> Bitcoin doesn’t use energy, bitcoin is energy

Or a little more precisely a bitcoin is a provable record that a significant quantity of free energy was once turned into heat. So it does use energy, in the creation and once it is created, that energy is wasted unless the created also needed to heat something.

energy would be wasted if it wasn't possible to prove the thing you said bitcoin proves. proof is the product of spent energy, therefore it's not wasted.

...which is a trivial result, and could be reproduced by simple trust (which is essentially free)

that’s the whole point - bitcoin manages to do that without trust. Trust is dangerous, we’ve been dealing with trust based financial system failures for hundreds of not thousands of years.

> that’s the whole point - bitcoin manages to do that without trust.

Well that's nonsense for a start.

Bitcoin simply shifts trust from a middleman to a vendor I am interacting with.

A middleman that is highly regulated, with all sorts of protections and restrictions in place to protect me.

A vendor who has a financial incentive to rip me off, and thousands of years of history to show us just how much they do when given the chance.

The trustlessness of cryptocurrencies is a lie. They move trust from a small number parties you can actually trust most of the time, to a huge number of unknown entities with perverse incentives.

nope, you're the one talking nonsense. when your bank tells you you have $100 on your account - it's a lie, all you have is a record in a database and never actual $100 in a safe to back that up.

all you have is trust that the bank will provide you $100 when you ask for it.

when you have 100BTC, you actually have 100BTC.

how is that hard to understand?

> nope, you're the one talking nonsense. when your bank tells you you have $100 on your account - it's a lie, all you have is a record in a database and never actual $100 in a safe to back that up.

Don't care.

> all you have is trust that the bank will provide you $100 when you ask for it.

Yup, turns out this trust is pretty good, it's backed up by all sorts of regulations and insurance, all sorts of protections and security, and in the last resort by the state.

> when you have 100BTC, you actually have 100BTC.

Who cares? When I have $100 in my wallet, I actually have $100.

You completely fail to address the point - when making a transaction, removing the bank from the picture actually hurts purchasers and demands far more trust.

> When I have $100 in my wallet, I actually have $100

yeah, tell that to Venezuelans.

> You completely fail to address the point - when making a transaction, removing the bank from the picture actually hurts purchasers and demands far more trust.

that wasn't actually the point, or at least was completely off target, but sure, i can address it - banks are providing some useful services, banks won't stop providing those services on top of cryptocurrencies, they will just have to face the reality that nobody is going to inflate them out of their financial screw ups.

and finally, if you're fine trusting politicians to run your financial system and regularly screw you up with inflation, financial meltdowns, bankruptcies, etc - i'm ok with your choice. just get off your high horse and don't claim nothing should be attempted to fix that by and for people who are fed up.

>yeah, tell that to Venezuelans

Or BTC hodlers who've seen an 80% crash, perhaps.

> banks are providing some useful services, banks won't stop providing those services on top of cryptocurrencies

Then they, and I, have no incentive to use cryptocurrency.

>finally, if you're fine trusting politicians to run your financial system and regularly screw you up with inflation, financial meltdowns, bankruptcies, etc

So far the current sytems in western democracies have outperformed any other system, ever. Further, having a centrally controlled currency is a good thing, yes, it allows monetary supply to be altered and manipulated to support the economy. Unlike, say, gold, which turned out to be a bad choice for a currency.

I'd far rather have monetary policy set by a government, or a quasi-independent entity like the Bank of England, than by some geeks and a bunch of miners.

> claim nothing should be attempted to fix ...

Your 'fix' doesn't actually fix anything and it makes a lot of things worse. That's why you get called on it.

> Or BTC hodlers who've seen an 80% crash, perhaps

zoom out, you're embarrassing yourself.

> Your 'fix' doesn't actually fix anything and it makes a lot of things worse. That's why you get called on it.

that's just like your opinion man. no reason to continue, time will prove who's right.

> zoom out, you're embarrassing yourself.

Not really, I'm not the one pointing at other currencies and how much they've dropped in value, that would be you.

and where exactly did i do that? will you provide a link to your claim?

Missed the 'vendor' part. Most folks dealing in bitcoin, don't trade a whole coin at a time (which is what, $20K?) They use an exchange. Which is the same as now, except without any federal safeguards. In fact bitcoin exchanges have infamously been hijacked and abscond with everybody's coins.

So where's the safety there? Its imaginary.

Not how it works.

You can trade any fraction of a coin with or without an exchange. Exchanges facilitate trading, but they aren't required.

And btc hasn't been 20k for over a year -- in fact it never got there as I recall. It's been trading around 3k for the last few months.

oh boy..

not your keys - not your bitcoin. that's the mantra in crypto world. you're just repeating nonsense you've heard somewhere.

whether exchange gets hacked is irrelevant to bitcoin i own if i'm the only owner of the keys.

not true for any money you're currently holding (if we judge from the position you're arguing for), those are completely imaginary indeed.

And the other 'whole point' is, its ridiculously expensive to the planet. Its playing mind-games with the ecosystem, burning terawatt-hours to enable imaginary points to be traded without imaginary safeguards.

Why do you say “imaginary points”? Do you consider your bank account balance to be “imaginary points”?

Of course they are just like religion, law, right and wrong and on and on. You can tell what is real, and what is all in Sapiens' heads - ask your dog. They know what real is.

The internet depends on politics and the military too. Don't be fooled.

oh yeah, they have so much control, they've totally fixed the problem of torrenting, child porn and illegal markets.

don't be naive, you can't block bitcoin any more than you can block porn.

besides, internet is no longer the only information transfer medium bitcoin can work over.

My miner dries my washing.

I don't think you understand what you think GP doesn't understand. Bitcoin uses energy to establish distributed consensus. What's technologically missing from the protocol is an energy-efficient way to establish distributed consensus, not a faster PoW algorithm.