The author repeatedly refers to Bitcoin as a "public good", "dependent" on a "volunteer-layer", like the crypto bros such as the article author are putting all their time and effort into running a public service for the greater benefit of society out of the goodness of their hearts with no expectation of profit. That is clearly the exact opposite of reality - they are trying to extract maximum personal profit in the shortest time irrespective of the damage they are doing to our society and environment.
javert 671 days ago [-]
Bitcoin people are not "crypto bros." Bitcoin people hate "crypto." You are conflating two opposing movements.
edit: but it turns out the article author is a crypto bro, not a bitcoin person.
jacobn 671 days ago [-]
A large fraction of the field of economics is about taking that tremendous force coming from the desire for personal gain (= greed if you will) and turning it into a public good (= the enormous abundance the markets have delivered) while avoiding some of the most egregious harms (= "externalization of costs, privatization of profits" = exploitation, pollution, overfishing, etc, etc).
What I believe OP is talking about is how the blockchain made it possible to incentivize people to mine, thereby delivering the service of the public good of the blockchain.
Sure, all of those individual points are of perhaps debatable value, but he acknowledges that while maybe mining or staking aren't quite it yet, the fundamental blockchain tech still enables decentralized coordination and the creation of a public good through private incentive.
Which is no small feat.
trevelyan 671 days ago [-]
The miners are certainly working for profit, yes.
The P2P network consists of volunteers who are not paid for running nodes, and whose contribution is basically guaranteeing open access to all of the data flows (confirmed and unconfirmed blocks and transactions) needed for other participants to join the network and participate on equal terms.
One of the major problems in the crypto space is that people attribute to "decentralization" the properties of openness that are actually there because of the volunteer (non-profit) provision of the open network from which miners/stakers are extracting their profits.
mattwilsonn888 671 days ago [-]
You misunderstand the meaning of volunteer in this context. It does not mean that the reason to run a full node is for "the greater benefit of society from the goodness of their hearts" (though the cost of running a Bitcoin full node is minuscule enough that many may do so according to those reasons), no - it means that full nodes are run unpaid for the good of the Bitcoin network; its actually crucial to the argument of the piece which your emotions distracted you from addressing.
But first your basic conception of Bitcoin will be addressed, since its all you opined on (why even respond if you aren't addressing the article?)
If Bitcoin only served miners it would not be around. Miners are paid indirectly by the rising price in Bitcoin, so those purchasing it are the ones who are setting that value - they are fully consenting to the simple and genius system for its economic and technological properties which they cannot get anywhere else. The Bitcoin system is very simple; if it was purely extractive as you claim people would not use it as a store of value and transaction layer. Considering large portions of users hold their coins through large price action, and have done so for the entire duration of its lifetime, they consider it useful beyond speculation. Who are you to tell them they are wrong in so few words? And if an invention is deemed valuable, why shouldn't it use energy?
And we haven't even gotten to the article yet, because you misunderstood the economic context for your preconception of a vocal subset of a community that the author is in disagreement with.
monkaiju 671 days ago [-]
Well said
randomhodler84 671 days ago [-]
No way, it is these things.
Do the maintainers of SMTP do so as a public good, eg: provide us with decentralized email systems?
Encryption protocols? ECMAscript?
Internet protocols are maintained as a public good. The Bitcoin developers are certainly not trying to extract profits, they are trying to deliver the world an open source monetary system.
kibibu 671 days ago [-]
Perhaps that's the core developers' goal.
What they are trying to deliver and what they are actually delivering are two wildly different things. They've built a platform that destroys the environment faster than the entire banking sector, enables scams and ponzi schemes at unprecedented scale and anonymity, meanwhile delivering a whopping transaction throughput of around 20/s - enough to support a few moderately busy supermarkets in a single small city.
randomhodler84 670 days ago [-]
With all due respect none of those things are true. I understand that you passionately believe them, but they are not true. You should try to understand how this works and why people would be interested.
kibibu 665 days ago [-]
It's very easy for you to check the TPS and power consumption of Bitcoin. If anything I've overestimated the transaction rate.
drcongo 670 days ago [-]
> What they are trying to deliver and what they are actually delivering are two wildly different things
That's precisely the point of the article isn't it?
javert 671 days ago [-]
The author doesn't seem to have much in common ideologically with most bitcoin people or to have a similar analysis of bitcoin to that of bitcoin people. So calling himself a "Keynesian bitcoiner" seems incorrect.
It seems that he disagrees with certain fundamental intellectual premises of bitcoin.
You don't get to call yourself a member of a movement if you fundamentally disagree with it. No; you're somebody criticizing it from the outside. That's fine, but don't conflate the two. You can't be an anti-bitcoin bitcoiner, an anti-left leftist, or an anti-Nazi Nazi.
hartator 671 days ago [-]
> “from each according to his ability, to the miners according to their hashpower”
Satoshi Nakamoto never said that.
nwatson 671 days ago [-]
It's probably just an attempt to twist Satoshi's organizing incentive into an existing economic axiom, should probably lead with "as if Satoshi had said ... <<...>>".
trevelyan 671 days ago [-]
It's paraphrasing Marx.
Satoshi did comment on the need for the network to provide a better incentive to P2P network nodes. He was well aware that a major class of essential nodes is expected to do work for free while miners are handed the profits from consensus operations.
mywaifuismeta 671 days ago [-]
What I really want to know is, why is this flagged? HN full of low quality BS semi-technical Medium articles, but once something about crypto comes up it gets flagged.
icefloe 671 days ago [-]
> "Bitcoiners are trying to create a public good (a non-excludable and non-rival data network) that is also self-sufficient (pays for its own provision)."
What is the economic benefit of Bitcoin, net of the environmental cost of powering its provision mechanism? If in the long term the cost of energy expenditure to generate a new coin surpasses its value, then society is in the red.
randomhodler84 671 days ago [-]
Bitcoin as a concept is philosophically opposed to the philosophy of Keynes. What is a Keynesian Bitcoiner anyway?
mattwilsonn888 671 days ago [-]
Maybe read it and you might find out.
obarthelemy 671 days ago [-]
Gist of the article: Bitcoin has issues because people are out for profit. Everything would be peachy if volunteers had control.
Goodluck with that. It's funny when a pro-X convinces you more that X is doomed.
mattwilsonn888 671 days ago [-]
That is not correct. It's more like the volunteer layer should have incentives to run well and the reason it can't scale is because it doesn't.
icefloe 671 days ago [-]
causality0 671 days ago [-]
I didn't think people still took Paul "The Bigger the Bubble the Better" Krugman seriously anymore.
throw0101a 671 days ago [-]
> I didn't think people still took Paul "The Bigger the Bubble the Better" Krugman seriously anymore.
"The Bigger the Bubble the Better" ? What is this in reference to?
diego_moita 671 days ago [-]
Oh yeah! We should definitively trust in random dudes posting on the internet instead.
You know, the kind that say that vaccines cause autism, global warming is a hoax, evolution is just a theory, Covid-19 is a scam by the globalists to better control people, ...
Wake up, sheeple!
/s
jjtheblunt 671 days ago [-]
I wondered if he was ever taken seriously, since he's so (narcissistically?) outlandish, then saw he's got a Nobel prize in economics. I must misunderstand something about him, clearly, or about the Nobel prize process.
agf 671 days ago [-]
What he won a Nobel for (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2008/kru...), and what he writes and speaks about in the non-academic realm, are very different. And I don't think the implied "successful people can't be outlandish" holds up, anyway :)
Ignore the Nobel prize for a moment and see his other accomplishments:
He is one of the most influential academic economists by number of citations, started a whole new field of Applied Economics (New Economic Geography).
His textbooks (including Econ 101 and International Economics, 12 editions since 1987!) sell very well, which must mean that they are well regarded by the professors that assign them.
In policy debates around the response to the Great Recession he revived the Liquidity Trap idea central to which was admitted as valid by the central banks and formulated a modern theoretic explanation for it (instead and in addition to the old IS-LM).
In his punditry at the New York Times and elsewhere he has represented the mainstream/orthodoxy of economic opinion. The liquidity trap was controversial initially, but it is well accepted now - by central banks, policymakers in governments and economists in the private sector.
If you think he is outlandish, you have to check your assumptions to what other academic economists think, and although it might different in style and presentation it will be the same.
He is hated intensely for his politics (he has a book called a "The Conscience of a liberal" and hasn't held back criticising people like George W. Bush, Trump and Putin) and by followers of heterodox economic schools and crypto-enthusiasts. It is your loss to ignore his insights.
jjtheblunt 671 days ago [-]
I don't ignore his insights. I just said he's outlandish : way outside the usual.
His NYT opinion articles are mainstream/orthodoxy according to what measure?
smaddox 671 days ago [-]
The "Nobel prize in economics" isn't a real Nobel prize. It wasn't funded by Nobel, and it isn't issued by the same committee.
throw0101a 671 days ago [-]
> The "Nobel prize in economics" isn't a real Nobel prize.
> It wasn't funded by Nobel, and it isn't issued by the same committee.
It is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences:
> Every year, the academy awards the Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, the Crafoord Prize, the Sjöberg Prize and several other awards. The Academy maintains close relations with foreign academies, learned societies and international scientific organizations and also promotes international scientific cooperation. The Academy of Sciences is located within the Stockholm region's Royal National City Park.
> Each September the Academy's Economics Prize Committee, which consists of five elected members [...]
> Some critics argue that the prestige of the Prize in Economics derives in part from its association with the Nobel Prizes, an association that has often been a source of controversy. Among them is the Swedish human rights lawyer Peter Nobel, a great-grandnephew of Ludvig Nobel. [...] saying that "There is nothing to indicate that he would have wanted such a prize", and that the association with the Nobel prizes is "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation".
At the same time, as an “economics topics worth reading about” detector it works pretty well as far as I can see. (Some of them will turn out to be rubbish a couple of decades later, but that’s experimental science for you.)
dctoedt 671 days ago [-]
Yes we do — he freely admits when he gets it wrong.
Rendered at 19:43:25 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
edit: but it turns out the article author is a crypto bro, not a bitcoin person.
What I believe OP is talking about is how the blockchain made it possible to incentivize people to mine, thereby delivering the service of the public good of the blockchain.
Sure, all of those individual points are of perhaps debatable value, but he acknowledges that while maybe mining or staking aren't quite it yet, the fundamental blockchain tech still enables decentralized coordination and the creation of a public good through private incentive.
Which is no small feat.
The P2P network consists of volunteers who are not paid for running nodes, and whose contribution is basically guaranteeing open access to all of the data flows (confirmed and unconfirmed blocks and transactions) needed for other participants to join the network and participate on equal terms.
One of the major problems in the crypto space is that people attribute to "decentralization" the properties of openness that are actually there because of the volunteer (non-profit) provision of the open network from which miners/stakers are extracting their profits.
But first your basic conception of Bitcoin will be addressed, since its all you opined on (why even respond if you aren't addressing the article?)
If Bitcoin only served miners it would not be around. Miners are paid indirectly by the rising price in Bitcoin, so those purchasing it are the ones who are setting that value - they are fully consenting to the simple and genius system for its economic and technological properties which they cannot get anywhere else. The Bitcoin system is very simple; if it was purely extractive as you claim people would not use it as a store of value and transaction layer. Considering large portions of users hold their coins through large price action, and have done so for the entire duration of its lifetime, they consider it useful beyond speculation. Who are you to tell them they are wrong in so few words? And if an invention is deemed valuable, why shouldn't it use energy?
And we haven't even gotten to the article yet, because you misunderstood the economic context for your preconception of a vocal subset of a community that the author is in disagreement with.
Do the maintainers of SMTP do so as a public good, eg: provide us with decentralized email systems? Encryption protocols? ECMAscript?
Internet protocols are maintained as a public good. The Bitcoin developers are certainly not trying to extract profits, they are trying to deliver the world an open source monetary system.
What they are trying to deliver and what they are actually delivering are two wildly different things. They've built a platform that destroys the environment faster than the entire banking sector, enables scams and ponzi schemes at unprecedented scale and anonymity, meanwhile delivering a whopping transaction throughput of around 20/s - enough to support a few moderately busy supermarkets in a single small city.
That's precisely the point of the article isn't it?
It seems that he disagrees with certain fundamental intellectual premises of bitcoin.
You don't get to call yourself a member of a movement if you fundamentally disagree with it. No; you're somebody criticizing it from the outside. That's fine, but don't conflate the two. You can't be an anti-bitcoin bitcoiner, an anti-left leftist, or an anti-Nazi Nazi.
Satoshi Nakamoto never said that.
Satoshi did comment on the need for the network to provide a better incentive to P2P network nodes. He was well aware that a major class of essential nodes is expected to do work for free while miners are handed the profits from consensus operations.
What is the economic benefit of Bitcoin, net of the environmental cost of powering its provision mechanism? If in the long term the cost of energy expenditure to generate a new coin surpasses its value, then society is in the red.
Goodluck with that. It's funny when a pro-X convinces you more that X is doomed.
"The Bigger the Bubble the Better" ? What is this in reference to?
You know, the kind that say that vaccines cause autism, global warming is a hoax, evolution is just a theory, Covid-19 is a scam by the globalists to better control people, ...
Wake up, sheeple!
/s
He is one of the most influential academic economists by number of citations, started a whole new field of Applied Economics (New Economic Geography).
His textbooks (including Econ 101 and International Economics, 12 editions since 1987!) sell very well, which must mean that they are well regarded by the professors that assign them.
In policy debates around the response to the Great Recession he revived the Liquidity Trap idea central to which was admitted as valid by the central banks and formulated a modern theoretic explanation for it (instead and in addition to the old IS-LM).
In his punditry at the New York Times and elsewhere he has represented the mainstream/orthodoxy of economic opinion. The liquidity trap was controversial initially, but it is well accepted now - by central banks, policymakers in governments and economists in the private sector.
If you think he is outlandish, you have to check your assumptions to what other academic economists think, and although it might different in style and presentation it will be the same.
He is hated intensely for his politics (he has a book called a "The Conscience of a liberal" and hasn't held back criticising people like George W. Bush, Trump and Putin) and by followers of heterodox economic schools and crypto-enthusiasts. It is your loss to ignore his insights.
His NYT opinion articles are mainstream/orthodoxy according to what measure?
The Nobel Prize people seem to think it is:
* https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/
> It wasn't funded by Nobel, and it isn't issued by the same committee.
It is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences:
> Every year, the academy awards the Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, the Crafoord Prize, the Sjöberg Prize and several other awards. The Academy maintains close relations with foreign academies, learned societies and international scientific organizations and also promotes international scientific cooperation. The Academy of Sciences is located within the Stockholm region's Royal National City Park.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Swedish_Academy_of_Scien...
* https://www.nobelprize.org/about/the-economic-sciences-prize...
The same folks who do physics and chemistry.
> Each September the Academy's Economics Prize Committee, which consists of five elected members [...]
> Some critics argue that the prestige of the Prize in Economics derives in part from its association with the Nobel Prizes, an association that has often been a source of controversy. Among them is the Swedish human rights lawyer Peter Nobel, a great-grandnephew of Ludvig Nobel. [...] saying that "There is nothing to indicate that he would have wanted such a prize", and that the association with the Nobel prizes is "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...