Funny how everyone complains it's wasteful yet I see absolutely nobody complaining that they have some sort of electricity shortage because of Bitcoin miners.
Cruise ships are hideously wasteful, but I don't see anybody complaining that they have some sort of gas shortage because of cruise ships specifically. Gas prices are what they are, and consumers complain in very general terms because they don't have good visibility into the global oil markets.
For all I know off the top of my head (where this comment is coming from), cruise ships aren't a significant driver of oil prices. I'd expect the scale of the shipping market to dwarf their effect, and I'd expect production to rise to meet their relatively steady demand, though I could be wrong about either or both. None of that (whatever the answers may be) means they aren't hideously wasteful in absolute and very meaningful terms.
I mean on HN you really do see a very anti-cruise ship sentiment whenever the topic comes up. They are really really wasteful and worse than commercial ships since they pollute the very water people want to visit for its beauty.
I wouldn’t really be all that upset to see them banned but there’s no momentum for it. Crypto just happens to be really visible to a lot of people who see no personal benefit for its existence.
> I mean on HN you really do see a very anti-cruise ship sentiment whenever the topic comes up.
For sure, and in other contexts too, but I don’t think the issue of not being able to buy gas because cruise ships exist comes up often (mostly because AFAICT it’s not real). And that’s really my point: it’s perfectly valid to complain about cruise ships being wasteful without being able to point to some incredibly obvious consumer-facing manifestation of that waste, because them being wasteful (they are, obviously) isn’t predicated on any such manifestation. Despite the vast scale of their waste, they’re a drop in the bucket that is the global economy.
Because shortages aren't the issue. The issue is using more power than all of Argentina for one currency. That is a lot of CO2 emissions for something that brings questionable value.
You’re not opting out of anything. At the end of the day, everyone is trading their crypto for dollars or another government currency.
Crypto is opting out of real money is the same way buying an unstable stock is. People are buying it hoping to get rich and convincing others to do the same, hoping they’ll sell it off before the price crashes and it’s completely worthless. Nobody is buying milk and eggs with GameStop stocks or *coins, and if they did, it’d make international news and that singular event would be referenced for 5 years by supporters as an example of how “real” their currency is.
> Crypto is opting out of real money is the same way buying an unstable stock is
Cryptocurrencies are indeed traded like meme stocks — their value is 100% based on narrative. The difference is meme stocks can’t be electronically transacted sans trusted third parties, which if you recall from the 2009 Satoshi paper, is the entire point of Bitcoin.
(There are other benefits to having a global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms, e.g. transparent supply metrics.)
> hoping they’ll sell it off before the price crashes and it’s completely worthless
What are the holders of Bitcoin supposed to sell it for, exactly? USD is being inflated. The stock market is insane. Housing is insane and comes with tax and maintenance liabilities virtually everywhere. Artwork is physical and illiquid. Government debt is increasingly dubious.
It would take governments becoming fiscally responsible and a return to a gold standard for Bitcoin to become less societally relevant. And even then, gold and gold-backed government monies would suffer from transparency issues and not being able to be electronically transacted sans trusted third parties.
I’m afraid there’s really just no good news here for people who refuse to invest in Bitcoin on general principle.
I think the point is that at present the majority of cryptocurrency usage is in investment, trading, and hoarding- speculation as opposed to actually using it as a currency for everyday transactions.
> I think the point is that at present the majority of cryptocurrency usage is in investment, trading, and hoarding- speculation as opposed to actually using it as a currency for everyday transactions.
Which is in practice really no different from meme stocks today.
Meme stocks which are only transactable via trusted third parties and are inherently trapped inside the walled gardens of various centralized brokerage firms.
Conversely, Bitcoin can be self-custodied with FOSS, and is trivially spendable via TTPs and L2 protocols. But yes, in practice people are using cryptocurrencies as speculative stores of value almost exclusively.
> Which is in practice really no different from meme stocks today.
Which is exactly my point.
Crypto is a decentralized meme stock. Unless crypto finds a way to become just a normal currency, it'll go the way of all memes over time: dead, once everyone and their grandma is sharing it.
Yes — insofar as cryptocurrency market valuation is based entirely on narrative.
No — in terms of it being possible to spend and store bitcoin sans trusted third parties.
(E.g. a Chilean real estate project developer — a Canadian expat without Chilean residency — once explained to me he had no choice but to use bitcoin in SA because the banks there refused to process his company’s regular large wire transfers.)
Bitcoin is in fact a bearer instrument, regardless of your beliefs about its credibility. How many national currencies are bearer instruments also without credibility in your eyes, for instance, and where does Bitcoin rank on that list?
> Unless crypto finds a way to become just a normal currency, it'll go the way of all memes over time: dead, once everyone and their grandma is sharing it.
That’s a narrative no better than any other which gets fielded every day on the crypto markets, although the benefactor of it is unclear to me. Cash and cryptocurrency are incredibly liquid compared to competing PMs and real estate. The S&P is down since 1970 when measured in gold, and central banks are racing to inflate fiat currencies.
If you think that buying into an MLM Ponzi Scheme is a good hedge against inflation, all the power to you.
But in the long run, it's not.
There are no cryptos which effectively server as either currencies or good stores of value. There are always many better alternatives in both cases.
If you want to opt out of currency - that's rational - you can buy land, low-overhead ETFs, indexes, bonds, gold, other currencies, Gold, commodities, and all of the above.
Consider the obvious problem with your stated benefits of crypto: for every supposed benefit, there are already other, better solutions.
The only thing crypto can do, that others cannot, is make you rich, quickly, by doing nothing, by getting others in to the pyramid.
In the long run, crypto has a role, but there's no crypto on the horizon that's really useful. Some day.
Meme stock drum beating over social media isn’t the same thing as MLM.
What’s the average PE ratio up to now on the S&P?
Land, where? Real estate is just as inflated as the stock market if not moreso; it also comes with a tax liability at minimum, and is far less liquid than equities, cash and cryptos.
PMs are no different from cryptocurrency in any meaningful respect, and are actively worse on many fronts — e.g. where do you custody it, how do you verify it, how do you exchange it easily, how do you prevent it from being seized or stolen.
Look, there’s a reason humans invented fiat currency. It would just be better if that currency were A) global, B) of fixed supply, and C) controlled by computer algorithms instead of political institutions.
> Consider the obvious problem with your stated benefits of crypto: for every supposed benefit, there are already other, better solutions.
That’s mostly true of non-money — read: non-bearer asset — use cases, like those epitomized by Ethereum and its many competitors.
Now don’t you see that of all the alternatives you offered (stock, land, gold…) all require some degree of state interaction, or non-portability. Bitcoin is weightless. Easy to move. Trustless. Not dependent on any state or monetary system. It is this portability, trustlessness and independence from the state, and even lack of interaction with traditional financial organizations is what provides value.
The S&P is actually down since 1970 as measured in gold. Gold is strictly worse than Bitcoin on every front save for its ability to be used offline.
(But even offline, gold transactions would require a great deal of care wrt anti-counterfeiting, and this is an edge case given gold’s primary use is as a speculative store of value.)
I don't know what (if any) effect Bitcoin mining has had on electricity prices, but we do have a GPU shortage because of Bitcoin miners.
It's a bit ridiculous when regular stores have lotteries to grant you the privilege of purchasing one of a scarce number of GPUs... at regular retail price.
In a sense, we could say “lack of CO2 in the atmosphere” is the scarce resource which is being depleted.
( Maybe kind of like how you can think of something which can burn by absorbing oxygen, as releasing phlogiston (which is just a lack of oxygen, in a certain sense)? )
