Environment we all need to LIVE! Whatever… there are some white techbros who aren’t quite rich enough yet… /s
No, not really. You traded what you had for what you needed and normally this was within a small-scale community where everyone knew each other. Even the yearly markets that would draw people from further afield, you’re still dealing with people you have some connections to and familiarity with (other local communities within riding walking distance.
Currency, while more portable and useful for that, was more about the elites imposing value on the goods they had no hand in producing in order to harness the wealth made by the labor produced by everyday people. Someone up thread noted that currency is tightly connected to the rise of the states and empires, which were a point in global history where the first major divisions of inequality emerged, with the rich elite and everyone else. Bitcoin, et al is just another iteration of that.
Quantum computing will dramatically reduce the environmental impact in a few years. (It will also turn the whole blockchain encryption system on its head, but that’s a different problem.)
Ok, let’s assume for a moment that unlike every other future technology for the last several decades, quantum computing turns out to be just as easy to do in practice and theory and so comes in right on schedule as something available to everyone. Even then, why would it help?
Bitcoing mining is competitive. How much resources go into a competition doesn’t depend on the basic difficulty of the tasks involved, only on how much the other people are willing to invest in it. I mean, guns have gotten way better at killing people than lances and swords, but it’s not like every country in the world suddenly dropped its military budget because of that.
But mining is still slated to continue for another damn century. So all you’re offering that with this exciting new technology we don’t actually have yet, the other part of this expensive speculation won’t be as devastating as it is now…color me whatever the vantablack equivalent of unimpressed is.
I’m going to miss monarch butterflies. I can’t believe we’re trading them for garbage like this.
Certainly the fluctuations in the exchange rate of bitcoin make it unsuitable as a currency but that’s not the only thing that does so. The relative values of items is fairly well established and a different unit of exchange will not change that.
What makes Bitcoin and other crypto currencies unsuitable for use a currencies is that they are completely untethered from the national currency of every nation. Nobody will pass a law declaring that you have to accept it as payment and you will never be able to pay your taxes with it. What use does it therefore have except to hide from taxes and currency controls? Accepting cryptocurrency for payment of a pizza or a car has always been a stunt
And countless places full of people too. I just picked one example near to my heart right now and ran with it…the list is endless. But hey, at least some people ended up with marginally larger numbers in a database somewhere, and apparently that’s what society is for. /s
The explainer I like best is “imagine running your car 24/7 for a year to solve a sudoku you can trade for heroin.” Bitcoin has some nice parallels with land…same scarcity (newly minted coins equate to newly discovered land, less over time), same first mover advantage, but we don’t all need bitcoin as we do land and don’t have accept techbros as some kind of currency rentier.
And out of this thread is the reminder that blockchain != bitcoin.
The point which everyone seems to be missing in my post above is that we can have both, though I agree that curtailing the crypto processing until such time as the quantum option exists would be a Good Thing for all the obvious reasons.
The way crypto is actually working right now, in real time, in real life indicates that not to be the case, though. Assuming some future as of yet not broadly accessible and deployed technology will be a simple fix isn’t particularly helpful either. I have no idea if and when quantum computing will replace what we have today, and frankly neither do you or anyone else. What is being done is happening right now, not in some future where technology is different and as of yet not entirely defined. The capitalist system has a real problem with not planning ahead based on what we have and know we have TODAY.
On top of all that, the other problems with an increasing reliance on computing to solve problems is rare-earth mineral problem. Some of these are found in places like the Congo, which is contributing to the problem of instability and violence in the region.
Cryptocurrency seems to me like a solution in search of a problem. Maybe I’m wrong, but at this point, it’s done nothing particularly useful from my perspective, but contribute to our ongoing environmental crisis and make some white techbro dudes richer. I’m sorry if you find that harsh, but the reality is that we are at a crisis point and while I’m not opposed to pie in the sky, let’s at the very least acknowledge the reality of the problems we face that can very well end civilization as we know it rather than just assuming that new technologies will fix it. Technology plays a role, but it’s a human problem first and foremost that must be solved.
If google manages what it hopes, then we will have one useful quantum computer ten years from now. I think that’s the absolutely most optimistic timeline would could have on that. While like you say people are firing up power plants for bitcoin and cancelling out what meager gains we have made against greenhouse gas emissions right now, while the world is on fire.
So I’m sure we can have both in some version of the future. Hell, mine and trade it using He-3 fusion plants on the moon and I won’t even care whether crypto is processing intensive or not. Right now, though, we absolutely can’t. We are actively sacrificing so much of genuine value for something that even on paper only has value until Elon Musk tweets something dumb. It’s indefensible.
