Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto
Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto
Politicians’ newfound love of crypto probably has more to do with a cynical bid for young voter support and Silicon Valley cash than a maturing of a financially perilous set of assets.
Other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, which are far more energy efficient than Bitcoin
Calling those that don't depend on proof-of-work "more energy efficient" is understating it to the point of being dishonest. The difference is not that they're more efficient in any conventional way. It's that they don't have the amazing bitcoin feature of relying for their operation on the practice of deliberately wasting enormous amounts of energy for the purpose of being able to prove that you've wasted enormous amounts of energy.
All the way through the cryptocurrency crash which the average reader of headlines might've thought had put an end to it by now, the bitcoin network has kept on burning up absurd amounts of power.
42the practice of deliberately wasting enormous amounts of energy for the purpose of being able to prove that you've wasted enormous amounts of energy.
C'mon, that's being disingenuous. Back when Bitcoin was released, nobody was giving a thought to computer energy use. A consequence of proof-of-work is wasted energy, but a focus on low-power modalities and throttling have been developed in the intervening years. The prevailing paradigm at the time was, "your C/GPU is going to be burning energy anyway, you may as well do something with it."
It was a poor design decision, but it wasn't a malicious one like you make it sound. You may as well accuse the inventors of the internal combustion engine of designing it for the express purpose of creating pollution.
12It's absolutely not the case that nobody was thinking about computer power use. The Energy Star program had been around for around 15 years at that point and even had an EU-US agreement, and that was sitting alongside the EU's own energy program. Getting an 80Plus-certified power supply was already common advice to anyone custom-building a PC which was by far the primary group of users doing Bitcoin mining before it had any kind of mainstream attention. And the original Bitcoin PDF includes the phrase "In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.", despite not going in-depth (it doesn't go in-depth on anything).
The late 00s weren't the late 90s where the most common OS in use did not support CPU idle without third party tooling hacking it in.
20Back when Bitcoin was released, nobody was giving a thought to computer energy use.
It didn't take long before people saw that energy was a major factor in cost of operations of the network.
It was a poor design decision
One that is fiercely defended by people who invested into the implementation. So it may not have started with it being anticipated, but not it is and people are actively choosing to perpetuate this use of energy.
14If I were looking to assign blame, I'd start with the coal and gas operators who are digging up fossil fuels that would otherwise remain in the ground just to fuel their bitcoin mining rigs, those who peddle specious arguments claiming that it somehow isn't a problem, those who turned the whole thing into a machine for separating the gullible from their money, and those who've built the shaky, buggy, mostly proprietary, convoluted, half-finished, untrustworthy, horrible mess that is the software ecosystem surrounding the whole cryptocurrency sphere. Perhaps none of that could have been foreseen by whoever designed bitcoin. On them we can instead put the blame for the failure to make it anywhere near sufficiently scalable, and the ridiculous choice of mechanism for the bitcoin monetary policy which serves to make it function only as a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme and not a durable currency. Regardless of who's to blame, it's got to go.
Perhaps there's already an alternative out there somewhere which is actually useful and not based on avarice, fraud, unsustainable resource usage, or unsustainable hype, but if so it's currently hidden under such an enormous pile of shitcoins that it's impossible to identify. At least the internal combustion engine was good at doing the thing it was supposed to do.
4
What asset would you consider a good value reserve?
3This whole article is dishonest nonsense. So many lols.
Apparently unwilling to put their full faith in a trustless technology,
Just like people are unwilling to put their money under their mattress.
Moreover, it has become clear that risks could spill over from decentralized finance to traditional finance,
Maybe "traditional finance" is an unstable scam too. But these people would never hint in that direction.
Its volatile value, which is evident in its wild price swings in the last few days,
How does Bitcoin look over the long term though? If going from $0 to $60,000 is volatile, then I'll take it. It's doubled since the past year. These articles that extrapolate from a "few days" are just opportunistic sleaze.
Don't get me wrong. Bitcoin is a bad "investment" versus other cryptos. But these articles are dishonest trash.
2
Wasn't fooled by crypto in the first place.
29...or were you?
Depending on whether some of it becomes, or not, a reasonably popular means of value exchange in the future, "being fooled" will mean having bought some when it was cheap, or not. 😉
1
Most people who got fooled once will get fooled twice. Thats just what fools do.
18This is 100% why it's good to have a small chunk of your portfolio in crypto. It's hit all-time-highs four times in the last ten years, and now that you can buy into Bitcoin ETF's, you can get dividends as well.
It's hard to argue that it won't again after that, but I wouldn't put any more than 10% of your investment capital into it.
3Statistically, yes. But they’re not fooled by crypto, but by other people, or just by their own not understood feelings.
3Yes, crypto people keep getting fooled by record breaking prices. So sad.
2The prices don't mean anything if no one is paying it, which if something is at said 'record breaking' levels, means there is at least 1 fool out of the 2 involved.
It's still just a pyramid scheme in the end, because if I'm trading ammo or a sandwich or pigs or something, at the end of the day if no one wants to buy them from me I can still use them myself.
With crypto, there will by definition be someone holding a valueless and unusable item at some point. Whether or not the opportunity to make money in the time before that happens outweighs being involved in a pyramid scheme, is what everyone has to ask themselves (and be judged for depending on their answer).
You can argue about whether all money is the same in this regard, but there have been hundreds of crypto coins that have failed since the last fiat currency died.
4
Don't be fooled by the 20000th round of "crypto is dead" articles.
I agree that BTC is trash but it's still up 100% from last year.
The people who write these articles have no clue.
edit: The Brookings Institute lmao. Right-wing boomer nonsense.
17What does it mean for bitcoin to double in value?
Has bitcon's utility or usefulness doubled?
Or has bitcoin behaved as a highly volatile speculative asset?
26It means that despite being fifteen years old, it still takes more electricity for a single bitcoin transaction than to drive an electric SUV from Florida to California, cost per single transaction has still spiked over 50 USD twice in the last six months, and it remains too prone to wild inflation and deflation for any serious business to actually price anything in.
In other words, it has the same inherent value it always has, none at all.
28
They wrote in the article that it rose. That was part of what they wrote about.
I don't see your point.
9
I never understood the crypto hype. There was even an article by protonmail detailing its history and all. Yet, I remain oblivious.
5Do you know anything about financial markets? It’s there for you to make money out from it. Study and you’ll understand everything you could do with it. Also, on crypto, the hype respects a cycle.
3Do you know anything about financial markets?
I'm at a beginner level in Investments and stock market.
Study and you’ll understand everything you could do with it.
I'm already learning about Investments and stock market. Maybe, once I finish that I could consider this. But, I don't see much value in crypto so won't bother.
Perhaps, if my perception changes in the future I could reconsider. Just not in the near future.
4
Is there anything more bullish than a big media organisation warning their readers not to buy? Top signal is when the NYT says it's great and everyone should buy in. Seems there's a way to go yet.
3This is an opinion piece.. It's clearly marked as being an opinion. Even though it has solid arguments, and probably hold some truth, it's not an actual news article written by NYT staff, it's not pretending to be a factual reporting by a journalist nor an objective truth.
Everyone is free to agree or disagree with it. To buy, sell, or hold.
It would be wise however to consider the argument themselves, and not decide go to in one direction just because the author/publisher is someone you like or dislike.
6
Is it actually viable for ordinary people to purchase small amounts of cryptocurrency for the sole purposes of making more private purchases online or taking advantage of cryptocurrency discounts? All the coverage on them is about large-scale investing which makes me feel like no one buying and selling actually has any interest in cryptocurrencies as an alternative currency. Instead it's just about getting rich, which is a massive turn off.
3Bitcoin is not practical for small purshases, because transaction takes several minutes, and have around 50USD per-transaction fee. Note the cost of fees and value of bitcoin vary wildly, so the same amount of bitcoin may be enough to pay rent in August, but not in September.
On a more ethical level, it's also quite bad because of the insane energy cost of bitcoin transactions.
4$50 per transaction fee is on the exceptionally high end.
The average fee for the last 24 hours was $0.81 per transaction according to https://mempool.space/mining
I agree with your other points.
1
I mean, I know I do it, but yea, not a lot of people do. Most see it as investing or gambling
Sadly we're not really well represented, which leads to a lot of people calling all cryptos a "scam" which is just blatantly false.
Monero!
1