The Bitcoiners were wrong: a blog post about privacy and bitcoin, and how they failed to design a cash alternative
Open link in next tab
The Bitcoiners were wrong | Unfathom.ing
https://unfathom.ing/blog/2024/the-bitcoiners-were-wrong
https://unfathom.ing/blog/2024/the-bitcoiners-were-wrong
I think some of the arguments are quite flawed. Bitcoin itself has most of the properties it is said to have, but it lives in a world that doesn't and so some only really apply if you manage to stay inside the system. Like, your Signal chats are private as long as you don't copy-paste them to Facebook.
Regarding self-custody/decentralization and using custodial services: The problem here is not that those properties don't apply to Bitcoin, but that some people just choose to give away control over their wallets or not use Bitcoin itself for certain transactions. Can't blame that on the currency, unless you think it can't be done any other way.
Regarding privacy: I don't think any serious "Bitcoiner" advertises Bitcoin as private. The message has always been that it's "pseudonymous", that you have to take extra steps in order to make it anonymous, and that it's transparent instead of private by design.
Regarding transparency/inclusion: These paragraphs actually argue about privacy again. One is trying to spin the existing transparency into a negative, which is a valid opinion but not something "Bitcoiners" are wrong about. The other circles back to the idea of staying inside the system. Bitcoin transactions are inclusive, but ofc you can still get into trouble if you have to fear external repercussions and can't stay anonymous.
Thanks for the breakdown. When I read the headline, I guessed at a bunch of what the article said and you confirmed most of it.
Bitcoin was both a massive failure and success - a failure because it ended up not accomplishing its biggest goal of being a bank killer, but a success because it demonstrated not only the demand but that such a system wasn't a complete moonshot.
/circlejerk
XMR 2 da moon!!!!
Also the fact Bitcoin is essentially a pyramid scheme. Get more people into it to artificially inflate its value, take the profits, leave everyone else with diminished value, build it up again, get rich, repeat forever.
Crypto should be illegal.
Crypto IS usable as an alternative to regular card payments though. If it gets illegal - what do we have left for online payment? Bank system, which is very hard and illegal to use anonymously, and is subject to sanctions/seizures/whatever. There is cash by mail, which is not always feasible. GNU Taler looks interesting, but seems like it not implemented much yet.
Sounds like you want to buy drugs. There's not a lot you buy online that you do so anonymously. Sure, there's a few things, but for the most part it's for goods and services that require your information in the first place. So what's the point?
The best idea is just money cards that you can buy at brick and mortar stores for things. Advocating for a literal pyramid scheme isn't worth it.
I personally use it for my domain name and a VPS. Not exactly illegal or requiring personal information.
As for cards that "you can buy in brick and mortar stores" - a) they will be affected by the same sanctions as normal cards, b) not even a thing in a lot of places (like, the only ones I have seen here are only sold at certain banks and only payable with a bank card). But yea, might indeed work well in certain cases!
I always find these breakdowns to be a little bit disingenuous. Like, you could do this same analysis on the whole email system, or on the whole world wide banking system, including ATMs, or on the energy usage of all DNS queries or even on global ActivityPub activity, not to mention shopping on Amazon or browsing Facebook. People DO do these kinds of breakdowns on generative AI, for exactly the same reasons, and reach the same kinds of conclusions.
Having a global computer network is INCREDIBLY energy intensive, with a massive carbon footprint. It's not shocking that a given application of that network is energy intensive, with a massive carbon footprint. These kinds of analysis are put together by people who already don't like cryptocurrencies (for all kinds of reasons both valid and ridiculous) who then go cherry picking MORE reasons not to like them.
A better comparison would be energy utilized per user, in which case the energy requirements for Bitcoin are miles and miles ahead of what the average person produces using a computer in the same amount of time. Even a gamer, playing 4k 120fps ray traced games 12 hours a day would use a fraction of the energy of someone mining bitcoin.
Exactly, if we do a back of the napkin calculation:
There are 200 million bitcoin wallets, let’s be generous and say those are all owned by unique individuals.
Bitcoin used about 114 TWh in 2021[1]
Bitcoin currently uses about 150 TWh annually
150 TWh / year
————————— = 0,75 TWh / user / year
200 million users
There are over 8 billion people on the planet today, let’s assume 4 billion of them have access to the global banking system.
The global banking system used an estimated 264 TWh in 2021[1]
If we assume the same consumption increase rate for banking, that’s about 348 TWh/year currently.
348 TWh / year
————————— = 0,087 TWh / user / year
4.000 million users
With these numbers, bitcoin uses almost 10x the energy per user annually.
There are of course a myriad of things one can argue over whether it makes a fair comparison, none of which I feel like arguing, since this is just a really simple estimate with a lot of assumptions.
1: I used the numbers in this article uncritically, if you have better numbers you can run your own calculations.
Its not like its people who dislike btc that make these misleading graphs. Its the financial industry.
This misinformation is paid for and spread by huge companies, just like tobacco companies did and oil companies did.
Unfortunately there's a lot of stupid people who look at anti-crypto pictures in their feed and believe the misinformation without actually looking at the data.
How much energy is used by our current financial system? How much energy is consumed serving ads to every human on every platform every second of every day?? No one ever questions that totally necessary use of our limited resources 🙄
Edit: Didn't realize you guys like ads.and the federal reserve so much. That's gonna be a pretty major Yikes from me, Bros.
How much energy is used by our current financial system?
Orders of magnitude less than Bitcoin requires, which is the criticism.
Dont spread misinformation. Its the opposite.
Bitcoin energy usage is negligible next to financial sector. And it doesnt increase as the transaction count increases, unlike tradfi
The financial sector offers a magnitude more services than just "transactions". It's a stupid comparison.
In actually decreases with time (by half every four year, unless the value increases equally, which is unlikely in the long run). However you should compare the energy per transaction, which is pretty lame (5txs per seconds or similar).
That's the fuckey. We should not consider the energy per transaction because the energy usage does not increase as transactions increases. This is how the banks fuck with the charts to make it look lime bitcoin uses a lot of energy. It doesn't.
That's quite a claim to make without a source?
*It's a wonder the rest of Lemmy hates this instance, y'all are insane.
Monero is here and always been. Research, and find you yourself. Monero is what Bitcoin was supposed to be
but Bitcoin does nothing to prevent custodial exchanges, in the way something like Monero does
In what way does Monero prevent that?
imagine if all the huge amount of support and effort that gets put into a nonfungible traceable system (btc) got put into monero. we wouls have such a strong community of cypherpunks