everyone in cryptocurrency has deceiving prospective buyers for years. You can still find people shilling the long-term value of Bitcoin and until the crash you could throw a rock and hit someone claiming NFTs were an investment or saying that it was just like the stock market.
That was the source of so much of the opposition on HN: it’s not that it was new but that it was being sold as something it transparently wasn’t, and perhaps 5% of the people in the field could engage intellectually with people who asked about fundamentals. Had people been selling digital lotto tickets, far fewer people would have objected because the risk and benefit profiles would have been accurate.
Now repeat the search with Lotto or Slot Machines.
The information out there is not at all unbiased or fair.
Crypto isn't about mining anymore.
It's weird to think that they "generated" 1.8bn. If I made 1.8bn selling sandwiches, you could probably find evidence of it somewhere, like in product packaging in dumps. But here the only thing left behind is a bunch of guys going "Yeah I left my position open and drained my life savings by accident."
Like, every bit of that money represents money that someone else lost, and basically nothing else. I can't wrap my head around it.