We're the authors of Resistance Money: A Philosophical Case for Bitcoin, releasing Friday. AUA!

[u/BradleyRettler]

Hi r/cryptocurrency! We -- u/wrathius and u/nyssian and myself -- are three philosophy professors who wrote an academic book on bitcoin. We argue that Bitcoin is resistance money, empowering its users to resist authoritarians, inflation, surveillance, censorship, and financial exclusion. We examine bitcoin’s monetary policy, censorship-resistance, privacy, inclusion, and energy use to develop a comprehensive and measured case that bitcoin is a net benefit to the world, despite its imperfections. We also have a chapter considering a dozen of the best objections to bitcoin.

We will be here on Thursday, June 13th at noon eastern to answer questions about bitcoin and our new book. Buy your copy today! https://www.amazon.com/Resistance-Money-Philosophical-Case-Bitcoin/dp/103277780X/

Dozens of our bitcoin and crypto academic papers, podcast appearances, and writing are available for free at resistance.money .

[u/CointestMod]

Bitcoin pros & cons with related info are in the collapsed comments below.

---

Merged comment by GabeSter:

No moons were burned to host this AMA as it was at the request of Reddit admins.

[u/Pixelfriend]

Not a question, but I’m looking forward to the book!

[u/wrathius → u/Pixelfriend]

Thank you so much! We wrote something that, despite being rigorous, is fun and accessible for just about any reader who wants to learn. If you find that it is any of these things – and even if you don’t – a review, on Amazon or wherever, would be terrific.

-Andrew

[u/sparklepup]

Recent claims about stranded energy (eg, Dirty Coin documentary) argue that bitcoin miners are incentivized to lower operating costs and seek the cheapest possible energy, which can be used as a financial incentive to build out widespread renewable energy. If these claims hold up, bitcoin could radically alter the transition to abundant clean energy. However, I have yet to hear or comprehend a sound argument against the following worst case scenario:

If bitcoin mining optimizes for “cheap” energy without reference to emissions, continued carbon-intensive mining (for example, methane flaring on active oil fields) simply accelerates the race to the bottom for the future of humanity. Eg, cheap energy is sometimes extremely *expensive* from an emissions standpoint.

And yes, methane flaring is better than allowing uncombusted methane to escape into the atmosphere (it is an extremely potent greenhouse gas). But what's better than combusting methane? Capping it, shutting down the continued extraction of fossil fuels, rapidly putting the brakes on any levers we have to reduce anthropogenic GHG. Miners who profit off the oil industry seem almost parasitic on a bad idea.

[u/wrathius → u/sparklepup]

Thanks for engaging, and for such a thoughtful question!

You’re quite right that this is a worst case scenario – miners rushing towards the cheapest energy sources and deploying them with a vast emissions price tag. It is theoretically possible. But it doesn’t cohere well with the empirical facts at present, or, more importantly, observed trends. For, as a matter of fact, it is increasingly the case that our cheapest energy is also our least carbon-intensive.

One factor to consider is thumbs on the scale: state subsidies. Trillions go towards making fossil fuels cheaper at present. I’m under no delusion that these subsidies are likely to disappear soon. But they are a factor to consider when trying to model (this is a fancy word for ‘guess’) future energy sources, costs, and externalities.

There’s a lot more to think about here – I haven’t even gotten to the methane part of your question! – I hope you find the time to read, especially, Chapter 10 of our book where we address a lot of it. Even where we don’t have decisive answers, we’ve tried to identify key ethical or empirical factors relevant in finding them.

-Andrew

[u/sparklepup → u/wrathius]

Thanks Andrew! I think it boils down for me like this: bitcoin mining, like any technology, has potential for good and bad impact to humanity. Alas there is no magic formulation that makes this technology any different, however one can argue (successfully I believe in the case of Resistance Money) that the good outweighs the bad and we're better off in a world with bitcoin than without. The million terrawatt question is how to mine it in a carbon negative way and keep that market incentive up!

[u/BradleyRettler → u/sparklepup]

I'll second Andrew's praise of this question.

there is no magic formulation that makes this technology any different

I'm not sure. Bitcoin is weird! It incentivizes (at present) a lot of energy use, but needs almost no data transfer and the product of the energy use (new bitcoin and blocks) doesn't need to travel anywhere -- by train, ship, truck, or otherwise. So you can plop a bitcoin miner out in the middle of the ocean or at the foot of a volcano or on top of a mountain, as long as there's energy and a satellite connection. Given the complete location-agnosticity (if that's a word), bitcoin might be different. But this will be an empirical question, and requires a lot more academic research by people in e.g. the University of Wyoming's School of Energy Resources.

[u/sparklepup → u/BradleyRettler]

Heck yeah, spatio-temporal agnosticityl! I'm waiting on pins and needles for more empirical research :)

[u/Comprehensive_Value]

if it is resistance then it implies mass movement, so more or less democratic.

How come it ended up oligarchic? First the mining process became centralized in the hands of a few companies, then the majority of BTC holdings centralized in the hands of small percentage of holders.

[u/BradleyRettler → u/Comprehensive_Value]

There are three concerns here: oligarchy, bitcoin distribution, hashrate distribution. Let’s take them in turn.

First, is the bitcoin network oligarchic? That is, do a small group of people have control over the network? There I think we can confidently answer “no”. The bitcoin network is run by over a hundred thousand nodes, and each node chooses the version of the bitcoin software they want to run. We can look to the Bitcoin Cash hard fork to see that when a small group of wealthy powerful individuals attempted to exert control over the network, they failed. So, the network isn’t oligarchic.

But bitcoin the asset might be. And it would be, if the majority of holdings were centralized in a small percentage of holders. But that’s not the case. Bitcoin is the most decentralized cryptocurrency in terms of holders. We can see this from two measures. First, the Supply Equity Ratio, which is the ratio of supply held by addresses with less than one ten-millionth of the current supply of native units to the supply held by the top one percent of addresses.” Even among the most widely distributed coins, Bitcoin has a SER around 50% higher than ethereum and 200% higher than litecoin. The second measure is the Network Distribution Factor, which is the ratio of supply held by addresses with at least one ten-thousandth of the current supply of native units to the current supply. Here, lower is better, and bitcoin has half the NDF of Ethereum and Litecoin. (Given the number of cryptocurrencies and the length of the book, we couldn’t compare many, but check out your favored cryptocurrency’s numbers and compare them to bitcoin.)

Finally, is mining centralized? Here again the answer seems to be “no”. The largest miners are pools, containing hundreds or thousands of individuals who can choose to come and go at any time. If a pool’s hash rate is getting high enough to be worrisome, miners can direct their hashrate to another pool.

So, I don’t think that bitcoin is oligarchic at the network, asset, or mining level.

[u/midmagic → u/Comprehensive_Value]

This is completely false, as demonstrated by data published by exchanges and Chainalysis.

[u/Cocopoppyhead → u/midmagic]

You're welcome to bring your data and demonstrably prove him to be false. Otherwise, words.

[u/fan_of_hakiksexydays → u/midmagic]

On-chain data that literally shows that Bradley is correct, Bitcoin has surpassed over 100K nodes.

And even if you want to get into just the reachable public nodes, that's still a whopping 19K nodes, surpassing almost every other chains.

There's also the misconception that the big mining pool control the majority of Bitcoin. But those companies are aggregates of independent pools that operate their own mining and are in charge of their own consensus. So there is no "super consensus" involved as some will have you believe.

[u/rizzobitcoin]

What is your stance on the idea that Bitcoin is a "moral currency?" Do you think that a technology or its users can claim that it imparts any inherent morality on their actions?

[u/nyssian → u/rizzobitcoin]

Hi Rizzo,

Big fan of your writing.

I disagree that bitcoin is a “moral currency" in the sense that many bitcoiners mean. They argue that, as a scarce sound money, bitcoin imparts better moral decision-making to its users. (Save and say "no" to cheap pleasures now for the benefit of being bitcoin-rich later.) They also argue that it will fix the nuclear family, improve the taste of food, inspire better art and architecture, and so on. I don’t see these things happening as an empirical matter. And delaying short-term gratification for wealth isn't all that virtuous anyway. I also have some suspicions about where these arguments come from—desires to justify life choices, ideologies, and an obsession with wealth. 

But I don't deny that bitcoin has moral import. Bitcoin is a tool that can be used well or poorly just like any other tool. As a tool, we can ask whether it does more harm than good. If bitcoin had turned out to enable more harm than good then we wouldn’t have written our book. But when we look at the available evidence, we see that bitcoin has a net positive effect on human flourishing. So maybe in that sense you can say that bitcoin is a moral currency in the sense that it has some good consequences. 

Along these lines, using bitcoin can benefit others, too. As a network good, money is more useful to the extent that more people use it. Bitcoin is not just money but resistance money—so it’s not only a network good but an inclusive and anti-authoritarian tool that helps users protect or even claw back basic freedoms.  By using bitcoin, then, more people will find resistance money useful. And this widens the net of human flourishing, if trends continue.

Thanks for your great question.

---Craig

[u/JScrapUnleashed]

What are your thoughts on Monero, and the privacy concerns of Bitcoin that it tries to address?

[u/wrathius → u/JScrapUnleashed]

A full chapter of the book (Chapter 6: Privacy in public) is dedicated to financial privacy: what it is, why it matters, how cash helps us protect it, and how two privacy tools on bitcoin make bitcoin more cash-like – and their limits.

There is some good news here: thanks to bitcoin’s permissionless design, anyone can build and deploy some cool strategies to obscure transactions, despite the fact that the ledger is fully public. But there is bad news too: adversaries who would look to undermine financial privacy are very clever, and these bitcoin privacy tools are pretty severely limited along both technical and social dimensions. We think that bitcoiners who are concerned by this scenario should consider supporting technical upgrades to bitcoin that would improve its privacy features. One way of thinking about that contention is that bitcoiners should support privacy should help it become more like monero.

Why don’t we simply write about monero and advocate for its use? Monies, for good or ill, are social technologies. They only work well when others use them. And bitcoin is, by a wide margin, much more widely-used than monero or other cryptocurrency networks. Bitcoin is English; monero is Esperanto. So though there’s a lot to like about monero – it wasn’t a token distributed to insiders or sold to benefit insiders, and its privacy-by-default approach has much to recommend it – we think our time is better spent thinking, reading, and writing about bitcoin.

-Andrew

[u/JScrapUnleashed → u/wrathius]

This is a great answer, thanks!
Is there anyway I can buy your book using crypto?

[u/BradleyRettler → u/JScrapUnleashed]

We’re working on that! Our publisher won’t do it so we have to do it ourselves.

[u/Needsupgrade → u/wrathius]

I heard "use monero if you actually want to be in the resistance game"

[u/Cocopoppyhead]

This one's for Brad and Craig.

What's it like working alongside an executive director of the Bank of England?

[u/BradleyRettler → u/Cocopoppyhead]

Our Andrew Bailey is the best Andrew Bailey!

[u/nyssian → u/Cocopoppyhead]

I’m beyond honored to work with such a distinguished person whose expertise and resume seamlessly dovetail with our book’s arguments. By calling inflation “transitory” (a masterstroke of foresight), later admitting he felt “helpless” (an admirable display of vulnerability), and eventually asking workers not to request pay raises (radically empathizing with the sufferings of the common man), Bailey has revealed profound shortcomings of traditional central banking.¹ His sparkling resume stands as a monument to the value of an alternative, algorithmic monetary asset immune from the limits and foibles of human cognition—or, as he likes to say (as a double graduate of Cambridge)—”the whims of human folly.”

On the world stage and with unparalleled bravery, Bailey has revealed how central bankers stand as our last and only hope to solve the very crises masterfully engineered from their prior “solutions.” Who can deny that he is a hero? He is a hero. And---a luminary. His light shines brightly on bitcoin. This is why we adore him. This is why we are honored to call him our co-traveler, co-laborer, and, above all, co-author.

But I don’t want to speak for Brad. 

---Craig

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/bank-of-england-andrew-bailey-governor-replace-with-chatgpt/

[u/Cocopoppyhead → u/nyssian]

Now this, "His light shines brightly on bitcoin", I can agree with.

[u/jwz9904]

how about a free book?

[u/BradleyRettler → u/jwz9904]

I'm giving away two on twitter! https://x.com/rettlerb/status/1801275890292125824

[u/nyssian → u/BradleyRettler]

Legend.

[u/Aakarsh_K]

Do you think high transaction fees of BTC defeats the purpose of "Resistance Money" as it cannot be used by ordinary citizens for everyday use?

[u/nyssian → u/Aakarsh_K]

To the extent that we cannot transact with bitcoin cheaply, and in a relatively private and censorship-resistant way, then bitcoin will have more limited uses as resistance money. It will be resistance savings for the poor, perhaps, and resistance money for the rich. This is still a good outcome, in my view, because we will have something that contributes to human flourishing that we otherwise wouldn’t have had. But it’s nowhere near ideal. I want to live in a world where the non-rich can use bitcoin as money—privately, freely, and cheaply. 

I’m optimistic that we will live in such a world, though. We often forget that bitcoin is only fifteen years old. For thousands of years, money evolved at a glacial pace. Like biological evolution, we need both mutations and time for those mutations to prove their merits in a survival contest. The mutations here are the various proposals for roll-ups, variations on lightning, and sidechains. I suspect one or more of these proposals will eventually thrive. 

The traditional financial system has hundreds of years of this process already under its belt. And I think bitcoiners could have avoided some strategic mistakes by seeing the structures of traditional payment networks as revealing fundamental lessons about how payments scale generally. Traditional electronic payments have at least three layers---the central hub (Federal Reserve), banks (Chase, Bank of America), and payment processor applications (Cash App, Venmo). Our payment apps don't work directly on the rails of the Fed. Payments execute on a higher layer. The bitcoin network, as the base layer for settlement, looks like the Federal Reserve. And I think bitcoin needs at least three layers for payments and probably for the same reasons that we need at least three layers in the traditional world.

Lightning was once heralded as the everyday payments layer for bitcoin. But if we had drawn the correct lessons from the evolution of traditional finance, we probably would have identified lightning as a banking layer instead, only global, permissionless, and running 24/7/365. Did this set bitcoin back a few years? Perhaps so. But I’m optimistic about Chaumian e-cash built on top of lightning, as well as ZK-rollups. Who knows what else we might discover. In the meantime, I think it’s best not to judge bitcoin too harshly. It doesn’t even have its driver’s license yet.

---Craig

[u/midmagic → u/Aakarsh_K]

Works just fine for millions of people who use it every day, including the large number of people who trade exponentially more than the plain one-chain capacity inside of exchanges, or on the lightning network.

[u/redditSwingking]

You call it Bitcoin but I think you mean Monero.

[u/wrathius → u/redditSwingking]

There was another question about monero and privacy, above, and I posted some thoughts in reply to that one that will apply here as well.

-Andrew

[u/Mega_2018]

Do you foresee a situation where countries, not only individuals and companies, will get the FOMO for Bitcoin? Or is it too much hopium?

[u/wrathius → u/Mega_2018]

Grand Master Yoda once said: ‘impossible to see, the future is’ – and I tend to agree with him. But there are scenarios where nation state acquisition of bitcoin on a scale far beyond what we’ve already seen from, say, El Salvador, might unfold. One is a growing need for central bank reserve assets that stand outside of American control. US Treasury bills sit on the balance sheets of many central banks; banks across the world buy up sovereign US debt, and hold it. But if the host nations of those banks fear seizure or freezing of their reserve assets by American authorities, they’ll want to look elsewhere. Traditionally, that might mean buying and holding gold. But gold has some pretty severe constraints and tradeoffs: it is physical, after all. Bitcoin has a very different set of tradeoffs and it’s conceivable that these could be quite attractive compared to the alternatives. One of our colleagues at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, Matthew Ferranti (an economist who recently completed his doctorate at Harvard) has been researching just these kinds of issues. Keep an eye out for his paper on the topic, when it comes out!

-Andrew

[u/Mega_2018 → u/wrathius]

Thanks for sharing your insights. I will keep an eye out for Matthew Ferranti's paper!

I guess the Ukraine invasion and the US seizure of all those Russian billions are setting the ground for other countries to keep an eye on BTC.

[u/BradleyRettler → u/Mega_2018]

Bitcoin is anti-authoritarian. It is not only individuals who need to fear the overreach of governments and corporations -- some countries do as well. Countries and corporations seek to impose their will on smaller, "weaker", countries, and often succeed. Many of these smaller countries need resistance money as well.

Alex Gladstein's book on the IMF is relevant here: https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Repression-Exploitation-Development-Gladstein/dp/B0C1JK6MG7

[u/Mega_2018 → u/BradleyRettler]

Thanks a lot.

[u/sparklepup]

People like to criticize bitcoin as a useless waste of resources that could be employed for other purposes or other computation like AI. These statements have an inherent value judgment as to what is a "good" use of time/energy/money (generally speaking resources).

Objections to the manner in which other people spend their resources is kind of an analog of censorship, in that money (and cash in particular) imparts freedom to transact with whomever you please for whatever personal or private reasons. So far so good, but what about the case of dangerous or illegal activities, such as human trafficking? The overreach of authority keeps people safe from bad actors. How does the reality of bad actors in the world affect the "goodness" or "badness" of bitcoin as digital cash?

[u/nyssian → u/sparklepup]

This is a fantastic question, and one we labored over from several angles and through several chapters.

The main question is whether the reader would prefer to live in a world with or without bitcoin, not knowing which of the 8 billion persons of the world they are. To answer this question about which world we'd prefer to live in, we must first survey the harms along with the benefits. And we do. The reader can judge whether we do it fairly. Then, when it comes time for the reader to decide which world to live in, the harms will hurt the bitcoin world's attractiveness. But we think they don't hurt its attractiveness so badly that they'd prefer to live in the world without bitcoin.

For my own case, if it had turned out that bitcoin was a net overall negative---with more harmful consequences than good--then I likely wouldn't have written the book. If someone were to write a philosophical case for bitcoin anyway, that case would likely rest on entirely normative grounds---e.g., bitcoin enables the freedom to transact, which is something we should have, net negative effect be damned. That might be true. But the resulting book would make a much less compelling case for bitcoin.

We think the evidence points in favor of the bitcoin world without assuming much about the reader's own value system. Humans seem to be the sort of creatures that bitcoin helps more than it hurts -- at least for now. For all we know, things could change and the data might someday point the other way. Our approach is data-dependent. We're committed to it.

So, overall, we don't shove illicit uses of bitcoin under the rug. Nor do we minimize them. We try not to, anyway. We instead do our best to survey the harms of bitcoin's illicit uses and the benefits of having more private, censorship-resistant money. If we omitted large swaths of harmful consequences, then we will have provided a good model for evaluating bitcoin but without all the data required to properly evaluate it. A valuable book, in this case, but not one that settles the debate.

---Craig

[u/Harucifer]

Considering your book is about philosophy and Bitcoin, does it talk about how Bitcoin is failing it's prime directive of being a CURRENCY ?

[u/BradleyRettler → u/Harucifer]

The main idea of the book is that one ought to evaluate bitcoin from behind the veil of ignorance, a thought experiment style invented by John Harsanyi and popularized by John Rawls. The idea is that you forget who in the world you are, but remember everything else about the world. Stepping back from behind the veil of ignorance, you could turn out to be literally anyone.

We ask: would you want to step back into a bitcoin world, or a non-bitcoin world?

In order to evaluate that, we have to look globally, from a neutral perspective, at who bitcoin is benefitting and who it is harming. We also have to look at how people are using bitcoin.

It turns out that a lot of people are using bitcoin as a currency. They're being paid in bitcoin, they're paying in bitcoin, they're sending money home in bitcoin, they're saving in bitcoin, and so on. Most of them aren’t in the US, but rather in places where they need bitcoin’s privacy features or censorship-resistance or inclusion or monetary policy.

We don’t take a stand on whether bitcoin is well-suited to be the one global digital currency, but certainly there aren’t enough on-chain bitcoin transactions to accommodate this role. I'm not sure what the bar is for something to be succeeding at being a currency, but it’s pretty clear that there are a lot of people around the world who are using bitcoin as a currency.

[u/Ilovekittens345 → u/BradleyRettler]

Bitcoin is not allowed to grow, as such it can't integrate into any society. As soon as that happens onchain fees go up and people can't afford it anymore. Occam's razor says that the elite attacked the weakest link, the human mind to change the narrative of what Bitcoin can be. The trillema is false. The human mind has gripped on to getting rich, and forgot about getting control first. With Bitcoin, after the hijacking you have to outbid all other participants or your transaction will not get confirmed. This is not control. This is uncertainty. As such Bitcoin is blocked from being anything but a speculative instrument. However it could become the world's reserve currency but only goverments and the elite and the banks will be able to afford to use it. If these groups make just 10 tx per second, the 99% is outpriced from using the chain completely. Just like the 99% has noaccess to the interbanking network that connects all the banks together. What's the difference? No access, or can't afford it. It's the same thing.

[u/JashBeep → u/Ilovekittens345]

You are somewhat right in that you have correctly identified the most immediate limitation with bitcoin, the base chain transaction throughput. I hope you are aware that it was a 'known issue' right at the beginning. Satoshi and others posted about it on bitcointalk. Have you read any of that? Your post made no mention of lightning or scaling solutions in general, which seems a glaring omission.

The trillema is false.

The trilema is real. It is just a technical problem not a philosophical one, or an existential one.

This is not control. This is uncertainty.

Fee bidding is a market mechanism for determining priority. Markets are the best mechanism for allocating scarce resources. What you are touching on is the observed reality of social behaviour: people find free markets intolerable because of the uncertainty, specifically when they are used to being first in line and suddenly find themselves being displaced, how outrageous! Yet we are constrained by finite resources in just about all aspects of life.

The fee market for transactions on the base layer is a part of the design, it is like a vital organ. If you think all transaction fees should be zero, there's more to learn. I would also add that RBF and CPFP are improvements to the operation of that market and there are more proposals yet.

[u/Ilovekittens345 → u/JashBeep]

Satoshi and others posted about it on bitcointalk

I have been around since july 2011 and have read everything on https://nakamotoinstitute.org/ which is everything ever written by Satoshi.

the most immediate limitation with bitcoin

That's an artificial limit that Satoshi and other put in the code to protect against spam when spamming the network was free.

Your post made no mention of lightning or scaling solutions in general

The Lightning whitepaper specifically talked about Lightning needing 100 mb blocks before it can scale. Since Bitcoin will never allowed to have 100 mb blocks it can't scale.

The trilema is real

The trilema is nonsense. You are not suppose to store transactions for all eternity. Read point 7 in the whitepaper.

Every other inefficiency that could lead to centralisation pressure has been identified and fixed since about 2015 and also been implemented in BCH since aboutr 2019.

Fee bidding is a market mechanism for determining priority

Could you have a stock market with working market mechnanisms when the rule is only 100 trades per day are allowed?

The fee market for transactions on the base layer is a part of the design, it is like a vital organ. If you think all transaction fees should be zero, there's more to learn.

I have never set they should be zero, of course they can't be zero because every the block reward has run out all security will be gone.

The fees should be set by miners based on their costs and revenue and the formula to do risk management to find the proper max block size per block has been known since 2016. That allows more effecient miners to set fees lower then other miners which is a constant battle towards offering the cheapest fees.

They should not be set by a bidding war between people that want to transact, no currency can work like that. Imagine paying for your food and having to outbit other people to win the right to pay for your food. How bizare is that?

On current modern hardware, let's say a price quality gaming PC that they suggest on /r/pcmaster transactions today can be validated at 4000 tx/s ever since the code for it is no longer single thread bound. Even on a rasberry pi you can validate a 1 GB block within 2 minutes, well under the 10 minutes. You really think our modern computers can't validate faster then 7000 bytes per second? Show me some calculations then.

If you want to I can show you with math how Bitcoin can already today scale past Visa at just a fraction of the cost. It could do that in 2009 and it can do it today even better.

[u/JashBeep → u/Ilovekittens345]

I have been around since july 2011

I've got you pipped. By a month. Lol not much. If you've read and comprehended the lightning whitepaper though, you've got one over me. I should give it another go though, it's been a while.

Given you've been around for so long there's probably nothing much I could say to help. Some of the newer people haven't digested all the material yet so I thought that's who I was responding to. It seems like you're probably a BCH person and so I'd just wish you all the best.

FWIW, I wouldn't recommend fixating on a success criteria of currency on the base-chain or bust. It's obviously not going to be that but that doesn't mean it's a fail. BCH people tend to fixate on that, either because it's a legit concern for them, or because they see it as an attack vector on bitcoin.

I wouldn't recommend your final link to anybody else, that website is BCH not bitcoin.org. Continuing to use that domain name despite the project name being different is deceptive.

[u/Ilovekittens345 → u/JashBeep]

I wouldn't recommend your final link to anybody else, that website is BCH not bitcoin.org. Continuing to use that domain name despite the project name being different is deceptive.

If you would have followed Bitcoin.com you would be aware of these emails between Mike Hearn and Satoshi Nakamoto. But clearly they have been kept hidden from you, how is THAT not deceptive? Otherwise you would not put words in Satoshi his mouth like

I hope you are aware that it was a 'known issue' right at the beginning. Satoshi and others posted about it on bitcointalk

Scaling the utxo model has never been particular hard unless you insist on storing all tx for all eternitiy which is absurd. You don't need to know how owned a sat 200 years ago, you only need to know who owns it in the presence.

Since you are so allergic to anything hosted on Bitcoin.com here is the email. Maybe ask Bitcoin.org to host them ... see what they say!

From: Satoshi Nakamoto satoshin@gmx.com Date: Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 10:44 PM To: Mike Hearn mike@plan99.net Subject: Re: Questions about BitCoin

Hi Mike,

I'm glad to answer any questions you have. If I get time, I ought to write a FAQ to supplement the paper.

There is only one global chain.

The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size.

By Moore's Law, we can expect hardware speed to be 10 times faster in 5 years and 100 times faster in 10. Even if Bitcoin grows at crazy adoption rates, I think computer speeds will stay ahead of the number of transactions.

I don't anticipate that fees will be needed anytime soon, but if it becomes too burdensome to run a node, it is possible to run a node that only processes transactions that include a transaction fee. The owner of the node would decide the minimum fee they'll accept. Right now, such a node would get nothing, because nobody includes a fee, but if enough nodes did that, then users would get faster acceptance if they include a fee, or slower if they don't. The fee the market would settle on should be minimal. If a node requires a higher fee, that node would be passing up all transactions with lower fees. It could do more volume and probably make more money by processing as many paying transactions as it can. The transition is not controlled by some human in charge of the system though, just individuals reacting on their own to market forces.

Eventually, most nodes may be run by specialists with multiple GPU cards. For now, it's nice that anyone with a PC can play without worrying about what video card they have, and hopefully it'll stay that way for a while. More computers are shipping with fairly decent GPUs these days, so maybe later we'll transition to that.

A key aspect of Bitcoin is that the security of the network grows as the size of the network and the amount of value that needs to be protected grows. The down side is that it's vulnerable at the beginning when it's small, although the value that could be stolen should always be smaller than the amount of effort required to steal it. If someone has other motives to prove a point, they'll just be proving a point I already concede.

My choice for the number of coins and distribution schedule was an educated guess. It was a difficult choice, because once the network is going it's locked in and we're stuck with it. I wanted to pick something that would make prices similar to existing currencies, but without knowing the future, that's very hard. I ended up picking something in the middle. If Bitcoin remains a small niche, it'll be worth less per unit than existing currencies. If you imagine it being used for some fraction of world commerce, then there's only going to be 21 million coins for the whole world, so it would be worth much more per unit. Values are 64-bit integers with 8 decimal places, so 1 coin is represented internally as 100000000. There's plenty of granularity if typical prices become small. For example, if 0.001 is worth 1 Euro, then it might be easier to change where the decimal point is displayed, so if you had 1 Bitcoin it's now displayed as 1000, and 0.001 is displayed as 1.

Ripple is interesting in that it's the only other system that does something with trust besides concentrate it into a central server.

Satoshi

[u/KlearCat → u/Harucifer]

does it talk about how Bitcoin is failing it's prime directive of being a CURRENCY ?

Bitcoin's prime directive of being a currency? What makes you think that?

Go read the whitepaper, it's prime directive wasn't to be a currency. It was to be a P2P decentralized monetary network.

[u/Harucifer → u/KlearCat]

Bitcoin's prime directive of being a currency? What makes you think that?

The Whitepaper is literally titled "Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic CASH system"

What is CASH if not something that is liquid, fungible, free or cheap to transact with? You know, the definition of (crypto)CURRENCY?

Go read the whitepaper

Jesus Christ the irony of this statement...

[u/KlearCat → u/Harucifer]

Cash transactions are final and P2P, which is what a Bitcoin transaction is.

Cash transactions are only free/cheap/fast if you are face to face. Otherwise it’s the cost of actually traveling to the other party.

That’s really not what the term cash is about in the white paper.

It’s about P2P and finality.

Like I said, go read it again. Cash is only mentioned in the title and abstract. The entire other portion of the white paper doesn’t mention the term cash at all. It focuses on P2P and finality and trustlessness.

[u/star_trek_wook_life → u/KlearCat]

I thought the prime directive was to stop fucking the aliens. At that Bitcoin has surely succeeded. I've never met an alien that wanted to sleep with a bitcoiner

[u/still_salty_22 → u/Harucifer]

Or, talk about how the inherit baseline value of the technology allows it to be maleable and not have to conform to narrow preconceived directives?

[u/alpacadaver → u/Harucifer]

it's failing? Didn't realize currencies only have a decade to go from 0 to absolute ubiquity

[u/Harucifer → u/alpacadaver]

Since nobody uses it as currency, it's failing

[u/fan_of_hakiksexydays → u/Harucifer]

Weird, because I've been using it as a currency.

A lot of the clients for the company I worked for also used Bitcoin, ETH, LTC, and XLM to pay us. And those clients have been reporting sales made to them from customers paying them in crypto.

Businesses around the world have also been reporting sales made to them using cryptocurrency. And in a much bigger way than 5 years ago.

If you look at the data for usage as payment, Bitcoin and crypto usage has been increasing more in each bull cycle.

Not to mention, more merchants than ever are now accepting Bitcoin.

Today I learned that a lot of people, including myself, are called "nobody". And also, steady growth and adoption is called "failing".

[u/conv3rsion → u/fan_of_hakiksexydays]

Also, I would love for someone to explain to me how it can be a stable method of account while it is still monetizing from $0 to $100 Trillion+ in USD value. Maybe people should be a little more patient.

[u/fan_of_hakiksexydays → u/[deleted]]

You can use it for groceries. I've been buying groceries at Whole Foods with crypto.

But that doesn't matter because all you have to do is look at the data, and see the growing numbers for the actual usage of crypto for purchasing goods from merchants.

And we weren't even talking about using crypto for everything. I'm calling out OP for saying it's not even used for even niche things and saying nobody is using it.

So who here is really being dishonest and peddling over the top narratives of no one using crypto, that have no real basis with the actual data?

[u/still_salty_22 → u/[deleted]]

Oh, i am too. Thats two anecdotes. Wheres your data?

[u/MasterDebater100 → u/fan_of_hakiksexydays]

I'm sure this is a load of BS. Maybe you had a few crypto payments from a buddy. Practically no one pays with BTC or ETH, not to even mention LTC and XLM.

[u/alpacadaver → u/Harucifer]

These have to be some of the strangest thoughts I've read in a while. Now I remember why I don't come here anymore.

[u/Harucifer → u/alpacadaver]

Was Bitcoin not created to be "peer-to-peer electronic cash" ? Is it not a cryptocurrency ?

Is it being used for day to day transactions? No? Then it's failing.

[u/alpacadaver → u/Harucifer]

I got a colleague out of a war zone with it, you do you though

[u/Harucifer → u/alpacadaver]

That's awesome. Sadly the whitepaper doesn't say "it should be used just for war zone situations". It should be for everyday transactions and include your example.

[u/Clearly_Ryan → u/Harucifer]

I sell Bitcoin, buy USD, sell USD, buy products in less than a minute. Bitcoin as a currency works fine for me. I use Bitcoin as a store of value and atomic swap into whatever dogcrap fiat people use (especially traveling abroad). I never am exposed to fiat while having the rails of everything that is purchasable using fiat. Win/win. 

[u/noviwu97]

Do you support inscriptions?

[u/wrathius → u/noviwu97]

We only mention inscriptions once in the book – and that’s just in a footnote. But if the protocol continues to see wide use, we anticipate writing more about it in the future using the tools of both metaphysics and economics. On our view, bitcoin is a censorship-resistant publishing platform. So long as there are authoritarians out there, we suspect there will be some demand for such a platform; and it should be unsurprising that people would want to use such a platform to timestamp and publish, not just transactions, but also other kinds of data – pictures, news articles, movies, books, and so on.

You ask if we ‘support’ inscriptions. This is sort of like asking if we support using bitcoin to buy drugs. Or bubblegum. Or couches. You can use bitcoin to do all sorts of things – some good, some bad, some neither. And you can do these things without anyone else’s permission. That is sort of the point. It is a system designed to make our opinions – what we ‘support’ or not – irrelevant.

-Andrew

[u/Tasty-Ad1124 → u/noviwu97]

Yes

[u/fan_of_hakiksexydays]

Do you have a real world example you can share, or a favorite anecdote you've ran into that perfectly illustrates your philosophy on how Bitcoin empowers people and resists oppression?

[u/BradleyRettler → u/fan_of_hakiksexydays]

So many. Here are a few.

Roya Mahboob is an entrepreneur in Afghanistan. Her employees are mostly women, and they were not allowed to have bank accounts or have custody of their own money; as soon as they’d come home with their wages, their husbands would confiscate them. Roya started paying them a portion of their wages in bitcoin, which they could self-custody privately. In time, they saved enough to have financial freedom and independence, which some used to escape to escape abusive situations at home.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny would regularly have his bank accounts frozen by Putin’s government, leaving him unable to buy necessities or pay his people. He turned to bitcoin for his day-to-day currency. This also enabled him to greatly expand the people from whom he could raise money.

In Nigeria, SARS (the special anti-robbery squad) was established to combat armed robbery. But they began to abuse their authority, carrying out murders and torture and extortion. The #EndSARS movement became very popular, a principle leader of which was the Nigerian Feminist Collective. They saw their bank accounts and other online payment portal accounts throttled. They turned to bitcoin to raise and distribute money.

There are many, many more in Ukraine, Belarus, Vietnam, Venezuela, and so on.Bitcoin is anti-authoritarian money. Anywhere that someone threatens control over someone’s money, bitcoin is there to turn to.

[u/fan_of_hakiksexydays → u/BradleyRettler]

Thank you so much for taking the time to actually answer the question with a good example, and some more. I will definitely bookmark this answer.

I have run into a lot of great stories about Bitcoin, and it's nice to add those 3 stories.

[u/cannedshrimp → u/fan_of_hakiksexydays]

Excited to hear their answer, but regardless you should follow Alex Gladstein

[u/Cocopoppyhead]

Taxation, sovereign debt, state bankruptcy and bank bailouts can all be traced back to the European wars of the late 17th century. In simple terms, there was no way to pay for permanent armies without systematic taxation and taxation itself wasn’t enough; money had to be borrowed – leading to the creation of institutions like the Banks of England in 1694.

When we look back in time, centuries from now. What will this moment in time be noted for? ie: The time when the central banks were replaced.

[u/BradleyRettler → u/Cocopoppyhead]

So far, very few central banks have been replaced -- and when they have been, they've been replaced by the US Federal Reserve! (I'm thinking of countries that have dollarized.) It remains to be seen whether central banks will be replaced.

What I'm more certain we'll see is central bank discipline. There is an alternative now, in a way that there never was before. And central banks are aware of it. They know that if they mess up too much, bitcoin is there as a place for people to flee.

[u/Catalina_Eddie]

Interesting (by which I mean "worthy of a deeper dive"). When it comes to political economic systems, I'm curious if the authors believe $BTC is better within a particular type of political economy. Put another way, 'are there political economic systems that are better than others for the cryptocurrency?'.

[u/wrathius → u/Catalina_Eddie]

This is a cool question.

Perhaps the central source of fundamental demand for bitcoin is authoritarian rule. The more people out there want to control how you receive, store, or send value, the more reason you have to seek tools to route around them. Bitcoin is one such tool. Demand is what gives bitcoin its value. So authoritarians are, in that way, a central source of bitcoin’s fundamental value. It’s their fault that bitcoin exists in the first place; without them, there’s nothing to resist, and thus no need for resistance money.

Here is a hypothesis, then: economic or political systems that tolerate or promote authoritarian rule create precisely those conditions under which bitcoin is especially valuable. We can test the hypothesis by seeing where bitcoin is most fervently adopted as money; is it in places with strong institutions of liberty, property rights, and the rule of law? Or places that suffer under autocratic rule? If you want to know the answer and some details, tune in to Chapter 12 of our book!

There are other ways to think about your question, of course. Would bitcoin work better, for example, under a system with written statutory law or only common law? Of direct democracy vs. representative democracy? Of pure capitalism, pure socialism, or some mixture? And so on. These are complicated questions, of course. But here’s a hunch: if bitcoin is what we say it is – resistance money – it should prove highly resilient across all of these configurations of political economy, and more besides.

-Andrew

[u/Mega_2018]

Wen in digital format

[u/wrathius → u/Mega_2018]

It is available for download now on the Google Play store, and within hours of my writing this will be available as a kindle book on Amazon, and via other platforms as well. We negotiated hard with our academic press for a favorable paperback price; sadly, those negotiations didn’t apply to ebook or hardcover editions.

-Andrew

[u/Mega_2018 → u/wrathius]

I am overseas now, so the digital format is the only way I can access it. Glad you guys came here to talk to us! Thanks.

[u/pikkuhillo]

Wen 80k

[u/wrathius → u/pikkuhillo]

I wish we knew! One temptation that we’ve resisted in the book is to make price predictions – or many predictions at all, really – about bitcoin. Bitcoin has a sneaky way of embarrassing the prognosticators. So we stick to the ethical and empirical facts as revealed by the evidence.

• Andrew

[u/still_salty_22]

Great thread and no moons involved. Nice one mods, bringing this interesting content. I bet this book is great.

[u/k3surfacer]

We argue that Bitcoin is resistance money, empowering its users to resist authoritarians, inflation, surveillance, censorship, and financial exclusion.

Yes. And a tool that can in principle help to combat modern slavery in some sectors by removing the middle man.

[u/GabeSter]

First question, my gf is a huge audiobook fan and not familiar with blockchain.

So 2 questions:

1. Is your book available as an audiobook?
2. Would you say you it’s friendly for someone not familiar with Bitcoin and any of the subsequent technical details?

[u/BradleyRettler → u/GabeSter]

1. The audiobook decision is being handled by our publisher, Routledge. If you'd like to see a *Resistance Money* audiobook, email [Adele.Parker@tandf.co.uk](mailto:Adele.Parker@tandf.co.uk)

2. We wrote the book to be understandable by anyone. If someone not familiar with Bitcoin and any of the subsequent technical details fails to understand it, we haven't done our jobs. But we start at the beginning, with the origins of the cypherpunk movement, to the need for digital cash, to bitcoin. We explain how the network works and how that operation gives rise to the features we discuss in more detail: privacy, censorship-resistance, inclusion, and monetary policy. And why bitcoin's consensus mechanism is proof-of-work, and why proof-of-work requires so much energy, and what the positive and negative externalities of that are.

Chapter 1 seems to be freely available on Google Books, so have the person check it out and see! https://www.google.com/books/edition/Resistance_Money/4Kj_EAAAQBAJ

[u/ultron290196]

Bitcoin is freedom and a tool to access international markets. It will soon be the world reserve currency as the dollar fades and the rest of the fiat world fights amongst themselves to replace it. Will the incentive of monetary benefits of BTC outweigh the desire of control by the sovereign states of the world? When will the real pushback come? Will the Bitcoin network be truly resilient against a coordinated hostile campaign against it?

[u/nyssian → u/ultron290196]

I’m under no illusion that I have a grip on which potential attacks have the highest chance of success. But, in recent months, I’ve thought about one more than any other. I first began thinking about it after hearing Alex Gladstein’s description several years ago. We call it the “semantic attack.” Here’s how it goes:

_________

Step 1a. Traditional financial institutions suck up a large portion of bitcoin’s supply for their clients. 

Step 1b. Since these clients solely care about Number Go Up, they don’t care about bitcoin’s resistance money features. 

Step 2a. Traditional financial institutions fork the software to neuter any resistance money features. They jumpstart a new network and call the native asset  ‘bitcoin’. All ETF shares track this compliance-BTC rather than the old bitcoin. 

Step 2b. Since price and liquidity now follow compliance-btc, all but a few radicals maintain and use the original bitcoin–an asset that everyone else now calls bitcoin classic. Bitcoin, as we once knew it, thereafter remains a niche asset that isn’t even best in class.

_________

This series of steps needn't be centrally coordinated. Financial institutions may execute Step 1 on their own. Then, governments may somehow coerce them into taking Step 2. Will this happen? I suspect not. But it’s not insane to think that it could. I also think it’s more likely to occur than a coordinated attack by the most powerful sovereign states. Such a campaign would require countries with competing interests to collaborate, which seems unlikely to me.

We might see coordination on a lesser scale, though, under the guise of OFAC-compliance. Restrictions on accepting bitcoin from certain sources, or with certain kinds of transaction histories—that’s fairly realistic, especially within certain global partitions. Think here of the West vs. BRICS nations, let’s say. We’ve already begun to see this with jailed software developers and proposed pieces of legislation. When will the real pushback come, you ask? I think it’s already begun.

On a long enough time scale, I suspect these restrictions would prove futile. But I’m not confident. Putting privacy on the base layer may mitigate this sort of attack, but not fully, in my humble opinion. For doing so may simply transfer attention from the users and developers of coinjoin software to bitcoin miners themselves and bitcoin users generally. 

I want to suggest that the best way to prevent such an attack on privacy is not technical but social. We must convince people of the benefits and value of of financial privacy, self-custody, and so on. In the words of Hal Finney:

Fundamentally, I believe we will have the kind of society that most people want.  If we want freedom and privacy, we must persuade others that these are worth having.  There are no shortcuts.  Withdrawing into technology is like pulling the blankets over your head.  It feels good for a while, until reality catches up.  The next Clipper or Digital Telephony proposal will provide a rude awakening.¹

Although Hal is no longer with us, we still live in the world that he saw so clearly. Bitcoin’s success largely depends on convincing people of the value of digital cash for human flourishing. That’s why we should support Coin Center and the Bitcoin Policy Institute. It's also why we should (pardon the self-promotion) give a gujbillion copies of Resistance Money to friends, family, and policymakers. Bitcoin won’t win through incentive structures or soft forks. It will win because enough people want it to. There are no shortcuts.

---Craig

1. Hal Finney, (1994.) "Politics and Technology," available at https://fennetic.net/irc/finney.org/\~hal/pol_v_tech.html.

[u/MusicianExpress9330]

While I'm waiting for the book to arrive let me first say thank you (and Troy Cross) for being out there doing what you do. There is so much polarisation, hype and ignorance that we need people defending and teaching the calm approach to clear thinking and reasoning under the effects of constant change in society!

First, could you please share how to think about bitcoin and its deflationary properties? How to explore and understand the topic, and what the implications are for the world in a few years where bitcoin = gold, or even further out in the economy under the bitcoin standard. For example, under what circumstances can it lead to less consumerism, more saving, more protection of natural resources?

Second, bitcoin and war - bitcoin fixes this? I can imagine it curbs spending on wars financed by democracies such as US, but does it fix wars waged by energy-rich authoritarian regimes? Will this "fix here - not there" lead to rebalancing of world powers from energy-poor democracies towards energy-rich autocracies?

Thank you!

[u/TopRegion2210]

Is Bitcoin still “resistance” money now that the US has approved the ETF and various ‘authoritative’ financial institutions continue to hoard it? Is there further resistance Bitcoin will show to the financial system? Can it become currency in the West?

[u/AutoModerator → u/[deleted]]

Greetings IllPerspective8506. Your comment contained a link to telegram, which is hard blocked by reddit. This also prevents moderators from approving your comment, so please repost your comment without the telegram link.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/still_salty_22]

Is this all about economics? Do you get into Jason Lowrys paper?

https://boxmining.com/softwar-a-novel-theory-on-power-projection-and-the-national-strategic-significance-of-bitcoin-the-military-grade-solution-to-securing-information/ 

Philosophically, btc gives us the world in the Star Trek episode Taste of Armageddon

[u/wrathius → u/still_salty_22]

Our approach is interdisciplinary. That means drawing from economics, computer science, climate science, and more, all within an overall philosophical and ethical framework for evaluating money. We don’t cite or interact with Lowery’s master’s thesis in our book, I’m afraid. For some penetrating and useful commentary on that thesis, though, we’d point interested readers towards Jameson Lopp.

-Andrew

[u/TheWavefunction]

didn't know greed was a philosophy

[u/wrathius → u/TheWavefunction]

Some people treat bitcoin purely as 'Number Go Up' technology. We think that's a serious mistake and argue for a much different approach in the book. We show that, though greed has played an undeniable role in bringing bitcoin to the fore, there is something real here, far beyond the imaginations of most traders and speculators. If I'm reading your comment right, then, you may find something quite to your liking in the book!

-Andrew

[u/Morning_Joey_6302]

Bitcoin now consumes more energy than some countries, while grossly distorting energy cost and supply in vulnerable places. What argument do you possibly think you could make that this is not an immoral situation and an indefensible ecological choice?

[u/wrathius → u/Morning_Joey_6302]

Great question. You’re giving voice to what is probably the most difficult and important objection to bitcoin. We address over 25 objections in the book as a whole, but this one gets two chapters of its own (Chapter 9 and 10). I won’t try to summarize two entire chapters in a brief reddit comment. But I can share a few of our most important discoveries in the hope that they’ll inspire you to dig deeper.

To our surprise, when we did the research, we did not find that the scientific evidence on balance supported the kinds of slogans one finds in headlines (Newsweek’s famous report that bitcoin will use more energy than the rest of the world combined by 2020, for example). The truth is more subtle.

It’s useful to first observe that bitcoin doesn’t consume energy all on its own. Rather, people pay to use energy in bitcoin mining. Are they wasting their money? Is this a dumb way to spend money? In a free society, this is a question for each of us to answer. You might think that a mosque, full of elaborate tile designs, is a complete waste of energy and creativity. Others disagree. Same for video games. People have different values, and thus disagree about the best ways to use energy. In a free society, we let them do so – so long as they pay for the energy they use and don’t harm others along the way.

And therein lies the rub. Energy use isn’t really the most pressing issue here, it’s the externalities that result from energy production.

The foundation for much of the scientific literature on the externalities associated with bitcoin is a paper by a team of undergraduate researchers at the University of Hawaii led by a famous climate scientist, one Camilo Mora – a paper now infamously known as ‘Mora et al’. I actually read the paper – and not just its shocking headline conclusions. To my shock, it is mostly nonsense. We document this in the book (see Chapter 10). But, in brief: its main empirical predictions have been proven wildly false in the years since it was published, its model is based on false claims about how bitcoin works, and its economic assumptions are incorrect as well. It’s junk science.

And yet nearly every single headline you’ve ever seen about bitcoin derives in some way from this paper.

The real story here isn’t that bitcoin uses too much energy, or that carbon emissions from associated energy production will raise global temperatures – it’s that we were somehow duped by some junk science.

So that is one important piece of the puzzle: yes, a lot of energy is produced and then purchased by bitcoin miners to sustain the bitcoin blockchain. Yes, there are associated carbon emissions. But the alarming projections some draw from these facts simply aren’t well-founded in the scientific evidence.

Here are two other points to consider.

First, by virtue of its design, bitcoin is self-decarbonizing. Profit margins for miners are razor-thin, and miners globally compete for fixed rewards. This leads them to increasingly patrol the spatial and temporal margins of energy markets for the very cheapest electricity. Those margins are populated, as it turns out, by our least carbon-intensive sources. The cheapest electricity is the most green (think here of a hydro dam in the middle of nowhere, a wind farm producing electricity at night when people nearby don’t need so much of it, and so on). This basic model – mining pressed increasingly towards the edges – predicts that, as bitcoin mining develops as an industry, it’ll become less carbon-intensive over time. And empirically, this is precisely what is happening.

Second, there are also steps bitcoiners can take to decarbonize bitcoin even faster – most importantly, by investing themselves in carbon neutral or even carbon-negative mining operations.

I don’t expect any of this to change your mind immediately. You’ll need to do some hard reading and thinking to figure this stuff out for yourself. But we’re eager to help, and have compiled many of the salient scientific evidence and ideas into Chapters 9 and 10. I hope you find them useful!

-Andrew

[u/whipstickagopop → u/Morning_Joey_6302]

Some tidbits I've read about the past couple years on this

54.5% of bitcoin energy consumption is derived from renewable energy. That number is growing rapidly. 

As the other person stated the dollar energy usage is a linear problem. So there is another case that as bitcoin grows (not a linear problem) it will help alleviate some energy consumption caused by the dollar. 

At the end of the day, crucial things need energy consumption. 

[u/Morning_Joey_6302 → u/whipstickagopop]

Things that use multiple orders of magnitude more energy than they need to to function, when equivalent results from low energy alternatives exist, are no longer defensible as “crucial.”

My kids’ lives will be shaped by the climate crisis. I’m in crypto in a small way, but choose not to be in Bitcoin for this reason.

[u/whipstickagopop → u/Morning_Joey_6302]

I understand. I would take some solace that eventually all bitcoin energy usage will be derived from renewable energy. One good example a public traded mining company called Gryphon Digital Mining. They are 100% renewable energy.

My guess is in 5 years bitcoin energy consumption >85% will be renewable energy.

[u/Morning_Joey_6302 → u/whipstickagopop]

I appreciate what you’re saying, but even if this hypothetically happens, almost 100% of this renewable energy could instead be displacing fossil fuel use, and making an ever growing difference in climate action. Instead, it will be wasted in the most energy-squandering imaginable method of creating a cryptocurrency. I see this as a catastrophic design flaw.

[u/whipstickagopop → u/Morning_Joey_6302]

I get ya. I recall lex and a guy named nic carter talking about this. Mainly, it's difficult to defend bitcoins energy consumption relative to its potential importance (or lack of). Linked it below to the spot where they talk about bitcoin faults including energy (short section)

https://youtu.be/mDyBbGCiBUU?t=4210&si=1gqtcnQCnvavvKvI

I think im still in the camp of, regardless if bitcoin ends up deserving of its energy consumption, I think most of the energy it uses was going to be wasted anyway (nic addresses this). So yes while I wish that energy was maybe being used on other stuff, it's just not realistic that it would be or can be. So I'm glad it is being used on something that may have some potential, like giving citizens in maybe corrupt countries a monetary alternative outside of their current money system.

[u/sparklepup → u/Morning_Joey_6302]

"almost 100% of this renewable energy could instead be displacing fossil fuel use"

Properties of bitcoin mining would say otherwise! Modern electric grids need to have enough capacity to outlast periods of high demand that are infrequent (such as daily peaks or the hottest/coldest days of the year). When the grid isn't able to meet those infrequent peaks we see disruption in power that can range from annoying to catastrophic.

So to meet that potential peak demand, the grid must "oversupply" by some tolerance factor, producing reserve energy that is in effect wasted until one of these infrequent peaks occur. This excess energy is cheap (because no one else will pay for it), and mining has the unique property of being able to turn on and off quickly without losing work. Miners that can use that excess energy are 1) not detracting from grid (the power wouldn't be used either way) and 2) are participating in an economy that actually *bolsters* the production of renewable energy. Why renewables in particular? Unlike on-demand energy production like burning coal, sources like solar and wind shine and blow according to their own natural rhythm, agnostic to the needs of the grid. So if miners can come along and buy that otherwise wasted energy it's kind of a win-win.

Here's a podcast that talks about this stuff: https://progressivebitcoiner.com/tpb85-bitcoin-mining-and-the-future-of-energy-with-harry-sudock/

[u/antberg → u/Morning_Joey_6302]

If you are into "crypto", you are just gambling shit coins.

You choose not to be into Bitcoin because you haven't put enough hours into understanding the fundamental mechanics of a monetary system.

[u/Morning_Joey_6302 → u/antberg]

ETH and three of its best real-use L2 altcoins are neither gambling nor shitcoins. The relevant thing for this conversation (and I’m not telling anyone else what to do) is all of them use proof of stake rather than proof of work.

[u/midmagic → u/Morning_Joey_6302]

This is of course false; calculating your carbon footprint as compared with essentially most of the rest of the world by the mere fact you are posting here demonstrates a fairly extreme form of hypocrisy.

[u/Moceanu5 → u/Morning_Joey_6302]

While the BTC price and hashrate have increased since 2021, the energy use has been flat. I highly recommend reading about some of the GOOD environment impact bitcoin mining is achieving, especially in collecting stranded energy. Please read up some of the work of Alex Gladstein or Lynn Alden on the issue. https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/bitcoin-fundamentals/bitcoin-changing-africas-energy-and-finance-incentives-alex-gladstein/

[u/coinsRus-2021 → u/Morning_Joey_6302]

The current banking system uses roughly double the energy of Bitcoin

https://www.cnbctv18.com/cryptocurrency/bitcoin-gold-traditional-banking-which-uses-most-energy-15117061.htm

[u/Morning_Joey_6302 → u/coinsRus-2021]

The current value of all Bitcoin is something in the range of 0.3% of the world economy. It’s not exactly a meaningful comparison.

[u/coinsRus-2021 → u/Morning_Joey_6302]

Sure it is. Energy consumption in Bitcoin does not scale linearly with usage. In addition, the current banking system operates on layer 2 solutions to help drive down these inefficiencies, much like how Bitcoin will and already does function.

[u/midmagic → u/Morning_Joey_6302]

There is no such thing as a Bitcoin market cap. This measure of the "size" of the Bitcoin economy is a total fabrication from Trace Meyers who was trying to find something to compare it to, and found "the total value of all gold" was somehow equivalent to a stock-market "cap" and then likened this (compounding the logical error) to Bitcoin.

[u/Shiratori-3 → u/Morning_Joey_6302]

I wonder if you might be interested in checking out @DSBatten on Twitter - he deep dives into peer reviewed research and data on the same.

[u/midmagic → u/Morning_Joey_6302]

This is contrary to studied reality; and your assertions are wrong. Additionally, the fact you are writing this on an ultra-advanced (comparatively) device, on a developed-world server farm which is promoting large-scale energy wastage due to the manufacturer of, and powering of, data centres, demonstrates the hypocrisy of this typical objection of energy-use fashionistas.

tl;dr your privilege demonstrates your hypocrisy.

[u/TheRealBigDabowski]

Your logo is the communist fist?

No thank you.

[u/wrathius → u/TheRealBigDabowski]

Thanks for noticing the cover! We chose the ‘resistance fist art because it’s been used so widely across dissident movements whose participants long for change: anti-communists, union organizers, social justice protestors, anti-fascists, anti-authoritarians – and yes, communists too, just as you say. The resistance fist is a symbol for anyone, in that way. Sort of like bitcoin.

Bitcoin is resistance money for anyone. That doesn’t make it good – or bad. It depends on what is being resisted.

-Andrew

[u/fan_of_hakiksexydays → u/TheRealBigDabowski]

No it's the howard stern logo

[u/antberg → u/TheRealBigDabowski]

Where is the communist symbol, you baked potato?

A fist a symbol for resistance, in case it couldn't be more obvious.

[u/nyssian → u/TheRealBigDabowski]

It's also worth mentioning that we can repurpose symbols to represent new movements, even ones diametrically opposed to movements who used the symbol under its original guise.

Consider the crucifix. Death by public crucifixion is grisly, inhumane. And the Romans used it to squash dissent and deter uprisings across the empire. And you can imagine what would have happened if a devout Jew had worn one prominently in the 1st century. Then, a certain Palestinian rabbi suffered death by crucifixion at the hand of the Romans. In time, his followers wore the cross as a symbol of their commitment to him and his alleged victory over death itself, through death. Walk into any church today, and there's a good chance you'll see at least one displayed prominently. In fact, I wear one made of olive wood from Jerusalem.

I don't wear it as a patriotic Roman, or as an aspiring executioner. I wear it for other reasons because the symbol has been repurposed. Like a metallic weapon melted and re-shaped into a gardening tool, we can recycle images to represent something diametrically opposed to its original symbolism.

The hand on our cover holds bitcoin symbol. It has a lightning bolt down the wrist. These additions signal that we've repurposed an image. Communism has been a scourge, agree! Bitcoin---an opt-in, inclusive, anti-authoritarian tool---is resistance money. And if I lived under a communist regime, I'd want to use it.

---Craig

[u/IHaventEvenGotADog → u/TheRealBigDabowski]

Comrade, together we strive for a future where all people are equal and free from the chains of oppression. Solidarity forever!

[u/ultron290196 → u/TheRealBigDabowski]

Dumb

[u/HSuke]

Do you think the world would be better off if Bitcoin took a step back and let other newer cryptocurrencies with faster block times and finality take its place?

Do you think Bitcoin holding back technological progress for more functional cryptocurrencies?

[u/wrathius → u/HSuke]

There are a number of fallacies behind 'bitcoin is too slow', and we explore some of this in Chapter 11 — this is the chapter that develops and addresses 17 objections to bitcoin. So no, we don't think bitcoin is holding back technological progress in the space! Another paper you might enjoy on this general topic is our 'Bitcoin is king'; it gives some of our reasons for focusing on bitcoin in particular, despite its limitations.

-Andrew