[Cryptography] I am not against good cryptocurrencies. I just don't think you can build one with a block chain protocol.

Greg greg at kinostudios.com
Thu Jan 7 11:43:51 EST 2021


> On Jan 7, 2021, at 4:49 AM, Ben Laurie <ben at links.org> wrote:
> 
> Because it wastes vast amounts of energy in order to fail to achieve any of its goals.

I’m not sure I see how it wastes any more energy than either you or I do to achieve our goals.

Thanks to the debate around this subject, people have looked into the numbers in greater detail, and they’ve found that Bitcoin uses its energy expenditures extremely efficiently to secure its network, more efficiently than previous systems have:

https://www.danheld.com/blog/2019/1/5/pow-is-efficent

> It does not democratise: the power is in the hands of the richest (i.e. those with most access to electricity and hardware).

That is not a stated goal of Bitcoin as far as I’m aware (no such thing appears anywhere in the whitepaper), and I’m not aware of a single monetary system in history where this does not occur. Perhaps you’d like to point to a monetary system where wealth is evenly distributed?

At least in Bitcoin a small group of people cannot simply print themselves however much money they want.

> It does not decentralise - the whole thing is run by a small number of consortia.

It does. This goal it's achieved quite well as far as I can tell. Whereas, the systems I’ve seen you suggest as alternatives actually fail to decentralize.

> It does not create value - there is incentive to spend as much value as is "created" (and I don't even need to argue whether something that is gone forever can really be worth anything).

I don’t understand what you’re saying here.

Cheers,
Greg
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