What do people think about Bitcoin?

LOL.

Poor guy doesn't even know what an average joe means.

Best of luck to you bro. I am peacing out from this thread. Gonna let donny, space ghost and others circle jerk each other.

 

I'm skeptical to claims on how Bitcoin is "good for the environment", but I don't think this line of attack regarding utilities is fair or realistic.

Your first example of weed implies the government can direct and control how WE ALL use energy, which is totally unAmerican... If you declare greenhouse gas emissions contraband, you pretty much have to shut down everything or live in China so the government can tell you what you can and can't do while you scrounge enough bribe money to convince them of things you can do.

The second example doesn't make sense either and ropes in unrelated problems in class or even racial disparities in local zoning/regulation. I'm sure some folks did protest btc miners moving in, but they got shut down because tax dollars to the state economy overrode the number of folks who protested AND voted for their favorite local politicians.

For the third example, I wouldn't call that or your second point an example of the Free Market, but the government that regulated utilities heard the arguments and didn't interfere with the private transaction between btc miners and energy utilities. It's not like the miners hid what they were going to do and then oopsie, we drank too much of your milkshake!

The main point in that thread: Business Contracts are important. If Miners bought 100gw of energy over time at a fixed wholesale price, then Utilities have to deliver it. Utilities decided to strike that deal with Miners rather than being torn down by fire and pitch forks for having rolling blackouts AND honoring their contract to Miners.

I don't see how that's different than building a chip plant in the middle of the desert even though making ultrapure water that's with standards purity in the parts per billion* takes more water than future expected agricultural demand in Arizona.

Or the government paying farmers to bury crops in the dirt.

Or a youtube influencer buying a lamborghini, pimping it with monster truck suspension/wheels then driving it off a canyon.

"Waste" isn't entirely bad. Nvidia started off as a graphics card maker for video games, also an unproductive and energy demanding frivolity. Now it's probably going to destroy us all by powering the brains behind murderbots. Yay!

Waste is subjective, and the media carries a heavy load and influence upon its subjectivity. Instead of finicky renewables plus a secondary chain of energy storage (lithium batteries), maybe steady nuclear is the best and cost efficient solution. I don't know.

Rightfully or wrongfully, BTC/crypto gets the blame for being the symbol for our era's excess, but that emotionality of how wrecked our system/society is shouldn't override good faith debates over BTC's pros/cons.





*You're more likely to win the lotto 450 times than find a sodium ion in semiconductor grade ultrapure water.

 

Because you want to deflect away from the fact that BTC is not currently useful to your average Joe so you speak about future cases that may or not ever materialize.

Lol…. A niche forum about basketball isn’t a good proxy for BTC adoption or “caring”.

And Enron was one of the most valuable companies at one point…. BTC is much more Enron than Walmart.

 

The differences between proof of work and proof of stake (effectively central control vs. decentralized control) are massive and their implications are very far reaching. You don't have to be pro-Bitcoin to feel this way, either.

To what I would respond; show me the lie.

There are people who have looked into it longer than I have and have come to the wrong conclusion. An investment of time is not a guarantee of outcome, but the correlation is strong. As for those folks, I'd say it's unlikely they have put in an adequate amount of time because variety knowledge-tubers don't really have the luxury of deepdiving into any given subject, at least in my experience. Also, there are people far smarter than I am who have **** the bed in terms of understanding Bitcoin, so appeals to authority I find not very compelling.

I'd not get wrapped up in a loaded term like 'lie'. That was merely a convenient turn-of-phrase wherein 'lie' was an easy substitute for 'incorrect'.

I'm not Professor Bitcoin or anything. I'd recommend anyone who wants to learn go use the wider internet. You'll find way better places to learn than my fingertips out there.

In my defense, however, I offer an analogy. If I stepped into a Calculus class without having taken Algebra, do you think I would fail that class? If I did, would you blame the teacher? Bitcoin is an intersection of many different forms of knowledge. Politics, philosophy, economics, technology, physics, etc. It's incredibly easy to have a gap in your understanding and come up with some incorrect assumptions.

One example is deflation. We've seen in this discussion people assume that Bitcoin's finite supply would render it impractical as a currency. This is an incorrect assumption due to its divisibility.

Another example is energy. We've seen people here who do not understand how energy markets work, and do not understand the concept of stranded energy or variable demand/throughput and what those things mean for energy technology adoption and sustainability.

These individual pieces of knowledge are not always (in fact they are rarely are) Bitcoin-centric, but yet they can cause massive misunderstandings and misconceptions, and it's part of why onboarding can be so difficult... just so many knowledge potholes to trip over.

Funny, the thing I most wanted you to respond to is the thing you did not respond to. Sad times

When you discuss novel stuff the chances of ****ing up or missing something are pretty high, so I'd cut them some slack.

The key argument is that inflation is an opaque/invisible tax that hurts the poor the most. The poor need a self-sovereign store of value more than anyone.

You may be paying too much attention to people's credentials. This is an emergent field, so there basically aren't any experts.

This is a point of contention in the BTC community. It's less about adoption vs. understanding and more about adoption timing vs. the inevitable financial reckoning. I'm in the camp that the "suddenly" part of "gradually, then suddenly" needs to be as slow as possible. If BTC flips the dollar in an incredibly short amount of time, it will be because of some great calamity. I don't want a crisis, I want a slow burn.

Again, I'm not a professional educator. I've given a metric ****ton of my time and energy to some clearly bad faith actors in this thread. Any honest questions posed I will happily answer, but as far as I'm concerned, I've done more than my duty here.

Again, if you don't know algebra, I can't help you learn calculus. Worse yet, if you come into class with a shitty attitude and are unwilling to listen, then I don't have time for you.

I've asked our resident naysayers time and time again for examples of what doesn't make sense, counter-arguments, etc and all I get back are platitudes and vitriol. My patience only goes so far.

Sadly there is no guarantee that a proper explanation will lead to the understanding of anything.

That being said, I commend both you and @Invisible Fan for approaching this discussion honestly and respectfully. You both have the right attitude and I believe with continued exploration of the space you will come to the same conclusions I have.

 

BTC is absolutely useful as a SOV to literally everyone on earth right now.

And yeah, cf.net isn't a good proxy, but the irony of saying "nobody cares" when the place someone is saying it clearly does care is pretty funny.

Care to make a tipjar bet about bitcoin's future? You seem quite sure of its demise with that Enron comparison.

 

I'm fairly certain the limited money supply will kill investment as we know it(creating cents out of cents is not expanding the supply no matter how you're cutting it), plus our entire ~quadrillion dollar plus financial system, and change lending as we know it, which is intentional because bitcoin is designed as an alternative to the fractional banking system.

It's why out of the majority of economists don't advocate going back to the Gold Standard.

Aspects of a deflationary currency:

1. Decreased Borrowing Demand: Deflation can lead to a decrease in borrowing demand as individuals and businesses may delay their spending and investment decisions. During deflation, people expect prices to continue falling, which can discourage borrowing for consumption or investment purposes. As a result, the demand for loans may decline, leading to reduced lending activity.
2. Increased Real Interest Rates: Real interest rates, which account for inflation, can be significantly affected by deflation. In a deflationary environment, if prices are falling, the real interest rates (nominal interest rates minus the rate of deflation) can increase even if nominal interest rates remain unchanged. Higher real interest rates can make borrowing more expensive in real terms, further dampening borrowing demand.
3. Debt Burden and Loan Defaults: Deflation can increase the burden of existing debt. As prices decrease, the value of money increases, making it more challenging for borrowers to repay their debts with money that has become more valuable. This can lead to an increase in loan defaults and non-performing loans, as borrowers struggle to meet their repayment obligations. Lenders may be more cautious in extending new loans, leading to a contraction in lending activity.
4. Tightened Credit Conditions: In a deflationary environment, lenders may become more risk-averse and tighten credit conditions. They may increase requirements for collateral, impose stricter lending standards, or reduce the amount of credit available. Lenders may perceive deflation as a higher risk environment, as falling prices can erode the value of collateral and increase the likelihood of loan defaults.

You should provide more examples or papers. The ones I've found supporting your argument are fanciful promises that aren't grounded by research but rather cherry picked quotes.

Dividing satoshis into smaller satoshis still sounds like a waste of energy other than the fact that when it does happen, the btc you're currently holding would ostensibly be worth a whole lot more to necessitate the hair splitting. I'm not sure how making money difficult for grandma solves anything.

 

… not if you bought when it was much higher. Then it’s just another one of the countless assets you can lose money with.

Considering the adoption of BTC and people doing things other than HODL…. Nobody cares is a pretty accurate statement.

I’m sure of the demise of everything given a long enough time line.

How would you even quantify the demise of BTC? Goes to 0? Goes to 100? Goes to 1000?

 

It's not.... except of the value added to the economy by expanding domestic semiconductor manufacturing vs whatever BTC adds..... I clearly have an idea what is far more productive in terms of energy and materials.

Or ethanol......

But still... I would argue that growing crops in the desert and growing crops for fuel is still more productive than BTC.

I'm not so sure waste is subjective since we can calculate the amount of materials and energy used to make a graphics card. All those graphic cards are going to end up in landfill... that might be a bit harder to make objective.

We can calculate the energy used to mine BTC. None of this adds in a favorable way for BTC.

Unfortunately, BTC proponents in the quest to sell their product/ideas have made the environmental case.

All these energy and materials are used to make an asset class so people can HODL? From my perspective, BTC is a colossal waste of materials and energy.

 

Am I wrong in thinking weed is still illegal on a federal level and that some states continue to enact harsh punishments towards people who produce and consume it like the state of Texas? I know there are your liberal havens like Austin where having possession of I think two ounces is a misdemeanor, but that still tells you it's not really a free market if the thing some people consume or sell leads to punishments. The weed industry in states where they've legalized it isn't even profitable for a lot of companies so I'm not even advocating for it really. Just, it's not really a free market like SpaceGhost and you have posited where it's still illegal in some states and those states still harshly punish people that produce or consume it.

It really only stopped carrying the taboo it used to have once you had affluent millionaires and billionaires, most of who aren't POC and have rich ties in the alcohol business to make it the over the counter purchasable product it is today in states where it is legalized. That's not really a free market either.

As far as the concrete factory point goes, it just illustrates that people can vote out a business from establishing there if they want to and that should be a thing. If a company that say produces a lot of chemical waste wants to establish itself near a city's only clean body of water that people use for consumption, the free market should not dictate the profits it'll generate for the town over the cons of how it's going to make the people in that town sick and affect their property value among a myriad of other factors, that too also negatively impact residents that live there economically. A private business and a utility companies profit gains should not override the quality of life and negative economic impact dumped on citizens that live nearby. That isn't fair or right. The reason that factory ultimately didn't get built is because the people that live there are affluent. I think housing around the Circle C and Oak Hill area is easily a million or more. They don't want their property value to decline by having an ugly concrete factory near them.

It's the same reason I-35 never got built and run through the rich side of Austin back in the day. Factories and anything deemed undesirable for wealthy people to have to look at outside their property just can't be. So clearly, if you're a citizen with enough wealth and status to push your weight around, you too can deny business formation in your local neck of the woods too.

Of the things you listed the only one that actually sequesters carbon is burying crops into the ground. If you leave dead crops on the surface to eventually decompose, 80% of it will go back into the atmosphere with about 20% of remaining that'll be soil. If you bury all of it, then all of the carbon that makes up the dead plant matter goes into the ground. You're also re-introducing nutrients still available in those dead crops back into the soil, making it so you don't have to use as much fertilizer or compost to amend the soil if you're trying to grow crops. And assuming the soil you buried on top of the dead plant matter stays put, that carbon will stay in the ground, while improving the soil, which will make your existing living plant life in the landscape healthier. And since trees already do better what some billion dollar carbon sequestration companies fail to do, improving the soil for them to better able to do what they do best is a good thing and truly good for everybody and it doesn't require an investment in a useless volatile speculative asset to make such a claim either.

However having a speculative asset that consumes the equivalent of six Houston households every year isn't good for everybody. Bitcoin is a gambling casino for already well off people with disposal income while consuming enough energy every year to power a small country. The video that Xerobull found boring illustrates we are emitting over 100 Earth's worth of sequestered carbon that used to be buried deep in the ground back into the atmosphere again. Every single year. That's not a good thing. Waste isn't good. I mean I was raised to never leave a light on in a room if I'm not going to be there and if water is leaking from the faucet, the importance of fixing the drip because it would be wasteful and costly over time. It's amazing to me the leeway we give companies that are so wasteful comparatively.

And I'm with you. Going back to the gold standard would be a disaster. Why bitcoiners want bitcoin to replace gold and have it become the new gold standard and treat it like a selling point is beyond me. You would think these bitcoin advocates that say they've studied history would know how awful it was back when we used the gold standard. Y'all are rehashing old bad ideas, putting it into a new package and selling it as revolutionary. At least steal an old idea that's good and hasn't already failed in practice before you decide to repackage it as revolutionary.

 

The point is that value is subjective. I sense the vitriol at the miners is really low key aimed at the believers who support BTC's market cap.

Another example in utility vs value. Movie companies will spend hundreds of millions (Jim Cameron!) sometimes building up sets out of nowhere or deploy gfx card arrays in hopes that it'll make back its investment and more...

WTH do that when you can make the same movie by animating it with Korean/Vietnamese drawers?!? Excess!! Waste!!

But in terms of the economy, it hired boatloads of craftsmen, performers, and artisans that would elsewhere be doing different things.

And if the movie never existed, we'd be none the wiser.

The key difference is that the government is using tax payer money to subsidize the wafer plant in the desert and the conversion of crops to ethanol while allowing farmers to privatize profits from increased corn prices from lower supply.

Meanwhile the "miner handouts" seem more like a contractual agreement between two non-governmental parties.

That mindset implies that you're okay with government meddling as long as you're aligned with it in belief yet would allow the government to meddle in matters that you're not politically/spiritually aligned with.

Probably not.

I don't like billionaires building super mega yachts either, but again...system is what system is. If there is The Revolution, bitcoin isn't the first thing on my mind to take down, and I'm lazy enough to concede that others will take it down for me...

Frankly, I hate that spin, and it arose around the GSE phase a couple years ago where one guy promoted "clean BTC" by verifying chains mined from alternative energy (lulz). The idea is in the weeds. I believe* demand generation from fossil fuel plants takes energy and effort to "spin on" after it spins off at night after normal hours. I'm spitballing but the miners would take alternative fuels by day, take credit for the capital writeoff needed to build the damn things, then cash in on the cheaper rate from power plants at night.

A bar napkin makes it fit, but yeah...tearing down the btc network won't resolve our highway to climate hell anytime soon. If you're a city/subarb dweller, either you and/or your neighbor owns an SUV/Truck sized car. Not good nor efficient, but we try...


*since no one else has elaborated

 

Killing a vender and taking his entire supply is about as free market as you can get. Yet no society allows this. Free Market theory is not a binary topic. Of course there should be reasonable and fair regulations. But lets not humor the fringe libertarians.

Issuing debt backed by a commodity will always fail, whether its gold, silver or bitcoin. Anything can be used for money. Its a very very bad idea to issue a world reserve currency backed by debt.

It would be a terrible idea to switch from $USD to Bitcoin overnight and any bitcoiner who advocates this is a fool and shouldn't be humored. Every Bitcoin cycle (~4 years) creates a new generation of bitcoiners, each onboarding from a different point of view. This is why you will see significant difference of opinions between Donnie and Commodore and myself.

 

I don't remember much about the legal underpinning of public v private harm in that one legal class I took in college, but there is a social contract where citizens give the state extraordinary powers to guarantee safety, maybe in the form of police or regulation of drugs. 70s era legislation gave the EPA a large leash on enforcing what companies can and can't dump into our soil, water, and air, but the deal with btc mining is that it isn't a direct and stationary source of pollution.

Your argument for the concrete factory would be stronger if we had an enforcable cap and trade system, but our country isn't there yet where an all seeing control room can determine where all points of emissions come from. EPA was successful in the 70s and 80s because it was able to identify large sources of emissions and force them to control "the bad stuff." It's prohibitively more expensive to track carbon and it's why carbon trading schemes or "buying trees" is largely a scam dressed up with good intentions.

For example, we have a lot of old gas wells that either aren't properly recapped or are in need of being recapped. Most of those companies that did it died or sold their liabilities. This is a failure in capitalism and isn't enforcable. In fact, one company is buying up all those wells to extract more gas and "claiming" it's doing repairs. Highly doubtful because if it made money to do things right, those old companies wouldn't have sold those spots in the first place.

So even "clean gas" has skeletons in its closet that the media doesn't like reporting on. Too depressing and against the narrative...

tl;dr even if the gov somehow wanted to control miner energy usage, they'd have to justify why they're picking on them and not other big users.

That's a cheeky argument. Burying biomatter or even storing it in concrete is like shaving pennies off our yearly tab. You shared a skeptic channel that covered crypto or elon and I think the latest one is about carbon sequestration. Makes sense, so I guess our hope is cheap fusion to round off the edges...

I think you're a decade plus younger than me, and I felt the same way during college. There's a lot to feel depressed about, though waste and excess can and has promoted innovation. It's a different mentality and one that cheap energy enables.

We take cheap energy and water for granted. I'm not saying to give up or not care, more like don't let the opportunity go to waste. I'm not even sure we can curtail warming by cutting off/redirecting trillions in economic reinvestment to enforce overcompromised Kyoto guidelines...

Because despite Globalization catalyzing world modernization, BTC rings strongly to millennials and older groups that had to live through the GFC and had all faith we had in the financial system entirely upended. Nothing was truly fixed post-GFC except the Fed turning itself into the Spender of Last Resort. Satoshi Nakomoto started working on Bitcoin as a direct result.

I believe the Fed is a joke. They played their hands too deep, meddled in everything despite knowing full well of lag effects, even dipped their own noses in their product, yet seem to have a thrall of slavish believers because we don't have an alternative to think or do otherwise. If they say things are great AND IF we act as if they're great, then they believe they've done half their job. Do your duty and spend for the economy!

So yeah, keep btc as an insurance policy or not. Gold was the old trade. Could still work, but it sure as hell isn't an inflation hedge...If you're worried about inflation, TIPS is better than gold.

 

Is a single movie emitting the equivalent of six houston's every year? As you stated movies lead to jobs for multiple people across different respected disciplines. What does bitcoin do for people? Nevermind the fact that movies can be life changing. Art is life changing. Bitcoin isn't that. It never will be.

What is bitcoin doing comparatively? Is it creating jobs? That's not even a claim DonnyMost is crediting bitcoin to. Job creation. Wasn't that the whole point of the Metaverse, web3 and all that other stuff that ended up being crap? To manufacture purpose for bitcoin and cryptocurrency use. Right? Because it currently serves no real functional purpose? Right?

The government already meddles with what people align with if they're the majority vote in their respected area of residence. You frequent the D&D. You know this. If enough Americans don't want bitcoin or crypto in their nation, they should have the right to say the get out. Just like residents in Circle C and Oak Hill that didn't want a concrete factory built near their homes.

Again SUV/Trucks, when not used as a status symbol, serve a functional purpose. Also, you would need the equivalent of what six Houston's, not all of who are SUV/Trucks owners or homeowners for that matter, to match the yearly output of bitcoin emissions. You're doing the classic blame the consumer for why climate change is worsening when it's often times industry level businesses that are responsible by far for CO2 emissions. But at least a lot of those other businesses offer a product or service that actually does something and again have consumer protection in place. I'm not even worried about me in that respect. I'm talking about people that have lost homes to scams built around bitcoin and crypto. They're never gonna get their money back. There should have been consumer protections in place to help, again just like when someone is a victim of a scam on eBay or some 3rd party retailer. The whole wash your hands, bitcoin isn't for you if you're too stupid to get scammed isn't a lucrative selling point.

If you really believe that this is going to be a thing from which even people experiencing the worst in life would benefit, you can't simultaneously go lawl, when someone who believes you and trusts you get scammed by the thing you said would change their world. It certainly did, but for the worse. That should be fixed especially if you want this to be a globally used currency by everyone, including your people more vulnerable to scams. If bitcoin had that, that would actually curb a lot of my b****ing.

But what I see are people that want bitcoin to replace gold and then go back to the bitcoin equivalent of gold standard even though back when we had the gold standard, it was trash. They want this to be a global currency but the same people that talk about how great it is also talk about how stupid people are and don't really seem to care about people vulnerable to scams or fixing that for that matter. You need consumer protections in place if you want this to be what DonnyMost claims it will be. There aren't.

 

I don't think it's completely unknowable or we can't have a good idea.

If BTC was doing something productive.... like make food, wafers, fuel, etc it would be a different story.

Why does that matter? Or why is that the key difference?

I'm more concerned about the end result..... domestic semiconductors provides a wide range of benefits while BTC mining does what exactly..... ? It creates some jobs but seems more like digging holes and then filling the holes.

But they still get handouts since utilities are a quasi private industry, electricity generation isn't some pure free market endeavor that doesn't benefit from government.

Objectively, the US government subsidizing food supply prevented a lot of starvation and malnutrition. The mindset proves I can objectively look at the end result.

I'm not going to toss the baby out with the bath water because we subsidize ethanol and crops in Arizona. BTC is an asset class the requires a tremendous amount of energy to create.

I'm not looking to take down BTC, just pushing back against all these claims by the zealots.

That's the problem with BTC..... so much talk and promises while what is actually happening on 9/13/23 is a far cry from the hype.

Again, I don't think tearing down BTC is prudent. I just think it's extremely wasteful and it's claims of environmentalism are far from reality. I do wish BTC would fail because of its wastfulness.

 

As an elder millennial who entered the work force in 2009, sometimes you are just unlucky. These kids entering the workforce in 2023 have this great demographic tailwind of boomers retiring causing a tighter labor market. Perhaps if I play my cards right, I can slip into the role(s) that my soon to be retired counterparts have and earn some more money.

The real truth is that the scales have always been heavily tilted towards the wealthy. Maybe coming out on top of two consecutive world wars created these anomalous blips that gives these false ideas that this is normal or what is expected? Regardless, the pre-GFC age wasn't some utopia or even close to it.

I disagree. I prefer to look at fiscal and monetary policy. I won't argue that the Fed doesn't make mistakes or have scandals or not always purely independent but these issues are just a symptom of humankind. BTC is supposed to be different, but it's still a human creation based on human ideas that can be exploited by human desires.

 

Anybody who buys at an all-time high of an asset is going to lose value over some period of time. That's a given. If those people wait long enough they will accrue all that value back (and more). If you have a short time horizon and you should not be parking your earnings in volatile assets. If you plan properly, you will never lose value with BTC.

I leave that to you. You're the one who seems so sure it's worthless and going to crash. Name your terms.

 

This is going to shock you, but I agree with the broader sentiment you're expressing.

We live in an absurdly inflationary environment that has had extremely free-flowing capital for a long time. If we switched to a Bitcoin standard tomorrow, it would crater the economy. Kind of like a junkie quitting cold turkey. This clip from 28:00 to 34:00 explains what I mean:



You're not going to be challenged to find a buttload of Keynsian economists and academics who think a BTC standard would be permanently catastrophic. Where I disagree with you (and them) is the long-term prospects of a hard money standard. I don't think spending would vanish and credit would disappear, I think both would just become more prudent. People still need goods and services, no matter if their currency is appreciating and depreciating.

You're right that a lot of this is theoretical, because Bitcoin is completely novel. The Gold Standard is the closest analog we've had to the Bitcoin standard, but they're actually different beasts. Despite that, I have no fear of a world operating on a Bitcoin standard. I think it would be a far happier and more logical place to be. What I fear is how we get there. The transition is going to be painful because we've architected our economy around inflation and expansion-for-expansion's sake for a very long time. That bubble is going to pop one way or another, whether that change undertakes us or we undertake it is a choice we have to make.

It's not a waste of energy if its useful to facilitate commerce. When the US started printing $100 bills it was because it made transactions easier. Whenever we start dividing Satoshis it will be for the same ends, only with a different cause (deflation vs. inflation).

 

A single blockbuster movie can build small towns or sets out of nowhere that will never be used again when the crew wraps up filming.

I feel graphics cards are better used displaying unproductive games or Marvel SFX, but someone else wanted to use it to do silly unproductive math.

I'm not sure how I can justify my preferences are better than the other person. I guess "Art" and "Culture" gives me justification. Hey...a drawing to be worth a few pennies or upwards of a half a billion dollars! But if we're quantifying that as justifying art, then that argument is similar to using BTC's market cap as its tangible value.

People think and dream differently. Making it all work and fit together is a challenge and might be a faulty premise to begin with.

I think I debated credit and value with Donny in similar lines because money as it's now defined has also become highly subjective...beyond the "amount of physical dollars" in circulation.

My responses to you asn't been what "Bitcoin does"...even my replies to Donny questions what it really does.

Your line of inquiry has been mostly arguments against its utility when value is seen differently and can be as much or more subjective.

I'm not sure "functional purpose" can be predicted with btc or other crypto...Maybe it all goes bust. Maybe it moons like the maxis here are predicting. Right now it's a silent fart that continues to simmer.

That hasn't been what I'm debating you about though because value, currency, and credit are real world concerns that aren't heavily spoken of in polite conversation and is usually reserved in professional settings among business owners, entrepreneurs, product/sales, or financial investors/institutions.

Even "functional purpose" is in the realm of the ideal. Philosophy can be a trip...

As for "respectable" jobs, that something with a peak market cap of 1T will draw in jobs and job creators. Just not the kind or amount of jobs that you'd like to admit or support.

Donny's Lightning Network didn't just pop up out of nowhere. A publicly trading mining company like Mara isn't run inside a closet and automated by chatbots.

You and I can vote and protest against the miners. I'm just not sure if we're arguing over the same themes as whoever is protesting against BTC in the US has been so unsuccessful that they're not even spoken of...

I'm not sure which TX miner is producing 6 Houston's worth of all btc emissions.

It's like arguing against Houston putting up another refinery because of the total amount of pollution producing/consuming/burning petrol takes on the world...the straw that broke the camels back.

If you use that line of attack, then yeah, let's go One Step Further and propose banning all SUV/Truck sales that doesn't serve any additional functional purchase for the single buyer. Much like government determining how the energy is used and how much used is socially acceptable in the replies before...

I didn't intend to "blame the customer", but it can be seen that way.

I'm saying our culture is excessive and potentially unsustainable. It's not entirely bad if it furthers growth despite the growing effects of climate change because it spurns different ideas and innovation that would never exist before if we lived in a mindset of scarcity and became more risk adverse.

If we collectively decreed that movies with budgets around or over half a billion dollars were excessive and wasteful, then we're writing off whatever contribution it could potentially have in society, such as art or just plain ol personal enjoyment.

Maybe I've lived too much in startup land where if the value or main product of the startup is rejected by investors, then its leaders scramble and pivot to a different idea for the company to latch upon. I don't think a currency "candidate" should do that, but this happens a lot in software.

I wholly agree the industry needs a lot of cleaning up with a lot of hard questions left unanswered. I also feel a similar distrust in jumping head first into the system. A lot of my concerns with Donny's evangelism are about the scams, lack of protections, and deliberate circumvention of established regulation designed to prevent these abuses in the first place.

You brought up casino...it's widely acceptable to go to one or buy lotto tickets

BTC is more speculative like betting on a casino than whatever promises of a currency/SOV/platform/etc that has been billed as over the years to boost it's legitimacy.

If you re-read your quote with the question of why casinos exist, there's some similar responses between them.

Your concerns are completely fair and I don't think it's b****ing. I believe that in a healthy debate, how arguments are presented and how they are received goes a long way for a decent conclusion or understand...for both parties.

I don't know and can't predict what BTC's endgame is. If I owned BTC, I'd treat it like a hedge or insurance.

I fully agree with you that BTC's promises/claims are not equal to the degree of responsibility and scope that people expect with their money. Some of the catchphrases used by maxis and crypto folk are toxic (Do your own research! **Translation : Don't @ me if you get scammed!**) because it blames victims and encourages hiding losses by their own evangelists in order to avoid shame pr discreditation...unless there's a different play to open up about getting defrauded.