"Money laundering and buying drugs"
"No intrinsic value"
"Energy waste"
These arguments have been in the wild for over 10 years and discussed by both sides in much detail. The article brings just personal opinion of author and probably the most dumb down version of these arguments I have seen. Not sure if satire or not.
First, society is a semantic shortcut, not something that actually exists as something that can experience gain or harm. Only individuals can, and many have, and do.
I had an unbanked contractor, a refugee from Russia who could not get a bank account anywhere he went, and had to hop countries a lot as visas expired, and I paid him in Bitcoin even though he was completely unfamiliar with it when I proposed it, because we could find no other solution. He and I both benefitted substantially from that. I'm aware that other solutions exist, and we had exhausted all the ones we could find, as one by one my bank started rejecting transactions as fraudulent.
For most of what we want to do in the US or the rest of the first world, we have a reasonably functional banking system. For most of what we want to do internationally, at least commercially or with trading partners able to work with approved banks, things work pretty OK. There is a substantial part of the world that doesn't live under these conditions.
Thanks for sharing your story. I'm sorry for the Russian refugee, but that kind of scenario - although noble - doesn't seem to really justify what 'we are doing' with crypto.
Indirectly, your scenario seems to admit that for the vast majority of the world, cryptocurrencies don't add much.
The question about how much costs a single bitcoin transaction is deeply flawed.
The amount of transactions a bitcoin network can process
does not directly depend on amount of electricity spent. Bitcoin network can work the same way using 10% of its current electricity consumption.
Also, lightning network will allow for thousand times more transactions with same energy cost.
Why is everyone obsessed with bitcoin electricity consumption? I wonder how much energy is required by the banking system to operate(imagine those thousands of people burning gas in cars to get to their daily work at bank). Humanity spends vast amount of energy on much more useless stuff with just entertainment value(World football cup, all those fans coming from different parts of world in the jets, logistics...)
Also, energy is a resource like any other and it's generation and price is subject to supply/demand. The fact, that is is used on mining bitcoins just indicate, that people value bitcoin technology more than something else they would spend the electricity on.
>Why is everyone obsessed with bitcoin electricity consumption? I wonder how much energy is required by the banking system to operate
People care because Bitcoin is, by design, massively wasteful. The banking system's energy use can be curtailed with green tech. Bitcoin's entire ledger is powered by proof of work, which by definition requires computers to grind at maximum power calculating millions of hashes. And the difficulty goes up if more people are mining. And on top of that, the Bitcoin network is extremely slow and several orders of magnitude less efficient than other banking systems in terms of transactions per second.
Everyone is obsessed because we're wasting damn near 1% of the world's energy so nerds can speculate on Dunning-Krugerrands and it's not doing anyone any favours in the long run.
> People care because Bitcoin is, by design, massively wasteful. The banking system's energy use can be curtailed with green tech.
Still does not explain how the current banking industry along with others, such as the entertainment industry is not "massively wasteful" by design. Sure, maybe a small portion of the banking system's energy can be curtailed with green tech, but what about the 24 hour ATM, the light posts at the banks, the AC units in each branch, the massive skyscrapers in which all of the banks corporate offices operate? and the energy required to build all of that infrastructure? As stated already, there are countless number of things that "waste energy", and in some cases "by design". Check out "b.s. jobs" on wikipedia.
>Still does not explain how the current banking industry along with others, such as the entertainment industry is not "massively wasteful" by design
a) The entertainment industry is irrelevant to the discussion of Bitcoin vs traditional banking systems. It's a red herring. Cut it out.
b) Bitcoin is using an amount of electricity comparable to the country of Ireland. The banking system might use that much power, but they're doing millions of card transactions a minute - there's actual returns and actual business being done. And literally everything you described is an externality that costs the system money - ATMs exist because they're cheaper than human tellers, the lightposts can use more energy-efficient bulbs, etc etc. None of these are explicitly designed to burn power.
On the other hand, if you add mining power to the pool, it makes it harder to get hashes, using more power. Bitcoin is regressive in its power usages. The traditional system does not actively set out to use more power. While due to inertia it may not make active strides to reduce it, but that's not the point here. It's not by design like Bitcoin is.
> Sure, maybe a small portion of the banking system's energy can be curtailed with green tech, but what about the 24 hour ATM, the light posts at the banks, the AC units in each branch, the massive skyscrapers in which all of the banks corporate offices operate? and the energy required to build all of that infrastructure?
The point is, that waste is all upkeep. Something the system tries to minimize, as it bleeds money through it. If ATMs can be made more efficient, the system saves money. In Bitcoin, OTOH, waste is not upkeep but a feature, which the system tries to maximize.
How exactly the system is trying to maximize waste?
In fact, miners did more progress on efficiency in terms of pure hashrate/watt with a million time improvement in past 10 years, than banking industry ever.
It is demand, that is driving the energy usage, not the system on its own. I agree with the person above, that it is basically justified by increasing consumption of the service.
You're right, I didn't keep scale in mind when listing examples. Didn't think it mattered since there are hundreds of relevant things that consume energy at different scales. Next time I'll avoid listing things that can be cherrypicked to make a relevant counter argument.
> Also, energy is a resource like any other and it's generation and price is subject to supply/demand
Actually most municipalities treat electricity like they treat water, more akin to a public utility. The actual cost isn't necessarily related to supply/demand.
Normally this isn't a big deal as historically the electricity use either was minor (homes) or lead to economic growth (businesses) similarly most businesses would make specific deals if they had heavy use.
Now Bitcoin threw a curve ball by allowing electricity -> money in a system not designed to make the cost of electricity support it.
Yes the fundamental idea of Bitcoin is great but the current external cost to support the "investment market" is quite high.
I mostly agree, except that the fundamental idea is bad because it inevitably leads to an arms race between miners. Using more electricity gives you a bigger share of the pie, but doesn’t actually grow the pie. So the electricity is really wasted. And this at a time when our energy demand is contributing to climate change.
> Bitcoin network can work the same way using 10% of its current electricity consumption.
Except by design, bitcoin miners are incentivized to consume more energy the higher the price goes. If they don't consume as much energy as they possibly can, their mining pool will have less of a chance to get that sweet, sweet block reward (....to convert back into an actual currency in order to, you know, pay their bills and stuff....)
> Also, lightning network will allow for thousand times more transactions with same energy cost.
If the solution to bitcoin's horrific energy consumption is to not use bitcoin.... what is the point of bitcoin?
> The fact, that is is used on mining bitcoins just indicate, that people value bitcoin technology more than something else they would spend the electricity on.
It is valued as a speculative asset and an excellent way to launder ill-gotten money. It's only use is for scams. Bitcoin generates a massive negative externality in that it drives up the costs of electricity for all the people who are doing actual productive things with it.
The whole thing is a abhorrent waste and supporters like yourself should be absolutely ashamed of yourselves for defending it (using some of the most paper-thin arguments, I might add...).
> The lightning network IS Bitcoin, just as using HTTP over TCP is using TCP.
So its got a decentralized, distributed public ledger recording every transaction made? Since when did that happen?
> It's the only way to survive economically in repressive states.
LOL. No. You use USD.... No citizens in economically repressive states are gonna flip to bitcoin. Not when it gets 4 transactions per second tops. Not when you have to purchase your currency from early adopters in order to participate. Not when you can lose your entire savings by simply exposing your computer to the internet.
As in "not using the blockchain" otherwise known as "not using bitcoin".
Lightning Network wouldn't even need to exist if Bitcoin was actually good at what it did.
Speaking of, when will I be able to use LN to purchase a cup of coffee from Starbucks?
> Also you can mine it yourself.
Yes. By "mine it yourself" you mean "burn more money on electric and hardware than the value of the bitcoin mined"? Cause last I checked the days of individuals being able to profitably mine bitcoin at home are long gone.
> There are may solutions for storing your deposits securely, hardware wallets being one.
So in addition to buying their Bitcoin from early adopters, these poor repressed people will also need to purchase an expensive (for them) hardware wallet and then learn to use it? What if that hardware wallet gets lost or stolen? What if they forget the key? What if the owner passes on and the children need to access the wealth? How does inheritance work?
> Everybody who tells me that knows very little about Bitcoin
Bitcoin users are an intersection of people who don't understand finance, economics, politics, computer science, monetary policy, legislation, regulation, socioeconomics, math, or seemingly life itself.... It's borderline willful ignorance.
The world's banking system is at around 500 Billion transactions per year https://www.worldpaymentsreport.com/reports/noncash while bitcoin has a mere 200 thousand per day https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions
Even if the banking system (not sure why you include commuters, but then we should also include bitcoin lambos) were to consume the same amount of power it would still handle 2.5 million times (edit: >6000 times) as many transactions.
To multiply your mistake, those Bitcoin transactions in the chart can be multiparty transactions, where, for example, a store issues all the daily refunds to its customers in a single transaction. Basically, a better metric is needed.
Most of the AI progress in last years is just tuning pattern recognition algorithms. We can not expect these algorithms to produce results like humans, because humans have a lot of information not just from percieving the world, but their patterns of thinking are also vastly dependend on the underlying structure of brain, that has developed over milions of years of evolution.
If there is a cliff, toddlers are scared of being nearby. They definetely don't have the ability to "imagine=simulate" the consequences of falling over the cliff. The fear is in the structure of neurons of brain.
If you feed classifier algorithm with images of black dogs and white swans and then want to classify black swan. Both classifying it as dog(because of color) or swan(because of shape) are right. The difference is only in bias, which features do you prefer.
You must watch the documentary "The secret life of babies". There is a scene where they put several babies on a "cliff" situation (with a glass in the same level to prevent them falling), they will confidently march into the glass - they do several other experiments that prove babies are fearless.
Babies are not born afraid of the cliff (i.e., it isn't hardwired into the infant brain); they develop fear of it at about 9 months' age, once their depth perception has developed.
> If there is a cliff, toddlers are scared of being nearby.
I don't know about a study proving that, might be true. But from my own experience, toddlers are not afraid of anything until a. they hurt themselves, b. they develop more and understand the concepts like height, c. the parent repeats "no" to them and/or shows them what to do or not to do until they learn.
So there might be evolutionary pre-programming in the human brain, but toddlers brain still needs to develop until those became active. I think there should be more research into how toddlers learn to crawl, stand and walk, how they learn to speak, etc.
https://youtu.be/WanGt1G6ScA?t=92 (from that video, at a timepoint which shows a young a baby crawling over a glass surface with a drop beneath it, with no sign of discomfort).
I'd say this proves the point completely. It shows that babies aren't scared of heights, and they don't acquire the fear from experience. Instead it seems likely it is that they either develop a mental model of how the world works, or they learn from watching other's behavior.
Your comment got treated rather harshly, so let me try to explain. The post is on topic for HN because, although the question is a whimsical one, it gratifies intellectual curiosity (please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Whimsical submissions like it have always been welcome here, as long as they're uncorrelated with anything that's appeared recently. (Sometimes people start doing the copycat thing of posting follow-up stories on almost the same topic. Those get old quickly unless they're really interesting, so the bar gets higher superlinearly.)
It isn't just a question of the community upvoting it. Plenty of stories get plenty of upvotes yet still don't belong on HN—e.g. most sensational controversies.
Many HN users value the diversity of the stories that appear here and don't take well to comments that appear to want to narrow the site down. That might be why your question got flamed.
Thanks for contructive answer. Got it. I was just curious. I am lurking here for long time and it seems to me, that the ratio of technical posts is really declining over last few months so I was wondering about the guidelines.
While my view is that if someone posted it on HN and it was upvoted high enough—it belongs there; there is little in this post that "gratifies intellectual curiosity". Unless we are talking about the child involved, but I doubt she reads HN.
There is often a complaint about negativity on HN, but I don't think swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction adds quality. If anything it devalues really interesting content.
Intellectual curiosity doesn't only mean studying great work or deep problems. It's closely allied with a playful spirit that likes to do things just because. That playful spirit is vulnerable to being dismissed as unserious, so it needs protecting. We protect it here.
Of course opinions will always differ about any given submission, but that's the general approach.
Every post starts out at 0. The community decides who to upvote and downvote. So does it deserve to be on hackernews? Hackernews users decided it does.
