from Hacker News

Bitcoin Is Screwed

by rainmaking on 2/25/21, 8:25 PM with 71 comments

• by paulgb on 2/25/21, 8:52 PM

  Are people just upvoting this because they don’t like Bitcoin? I don’t like Bitcoin either but none of these are original arguments and this looks like an ad for a different cryptocurrency I’ve never heard of.

• by marcell on 2/25/21, 9:11 PM

  > I just came across a digital currency system called Taler that solves the double spending problem by having a central authority

  This misses the entire point. Anyone can solve the double spend problem with MySQL, the innovation of bitcoin is that it is decentralized with no central authority.

• by coinward on 2/25/21, 9:00 PM

  Taler might repeat the atrocities of others before them who manipulate the supply of "money". Author glazed over the point of separating state and money is a return to sound money. Authorities have never stayed trustworthy and always give in to political pressures to expand monetary supply, until BTC emerged as money.

• by bondarchuk on 2/25/21, 8:55 PM

  >Just use the darn government to solve the double spending problem.

  Yes, we tried that, but they kept creating new coins out of thin air.

• by stevenjgarner on 2/25/21, 9:20 PM

  Isn't "having a central authority" the very problem that Bitcoin solves? You can't just say Taler is better than BTC because it has a central authority. Central authority IS the problem. All central authorities are doomed to fail sooner or later BECAUSE they are centralized. Has a distributed authority ever failed? What am I not understanding?

• by gruez on 2/25/21, 8:57 PM

  >It came as close as is humanely possible by all means, but quite simply by needing electricity and advanced silicon, it's doomed. In other words, Bitcoin never was what claimed to be. It's main virtue is that it's pretty good at obfuscating that.

  and what's that? Based on the prceeding paragraphs it seems to be some sort of payment system that can operate without the influence of an "authority" (whatever that means). But if he took the time to read the whitepaper, he would discover it says:

  >Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

  Seems like it's doing that just fine.

• by philistine on 2/25/21, 9:26 PM

  I thought the whole article was a joke. For real, are there others who honestly thought it was humorous?

• by somdax on 2/25/21, 9:02 PM

  About Decentralized Systems. What are some those that you know about that are being used and can be considered a mature and proven decentralized system? (However you want to defineature and proven)

  Is the collection of governments around the world an example of a decentralized system?

• by anm89 on 2/25/21, 8:57 PM

  {Thing} is {negative adjective}.

  Excellent. Good to know.

• by bryanlarsen on 2/25/21, 9:46 PM

  The best argument I heard against Bitcoin is the need for miners to continuously sell coins to pay their electricity bills, putting continuous downwards sell side pressure on prices. With a normal asset, buy & sell demand is roughly equivalent and prices are roughly stable. But with bitcoin if buy & sell demand by consumers are roughly equal the miners additional sell pressure will result in lowering prices.

• by bwasti on 2/25/21, 8:55 PM

  Mining Bitcoin can be done with pencil, paper and the ability to communicate with others also interested in Bitcoin.

• by biolurker1 on 2/25/21, 9:16 PM

  Let's see the argument.

  Bitcoin: I wanna be decentralized and transparent!

  Taler: I wanna be centralized and anonymous!

  Author: bitcoin is screwed!

  Conclusion: author can't be a programmer.

• by mindcandy on 2/25/21, 9:09 PM

  This is a very bad-faith argument. It basically comes down to "Bitcoin doesn't replace civilization in a single stroke. So, there."

  "There are no power stations without a central authority." is a clever twist of words. It's a false statement that sounds true. There are lots of power stations. They are not under A central authority. They are under huge number of centralized authorities locked in a symbiotic/adversarial relationship. The USA can't stop North Korea from powering Bitcoin miners. That's not a happy example. But, it's a strong one.

  I've heard of great strides towards decentralized power generation and distribution in Europe. Particularly Germany. But, I don't know the details. I do know that one thing crypto is exceptionally good at is recording, publishing and paying for attribution down to micro details. I would be amazed if someone hasn't started some DistributedPowerCoin. It won't be a Bitcoin script. But, it might be backed by Proof of Staking Bitcoin.

  "Can't produce chips and have a computer supply chain without a working legal system." Bitcoin doesn't attempt to replace the legal system. Arguing that it fails to accomplish something it does not attempt to do is bad form. Ethereum hopes to eat a large slice of the legal system's pie. But, that's another topic.

  But, in general Bitcoin does not set out to replace central governments entirely. It seeks to reduce their power over individual finances. Arguing that failing to achieve crypto anarchy means failing entirely is not convincing.

• by cowpig on 2/25/21, 9:01 PM

  I think this is less about Bitcoin being screwed, and more a criticism of the neo-libertarian escapist approach to economics.

  That we all depend on the systems that govern our world, from the clean(er) laws physics of it all the way up to the wet, nasty dynamics that emerge from collective human behaviour, and no clever use of technology will ever make that not true.

  Technology can (and often does) make those systems better, though. And focusing on that instead of building a worldview around the escapist fantasy seems prudent

• by altvali on 2/25/21, 8:53 PM

  While the first sentence sounds like an advert, the arguments that follow are pretty compelling.

• by yownie on 2/25/21, 10:38 PM

  >laboritory

  okay buddy,

• by 015a on 2/25/21, 9:42 PM

  I agree with the conclusion, and to a lesser degree, the argument.

  The newish book Money (Jacob Goldstein) presents a compelling argument for why Bitcoin won't succeed as a currency; in the history of humanity, not once has a fundamentally new kind of currency been created intentionally. Specific currencies (for example, the US Dollar) were created intentionally as a currency, but when we're discussing new kinds of trading liquid wealth, its never intentional. It was always something that we (as a species/community) look back on and say "oh shit, I guess that's been a currency all along".

  The book doesn't present a strong argument for why this is always the case, except to say that it always has been the case.

  More tangibly; I think modern money theory (MMT) has proven itself to be a startlingly powerful tool in keeping our fragile society going. Many people are discussing cryptocurrencies in the vein of "we don't trust the Fed, they've been fucking with the US Dollar for too long". I tend to think that the world would look very different today if the Fed hadn't spent the past 100 years fucking with the US Dollar. Its very likely you wouldn't be alive, and that HackerNews wouldn't exist, and society as a whole would be significantly more "wild west".

  Bitcoin, and other cryptos, are interesting as an analogue to Gold. They're horribly uninteresting as an analogue to the US Dollar, for the exact reason why people mistakenly and, frankly, stupidly, believe they are interesting; they're difficult/impossible to manipulate.

  Additionally, I think the Electricity and Silicon arguments are profound. If Bitcoin reaches a similar level of money velocity to the US Dollar today, the network would consume more electricity than the entire planet produces. Land area the size of US states would have to be converted into power plants and silicon manufacturing facilities. The Bitcoin community attempted to enact technical changes which would make its transaction processing more efficient; it failed the vote. Because Bitcoin Monetary Policy is a democracy (of the people who can afford mining machines, which has coalesced to a handful of rich organizations, most of which are in China), even Fundamentally Good Changes can fail, because of misguided ethics, greed, etc.

  And that, at the core of the argument, is why this "down with the Fed, down with centralization, up with Bitcoin" position is so insane. Bitcoin has monetary policy. This monetary policy is implemented as a pure, technical democracy. That's fantastic, except, 99% of people don't get to vote, and will never be able to, because votes effectively come down to "hashing power", which is expensive and only going up in price. Bitcoin was designed as a democracy, but in effect, it will create the most pure, cryptographically secure, cyberpunk corporate future. Like communism; looks great on paper, but that's only because the papers always fail to account for the most basic human motivation: Greed.