I do not understand this argument. The fact that bitcoin mining is profitable inherently means that society has already deemed it useful, no? Users would not pay for it if it were not useful.

> Everything we do as a society I think should be from time to time evaluated

Who should do this evaluation? If not users freely allocating their own resources on the free market, then who?

> the incentives should be updated to support things that are consider useful, and to penalize things that we do not.

Please define useful. Humans have different needs and value things differently. What is useful to one may not be useful to the other. Any system that picks winners will also pick losers.

> I do not understand this argument. The fact that bitcoin mining is profitable inherently means that society has already deemed it useful, no? Users would not pay for it if it were not useful.

Just because there is a market for something doesn't mean that "society" as a whole has decided that it is useful. There's an underground market on taking out hits on someone else, that doesn't mean that "society" has decided that murder is good.

> Who should do this evaluation? If not users freely allocating their own resources on the free market, then who?

A public body that is democratically constrained.

> Please define useful.

Welfare enhancing for humanity. Sometimes, a welfare enhancing step will involve losers and winners, you're right. For instance, if one person held $200 billion and the rest of humanity held $1, redistributing that money would almost certainly be a welfare enhancing step given diminishing marginal utility of the $.

We put far too much faith in centralized authorities to arbitrate standards of morality. How sure are you that such an authority will actually reflect the best interest of the people, and not itself?

> There's an underground market on taking out hits on someone else, that doesn't mean that "society" has decided that murder is good.

That's a great cherry-picked example, but there are far more examples of people freely purchasing what they deem to be useful, and even more examples of useless things disappearing because no one wanted them. Most failed startups we cover here are probably an example of the latter, and there's plenty of discussions of how to achieve the former on hn, too.

> Welfare enhancing for humanity.

Who gets to determine this, except the members of humanity themselves? Does some 'public body that is democratically constrained' know what's best for each individual person it's responsible for? Does it adhere to some ideology that dictates the universal moral good, whether everyone else likes it or not? How does a group of politicians living in their own little bubble know what's best for Joe Plumber in e.g. North Dakota?

What moral framework do you suggest that we inflict upon all of humanity?

> That's a great cherry-picked example

I consider it reasoning from the limit case - obviously the existence of a market is not sufficient to prove that society has decided it is good, as the counter-example of the market in murder shows. Nothing more behind that statement and I think that markets are often a powerful tool.

> What moral framework do you suggest that we inflict upon all of humanity?

You can't escape "inflicting" a moral stance on the world. In the hypothetical world where the one has $200 billion and the remainder have $1, perhaps the government is not "arbitrating standards of morality", but if they make it illegal for the 7 billion to steal from the one person who has $200 billion, they are taking an ethical stance and "inflicting" it on the rest of the world.

We're a socially cooperative species - obviously we need a way to govern the form of those interactions, even in order to have a functioning market in things.

> You can't escape "inflicting" a moral stance on the world.

Only if you start from the assumption that such things as bitcoin mining ought to be regulated in the first place. You're right - we are a 'socially cooperative species', and we're good at it. Leave us alone to cooperate and don't invoke some government authority.

I'm arguing that involving a governmental authority to arbitrate morality is a can of worms that really doesn't need to be opened here.

> Nothing more behind that statement

Fair enough, I thought you meant to take that statement farther than you did.

> You're right - we are a 'socially cooperative species', and we're good at it. Leave us alone to cooperate and don't invoke some government authority.

So it's cool if I go to someone and take their bitcoins from them at gunpoint? Or start Mafia 2.0 and create my own protection racket here in SF?

I don’t understand - it’s like we have to repeat the same mistake over and over again. What industries have historically successfully self-regulated for the benefit of the society at large? Regulations and government involvement is why we don’t live in a slave society with a handful of militaristic barons.

> You're right - we are a 'socially cooperative species', and we're good at it. Leave us alone to cooperate and don't invoke some government authority.

Isn't "some government authority" exactly how we as a species go about "socially cooperating" on a larger scale?

Thanks for the reply, it helped me understand where you are coming from.

For purposes of discussing bitcoin, it is a global good, and environmental concerns are a global concern. If there is a global market for bitcoin, then taxing bitcoin mining (or other such measures) in one country would just incentivize miners to move to another country. So any such action as you describe would need to be coordinated on a global level among several or all nations.

> There's an underground market on taking out hits on someone else, that doesn't mean that "society" has decided that murder is good.

Not sure if it is fair to compare bitcoin production to murder. I agree that we need some sort of action for climate change, but I am not sure regulating bitcoin is the answer. We'd have to apply the same subject "utility" measuring stick to _any_ activity that consumes electricity and regulate that. Like others have suggested, maybe taxing certain types of energy usage directly according to their climate change impact would be more effective and would apply evenly to all goods / services without deciding on behalf of individuals what is useful and what is not.

> So any such action as you describe would need to be coordinated on a global level among several or all nations.

I was not the original person you were discussing with, so I don't think a tax specifically on bitcoin mining would be the best idea, but yes global problems require global scale coordination often.

> Not sure if it is fair to compare bitcoin production to murder.

My point is merely that the fact that a market exists for something is not sufficient to show that "society" has decided it is useful IMO.

> Like others have suggested, maybe taxing certain types of energy usage directly according to their climate change impact

Yeah, I was the one who commented that, so I definitely agree

> The fact that bitcoin mining is profitable inherently means that society has already deemed it useful, no?

Not when that mining doesn't account for externalities

The fact that tulips are selling for 10x their prior year price inherently means that society has decided tulips are more valuable than gold. People wouldn't be investing their life savings in tulip futures if they weren't a stable store of wealth, right?

I’m truly shocked by the number of people who totally fail to grok the economic logic behind a lot of the projects being built on blockchain tech. Many dismiss such work as totally worthless.

I suspect such dismissive types lack the combination of deep technical ability and profound economic intuition that made the Collison brothers wealthy. Or maybe it’s just that they don’t care to think these things through. Like PG says in his exploration of the aphorism “a word to the wise is sufficient:” “Understanding all the implications — even the inconvenient implications — of what someone tells you is a subset of resourcefulness. It's conversational resourcefulness.”

http://www.paulgraham.com/word.html

>I’m truly shocked by the number of people who totally fail to grok the economic logic behind a lot of the projects being built on blockchain tech.

If you are so shocked then please explain why Bitcoin miners refused to increase the transactions per block to a level that is suitable for Bitcoin? It's literally a configuration flag they have to change and the environmentalists and people against power waste would be happy and you could tell them to shut up. The people using Bitcoin as money would also be happy. Everyone would be happy except some puritans that insist on a specific block size.

The reality is that no amount of economic intuition and deep technical ability can explain this and it's not making any neo "Collison brothers" types wealthy. It also isn't a problem of not thinking things through. It's not a matter of groking economic logic because there is literally no economic argument in favor of restricting transactions per block. It's worthless because everyone that wanted to use Bitcoin for its intended purpose has already left and only those who are in it for the bubbling behavior have stayed.

I will even admit that after understanding the long term trend of Bitcoin (not the xth bubble that is currently occuring) I would buy it, but again, only for speculation. It's worthless, as a currency, precisely because its deflationary, expensive and slow to transact, a tax nightmare because of capital gains and the fact that nobody accepts it.

So yes, it definitively is worthless. Just because some tech dudes bet on price increases doesn't mean it isn't worthless.

I'm more shocked by the number of people who fail to grok the economic logic and still engage in correct behavior. They make the mistake of equating the power consumption as necessary to process a certain amount of transactions and they are definitively wrong, however their judgment is still right. Bitcoin wastes too much power for the little value it provides. They don't have any right to be worthy of your criticism but yet they do, if you listened to them your crappy little currency would be better off and that's why your argument is on very thin ice.

I have an absolute disdain for dishonesty. Own and admit your mistakes instead of pretending that the other side is wrong.

> If you are so shocked then please explain why Bitcoin miners refused to increase the transactions per block to a level that is suitable for Bitcoin?

I'm no Bitcoin maximalist, but this problem cannot be solved by increasing storage requirements in a linear fashion to accommodate more transactions, as then you are trading one problem for another.

Case in point Bitcoin Cash which, (if actually used) with a block size of 32MB could grow at 1.6 TB/year, prohibiting most individuals from running a node.

There's also the problem analogous to road planning where adding lanes does not decrease congestion, because the level of congestion than exists represents what people are willing to tolerate before giving up on driving.

That being said wrt your question there's also an element of greed in that there's money to be made selling level 2 solutions, but it's not as clear cut as the big block crowd would have it.

> I’m truly shocked by the number of people who totally fail to grok the economic logic behind a lot of the projects being built on blockchain tech.

Literally none of them have any logic behind them other than "let's add blockchain at the end, and ask investors for money".

> Many dismiss such work as totally worthless.

It is absolutely, 100% entirely worthless with no exceptions.

> I suspect such dismissive types lack the combination of deep technical ability and profound economic intuition that made the Collison brothers wealthy.

Stripe actually does provide a useful, and a used service with a well-defined and understood economic model.

> Understanding all the implications — even the inconvenient implications — of what someone tells you is a subset of resourcefulness. It's conversational resourcefulness

Yes, And the implications of bitcoin are simple: it's a useless wasteful technology that still hasn't found any useful application, or an application that cannot be achieved faster and more securely by other means.