glenvdb

Your post comes off strongly as cultish/MLMish

That's because I strongly believe in its ability to have positive change on our civilisation... environmentally, economically, politically, and sociologically.

Any belief held strongly enough appears cultish. Ultimately, I don't really care how it appears.

But hey, I could be wrong about Bitcoin, I just hope I'm not.

If I'm wrong I look foolish and have lost thousands of dollars saved in Bitcoin. If I'm right... well, I guess we'll see.

If you're interested, but want to skip the noise on Twitter, uou can read most of his work in regards to Bitcoin and its humanitarian impact here: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/authors/alexgladstein

I think that I see in my network of people that the more technically apt they are, the less they believe in it

This is because they just see the blockchain as an inefficient database, rather than really understanding the problems Bitcoin solves and why Satoshi made the choices they did. There are important trade-offs between efficiency, redundancy, decentralisation, and robustness in an adversarial environment.

The other aspect is that they just look at Bitcoin through a technological lens and judge it inferior to other networking & data storage technologies. They don't have a deep grasp of the concept of money and what properties makes for a sound form of money. Vijay Boyapati (ex-Google engineer) does a pretty good job explaining it from that perspective [1].

It's a shame that so many, otherwise smart, people are sleeping on such a revolutionary change in the world. The idea of Bitcoin has been thought about and predicted for many years by people held in high-regard among HN readers, such as Buckminster Fuller [2], Henry Ford [3], and Friedrich Hayek [4], and they'll still dismiss it out of hand.

Such a massive lost opportunity for great skills, knowledge, and talent to be applied to what I think is one of the most important innovations of our civilisation.

[1] https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...

[2] https://news.bitcoin.com/look-at-how-buckminster-fuller-pred...

[3] https://news.bitcoin.com/how-henry-ford-envisaged-bitcoin-10...

[4] https://twitter.com/janpaul_f/status/1461596623038038017?s=2...

The metaverse (not Facebook's/Meta's version) can be whatever you want it to be. That's the point.

You could sign into different worlds, or turn different layers of reality on/off.

Perhaps you choose to use a reality where the rules are more akin to the real world, and so the best way to get around is a car... a car that looks and behaves like a car.

And then 15 minutes later you get bored and jump into a world where you can have rocket boots instead.

There will be markets for all different types of realities.

The post I replied to was about the viability of Bitcoin being a currency

I made the point that it being used as a currency, right now

Discussion about the morality of legal tender laws is another matter

Bitcoiners

Thousands of people are doing it and these sorts of things make it easy to do:

https://getumbrel.com/

https://start9.com/

Well... neither does your's, or this one for that matter.

You think they're going to shutdown the Internet to kill Bitcoin?

Even if they did, once the Internet was back up and running what would stop the Bitcoin network from continuing where it left off?

There's thousands of people around the world running their own Bitcoin nodes, many also protected behind Tor [1]. In what realistic way could governments shut it down globally?

They could go for centralised custodial businesses like the exchanges, but that doesn't stop the Bitcoin network itself. Also there are decentralised exchanges like Bisq that can't be shutdown.

"Yes (you will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography.), but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.

Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own." — Satoshi Nakamoto

"A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990’s. I hope it’s obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we’re trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system." — Satoshi Nakamoto

1. https://bitnodes.io/dashboard/

The people of El Salvador would appear to disagree.

You've revealed plainly that you haven't got a clue what you're talking about.

Miners can't change the protocol of the entire network.

The only malevolent thing they could do is perform a 51% attack if they all colluded together. And even that wouldn't achieve much, so there's not much incentive to do it. All they can do is a double spend. They would've been better off spending that energy on mining blocks to be rewarded with the Bitcoin subsidy.

You can get around many paywalls with 12ft.io

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.economist.com/leaders/20...

I'm sorry, are you saying Bitcoin is hyper-inflating? Am I getting my wires crossed or are you confusing terms?

I wonder if cemerick has any more comments on "absolute fantasies"... probably not.

People still talking about high Bitcoin transaction fees pretending like the Lightning Network doesn't exist... it's almost as though they aren't keeping up with latest developments in the space, instead relying on old information they formed their initial opinion on.

Also El Salvadorians can use any app/wallet they want to transact over Bitcoin/LN. However, the government provides incentives to use Chivo. If the government is too exploitative people will move away from Chivo.

Alex Gladstein has written about this at length.

He works for the Human Rights Foundation and advocates Bitcoin for its humanitarian use cases. He has spoken to many people in these types of countries to get their take on it. See for yourself...

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/authors/alexgladstein

The only thing fiat currency across the world has proven is that it's subject to the whims of bureaucrats and has the theft of inflation built-in. Even the "best" fiat in the world like GBP and USD have seen their purchasing reduced drastically over the decades.

I don't trust politicians to manage their money or economy well. But I do trust code and math that enforces decentralised consensus that can't be manipulated by a handful of powerful people. Some have tried in Bitcoin's short 12 year history, and they've all failed.

You say Bitcoin is inefficient. In comparison to what? By what measures? If you compare Bitcoin to gold mining it uses less energy. https://cbeci.org/index/comparisons

If you compare it to the legacy financial system (and many other industries), it also uses less energy. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-energy-use-comp...

You say Bitcoin is volatile, but that is to be expected for a new form of money that people are still trying to figure out the value of. How long do you think it took for gold to reach a stable point of perceived value over its long history? Bitcoin is only 12 years old.

But perhaps calling it "volatile" isn't really even fair to begin with, when you compare it to top stocks and gold. https://ecoinometrics.substack.com/p/ecoinometrics-comparing...

Need for endless mining? Of course it's endless, it's a vital part of network security in an adversarial environment. As the network stores more value the energy expenditure will need to go up to secure it. This is true of any other store of value. Gold is not only incredibly expensive to mine, it's expensive to secure in large facilities.

The more Bitcoin integrates into the economy and the more wealth it secures, the more energy expenditure it should use. This is by design and a good thing. And if you compare it to other industries (linked above), it is far more efficient than current systems.

Forget "crypto". Most of them are varying degrees of scam or cargo-culting around "blockchain technology" (including Ethereum). Bitcoin is the only one that matters because it's truly neutral and decentralised. It wasn't founded by any company, there's no marketing team or CEO. It's just an open network protocol that people choose to opt-in to because they understand its value proposition to the world. In the same way that there's a separation of church and state, there needs to be a separation of money and state.

https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...

Finally, the fact that Bitcoin proponents have to point to poor authoritarian countries to find legitimate usecases is telling in and of itself. It's basically a blunt admission that the technology is mostly useless in the US.

You say that as though it makes it all but useless, despite the value it provides to people in those countries... that's very telling in itself.

But as I said there are many use cases, I just pointed out a few that I thought were most important on a global scale... because, you know, it's not all about people in wealthy developed nations.

But outside of those types of countries, and in countries like the US, the self-serving use case is a hedge against inflation. If inflation doesn't worry you, that's ok, but the recent money printing in trillions of dollars worries lots of other people. In 20 years I've seen the purchasing power of my money halved. I'm much happier to store my money in an asset that, so far, is seeing its purchasing power increase year on year.

From a technical standpoint the other use case, over the lightning network (and other layers and sidechains), is that it allows for instant micro-payments not possible with the legacy financial system. People are building products like podcast platforms which stream satoshis to content creators for every minute someone listens to their podcast. Others are building systems where every API call can be instantly billed. Or content distribution systems (think Bittorrent) where seeders can be compensated for service.

There are plenty of technical uses cases for a digital native money on the internet.

If you don't understand why it has utility I don't think there's anything more I can say to convince you. Sorry.

Before addressing this comment I want to pick up a point from your previous post.

But say you want to flip a switch and turn off a single cryptocurrency in order to do it, and you'll have floods of people trivializing it, saying "well, let me tell you why 110 million people's CO2 emissions aren't that big of a deal..."

Well, with Bitcoin, you can't "flip a switch" to turn it off. There's literally no one on the planet with that power, which is kind of the point. As long as people see value in the asset and the network, it will always be there.

Moving onto your latest post, everything you said depends entirely on whether you believe the value proposition of Bitcoin separating money and state.

As said by Satoshi Nakamoto, "The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible."

It's worth a lot to me and many other people not to see their wealth melted away by inflation, which is basically a hidden tax that disproportionally effects the people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale. And that's just one use case for it (i.e. store of value). There are other important features of Bitcoin that people value.

A sound money with decreasing inflation, absolute scarcity, that is difficult (if not impossible) to manipulate is very valuable to ~8 billion people on this planet. At the moment only a small percent of people understand that (maybe hundreds of millions?), but that may change over the coming decades.

Looked at it in that way, it's current energy expenditure is incredibly small and for the amount of wealth it secures and transfer globally... also incredibly efficient.

Scroll down to the bar chart showing the country rankings.

Look at the top 3 countries (China, US, India).

Compare those to Bitcoin... can you honestly tell me that Bitcoin constitutes a significant amount of energy consumption in that context?

And it's also worth noting that energy consumption isn't necessarily bad for climate change. You're conflating "energy consumption" with "CO2 emissions". It's CO2 emissions that are the problem, and Bitcoin energy consumption is far more green than most other industries.

So we have a monetary network that consumes a globally insignificant amount of energy and is more green than many other industries... is it really a significant problem?

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-energy-use-comp...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-7dMVcVWgc

Some people will never change their minds. They've made their choice and changing their mind would be more painful than not.

Bitcoin could be the world reserve currency and the same people would still say it's a scam.

Ultimately, who cares? The world is changing with or without them.

Someone was telling me that the general problem with HN is that they're all very technically capable, so they look at Bitcoin, understand it from a technical perspective (not always true) and deem it as inferior to other technical solutions, like a centralised database.

The bit that's lacking is an understanding of money, and what makes certain types of money sound or unsound. It's easy to overlook the problems of fiat money because its all we've ever known.

What was it about gold that made it the dominant form of money for literally thousands of years? Why was it abandoned? How does Bitcoin solve the problems of gold and fiat?

Vijay Boyapati (ex-Google engineer) does a pretty good job of outlining this in his article.

https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...

I wish more people on HN would read it with an open mind.

Do you understand the tradeoffs of why it works that way?

That for an open and fully accessible, decentralised system that exists in an adversarial environment there has to be a large cost to any attacks?

Of course there are much more efficient ways to store data, but those are centralised and vulnerable to the problems of centralisation. The blockchain's and proof-of-work's purpose is to be decentralised.

Lots of people disagree with you about that. Sorry you see it as a waste, but we're going to keep using it and dedicating more energy towards it because we understand its value.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-7dMVcVWgc

But if you're actually curious to know it only takes a quick search to find info about proportions of use around the world

https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adop...

It's very hard to get exact numbers of users, because of how Bitcoin works, but this should give you a good sense of proportions and you could infer numbers of people based on known population sizes for each country

Not exactly, no. But I wasn't the one assigning a vague description of "size" to the number of people that use it that way, was I?

Database insert? Ok...

You may benefit from reading about why Bitcoin works the way that it does, and why certain tradeoffs were made.

But you don't really care to know, do you?

Please look at this data and then come back and tell me you still think Bitcoin mining is having a meaningful impact on climate change and why.

https://cbeci.org/index/comparisons

I'd be curious to read your thoughts.

Yes, the wrench technique will always ultimately win.

https://xkcd.com/538/

But they have to know someone holds it in the first place. You can walk around with a seed phrase in your head and no one would know.

I find it very manipulative to offhandedly dismiss the utility it provides to people suffering under oppression or unstable financial systems and to compare that to smoking.

As the article states, check your financial privilege.

And "tiny amount of people"? What's "tiny" here? Hundreds, thousands, millions? Do you know how many people use Bitcoin in this way?

I would be absolutely shocked if Bitcoin's value ever dropped to zero.

I can't see any conceivable way that happens at this point. Even a coordinated effort by the world's governments to "ban" it (they can't really ban it) would not drive its price to zero... if anything it might even have the inverse effect.

Can you provide any conceivable way this would actually happen? Maybe an asteroid hitting Earth and wiping out all human life on the planet?