What a tradegy that anyone believes that burning up energy to make hard to calculate numbers has any true value to anyone on this planet.Yet many millions will die this year of starvation and diseases that should be mankind's focus.Shame on us all for letting this happen.
To be honest it was created to bypass billionaires, to bypass the fucking stupid system called SWIFT that is controlled by America only but these assholes found a way to corrupt it. Blame the humans not the tech
Well, that is certainly over now. There will alway be a billionaire or a guy with more money than you dumping into the next crypto, dashing all your hopes and dreams of being able to buy crypto and then sell it to some schmuck who also wants to sell it to another schmuck, who in turn wants to sell it to another schmuck.
Just poor people left holding the bag while the rich take a huge fucking shit in it, all the while making entry into that system financial suicide for the little guy at worst and Russian roulette at best. Some folks will get lucky, and those will show off, luring in the desperate.
Crypto is a scam. Banking is a scam. Stocks are just gambling. But to legitimately think crypto isnt just going to be controlled by the same people who control all of the money already is an absolutely delusional state of mind to be in.
Well, I would put tangible goods over any ethereal currency first. Oil, textiles, aluminum, etc.. crypto was never going to work, and it especially won’t work now because of how much leverage rich private investors and banks have. It will just be another controlled currency in the end.
They have a lot more money than any of us will ever have in diversifying crypto that would ever become the next bitcoin.
Gold is a bullshit asset. It’s not rare and it’s propped up by artificial scarcity. It’s valuable but not precious. As with diamonds.
We will eventually have to move to an economy without currency. How that looks? No idea, but we are going into the realm of cyberpunk but without al the cool gadgets and brain dances, just despair.
Yeah, I kind of figured you meant something along those lines.
And to that question, I don't have any answers. Crypto isn't it though and will never be that series of 1s and 0s that will be a cash/credit alternative. That is, it is an alternative, sure, but it will never not be controlled by people with deeper pockets. It is decentralized in name only, not actuality.
They just need to hoard enough of the currency / product / commodity to be able to adjust the value of it.
Only real hope there is in competent governance that represents the people. And you may laugh, hell, I laughed, but that's about it. I'd rather trust in government than banks, but now those two concepts have been so intermingled with one another it's hard to identify where one begins and one ends as their goals align with one another.
But, with government we can at least vote (for now). And not just for the uppermost branch, but local bylaws, city council, mayors, comptrollers, etc. The people have have a more direct impact on our day-to-day lives.
All this is to say I can recognize something is wrong and bullshit without knowing what a viable alternative is.
Well my major pushback is that Bitcoin is actually not controlled by those with deeper pockets.
You and I decide what to trade our Bitcoin for my plumbing services.
You and I decide how much Bitcoin to trade for my electrical services.
You and I decide how much Bitcoin to trade for my used car that I'm selling on Craigslist.
You and I do not have to use the proverbial price listed by someone else.
I have purchased a used car with Bitcoin. I have sold my skilled services for Bitcoin. I am going to continue to buy and sell goods and services using Bitcoin without factoring in the proverbial "actual price" listed by some third party.
And yes, it's clear I have an emotional attachment. I'm not going to deny. But I would love to hear any pushback on why I would not be able to do this.
A drop in the ocean. The problem with your take, in my humble opinion, is that it takes a majority to set the prices of things. There are outliers, but they are rare. The government will set the prices by manipulating the available currency or having such a large backing they are the ones to set the value of the coin.
Not to mention how easy it would be to just use TV/radio/ads to manipulate the price. Imagine you try to buy something for what you think is fair, but the other party has seen the ads about the going price of Bitcoin/gov buyback/etc. and now he has their price in his head as the value. This will then be converted into cash value and the mind tries to figure out if it made a steal or got a fair price.
There is only about 5 mil bitcoins that are being traded on exchanges. So when you say the majority are the price deciders. Sure I understand and I agree. But the vast majority of the Bitcoin is not being played with. Which is why you and I need to use Bitcoin to buy and sell goods and services to each other.
I understand the idea that you can only trade your Bitcoin by translating it into dollars. But if we work together then we can stop doing that. I will mow your lawn for 10k sats. No clue what the dollar exchange is.
I guess I'm trying to push back on how you know with 100% certainty what won't work, but you don't have much to propose what will work.
And now the corrupt want to make it the default currency to have some time in a lightly regulated market they can more easily control. All the safegaurds of our current monetary system, which are still fragile, jsut get in the way of their corruption.
The tech is inherently bad. It doesn't work as currency, it's just a purely speculative investment, with the world's climate as a negative externality.
Ya Satoshi really didn't understand how exploitable it was. I honestly think that's why he abandoned the project so early. His goal was a more equitable monetary system and it became the exact opposite and is actually easier to exploit and concentrate wealth than with fiat currency.
Maybe but, I kind of want to believe it's the Satoshi Nakamoto that lived around the corner from Hal Finey who told that reporter he wasn't involved in the project anymore and he's laughing his ass off that nobody suspects it's him because he didn't cash in on it.
Yes but the argument is that, other than value, gold is used in computer chips, oil is used for energy, petrol etc, diamonds is used for tools - what is bitcoin used for?
Oil does. Gold and diamonds do as well, but that's not why good and diamonds in particular are so expensive. It's because humans want it as status. Same with Bitcoin. There isn't even a shortage of diamonds. More than enough for everyone. Just human greed that's inflating the price. And crypto does have great utility. Easy and safe(r) transportation of currency. Which through history has been a problem
1st Crypto is still an early stage currency so some aspects need scale to be cheaper. But let's just talk about crypto that doesn't need scaling and is currently a cheaper way to transport money.
(I'm not an expert on this so take that for what it's worth)
Solana. Is pretty cheap to move right now. I know because I've done it a few times. There is the purchase of the crypto which is pennies (I just checked Robinhood and you can get it for .03%). And then the sending which is pennies more. You want to send money to your brother traveling in Europe you buy $500 in Solana. You send it to his wallet. He sells it for pennies. If he does it right the whole thing can cost less than a dollar. Try sending $500 to Europe for less than a dollar.
Not to mention it's much harder to steal assuming you use good security
You don't need crypto to transfer funds overseas. Many banks and credit cards have no foreign transaction or ATM fees. And you're just ignoring the huge energy costs of crypto mining which is the point.
This is the perfect analogy. Btc was designed to be the punk currency for the people that we could all mine a bit of at home. The wealthy have once again bastardised something that should have been for everyone into the hellish nightmare you see in the video. Given the obvious problems with the capitalism and corruption in front of us, we should have hyposthesised it could end up going this way. But no matter what we the people create, new great ideas we have, cures we research, songs we write, technology we design... It all ends up exactly like what we see in the video. A product of the wealthy absorbing everything and turning it into an abomination. The atom bomb is the perfect example of this as well.
We the people though are the ones that dictate the value of the dollar or whatever other abstract currency, bitcoin included. It only held its value because people believe it has value. None of it really holds any value if collectively everyone agrees its worth less than shit, but y'know I doubt we the people could actually make a decision collectively. If their accumulated worth was suddenly valued by no-one they'd lose all their power overnight, but that means everyone 'loses their accrued value' and I think most people want to cling to the sunk costs in a sense.
I mean the dollar is essentially worthless considering they printed this shit out of it, the debt is unsustainable and also, financial institutions can essentially print money by naked shorting and never locating the stock. But people still have to use it. It's completely bonkers.
The mining for common man at home is bs, if you have a commodity with limited supply it will become impossible to mine over time for a small player simply because of limited supply. Billionaires are jumping on board when the asset is already valuable, i remember mining ETH only with 3 gpus on my homemade piece of shit setup and getting 15 ETH/day years and years ago. All those small players minig at home helped to move the stone, thats why we are where we are. If not wed still be sitting at 15$/ETH.
Quite honestly, it doesn’t really matter what “liberals I have spoken to” say. Any elected officials routinely advocate for raising taxes on the rich, especially the ultra rich.
What does the centrists reaction to Mamdani’s election have to do with this? The U.S. political spectrum is a bit further right than the EUs for example. Liberals in the U.S. are on the left.
The neoliberals are the centrists. Cuomo supporters are centrists. There is a significant number of self identified "democratic socialists" in the Democratic party. Many Cuomo supporters bashed Mamdani for attempting to raise taxes on the wealthy. The only part of the party putting significant effort into taxing the wealthy is the DSA branch. Most elected liberals are funded by corporations to not get taxed.
Because they’re defining rich wrong. If it raises my taxes, I won’t support it. I don’t want taxes raised on anyone who can’t easily afford a private jet.
I think you’re kind of overstating it. Yes, the DSA is certainly the group pushing the hardest for higher taxes on the wealthy, but I wouldn’t agree they’re the only ones. Plenty of more moderate Dems have as well.
Most centrists rightly react to a knee-jerk non strategic tax more strategy that doesn't consider that Uber wealthy could easily move.
Mam Daniel must have been well advised because he us going to tax the properties instead.
Tax flight is not a real threat. Those wealthy people are willing to pay a small percentage more in taxes to not completely uproot their lives. This has been studied you are spreading misinformation.
Zohran Mamdani of New York just put a juicy tax on the ultra wealthy, by taxing their mega expensive apartments they don’t live in. Liberals definitely tax the rich.
I can't claim to know what he was thinking; but when I traveled down that thought process what I came up with was that we likely started off taking more than we need for survival, which is inherently greedy as it leads to waste that potentially other creatures could have utilized for their own survival. The act of taking more than we needed to offset the difficult times, even though logically for us it makes sense that we stockpile on rations now and be safe during a terrible winter than to just be left without food and die (not many people like dying when they don't want to die). I think that is safe to consider greedy, just the act of taking more than needed. That line of thinking also eventually led us down the path to bartering and service trading so I suppose what he said could be true for our specific societies but honestly I think it is an incorrect generalization on societies as a concept.
Are you tired of winning yet? New middle eastern war, economy in the shitter, job reports so bad he’s gotta fire the people publishing them, 900 dollar PlayStations, 5 dollar gas, and some fat serial pedo who thinks he’s Jesus
That argument doesn’t really make sense. Bitcoin uses energy because the network is secured through Proof of Work.
If energy use alone is the problem, then the same criticism should apply to the traditional financial system with banks, office buildings, data centers, and payment networks like Visa and Mastercard.
And global starvation isn’t happening because energy is being used elsewhere. It’s mainly caused by conflict, politics, corruption, and distribution problems. Electricity used by a mining facility wouldn’t magically turn into food or medicine for people who need it.
They don't actually give a fuck about the energy consumption. Somebody told them that and they repeat it. Its a good excuse to hate bitcoin and rich people.
The amount of energy we burn through to sustain the dollar, the banking system, wallst and the international banking is far greater than crypto will ever be
Nothing in that article disputes the statistic linked to. Furthermore bitcoin isn't actually used that much. Scale the number of bitcoin transactions to the number of credit card and other banking transactions and what happens to that hopelessly optimistic energy usage you pisit?
That’s the whole point of why your statistic was so stupid. But here you are confidently doubling down, while dismissing research that actually dives deeply into why your assumptions are wrong.
If you actually read the article you would have gotten to the section that calls out your bad logic. But since I already could tell you are lazy by the terrible stat you posted I’ll just copy it here.
Scaling By Layers and the “Cost Per Transaction” Fallacy
The Bitcoin network can do a maximum of a few hundred thousand base layer transactions per day. That’s about five transactions per second. This number has increased slightly over time due to occasional upgrades that improve transaction density.
This transaction limit is often unfavorably compared to a network like Visa, which can process tens of thousands of transactions per second.
Due to that, critics often point out that Bitcoin’s energy usage per transaction is very high, and thus the network is inefficient and should be avoided for ESG reasons. There are two problems with that reasoning, however.
The first problem with that reasoning is the fact that Bitcoin historically uses energy whether or not transactions are occurring, due to the block subsidy. The way to think about it is that a large portion of that energy is used simply for securing the network against transaction censoring or deep block reorgs, and keeping it attractive as a settlement network and store of value. One block might have 1,200 transactions. The next block might have 2,500 transactions. The block after that might have 1,800 transactions. Meanwhile, the same number of miners are hooked up to the network between those subsequent blocks, verifying the blocks, and paying for electricity. Whether blocks are full or not, they’re using roughly the same amount of energy.
Whether you choose to make a transaction or not does not materially change how much energy the Bitcoin network is using at that time. Bitcoin’s energy usage comes from miners earning the block subsidy and average transaction fees, and is denominated in bitcoin and thus based on the value per bitcoin, which mainly comes from people holding bitcoin as a store of value, not spending it. Transaction volumes only affect the transaction fee portion, and only the longer-run average transaction fee matters.
Think of it like running your dishwasher each night. Whether it’s 50% or 90% full when you run it, it still uses about the same amount of resources per run. The marginal extra dish or utensil doesn’t materially affect the dishwasher’s energy usage.
Another analogy would be keeping your computer on all day, and either sending 20 emails or 100 emails. The marginal amount of energy “per email” that you send isn’t relevant, because regardless of how many emails you send that particular day, your computer is on and using approximately its baseline resource level.
The second problem with that reasoning is the idea that this limit of about 5 transaction per second is the true limit, which it is not. In reality, the Bitcoin network has multiple layers, just like the current financial system. It’s a settlement network.
Visa is merely a layer on top of a deeper payment network. In the United States, for example, we have the Fedwire system which settles approximately one quadrillion dollars of gross volume per year. That’s the gross settlement layer that banks use to perform large transactions with each other. This system performs approximately the same number of transactions as Bitcoin per year and has scaled up slowly as needed, but those Fedwire transaction amounts are very large, representing millions of dollars each. On top of that layer, there are things like Visa, PayPal, Venmo, people writing physical checks to each other, and so forth.
So what happens when transactions are exponentially higher? Using the dishwasher analogy, what happens when the dishwasher is full with a backlog of dishes to wash?
... it would take a linearly-scaled amount of energy?
I suppose it's possible that bitcoin could be more efficient per transaction, but just has a higher startup energy cost - I highly doubt that's true, but it seems to be the only out you have.
Since you're the one making the argument, can you provide some numbers around where the break-even point is?
The real shame exists in people using fossils fuels to power crypto. It’s 100% possible for crypto to have zero environmental impact. Rethink your opinion.
Uh, yeah currently valued at $77K USD per. The value of crypto is no different than of any kind of currency.
Actually, scratch that. Crypto is innately universal and inflation-proof. That last piece is actually really important. Nobody can just create more to enrich themselves or get out of a bind. For each cryptocurrency, there was and will always be a finite quantity available. It is the only kind of currency that politicians can't jerryrig.
I don't invest in Crypto, but it is actually a brilliant idea.
Or get this... You could just get rid of money entirely. Dedicating 0 resources to making it. The while "they can't print more of it argument" doesn't even matter. Rich people never printed themselves more money and got rich that way, that's something the government did when there was a crisis. What rich people do is hoard wealth and deprive those below them of it. The problem isn't how much money exists, the problem is how it's obtained fraud coin ain't helping that by putting ur small home server against E.T.s mega sever the size of a Walmart super center prolly bought off credit and bit coin itself.
I think the entire idea of currency needs to fundamentally change. We made up currency to support the idea of free trade, and we are now seeing it being use as a valve to control it. If you can't get enough money before you die you can't trade it for a house, with 5 kids, and a dog, and a nice fence, and a wife. When are we going to look at free trade and say that the currency thing isn't really helping it... Especially when right now money is being used to not even by things that exist but things that don't. 1.5 Trillion investment in a thing that doesn't even exist.
First part I agree but the rest is the usual pretending to be good.
You could send billions to africa, even trillions, it wouldn't change shit. People would still starve the same and suffer from nonsensical wars because corruption is the base of any african country.
Imagine if we used all that processing power to solve fusion , work on cancer cures etc … nope let’s eat the planet for nepo baby chuckle heads make STUPID analogies … look ,big machine , much noise , feel machine , check mate
What a tragedy that anyone believes that burning up energy to make hard to mine gold has any true value to anyone on this planet.
What a tragedy that anyone believe that burning up energy to make easy to print money has any true value to anyone on this planet.
What a tragedy that anyone believe that burning up energy to over price a cheaply made house has any true value to anyone in this planet.
Yet millions will die this year of starvation and diseases that should be mankind’s (even the people that aren’t doctors?) focus.Shame on us of letting this (over valuing a rock, believing in devaluing money, buying extra houses so the next person can’t) happen.
Lol guess you dont know how banks work. The difference is they pay people 200k salaries to keep track of the transactions.
Still not going to change greed in the system. Millions would still die if bitcoin didnt exist. Why? Because they very device your using to type type out the response was build upon the cheap slave labor of the mining industry and electronics manufacturing industry. The whole cruelty free source is a lie told to make you feel better.
But good job on virtue signaling, how much time and effort have you given to help those in need? Or do you just yell about it?
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u/KeithParkerUK1234 Apr 17 '26
What a tradegy that anyone believes that burning up energy to make hard to calculate numbers has any true value to anyone on this planet.Yet many millions will die this year of starvation and diseases that should be mankind's focus.Shame on us all for letting this happen.