I have been using crypto since 2017, made plenty of dumb trades which caused me to lose out a lot. Currently my portfolio is about 80% BTC and while the new USA admin seems they may do more damage than good to the crypto space I’m still positive about Bitcoin.
This sub seems like a meme or anti-btc sub mostly. Anybody here who isn’t that way?
Lemmy is just not a great platform if you value personal property and individual freedom, it was started by socialists/communists and it shows. It’s pretty random that I even answer to this post because I check lemmy only once every few weeks. >97% bitcoin here.
I’m pro-₿itcoin
It’s money. It’s private property. I’m anti- both of those. But, I am coerced and compelled to participate in a monetary economy. So, as long as we are stuck in this situation I choose to save my money in a form that is the most reflective of my rejection of existing centralized hierarchical institutions and one that I believe can leverage those rather toxic aspects of capitalism to springboard it’s value. Like, you don’t have to be a monetary luddite just because you’re a communist (In fact, some people are communists and socialists specifically because they understand money more intimately and exactingly than most capitalists).
So I’m money negative overall, bitcoin positive within that negative space. I’d be cool if it sucked a bunch of the inflated value out of real estate, though I don’t know if it’ll actually do that. Governments for sure will never allow it to hamstring their ability to raise military funding through inflation as a lot of anti-war libertarians envision.
It’s private property.
Why does it count as private property and not personal property?
It’s an environmental disaster where the worst people in the world use vast resources to power and cool entropy machines
Is fiat better?
We drop interest rates in order to spurn more consumption, to hit an inflation target as technology lowers the price of goods, what would you call that?
Yes, fiat is a better ledger system for currency. Proof-of-work crypto has gotta be the most energy inefficient design in the history of humanity.
what would you call that?
I call it capitalism. As long as the bourgeois controls money - whether that’s gold, fiat or crypto curriencies - then it’s going to drive a system based on infinite growth and consumption
The goal of PoW is to be resilient and neutral in order to build a secure consensus from parties that don’t know or trust each others and it’s the most efficient way to achieve that goal. We currently don’t know other consensus mechanism that would be as resilient or neutral. There is Proof-of-Less-Work which is an interesting innovation from Alephium but it’s still based on PoW.
How the bourgeois controls money in Bitcoin ? How can infinite growth happen on a fixed supply ? How consumption would increase if money tends to gain value over time ?
Money ≠ Capitalism
Money is a primitive technology discovered by human way before scribing. In fact the first form of scribing appearing is money. It’s so old and so embeded in our civilization that we don’t really know how it works or how it emerge. We have no proof that bartering existed before money, the idea that money was made to fix bartering issues is false.
Bitcoin ≠ currency
Bitcoin is not a currency, it’s a decentralized p2p network of trust building a consensus over a common immutable history that qualify as truth. Money is the first application of it but we already have other usecase such as the free software OpenTimeStamp used during Guatemala’s election for exemple.
Edit : Grammar
Money ≠ Capitalism
I never said or implied otherwise. I actually implied the opposite. Money isn’t inherently controlled by capitalists, but a capitalist society needs to have the bourgeoisie controlling the money.
How the bourgeois controls money in Bitcoin ?
Because they own the massive “mining” operations that do the vast majority of the entropy generation. Those datacenters are capital. They also control the markets that determine the speculative value of bitcoin.
We have no proof that bartering existed before money, the idea that money was made to fix bartering issues is false.
I never said or implied that. I’m actually a fan of David Graeber who wrote about that in Debt: the first 5000 years
Bitcoin is not a currency, it’s a decentralized p2p network of trust building a consensus over a common immutable history that qualify as truth
You’re describing the concept of a blockchain. Bitcoin is an attempt to use a blockchain to implement a currency. Of course it has failed as a currency, so they’ve changed the purpose to be a financial instrument that’s easy to speculate on
We currently don’t know other consensus mechanism that would be as resilient or neutral
This is the crux of why bitcoin is a shit idea. You can’t be neutral on a moving train. It’s far more efficient to establish actual trust instead of chasing a mathematical ideal of trust.
The core idea you’re getting at is: because of the blockchain, you can be certain that when satoshis are added to your bitcoin wallet, the transaction was authentic, and as long as your key isn’t compromised, you can trust that it will remain in your wallet. It’s a neat mathematical trick, but you still need to be certain that your computer is secure, that the person isn’t sending you money tied to a crime, that any third parties being used haven’t built in backdoors, that your wallet isn’t physically destroyed, and so on and so on.
It makes much more sense to have a handful of trusted entities (like with ssl certificates)
they own the massive “mining” operations
This doesn’t make them controlling Bitcoin at all. Bitcoin has a polycentric governance when no single actor could control it. Mining is a more complexe than simply buying ASICs and burning electricity. Wall Street guys invested millions if not billions into Bitcoin mining company that have died because it was just rich guys knowing nothing about mining that thought that they would make tons of money.
Also while you’re right that currently they are more private companies you could have governement-mining like Buthan is doing right now and has done for a few years. Community mining could also exist, I mean a mining pool is a cooperative design.
You’re describing the concept of a blockchain.
No. The blockchain is just the format use to store the data, the real innovation come from Nakamoto’s consensus, and the difficulty adjustment.
Blockchain is a buzzword from the banking industry and fintech. Blockchains existed decades before Bitcoin but they weren’t marketed as such. Even git (2005) works like a blockchain but with another governance and without all the decentralized BS.
Currency is the first application but we already have other uses such as OpenTimeStamp used during Guatemala’s election of 2023 for exemple. And we will have more and more once client-side validation technologies such as the RGB protocole will be live for exemple.
Of course it has failed as a currency
It hasn’t fail as a currency when you watch what is happening in some Africa countries such as Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo to name a few. Same for latin america with Peru or Asia with India or Vietnam.
Also the ammount in USD that is transacting on Bitcoin yearly is in par with other payment processor such as Visa, Mastercard and outrunning AmericanExpress.
Bitcoin will never replace state money even tho many bitcoiners idealize this. However there is a high probability that in the future many if not most or all of the state currencies will run on Bitcoin as it’s more efficient. We are at the beggining it’s like the 90s for the web when nobody thought that this useless technology will permit us to buy stuff online. But this is me speculating here.
but you still need to be certain that your computer is secure
Same for every single software… Banking, PayPal etc… are not immune to that.
You can also mitigate the risks proportionnaly to your wealth and threat model. Multi-device multisig is an exemple. Liana Wallet with miniscript and timelocked is another.
You don’t have to be as secure for a few thousand sats, than tens of millions, than a full bitcoin or more.
We (human) are very bad at information security. Bitcoin had a strong impact on that field of IT, it is so big that in 10 years we have made enormous progress, significantly more than in the last 50 years of computer science.
It makes much more sense to have a handful of trusted entities
How does Bitcoin is incompatible with that vision ? Any way I disagree with that statement and I think that these “handful of trusted entities” will indead use Bitcoin to transact. But again this is my point of view and me speculating.
with ssl certificates
SSL certificate also use asymetrical cryptography just like Bitcoin. How is this different since you also have to be sure that the private key of the “trusted entity” isn’t compromise ?
I agree with your ultimate assessment of money, but the security mechanism of bitcoin is an order or two less energy demanding than the security mechanism of the dollar. The US military is the largest consumer of energy on the planet. Projection is how champions of US hegemony attack bitcoin. Theirs aren’t the best arguments for you to use, keep it simple and stick to the base condemnation of money and crypto’s technological acceleration of it’s potency.
No it’s more complex than that, actually Bitcoin mining could help financing the energy transition and cleaning methane from the atmoshpere.
Peer-reviewed scientific papers :
- https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2025/cambridge-study-sustainable-energy-rising-in-bitcoin-mining/
- https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/sites/default/files/publications/rethinking-load-growth.pdf
- https://en.odfoundation.eu/content/uploads/2024/05/20.05.2024_odf_bitcoin_mining_eu_elect_grids_eng-1.pdf
- https://www.theirm.org/news/bitcoin-and-the-energy-transition-from-risk-to-opportunity/
Mainstream media coverage
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly4xe373p4o
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-30/bitcoin-btc-miners-like-bit-digital-draw-from-iceland-s-renewable-energy-surplus
- https://www.reuters.com/technology/cryptominer-mara-taps-us-shale-patch-power-generation-new-pilot-program-2024-10-08/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/07/07/everything-you-need-to-know-about-bitcoin-and-the-environment/
- https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/05/05/bhutan-has-secretly-mined-bitcoin-in-the-himalayas-for-years-and-it-did-so-sustainably
Edit : added more sources because I published it before finishing by mistakes
I’m an ETH-head. I understand it. It makes sense. Bitcoin? Bitcoin doesn’t make any sense to me. I have severe concern about its long-term security model and the community’s overall lack of desire to change anything about the protocol, including its security model.
That said, I’m overall negative about crypto in general these days. VCs, corporations, institutions, politicians, etc have all seemingly co-oped crypto in a big way. There’s not much about the original cypherpunk ideals that remains anymore.
I’m part of Breadchain, a project spearheaded by The Blockchain Socialist to promote and fund left-aligned crypto projects that help workers and coops, etc. But again, these days I’m getting very jaded about the trajectory of crypto.
My biggest worry about Bitcoin is that it’s still on proof of work. Even if it has shown itself to be bulletproof, it uses as much electricity as a small country and I don’t think the environmentalists are going to just let that slide.
Proof-of-Stake is not a great match for Bitcoin because it fails at being neutral, it’s a plutocracy system and is not as resilient as PoW.
You know what other global industries consume more than small countries ? All of them, including banking. This is an unfaire comparison in my opinion. Also the energy consumption is not the most interesting factor, the source of the energy is more interesting in my opinion.
Here is a comment I just made under OP’s post to list a few academic peer-reviewed paper about the positive environmental impact of Bitcoin’s PoW for financing renewable energy production and cleaning methane from the atmosphere. I’ve also included some articles from mainstream media.
Do you happen to have a source showing that Proof-of-Work (PoW) is more secure than Proof-of-Stake (PoS)? Most comparisons I’ve come across seems to show that PoS is more secure, especially when it comes to cryptoeconomic defense.
For example, PoS has built-in economic deterrents:
- As an attacker accumulates, the price of the token tends to rise, making the attack increasingly costly.
- Existing holders benefit from this price increase and can sell to the attacker, effectively extracting value from an attacker during an attempted takeover.
This is unique to PoS and doesn’t exist in PoW, where the cost of an attack is external and doesn’t get progressively more difficult to attack.
I don’t have a source, I’ve made those assumptions after countless conversation with various actors across the blockchain space both from PoW chains and PoS ones.
It’s not much about security but more about permissionless, neutrality and resilience. PoS isn’t insecure but it’s less resilient and tend to have neutrality issue that we don’t have seen yet on Bitcoin PoW for exemple.
There is different things here. First with PoS you don’t have a link to the real world, atoms and stuff. You don’t really have a physical cost to secure the network, you don’t have external factors like you have on mining farms. The competition is completely different where you have to find the cheapest energy source and the most stable places to mine. In PoS validator gets richer and gets more influence, in PoW this isn’t exactly the case due to physical reasons.
If for some reasons like a bug or a global disaster and that all the nodes went offline when the validator start to come back online they will have to communicate and choose what is the real chain. With PoW miners will simply mine the longest chain as it’s the consensus. Bringing more resilience.
Also in PoS like on Ethereum an issue is centralization of the validator, on PoW this is more about concentration while not an ideal thing this isn’t as bad as Lido and AWS centralisation.
I agree with a lot of your points, but I’d add that money is a limited economic resource tied to the real world, atoms and all that. Buying stake in a network carries a real, physical cost similar to buying mining equipment.
Also, I don’t think PoS’s more flexible recovery models are necessarily a bad thing. They actually provide adaptability in case of problems.
But if we look at resilience historically, PoW chains have been vulnerable to 51% attacks, like we’ve seen with Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin Gold. Where as with PoS, noone has even been able buy up 51% of a chain for an attack.
Sorry but you can’t compare the physical ressources of PoW and PoS, mining isn’t buying a shit tons of ASICs and getting bitcoins.
How it’s recovery model is more flexible ? How does mining can’t adapt to issues ?
51% on Bitcoin has been highly improbable from decades now, miners will see it comming fast enough to adapt. Forks and 51% attacks are two very different concept. You had it with ETH PoW and you’ll probably get new fork even after PoS chains.
Again I never said that PoS was less secure, I said it was more neutral and resilient. Bitcoin needs to be neutral and resilient as a network. PoS is a different consensus mechanism that have different tradeoff.
I mean in general, Bitcoin aside, PoS is more resilient than PoW. The only major resilience issue I know of in PoS is when validators came offline for Ethereum and couldn’t reach finality. But I don’t think that’s a fair comparison to PoW because PoW doesn’t have finality in the first place. Also, because PoS has finality, it’s resistant to long-range attacks, even if someone did a 51% attack (which has never happened for a PoS chain), they wouldn’t be able to rewrite finalized blocks.
