> Which, like most things, is something that probably be left to the free market.

The free market is often at odds with society at large, which is why we have regulations to protect society from the free market.

I was just trying to think of how to put this succinctly. Well said!

In addition, it tends to become more at odds with society as wealth inequality grows and that is at an all-time high and growing. Perhaps a signal that more people need to point out, as you did, every time the free market is tossed out as a universal solve-all.

Except it's not a free market.

Those same regulators also give tax breaks to large inefficient corporations and tell small businesses they must close down for arbitrary intangible public health reasons, while the large corporations can remain open.

In both examples, it's the regulators whom are detrimental to society, not the free market.

Virtually everyone that champions regulations are not for regulation, but for imposing political will in a way favorable to them. I know this because these people freak out and think it's the end of the world when there's a seat change in politics and the very same regulators they loved are now imposing political will in a way that's unfavorable to them. They also seem to believe in democracy, but only if when they win.

The free market cant solve big societal issues we are staring down the barrel of. We need coordination at the highest levels of human civilization and not some handy wavey hope a million monkeys will reach the answer.

You might want to prepare for the worst then.

That's probably not what you were expecting, but if that's really the case, it probably doesn't help that society is hyper-polarized. It also doesn't help that the main political opponent in the next election is being railroaded by the court system.

If the idea is to unify and coordinate to solve problems, alienating and demonizing 70M voters and half of the country is not the way to do so. The message half the country hears and thinks is: when push comes to shove, the other half prefer crushing political competition by any means necessary rather than find common ground and work together. Those are the rules one side is playing by, and it shouldn't be a surprise when the other side does the same, or takes their ball and goes home.

While you're not incorrect about the flaws of regulation, none of what you said is an argument for laissez-faire.

Laissez-faire is the default.

It's only through the indoctrination of young impressionable minds by the state that people become persuaded by arguments the state should intrude into things.

I would think it's injuries and deaths from the lack of safety and standards that would be far more persuasive. It's never about trusting the state; it's understanding that unchecked capitalism is less trustworthy. That's not to say it's inherently evil, but quite to the contrary: profit is inevitably self-serving, and only outside forces can ensure that the needs of others are considered.

I'm confused.

The only reason every criminal stepping foot on my property doesn't have their head on a pike is because the state will involve itself in their failure to prevent criminals from committing crimes on my property.

My property would be drastically safer if the state was not involved. You might disagree with my methods of deterring crime, but

1. I don't believe in democracy. My rights are not subject to vote.

2. There is literally no rational explanation why anyone should relinquish their natural rights and delegate them to a state. This is what The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt discusses at length. Schmitt is often dismissed by Western academics because of his later association with the Nazi Party, but it's a cop-out for a serious introspection of what his works said about the underlying nature of society and human nature. It frightens them, to put it mildly. Hitler was only able to take power after grasping the implications of his work.

3. I would bet my life savings that if I could get away with leaving the heads of criminals on pikes, along with other unspeakably heinous things, there would be a large drop in crime. Most won't dispute this, which begs the question why does the state allow criminal behavior to prosper when it costs far less to not get involved.

Clothes dryers save time, allow people to dry their clothes in their cramped apartments without the humidity going through the roof, calling that a western frivolity is a bit over the top.

Bitcoin however provides what? A tiny fraction of the transactions per second that visa does, without all the consumer protection that credit cards encompass, with orders of magnitude more power consumed. All the while providing 'freedom' to a handful of activists, but most of all money launderers, drug sellers and all sorts of shady businesses.

> Which, like most things, is something that probably be left to the free market.

Except Bitcoin mining is a perfect example of why these things should NOT be left to the free market.

What better currency competition is out there?

Almost all of them? It hasn’t had much impact on the real economy so clearly most people do not consider it better.

The entire history of fiat currency is a combination of warfare and currency collapse.

Why was the Bank of England created? To wage war.

Perhaps “wasting” 2% of the world’s electricity supply will look a lot better when civilization scale money laundering and currency collapse is a thing of history, not to mention the curb on national budgets being allocated to war machines!

Are you seriously arguing that money laundering or military spending will go away if Bitcoin is more widely used?

Continuing this, “fiat currency” has a specific meaning in economics: it’s a currency not backed by a commodity. Bitcoin is a fiat currency because the only value it has is based on social consensus, making it exceptionally volatile, but at the time the Bank of England was founded the pound sterling was based on silver (hence the name) as it had been for a millennium and it transitioned to gold for a couple centuries. The reason the Bank of England was founded wasn’t due to the choice of currency but rather credit, and as with war I find it unpersuasive that humanity will discontinue either.

What we’re talking about here isn’t your everyday money laundering; it’s civilization-scale laundering facilitated by central banks. This isn’t some small-time operation; it’s legalized crime on a global scale. Banks pack their balance sheets with worthless securities, then cry for bailouts when the jig is up. It’s a classic con, and it’s happened worldwide numerous time, from small to large countries, and always propped up by the fiat system. Without fiat’s flexibility to, let’s say, ‘creatively manage’ economics, this kind of scheme becomes a whole lot harder, if not impossible.

Bitcoin fiat? That’s way off base. No serious analyst would lump Bitcoin in with fiat currencies. Why? Because fiat currencies are backed by government decree, used for tax payments, and can be issued ad infinitum by central authorities. Bitcoin ticks none of those boxes. It’s decentralized, with no central authority to pump out new units or demand its use for official transactions. Bitcoin is as far from fiat as you can get.

Regarding the Bank of England’s founding in 1694—let’s get our facts straight. It wasn’t about credit; it was about waging a war without the cash to back it up. This move marked a turning point, expanding the empire and cementing the British Pound as a reserve currency. This kind of dynamic isn’t ancient history; it’s alive and well, fueling today’s massive military expenditures. These are bankrolled by the fiat system’s ability to inflate currency and issue debt. And when fiat currencies collapse? It’s usually the losers of these conflicts who feel the burn. So, yeah, Bitcoin offers a real alternative to this endless cycle of warfare and financial manipulation.

Fiat currency is an excellent mechanism for stealing wealth from a population without them realising (well realising who took it at least). Each time they create credit (i.e. print money out of thin air), they don't create value, they simply dilute the value of the money supply across more monetary units. The value in the newly printed "credit" comes from the existing money. That's why prices go up endlessly. It's not the value of things we buy increasing, but the value in our money leaking away into the money they are creating. The reality is that value of most consumables (food, electronics, cars, toothbrushes etc) is going down year on year by ~5% but by increasing the money supply by ~7% each year, we actually see prices increase by ~2% average (CPI).

It also distorts other fundamental signals like GDP. Devaluing the unit of account by printing money makes the GDP figures go up because you're measuring it with something that's going down in value. Looking at the USA and accounting for money supply increase, it has had falling GDP for decades.

Money is proof of work, or it should be. To create it should take as much work as it's worth (this is true for both gold and bitcoin). In reality, fiat is proof of work for the population, while the bankers have a free money spigot. They can pour trillions of it out of nowhere with a few keystrokes and then charge interest on it for decades to come, as if it was their own money.. It gives them undeserved, unlimited power.

If all of them were competing then Argentina would be using the Indian Rupee or any of the many other options for their failing currency. But they don't. Fiats are tied to a specific geographic location.

If there isn't an impact on the real economy then the discussions here on how much energy is burned aren't meaningful.

Bitcoin is hardly used in day to day life. It is designed so that energy use increases with coin price. If Bitcoin became a mainstream currency used even by one country for a lot of things energy usage goes up even more.

I am ignoring a lot of things here: transactions per second can’t support it but let’s assume LN works well and also energy required to keep expanding may not be available (only one nearby star) which makes POW more Proof of Asic but potentially makes the network vulnerable.

It's really hard to gauge how much utility cryptos are providing. After all, people who need cryptos the most are those who can't use "proper" channels to transfer money.

Also, some portion of those likely shouldn't be allowed to use any channels of money transfer (criminal organizations and their ilk), as they ultimately provide negative utility to the rest of society.

PoW is stupid and currencies need to evolve off of this.

Within Crypocurrency world there are Bitcoin maximalists who believe it is the only true coin and probably like PoW.

However other ones are moving to PoS which is better for the environment. Can’t comment on security but reckon they can make it secure.

> Like, no one thinks data centers for AWS are bad.

No, but lots of people think the amount of energy they consume is bad, and lots of people and spent on trying to reduce the amount of energy.

Except the US electricity market is not a free market. Most people only have one provider to choose from.

Implicit in this kind of headline is the presumption that bitcoin is not useful. After more than a decade of scams, I think the burden of proof is on bitcoin to demonstrate utility.

> Like, no one thinks data centers for AWS are bad.

In a world of dwindling EROI and exponential carbon emissions, all data centers are bad.

If we cared about the future at all, we'd be switching them off and triaging our energy use.

... like calling out BTC's egregious waste of electricity?

Where 75,502,165,623,893/75,502,165,623,894th of the work is literally thrown away.

Yes, crypto miners should be among the first servers to switch off.

Bitcoin could be a very market-efficient means of meeting demand for money laundering, extortion, etc., and we could still declare it a useless waste.

Given the current geopolitical landscape, I'm not sure it's utility is overall positive.

Now, I'm myself torn on this, but I wonder.

Plenty of people think the data centers for AWS are bad.

I think AWS data centers are bad.

> probably be left to the free market.

Ah yes, the mythical free market that no one ever questions, the unassailable arbiter of value in this world. This underpinning assumption needs to be pointed out. Clearly, the free market is not infallible. The question is how do mixed economies make best use of markets, regulation, taxation, and have a functioning justice system so that we don't shovel raw human souls into the profit machine.

Most people recognize a role for regulation in matters that concern everyone, particularly when there are large negative externalities that markets can't price in appropriately. I know HN conversations are necessarily curtailed for brevity, but generally, no, wasting vast amounts of energy for temporary profit doesn't seem like the kind of thing that should go unregulated when such waste produces large-scale environmental consequences for us all.

Indeed, many people seem to think the market solves all problems. In a sense it does, but only in a very specific sense. Like, if we there was some loophole in the law that allowed killing people with a pistol, the market would respond by making bullet-proof vests expensive, and by producing cheap, but bad protection vests. And guns, of course. It wouldn't solve the killing, but it would solve the question "how much can you spend to protect your life"? Perhaps it would make food cheaper. The market is a sick joke.

In this case, the free market can solve the problem: how high can the electricity price go, or how many power outages can there be, until people are sick and tired of this Bitcoin bullshit?

I have found that HN sentiment (not just in the case of my comment above) does not suffer criticism of markets well.

Lucky enough, we are not living in a free market.

Otherwise we would all be fucked.

Just in case you don't get it: have you ever seen a company making a high quality, sustainable and save product because of free market? Nope they do it because of laws we as a society make.

And in this particular case, i'm absolutly for banning it globally.

A true free market would have plane crashes every day and Boeing being hailed for their excellent safety record.