There are so many frustrated nocoiners here on HN, it’s crazy. It’s interesting that on a tech site people can be more negative towards new technology, than on youtube for example, where I don’t see so much hate....I just don’t understand why.
I think the answer is because it IS a tech site. Members here understand that Bitcoin is a vastly inefficient and ineffective way to achieve the end goal.
My view is definitely that Bitcoin solves a problem I don't have, in just about the worst way possible (proof of work).
This place was flooded with extremely biased nocoiners long before energy consumption was a hot topic.
I truly believe it’s simply that they want it to fail since they missed the boat, and their ego is on the line as a forward thinking, “ahead of the curve” technologist.
It can’t be the biggest development of the last decade, what would that say about them? Therefore, inefficient ponzi that’s only used for drugs!
It wasn't this bad in early 2013 when the price of BTC was $70. Actually pg's comments here persuaded me to buy a lot of Bitcoin (with a few other influential people, like Chamath Palihapatiya and Max Keiser, and the Cyprus bail in). Usually I missed all the good early startup investments, as I'm not an American, so Bitcoin was the first exciting thing that I had the ability to invest in early.
Cryptocurrency has indeed been through several speculative bubbles, and we may even be in the midst of one now.
However, I think the speculative bubble valuation of 2010 is well justified now. The thing about speculation is that sometimes the speculators are right. Tesla is almost certainly in a speculative bubble, too, but every day they arguably justify a higher base value.
That said, you seem relatively balanced for a crypto critic, and didn’t miss the boat but rather jumped off, so I’m not sure you’re part of the cohort I’m describing.
It's great for you, I love Bitcoin, but there are a lot of other exciting things happening in the world that people should invest in depending on their understanding of the world and their priorities.
I'm also very excited about Moderna's mRNA pipeline for example, building new vaccine for cronic illnesses (vaccines are trivial important application at this point of course), and Tesla's mission of decarbonizing the world and getting rid of air pollution. It's just Bitcoin is what I believe will give me the highest ROI right now to invest later in other important technologies.
Of course you don't have the problem because your government is currently not oppressing you and nobody is targeting you. But if that were to change I believe you'll start appreciating Bitcoin more.
The idea that some made-up money that only exists on the internet is some kind of weapon against oppressive governments is so out of touch with reality, that it's incomprehensible how somebody can actually believe that.
For me it is the only reality that exists. I have been using Bitcoin for a long time, travelling a lot, and I see a lot of currencies, and none of them feel close to my ideology. I accept them at the same time, and work around the tax laws imposed by my country by getting a loan against my BTC (which I wouldn't need to if I would live in another country).
There is a lack of interest and understanding of central banking and history of money.
Thus most of the analysis is in the framework of systems efficiency (obviously, we're tech nerds afterall).
Crypto is a breakthrough in distributed computing, but utterly under-performs in efficiency against typical computing solutions. This is because of the trade-offs made in order to create a decentralized, permissionless, censorship resistant network.
The network is paying out $X every 10 minutes to miners. If miners, in aggregate, are spending more than $X some will stop because it's not profitable. If miners, in aggregate, are spending less than $X, more miners join in because there's still some easy profit to be had. Obviously, there is some friction preventing this from being a perfect match (entry cost of buying new mining hardware) but this is an approximate price target for how much money "makes sense" for the miners to spend in total.
Here on HN people seem to mostly understand that this means:
1. Higher bitcoin valuation leads directly to more spending on mining
2. Cheaper energy just leads to more energy consumed by mining for the same amount of spending
3. The amount spent on mining has no market-driven correlation to the amount "needed" for security
That seems like a pretty bad system from a technology point of view.
It's the ideology behind bitcoin, some people sympathise with it and some people don't. And the monumental waste of energy is a real issue too. This something even the inventors of bitcoin themselves have admitted.
The main issue of this article is electricity. Another point can be made about the origin of hash rates generated during BTC mining operations. In Q2 2020 China (65,08%), Russia (6,90%), Kazakhstan (6,17%) and Iran (3,82%) comprise ~82% of average monthly hashrate.[1] "Decentralized" :)
They read that Bitcoin uses more electric than Argentina and now they have their panties in a bunch because they believe the talking heads that say climate change will end the world.
