Bitcoin isn’t exciting because it doesn’t solve very many problems relative to the massive energy expenditure needed to create it. It’s like a fire at an oil well or a gas pipeline break. The arguments for why we should use it remind me a lot of arguments for why this year is the year of the Linux desktop. Bitcoin may be eating a lot of speculation but I can’t buy beans with it.

it's as old as android with like 5 orders of magnitude less societal impact and worse societal impact when there is societal impact than android. it's eaten a material amount of all gains in renewable energy basically using cycles to heat the world for what ends up being an O(n) database insert.

Database insert? Ok...

You may benefit from reading about why Bitcoin works the way that it does, and why certain tradeoffs were made.

But you don't really care to know, do you?

I did do the reading. It's an O(n) db insert. The blockchain's the DB and the insert needs PoW.

throughput of a blockchain is contingent upon tweaking but for the original bitcoin, still used, it's 6 mb/hour. electricity consumption is 14 gigawatts. if i were given 14 gigawatts of electricity i think i could do better than 6 megabytes/hour.

Do you understand the tradeoffs of why it works that way?

That for an open and fully accessible, decentralised system that exists in an adversarial environment there has to be a large cost to any attacks?

Of course there are much more efficient ways to store data, but those are centralised and vulnerable to the problems of centralisation. The blockchain's and proof-of-work's purpose is to be decentralised.

right. everything is a tradeoff. but in almost every other part of the tradeoff space you can do better than 6 mb/hour for 14 gigawatts.

People just trying to justify to themselves why they didn't buy bitcoin at $100.

Looking at the comments here it's almost like a political debate where they keep trying to come up with justifications.

Someone was telling me that the general problem with HN is that they're all very technically capable, so they look at Bitcoin, understand it from a technical perspective (not always true) and deem it as inferior to other technical solutions, like a centralised database.

The bit that's lacking is an understanding of money, and what makes certain types of money sound or unsound. It's easy to overlook the problems of fiat money because its all we've ever known.

What was it about gold that made it the dominant form of money for literally thousands of years? Why was it abandoned? How does Bitcoin solve the problems of gold and fiat?

Vijay Boyapati (ex-Google engineer) does a pretty good job of outlining this in his article.

https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...

I wish more people on HN would read it with an open mind.