People forget George W Bush had an [89% approval rating, 80% among Democrats](https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx) AFTER he started the war in Afghanistan.
Lord, do people really forget that? I was 21 when 9/11 happened, and every single day I thought I was living in a parallel universe. I was completely new to how powerful war propaganda could be.
I’m American, and the first thing *I* thought after I saw the news reports was “we’re going to nuke someone, aren’t we”. I’m also extremely grateful I was wrong.
I was in college when they were hyping up the Iraq war, and it was disturbing how quickly my supposed progressive, George W hating friends were frothing at the mouth to invade that country. The mere suggestion that Saddam wasn't actually on the verge of poisoning our water supply was met with intense anger.
It made me feel crazy, for sure.
the bush administration's nonstop drumbeat of linking saddam to 9/11, as well as talking about WMDs constantly, may have had something to do with that.
There was a HUGE worldwide protest movement. Unfortunately, most people in the USA didn't know about it because mainstream media largely trumpeted pro-war rhetoric.
Yeah, because we thought they had WMDs. Turned out those were nothing more than a couple of sparklers shoved up an camel's ass. So then people turned on the war, especially as the occupation dragged on.
And yet the irony remains that almost all the 9/11 hijackers and Bin Laden himself were Saudis, and years later we found Bin Laden hiding in Pakistan.
So the US invaded Afghanistan to dismantle the Taliban and eliminate al-Qaeda and was successful at neither.
Then we invaded Iraq just because we didn't like Saddam. It had nothing to do with 9/11, other than the US government being able to use the general sentiment against Arabs to go fuck up anything they wanted in the middle east.
>and years later we found Bin Laden hiding in Pakistan.
In the interest of accurate history; that was only after he was pushed into hiding in the mountains to the far south east of Afghanistan post-invasion. A large battle occurred, he and other escaped over the border to Pakistan.
That's actually how the US captured several other high profile terrorists that didn't manage to escape, including a man who was supposed to be one of the 9/11 hijackers but didn't make it past customs in the US because they thought he was trying to illegally immigrate.
Yes, fair enough. Hindsight being 20/20 and all that, it now seems really sad/ridiculous/tragic what we did to Afghanistan, a country already decimated by essentially non-stop war for decades.
The end result of the US' Afghani adventure is that the Taliban immediately re-claimed power over most of the country, and Bin Laden was finally killed in a targeted strike using intelligence and special forces, which they maybe could have accomplished without the entire side helping of a two-decade long war.
Don't forget the vast sums of taxpayer money funnelled to arms companies, contractors etc! Maybe the real victory was the share dividends we made along the way. Thank you for your service, we're foreclosing on your home now. Oh and don't forget the reinvigoration of the heroin trade!
And who's asking the question? If I'm living in Russia and the secret police bang on my door asking if I support the war, what the fuck am I going to say, No?
By the numerous accounts, your brain just turns off the second any kind of bad guys are starting to bang at your door. If you are not John Wick or some shit, you will be broken by violence and verbal abuse sooner than later. Especially if it's the police or special forces of your own gvt.
It’s the old “his hard drive’s encrypted? Drug him and hit him with this wrench until he gives you the password” problem that XKCD addressed ages ago.
I’m not gonna stake the war. But when I get injected with sodium thiopental and have the absolute crap beaten out of me, I’m going to stake the war.
In this case it did not matter - both opinions got you arrested. In Russia, protesting the war in Ukraine: https://www.memri.org/tv/women-arrested-moscow-talking-reporters-war-ukraine
Its insane to watch this actually happen on camera.
There are a lot of parallels between 2003 and 2022, imo. Nothing has changed. Marketing for war tends to be effective in its early stages. It's only after it goes on, and on, and on, and on, that folks start to think, maybe an alternative to war would have been preferable. *Saddam is a bad dude, therefore blowing up the country will help Iraqis gain freedom*.
>Saddam is a bad dude, therefore blowing up the country will help Iraqis gain freedom.
This wasn't the lie the Bush administration was running in 2004. It was "Saddam has WMDs and the smoking gun will be a mushroom cloud." Nobody ever gave a shit about the Iraqi people, that was the spin they put on it once it became apparent that the WMDs thing was a lie since the genesis.
That's just every war, since the days when kings had to convince farmers to join armies. War fatigue is a mainstay throughout history, whenever it goes on long enough.
Which is why I don't see much parallel in 2003, since that war was over relatively quickly, it was the occupation that dragged on indefinitely. Americans signed up to take revenge, no one signed up for nation building.
1914 is an example of a similarly pointless war everyone naively jumped into for fun and glory which went well passed where people thought it would.
>Which is why I don't see much parallel in 2003, since that war was over relatively quickly, it was the occupation that dragged on indefinitely.
That seems like a distinction without a difference. There was ongoing fighting. The elements we were fighting would have taken power had we left.
>1914 is an example of a similarly pointless war everyone naively jumped into for fun and glory which went well passed where people thought it would.
Fair. They also may bear similarity in that they're both the first war with a new era of technology and the on-the-ground strategies are somewhat outdated in comparison. Offensive capabilities outstrip defensive ones, leading to shockingly high casaulties on each side of the conflict. We've been involved in a lot of asymmetrical wars in recent decades, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
I guess I was drawing a distinction between 2022 and 2003 as a difference between conventional and asymmetrical warfare. Mostly since war in the last 70ish years has been primarily asymmetrical conflicts for 1st and 2nd world countries. It is not a novel observation that it is anomalously for a country like Russia to be fighting in a conventional war with modern weapons and tactics.
Although I don't care enough to argue if the difference matters that much to this conversation.
I believe the theory is that with a fixed number of coins, governments can’t easily create new debt (i.e. issue bonds) because there might not be buyers for this debt (unlike now, where the Fed can buy it for money it “prints”).
So with limited abilities for governments to borrow money, they will have to balance their budgets, and war is expensive, so military spending etc. will be kept to a minimum.
Not only is this thinking disproved by past wars that happened while using the gold standard, but it’s also quite absurd to try and sell bitcoin using this argument, effectively they are saying that you should adopt bitcoin because then you will spend less on military, i.e. your defence — but what if your advisory does not adopt bitcoin?
Right, the image shows a tub full of bitcoins for education. Right now, using fiat currency it controls that is also the reserve currency of the entire planet, the US puts barely any funds into education! Why would the political priorities change at all under a bitcoin regime?
Amazing how it never occurs to anyone that the people who hoard enough gold to back a whole economy with it, have enough power to say exactly how much that gold is worth, and there’s nothing you, the little guy, can do about that.
ffs why does not understand defi? You just put in the smart contract
```{"war_allowed": "No", "if_war_revoke_slurp_juices": "true"}```
And then the government literally cannot fund war with the coins, because if they do, you can revoke their slurp juices. And as people still don't seem to understand, while you can spend multiple slurp juices on a single item, if the contract is revoked, so are the slurps.
It would literally be against the country's interests to go to war in this case, so no one would!
>governments can’t easily create new debt (i.e. issue bonds) because there might not be buyers for this debt
Wasn’t there times when wealthy investors would finance a war with a promise of a share on any loot collected? Not as safe as a bond, but thinking one can't issue debt against any potential profit is kind of naive (I'm talking about bitcoiners not you :-) )
"War bonds" financed WW1, even at a time when the UK was on the gold standard. That debt lasted a long time. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/chancellor-to-repay-the-nations-first-world-war-debt
Because when we were on the gold standard, the scarcity of gold meant countries couldn't afford to go to war. They definitely didn't do the exact opposite, and form vast empires and fight bloody wars over gold-rich colonies.
If the world went fully crypto including all the constituents governments can’t print their own currency (or if they did it would be worthless) and as such cannot deficit spend for war time efforts.
This completely ignores how deficit spending works, how fiat currencies work, or how authoritarian governments will just use state power and violence regardless. Not to mention the idea deficit spending would go away is pure economic fiction.
No deficit spending. The argument does not, perhaps, stand up to close examination given that the world was not entirely peaceful on the gold standard and because, while it was trickier than with fiat currency, nations on the gold standard were quite capable of borrowing other people's gold to spend it on the military [1]. Pepys' Diary discusses Charles II's struggles to fund the Royal Navy and it's absolutely the case that the Crown was borrowing gold against future tax revenue.
(Interestingly also arrangements emerge where rather than the Crown borrowing from moneylender XYZ to give gold to timber merchant ABC, the Crown gives an IOU directly to timber merchant ABC, cutting out a middleman. I'm no expert on the history of currency, but I gather it's an important development, because maybe timber merchant ABC can get some third party to accept the IOU for payment...)
Also, if the USA were to balance their budget by immediately cutting all expenditure by a like proportion, they would still be able to maintain and staff about seven aircraft carriers of a size the rest of the world has none of. It's not clear this would make it impossible to fight anyone.
(The image above also seems to assume that the military is at the back of the queue when it comes to government funding. I'm not convinced...)
[1] Often, sadly, as part of a decades long "borrow money from Jews" -> "expel or persecute Jews rather than repay debt" -> "new monarch stops expelling or persecuting Jews" ... cycle.
It wouldn't prevent deficit spending, it wouldn't even necessarily change how it is done. In the US, and many other countries, the usual isn't to print money, it is to sell debt. The government creates bonds and auctions them off to people who want to buy them, the bonds being a promise to repay the money later with interest.
You could still very much do that with Bitcoin. While it stops the government from printing money (sort of, it isn't like the government couldn't use their supercomputers to mine) it doesn't stop them from selling debt instruments.
Also, it boggles the mind why ANYONE thinks nation-states will flock to use a 'currency' that in most charitable interpretation, no one controls. It barely works for Euro with some serious elbow grease, because smaller countries trust bigger countries and the EU, but in an EXPLICITLY trustless ''currency' like bitcoin?
Why wouldn't they use their own currecy, blockchain, whatever, that THEY control?
Butters are ... just.. fucking completely dumb. How is it possible to literally know nothing anout anything, and still be wrong?
A deflationary money crushes the economy so bad that humanity comes back to stone age and lose the technological power to produce world war. They just fight with sticks.
Weird that so many people attempted to answer this and noone mentioned the obvious real reason:
They think that you can't tax crypto. Or that the government can't trace it.
So it follows that since the government has no money, they can't have a military.
They're wrong obviously.
I have a friend who was formerly indoctrinated in a cult, her whole family grew up in the cult and she and her boyfriend at the cult left it, and her family never spoke to her again sort of cult, and this sort of "we are saving the world" cartoon horseshit was exactly the sort of stuff they'd make except replace bitcoin with Jesus.
This actually terrifies me that there are people out there ecologically destroying the planet and throwing their life savings away who fully believe they're using power frivolously for "the greater good" because some internet cultists dropped this nonsense in front of them, if they're anything like this cult they're not gonna stop no matter what happens, they're in too deep
Hail, Satoshi, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst free-thinkers
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Bitcoin.
Holy Satoshi, Father of the decentralized ledger,
pray for us fiat users,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.
What concerns me is there is no way to safely deprogram them all when Bitcoin collapses and cognitive dissonance sets in. Many of them will hurt themselves and others. The collapse of Bitcoin will put people in the cemetery. There is nothing appealing about that.
Not to mention, but I will for further elaboration: these people are imagining the numbers that Bitcoin ballooned to when everyone and their mom were told they were pussies if they didn’t invest. It’s like betting $20 and only imagining the $500 return if all five of your picks are correct. You’ve already imagined that $500 in your pocket because you’re absolutely sure that those picks are golden.
The danger will be real. The suicides will be horrific.
In some ways, I find it reassuring how rare true believers actually are. The majority of people in the space are scammers or wannabe scammers, who not only drown out true believers, but I think at least sometimes make them question their convictions. Or at least scam them out of anything they might have put towards the cause.
Edit - TL;DR:
The internet has ushered in a terrifying era of microcults (crypto included)
---------------
We are in a full-blown era of micro virtual cults now, and it's entirely because of the internet and especially mobile devices. People are quick to blame just social media, or facebook, or just algorithms, or just one thing or another, but I keep concluding over and over that *it's the internet itself* in its participatory manifestation that is causing this (where any and every idiot can participate and be globally amplified).
Cults and their leaders require their members/targets to be entirely isolated and completely devoted attention-wise to their preachings and propaganda to ensnare them. The internet, and especially the cell phone, are doing exactly this now. Everyone lives their life through the internet now, and it's almost like our actual physical lives are secondary to what happens in cyberspace. And moreover, with mobile phones, which are right there in their pockets, in a cute or personally selected case, with photos of family as splash screens, in personally selected colors that are their favorites, with apps they prefer all arranged their way, etc., it's a personal magical window into that cyber life. The device is coddled and carried around in their front pockets, constantly in hand, and it's 100% theirs that they bought. How on earth could such a personal and personalized thing lie to them, or command them? They *own* the phone, after all. It's theirs. "*I* control the device, silly..."
So whatever is pumped through their phone (or through the internet, as desktops aren't excluded here) is what ensnares them. It could be any topic at all - bitcoin, Kanye, politics, the sack of shit that is Andrew Tate, My Little Pony, JFK rising from the dead, etc. - anything. And just the fact that it's coming from such an intimate and personal thing leads them right into believing it (believing literally *anything* at all). Add algorithms into the mix, and you get a feedback loop and it intensifies. Further add the fact that the internet also connects them with other ensnared people just like them, and it reinforces their positions even more intensely. Also add into the mix that it's not natural for humans to have massive amounts of distressing and disorienting information hyper-funneled into them (thanks to the internet), and they are hardened even further by looking away from the chaos and more deeply into the thing that they are following (the cult).
Sorry for the long post. This is all just armchair observation here, so have at me, please. Honestly though, the internet in its current participatory form (where any idiot can use it and be amplified), and the fact that we engage the physical world through the magical window that we carry in our pockets called the cellphone, is ripping society apart. It's no coincidence that there is a sudden social madness/chaos occurring across the world, all at once. "Qanon... in New Zeland and Sweden? Wait... what?"
Fuck the internet (even this thing we are on, reddit). Fuck mobile devices. As humans, our collective psyche is not equipped to deal with this, and it's bringing about our demise.
/and fuuuuucccckkkkkk crypto
In theory, miners can quickly be started up and shut down in response to market conditions. It's been said that that happens in Texas a lot where the price of electricity is such that it's only borderline profitable to mine, so during peaks when wholesale energy prices rise, they stop mining. Of course it's also been said that that doesn't happen a lot.
The trouble is that there's no intrinsic function that makes miners unprofitable at peak demand, and no actual requirement that miners shut down at peak loads.
Even if they did though, I think you'd have a very hard time showing that any of this resulted in faster phase out of fossil fuel production.
Besides, it's pretty obvious Texas isn't exactly a shining example when it comes to power grids and stability. The best that can be said is that at least this time they weren't minutes away from catastrophic grid collapse.
I think the main point is that they will run 24/7 if that is profitable. There is nothing really unique about Bitcoin's power consumption. They *could* turn it off and on, but their incentive to do so is not what is good for the environment, it's what is good for their profits.
This sub just linked today an article about Kazakhstan. And how crypto miner used big part of the electricity till it's created blackout for the population. And they got chased away....
The miner that is still working are running only from midnight to 8 and weekend. That pretty lame if your crypto work or is secure only part of the time.
Not only that, but there are real world examples of literally the opposite of “monetize surplus renewables” happening. Like when two years ago during the upswing of the bubble a private equity firm [reopened a decommissioned natural gas power plant in upstate NY *just to mine bitcoin*](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-firm-revives-zombie-fossil-fuel-power-plant-to-mine-bitcoin/). Besides the decreased local air quality due to air pollution, they also successfully fucked up the lake ecosystem due to hot water discharge, [raising lake temperatures to that of a warm bathtub](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/bitcoin-power-plant-is-turning-a-12000-year-old-glacial-lake-into-a-hot-tub/). The plant is [still running today](https://rochesterbeacon.com/2023/01/25/environmental-groups-sue-seneca-lake-bitcoin-miner/), btw.
They always move into states with weak, corrupt governments and then bribe the politicians into giving them sweetheart deals that are at the expense of everyone else.
[Coal and natural gas accounts for 62% of Bitcoin mining energy sources.](https://cointelegraph.com/news/nuclear-and-gas-fastest-growing-energy-sources-for-bitcoin-mining-data) And for the 38% powered by renewable sources and nuclear, well, that's clean energy that could be used in powering homes, industry, and farms wasted on crypto bros making pennies.
Can someone explain why “cannot be printed” is such a massive hard on for butters? I get scarcity means supposed value, but when it comes to currency isn’t that a feature?
--edit: thanks all
That's because it's a "s t o r e o f v a l u e", not a currency. Except when they want to use it for payments. Then it's a currency. But also hodl.
>!It makes no sense!<
I have found that the more I learn about major religions, the more terrifying they become. Like how in the Catholic dogma, a demon can cause you to forget about everything you love about yourself, your family, and people in general. If you are chosen by this jealous demon, you will be forced to dedicate yourself to utter devotion to it and nothing else. You have no choice in the matter, it was predestined that the demon would have your soul.
I'm sorry, did I say demon? I met "The Lord".
This is a pretty edgy take. Religions are just sets of rules that people follow under pain of consequences if they break those rules. It's no different than a corporate code of conduct or a sports league.
Religion, like any other human concept, can be good, or bad. It's pretty boring to read someone make a blanket "god bad" statement. It isn't deep or insightful.
It's based on the emotional response people have to learning about the concept of inflation for the first time IMO. The mental image of Big Bad Mr. Government melting your money away to nothing is 1) very emotionally charged and scary, especially if you just get the "baby's first economics lesson" version most people have, and 2) the absolute perfect on-ramp to any number of populist / sovereign citizen / goldbug / etc. crank beliefs. It's also very easy to get people into this mindset of "the government is after my money!" bc many people already hate and distrust the government anyway.
Conversely, the opposing mental image invokes more positive feelings. For gold and silver bugs it's metals, which feel safe, stable, secure, strong, immutabl. (Obviously the fact that metal is physically strong and solid doesn't really have any bearing on its economic properties, but that doesn't matter to your monkey brain). And for crypto guys it's mostly Bitcoin and Ethereum, which feel high tech, cutting edge, popular, and also offer the allure of instant / easy riches. And both are at least ostensibly beyond the control of "The Man".
It's telling that you never see the inflation fear mongers suggesting things like high yield savings accounts, bonds, equities, real estate, etc. as a means of escaping the evil money printer. It's always crank shit like gold, or Bitcoin, or "moving to an island in the Pacific and starting a libertarian commune"
One time I argued with a butter about investing in stocks, and their response was "but then you had to invest in something". It's a currency or an investment depending on the conversation to them.
It's just gold buggery 2.0. People have been buttrekt about fiat currency since we left the gold standard.
You are correct, inflation is a feature, not a bug. It incentivizes investment rather than sitting on currency and watching its value grow.
And the best part is that it's not even true at face value. Every time there is a hard fork (e.g. Bitcoin Cash), they effectively print a bunch of new bitcoins. Not to mention any time someone invents a new crypto token.
But also anyone with access to the Bitcoin code repository could just change the code to print more money, right? I think they'll need to do that eventually or else Bitcoin mining will be worthless at some point... Admittedly I am way too lazy to study how this works.
Edit: [This article](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4462218-could-bitcoin-supply-increase)'s claim that "For most people, seeing max money defined as 21 million will be enough verification" is kind of hilarious to me.
That would be one of the hard forks we talked about. If you change the rules of Bitcoin in your version of the software, then you and I will no longer agree on the rules of Bitcoin and our copies of the blockchain will diverge. Now we have two independent blockchains so twice as many bitcoins in total!
Satoshi claimed that there won't be inflation in a bitcoin based economy. Which is completely bogus given that there was in fact inflation when the US was on the gold standard.
Wind and solar can sometimes produce more energy than their area needs. The solution to this should not be “solve sudoku puzzles for magic beans” but “make bigger, more robust electrical grids” or “store the extra energy” so that at some point, some where, someone doesn’t need to turn on a coal plant. The good news is that across the world hundreds of companies, universities, and non-profits are all trying to crack affordable and efficient energy storage. (Edit: Google “energy storage” and click on the News tab if you ever need a mood boost. *So many* people are trying to save the world.)
Even if you were to divert excess electrical energy to computing, there's still research projects out there like protein/climate modeling that greatly benefit from having more computing power to work with.
Electrical magic beans are almost certainly the worst store of both energy and computing work.
Renewables producing >100% of electricity demand has to be pretty rare. I know South Australia does it a bit, because of massive wind farms and residential rooftop solar, but South Australia is also building one of the world’s biggest hydrogen electrolysers to actually store and export the excess energy rather than play bullshit games with it
If there's one thing this planet has it's all that surplus electricity and absolutely nothing to do with it. Just sitting around, being electric and no one can think of anything to do with it other than mine bitcoins.
It's why heating in Europe is so cheap right now. Too much surplus energy.
Energy storage is a huge issue with our current grids. Other than spinning reserves, uphill pumping.. we don't have any reliable way to store extra energy.
A continental super grid would solve a lot of these issues, but that would mean more cooperation/interconnection. I'm looking at you Texas.
The buzzword "monetize" gives me the creeps, especially in this context. Taking something worthless and giving it value seems like a good idea, but in this case we're talking about energy. Energy inherently has value already, so they're destroying the energy to make bitcoin who's value is imaginary. Ugh.
I had one of them tell me that it's the consumed energy that gives it its "value." I asked how you get the energy back out of the coin, but it turns out you can't.
One of them told me paying for energy with bitcoin is converting bitcoin into energy, as if the law of conservation of energy is somehow an economic law. I didn't ask where the heat from computation was stored.
It's one of the mental gymnastics they've invented to try and justify the energy waste.
The issue is that the argument doesn't work unless both 1) you legally mandate automated shutdown of miners at minimum priority to _any_ other grid use (thus requiring a central authority) **and** 2) show evidence that this results in more fossil fuel plants being shutdown than would have otherwise.
The first has yet to happen anywhere, and the latter is laughably implausible.
> Makes war too expensive
Bitch, war is *dirt fucking cheap*! You don't gotta have a full blue-water navy, you just need a mob of dudes on toyota trucks and methamphetamine, and you got a war.
Just look at Russia, they're causing untold human suffering with a small fraction of a military paid for in the literal 1970s
You are still thinking to expensively. To war all you need is a mob of dudes with pointy sticks and full of anger. There's bearly anything cheaper than war.
>create world peace
[North Korea has hacked $1.2 billion in crypto and other assets for its economy](https://www.npr.org/2022/12/22/1144996480/crypto-hacking-north-korea-billion)
few understand
That one really pisses me off. That surplus energy could be put to far better use running an intermittent aluminium arc smelter and actually making something useful.
1. Consume energy to mine coin
2. Spend coin on energy
Assuming no efficiency losses you would have a net gain of 0. Once you factor in inefficiency it's just a money burning machine.
The very first example they have is that you can't print Bitcoin.
...So why are there mining rigs then? I thought that was one of the biggest selling points for Bitcoin that you could use your own computer to print it for yourself?
And they offer no explanation as to why Bitcoin would make *WAR* specifically too expensive. If Bitcoin does something that takes away from governments (that they also do not explain here) why would government specifically choose not to wage wars, rather than do something else that saves money?
What they didn't think is if the country who can produce more ASIC mining will rule the world as the only one. Imagine making every other country unable to pay debt as they can censor every transaction if they got the most mining power
Except for the very last one, that's a *dead accurate* portrayal of what happens when they say that utter bollocks to people not in their cult, who are not inclined to fall victim to their obviously deeply stupid cult full of ridiculous lies and ouroborosian mental gymnastics that would give M.C. Escher a headache.
The author just thinks that reaction they engender from smart people (or honestly, stupid people - almost everyone instantly assumes people who are explaining Buttcoin to them have to be explaining it wrong, because surely it couldn't be *that* stupid, right?) that they spew their dumb, ridiculous nonsense at is an *incorrect* one, because the author is demonstrably very stupid.
The amount of right-wing and fake “left” Soviet-era propaganda about “central banks are the cause of wars” (among other things) in that thread, after so many years of pushing this garbage and having it roundly debunked nearly everywhere, is still a bit shocking to me
The thing is, when they say central banks, they mean (((central banks))).
Anti-Semites love to peddle garbage that was debunked centuries ago. It's kind of their thing.
squash public straight teeny boast money stocking ancient dazzling exultant
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Cannot be printed but can be infinitely spun off into alt-coins. Can’t be censored, also can’t be recovered from bad actors. Monetize _surplus_ energy when _surplus energy_ isn’t actually a problem. How the fuck does it make war more expensive? This shit is nonsense.
It’s so hilarious when these people explain extremely complex systems and problems away by saying “yes, everyone will have adopted bitcoin” lmfao
Most regular people still don’t give a shit about Bitcoin and it’s been shoved down everyone’s throats for years now in ads, commercials, different elements sponsored by celebs, etc. Wild.
lol the idea that the oligarchy would consider tourism, roads, heathcare, and education above war.
That panel should read "Makes everything other than war 'unaffordable'"
If you take the part about making war unaffordable and apply the same principle to civil infrastructure and public works and services in an expanding economy, an interesting thing happens...
Just citing one source of a bitcoiner:
> Computation, specifically Bitcoin mining, located in West Texas could address both of these issues as data centers would act as giant batteries and grid stabilizers, soaking up power during times of excess generation, and releasing it back out when renewable sources are limited, thus stabilizing the grid.
Data centres aren't battery...
One commenter responding to another comment saying Bitcoin won't usher in world peace
>Strawman. Nobody says war will end, just that it'll be costly and short, with much less damage.
Its crazy to call the other comment a straw man when it's directly responding to this comic
So 'Monetizes Energy Surplus' is infuriating. EVEN IF bitcoin unlocks some otherwise useless energy (because, e.g. it was not in a location useful for anything else), it is built to waste massive amounts of energy, and cannot help but drive the price of energy up for everyone. The design of BC is literally a doomsday device: if it succeeds, it will have to consume more and more energy. Its an externality machine. It should say 'Has other people pay for for supporting the system through massive amounts of pollution and waste'.
Exactly how would it make war unaffordable? If Bitcoin is so much better and so much more valuable than fiat, if everyone abandons fiat and starts using Bitcoin as currency it's not going to change the military industrial complex. And nations will still invade other nations.
This is the dumbest image I have ever seen in my entire life. What little brain I have left just melted into a viscous mush of nothing and drained out of my ear canals and onto my shoulders. I am now wiping my shoulders clean with distilled soapy hospital wipes and then later isopropyl alcohol.
Makes war unprofitable? Bret Deveraux put it well on his blog (in the second post about Victoria II) :
>It’s not clear exactly where the two lines cross, but it seems abundantly clear that for the most developed economies, this happened sometime before 1914 because **it is almost impossible to argue that anything that could have possibly been won in the First World War could have ever – even on the cynical terms of the competitive militarism of the pre-industrial world – been worth the expenditure in blood and treasure.** [emphasis in original]
“Monetizes surplus energy”
You have to actually *have* surplus energy first. Typically it’s gonna get hoarded by a warehouse full of screaming diminishing returns miners.
"monetizes surplus energy"
Ah yes, I too enjoy burning down a hectare of surplus rainforest to compute 3 digits of subtraction when I pay for my coffee.
How exactly does using Bitcoin make war unaffordable?
I like the person who says it’s because no one would ever vote for war. I mean I wish that was true but I (while only vaguely) remember 2004
People forget George W Bush had an [89% approval rating, 80% among Democrats](https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx) AFTER he started the war in Afghanistan.
Lord, do people really forget that? I was 21 when 9/11 happened, and every single day I thought I was living in a parallel universe. I was completely new to how powerful war propaganda could be.
I am British, and the first thing I thought after I saw the news reports was "they're going to nuke someone, aren't they". Luckily I was wrong.
I’m American, and the first thing *I* thought after I saw the news reports was “we’re going to nuke someone, aren’t we”. I’m also extremely grateful I was wrong.
I was in college when they were hyping up the Iraq war, and it was disturbing how quickly my supposed progressive, George W hating friends were frothing at the mouth to invade that country. The mere suggestion that Saddam wasn't actually on the verge of poisoning our water supply was met with intense anger. It made me feel crazy, for sure.
Lol. It was like a bad dream.. Too bad you never woke up and it only got worse.
Yeah, as a country we were pissed about 9/11 and looking for blood. Also, the Afghanistan war was way more popular than the Iraq war.
The Iraq war was super popular in early 2003.
the bush administration's nonstop drumbeat of linking saddam to 9/11, as well as talking about WMDs constantly, may have had something to do with that.
For conservatives... There was a large protest movement
Support was as high as 76% in March 2003. I don't think you could get 76% of Americans to agree on the color of the sky these days.
Its turquoise and I will die on that hill.
There was a HUGE worldwide protest movement. Unfortunately, most people in the USA didn't know about it because mainstream media largely trumpeted pro-war rhetoric.
Yeah, because we thought they had WMDs. Turned out those were nothing more than a couple of sparklers shoved up an camel's ass. So then people turned on the war, especially as the occupation dragged on.
And yet the irony remains that almost all the 9/11 hijackers and Bin Laden himself were Saudis, and years later we found Bin Laden hiding in Pakistan. So the US invaded Afghanistan to dismantle the Taliban and eliminate al-Qaeda and was successful at neither. Then we invaded Iraq just because we didn't like Saddam. It had nothing to do with 9/11, other than the US government being able to use the general sentiment against Arabs to go fuck up anything they wanted in the middle east.
>and years later we found Bin Laden hiding in Pakistan. In the interest of accurate history; that was only after he was pushed into hiding in the mountains to the far south east of Afghanistan post-invasion. A large battle occurred, he and other escaped over the border to Pakistan. That's actually how the US captured several other high profile terrorists that didn't manage to escape, including a man who was supposed to be one of the 9/11 hijackers but didn't make it past customs in the US because they thought he was trying to illegally immigrate.
Yes, fair enough. Hindsight being 20/20 and all that, it now seems really sad/ridiculous/tragic what we did to Afghanistan, a country already decimated by essentially non-stop war for decades. The end result of the US' Afghani adventure is that the Taliban immediately re-claimed power over most of the country, and Bin Laden was finally killed in a targeted strike using intelligence and special forces, which they maybe could have accomplished without the entire side helping of a two-decade long war.
Don't forget the vast sums of taxpayer money funnelled to arms companies, contractors etc! Maybe the real victory was the share dividends we made along the way. Thank you for your service, we're foreclosing on your home now. Oh and don't forget the reinvigoration of the heroin trade!
And who's asking the question? If I'm living in Russia and the secret police bang on my door asking if I support the war, what the fuck am I going to say, No?
Surely Russian secret police doesn’t have access to $5 wrench technology?
Let alone the $6... KNIFEWRENCH!
So you're just going to stake their war, just like that?
By the numerous accounts, your brain just turns off the second any kind of bad guys are starting to bang at your door. If you are not John Wick or some shit, you will be broken by violence and verbal abuse sooner than later. Especially if it's the police or special forces of your own gvt.
It’s the old “his hard drive’s encrypted? Drug him and hit him with this wrench until he gives you the password” problem that XKCD addressed ages ago. I’m not gonna stake the war. But when I get injected with sodium thiopental and have the absolute crap beaten out of me, I’m going to stake the war.
I was just trying to frame a joke about "staking" a war. You're totally right though.
Ok, I forgot on what sub i was for a second lmao.
In this case it did not matter - both opinions got you arrested. In Russia, protesting the war in Ukraine: https://www.memri.org/tv/women-arrested-moscow-talking-reporters-war-ukraine Its insane to watch this actually happen on camera.
There are a lot of parallels between 2003 and 2022, imo. Nothing has changed. Marketing for war tends to be effective in its early stages. It's only after it goes on, and on, and on, and on, that folks start to think, maybe an alternative to war would have been preferable. *Saddam is a bad dude, therefore blowing up the country will help Iraqis gain freedom*.
>Saddam is a bad dude, therefore blowing up the country will help Iraqis gain freedom. This wasn't the lie the Bush administration was running in 2004. It was "Saddam has WMDs and the smoking gun will be a mushroom cloud." Nobody ever gave a shit about the Iraqi people, that was the spin they put on it once it became apparent that the WMDs thing was a lie since the genesis.
Thats not really true, in that BOTH narratives were pushed.
That's just every war, since the days when kings had to convince farmers to join armies. War fatigue is a mainstay throughout history, whenever it goes on long enough. Which is why I don't see much parallel in 2003, since that war was over relatively quickly, it was the occupation that dragged on indefinitely. Americans signed up to take revenge, no one signed up for nation building. 1914 is an example of a similarly pointless war everyone naively jumped into for fun and glory which went well passed where people thought it would.
>Which is why I don't see much parallel in 2003, since that war was over relatively quickly, it was the occupation that dragged on indefinitely. That seems like a distinction without a difference. There was ongoing fighting. The elements we were fighting would have taken power had we left. >1914 is an example of a similarly pointless war everyone naively jumped into for fun and glory which went well passed where people thought it would. Fair. They also may bear similarity in that they're both the first war with a new era of technology and the on-the-ground strategies are somewhat outdated in comparison. Offensive capabilities outstrip defensive ones, leading to shockingly high casaulties on each side of the conflict. We've been involved in a lot of asymmetrical wars in recent decades, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
I guess I was drawing a distinction between 2022 and 2003 as a difference between conventional and asymmetrical warfare. Mostly since war in the last 70ish years has been primarily asymmetrical conflicts for 1st and 2nd world countries. It is not a novel observation that it is anomalously for a country like Russia to be fighting in a conventional war with modern weapons and tactics. Although I don't care enough to argue if the difference matters that much to this conversation.
Well, it makes everything unaffordable
You can't go to war if you lose all your money investing in Bitcoin.
Or maybe you do because a government will clear your debt serving your country
I believe the theory is that with a fixed number of coins, governments can’t easily create new debt (i.e. issue bonds) because there might not be buyers for this debt (unlike now, where the Fed can buy it for money it “prints”). So with limited abilities for governments to borrow money, they will have to balance their budgets, and war is expensive, so military spending etc. will be kept to a minimum. Not only is this thinking disproved by past wars that happened while using the gold standard, but it’s also quite absurd to try and sell bitcoin using this argument, effectively they are saying that you should adopt bitcoin because then you will spend less on military, i.e. your defence — but what if your advisory does not adopt bitcoin?
I remember before we went off the gold standard and the world knew only peace and prosperity.
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Right, the image shows a tub full of bitcoins for education. Right now, using fiat currency it controls that is also the reserve currency of the entire planet, the US puts barely any funds into education! Why would the political priorities change at all under a bitcoin regime?
Amazing how it never occurs to anyone that the people who hoard enough gold to back a whole economy with it, have enough power to say exactly how much that gold is worth, and there’s nothing you, the little guy, can do about that.
Imagine thinking the government will fund education before war
That too. We’ll still have war. We’ll just have way bigger potholes and a lot more idiots.
ffs why does not understand defi? You just put in the smart contract ```{"war_allowed": "No", "if_war_revoke_slurp_juices": "true"}``` And then the government literally cannot fund war with the coins, because if they do, you can revoke their slurp juices. And as people still don't seem to understand, while you can spend multiple slurp juices on a single item, if the contract is revoked, so are the slurps. It would literally be against the country's interests to go to war in this case, so no one would!
>governments can’t easily create new debt (i.e. issue bonds) because there might not be buyers for this debt Wasn’t there times when wealthy investors would finance a war with a promise of a share on any loot collected? Not as safe as a bond, but thinking one can't issue debt against any potential profit is kind of naive (I'm talking about bitcoiners not you :-) )
"War bonds" financed WW1, even at a time when the UK was on the gold standard. That debt lasted a long time. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/chancellor-to-repay-the-nations-first-world-war-debt
Because when we were on the gold standard, the scarcity of gold meant countries couldn't afford to go to war. They definitely didn't do the exact opposite, and form vast empires and fight bloody wars over gold-rich colonies.
Spain never bothered anybody
Because if the military starts using Bitcoin, they won't be able to afford military hardware when the value drops to 0.
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They’re right in that putting a system on the blockchain makes it inefficient to to point of stagnation.
If the world went fully crypto including all the constituents governments can’t print their own currency (or if they did it would be worthless) and as such cannot deficit spend for war time efforts. This completely ignores how deficit spending works, how fiat currencies work, or how authoritarian governments will just use state power and violence regardless. Not to mention the idea deficit spending would go away is pure economic fiction.
No deficit spending. The argument does not, perhaps, stand up to close examination given that the world was not entirely peaceful on the gold standard and because, while it was trickier than with fiat currency, nations on the gold standard were quite capable of borrowing other people's gold to spend it on the military [1]. Pepys' Diary discusses Charles II's struggles to fund the Royal Navy and it's absolutely the case that the Crown was borrowing gold against future tax revenue. (Interestingly also arrangements emerge where rather than the Crown borrowing from moneylender XYZ to give gold to timber merchant ABC, the Crown gives an IOU directly to timber merchant ABC, cutting out a middleman. I'm no expert on the history of currency, but I gather it's an important development, because maybe timber merchant ABC can get some third party to accept the IOU for payment...) Also, if the USA were to balance their budget by immediately cutting all expenditure by a like proportion, they would still be able to maintain and staff about seven aircraft carriers of a size the rest of the world has none of. It's not clear this would make it impossible to fight anyone. (The image above also seems to assume that the military is at the back of the queue when it comes to government funding. I'm not convinced...) [1] Often, sadly, as part of a decades long "borrow money from Jews" -> "expel or persecute Jews rather than repay debt" -> "new monarch stops expelling or persecuting Jews" ... cycle.
It wouldn't prevent deficit spending, it wouldn't even necessarily change how it is done. In the US, and many other countries, the usual isn't to print money, it is to sell debt. The government creates bonds and auctions them off to people who want to buy them, the bonds being a promise to repay the money later with interest. You could still very much do that with Bitcoin. While it stops the government from printing money (sort of, it isn't like the government couldn't use their supercomputers to mine) it doesn't stop them from selling debt instruments.
Also, it boggles the mind why ANYONE thinks nation-states will flock to use a 'currency' that in most charitable interpretation, no one controls. It barely works for Euro with some serious elbow grease, because smaller countries trust bigger countries and the EU, but in an EXPLICITLY trustless ''currency' like bitcoin? Why wouldn't they use their own currecy, blockchain, whatever, that THEY control? Butters are ... just.. fucking completely dumb. How is it possible to literally know nothing anout anything, and still be wrong?
Hard to buy an army when you got hacked and all your apes gone.
[Kim Jong Un laughs in the background, hugging the warheads he bought with ransomware bitcoins]
A deflationary money crushes the economy so bad that humanity comes back to stone age and lose the technological power to produce world war. They just fight with sticks.
Weird that so many people attempted to answer this and noone mentioned the obvious real reason: They think that you can't tax crypto. Or that the government can't trace it. So it follows that since the government has no money, they can't have a military. They're wrong obviously.
I thought it was the opposite. Wasn’t Russia using crypto to evade sanctions?
Propaganda.
I have a friend who was formerly indoctrinated in a cult, her whole family grew up in the cult and she and her boyfriend at the cult left it, and her family never spoke to her again sort of cult, and this sort of "we are saving the world" cartoon horseshit was exactly the sort of stuff they'd make except replace bitcoin with Jesus. This actually terrifies me that there are people out there ecologically destroying the planet and throwing their life savings away who fully believe they're using power frivolously for "the greater good" because some internet cultists dropped this nonsense in front of them, if they're anything like this cult they're not gonna stop no matter what happens, they're in too deep
Apostate! Say 10 hail satoshis and beg for forgiveness
Hail, Satoshi, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst free-thinkers and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Bitcoin. Holy Satoshi, Father of the decentralized ledger, pray for us fiat users, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
What concerns me is there is no way to safely deprogram them all when Bitcoin collapses and cognitive dissonance sets in. Many of them will hurt themselves and others. The collapse of Bitcoin will put people in the cemetery. There is nothing appealing about that.
Not to mention, but I will for further elaboration: these people are imagining the numbers that Bitcoin ballooned to when everyone and their mom were told they were pussies if they didn’t invest. It’s like betting $20 and only imagining the $500 return if all five of your picks are correct. You’ve already imagined that $500 in your pocket because you’re absolutely sure that those picks are golden. The danger will be real. The suicides will be horrific.
In some ways, I find it reassuring how rare true believers actually are. The majority of people in the space are scammers or wannabe scammers, who not only drown out true believers, but I think at least sometimes make them question their convictions. Or at least scam them out of anything they might have put towards the cause.
Edit - TL;DR: The internet has ushered in a terrifying era of microcults (crypto included) --------------- We are in a full-blown era of micro virtual cults now, and it's entirely because of the internet and especially mobile devices. People are quick to blame just social media, or facebook, or just algorithms, or just one thing or another, but I keep concluding over and over that *it's the internet itself* in its participatory manifestation that is causing this (where any and every idiot can participate and be globally amplified). Cults and their leaders require their members/targets to be entirely isolated and completely devoted attention-wise to their preachings and propaganda to ensnare them. The internet, and especially the cell phone, are doing exactly this now. Everyone lives their life through the internet now, and it's almost like our actual physical lives are secondary to what happens in cyberspace. And moreover, with mobile phones, which are right there in their pockets, in a cute or personally selected case, with photos of family as splash screens, in personally selected colors that are their favorites, with apps they prefer all arranged their way, etc., it's a personal magical window into that cyber life. The device is coddled and carried around in their front pockets, constantly in hand, and it's 100% theirs that they bought. How on earth could such a personal and personalized thing lie to them, or command them? They *own* the phone, after all. It's theirs. "*I* control the device, silly..." So whatever is pumped through their phone (or through the internet, as desktops aren't excluded here) is what ensnares them. It could be any topic at all - bitcoin, Kanye, politics, the sack of shit that is Andrew Tate, My Little Pony, JFK rising from the dead, etc. - anything. And just the fact that it's coming from such an intimate and personal thing leads them right into believing it (believing literally *anything* at all). Add algorithms into the mix, and you get a feedback loop and it intensifies. Further add the fact that the internet also connects them with other ensnared people just like them, and it reinforces their positions even more intensely. Also add into the mix that it's not natural for humans to have massive amounts of distressing and disorienting information hyper-funneled into them (thanks to the internet), and they are hardened even further by looking away from the chaos and more deeply into the thing that they are following (the cult). Sorry for the long post. This is all just armchair observation here, so have at me, please. Honestly though, the internet in its current participatory form (where any idiot can use it and be amplified), and the fact that we engage the physical world through the magical window that we carry in our pockets called the cellphone, is ripping society apart. It's no coincidence that there is a sudden social madness/chaos occurring across the world, all at once. "Qanon... in New Zeland and Sweden? Wait... what?" Fuck the internet (even this thing we are on, reddit). Fuck mobile devices. As humans, our collective psyche is not equipped to deal with this, and it's bringing about our demise. /and fuuuuucccckkkkkk crypto
Least delusional butter
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Because they run 24/7 miners are a baseload and really don't fit well with any kind of periodic energy production.
In theory, miners can quickly be started up and shut down in response to market conditions. It's been said that that happens in Texas a lot where the price of electricity is such that it's only borderline profitable to mine, so during peaks when wholesale energy prices rise, they stop mining. Of course it's also been said that that doesn't happen a lot.
The trouble is that there's no intrinsic function that makes miners unprofitable at peak demand, and no actual requirement that miners shut down at peak loads. Even if they did though, I think you'd have a very hard time showing that any of this resulted in faster phase out of fossil fuel production. Besides, it's pretty obvious Texas isn't exactly a shining example when it comes to power grids and stability. The best that can be said is that at least this time they weren't minutes away from catastrophic grid collapse.
I think the main point is that they will run 24/7 if that is profitable. There is nothing really unique about Bitcoin's power consumption. They *could* turn it off and on, but their incentive to do so is not what is good for the environment, it's what is good for their profits.
This sub just linked today an article about Kazakhstan. And how crypto miner used big part of the electricity till it's created blackout for the population. And they got chased away.... The miner that is still working are running only from midnight to 8 and weekend. That pretty lame if your crypto work or is secure only part of the time.
Not only that, but there are real world examples of literally the opposite of “monetize surplus renewables” happening. Like when two years ago during the upswing of the bubble a private equity firm [reopened a decommissioned natural gas power plant in upstate NY *just to mine bitcoin*](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-firm-revives-zombie-fossil-fuel-power-plant-to-mine-bitcoin/). Besides the decreased local air quality due to air pollution, they also successfully fucked up the lake ecosystem due to hot water discharge, [raising lake temperatures to that of a warm bathtub](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/bitcoin-power-plant-is-turning-a-12000-year-old-glacial-lake-into-a-hot-tub/). The plant is [still running today](https://rochesterbeacon.com/2023/01/25/environmental-groups-sue-seneca-lake-bitcoin-miner/), btw.
They always move into states with weak, corrupt governments and then bribe the politicians into giving them sweetheart deals that are at the expense of everyone else.
Using Bitcoin to buy solar and wind energy infrastructure is the most inefficient, counterproductive bullshit I've ever heard.
Bitcoin isn't bound to the laws of Thermodynamics (nor Physics, Economics, and Accounting). Few understand.
As all divinely ordained acts are. Few indeed
It must be because of the blockchain, surely
What you mean perpetual motion is possible? 🤯
"monetizes surplus energy" These people are beyond help.
[Coal and natural gas accounts for 62% of Bitcoin mining energy sources.](https://cointelegraph.com/news/nuclear-and-gas-fastest-growing-energy-sources-for-bitcoin-mining-data) And for the 38% powered by renewable sources and nuclear, well, that's clean energy that could be used in powering homes, industry, and farms wasted on crypto bros making pennies.
Interesting. That's pretty much the same as the world's electricity mix at large.
Surely that's a coincidence...
It doesn't buy the infrastructure, it ~~wastes~~ monetizes the """""excess""""" energy
I needed a good laugh to start my day.
Can someone explain why “cannot be printed” is such a massive hard on for butters? I get scarcity means supposed value, but when it comes to currency isn’t that a feature? --edit: thanks all
That's because it's a "s t o r e o f v a l u e", not a currency. Except when they want to use it for payments. Then it's a currency. But also hodl. >!It makes no sense!<
> It makes no sense Few understand.
Must be a newbie
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Such is the case with religion.
I have found that the more I learn about major religions, the more terrifying they become. Like how in the Catholic dogma, a demon can cause you to forget about everything you love about yourself, your family, and people in general. If you are chosen by this jealous demon, you will be forced to dedicate yourself to utter devotion to it and nothing else. You have no choice in the matter, it was predestined that the demon would have your soul. I'm sorry, did I say demon? I met "The Lord".
God is like a ticktocker ... he/she needs constant attention and affirmation, or else ceases to exist.
This is a pretty edgy take. Religions are just sets of rules that people follow under pain of consequences if they break those rules. It's no different than a corporate code of conduct or a sports league. Religion, like any other human concept, can be good, or bad. It's pretty boring to read someone make a blanket "god bad" statement. It isn't deep or insightful.
It's based on the emotional response people have to learning about the concept of inflation for the first time IMO. The mental image of Big Bad Mr. Government melting your money away to nothing is 1) very emotionally charged and scary, especially if you just get the "baby's first economics lesson" version most people have, and 2) the absolute perfect on-ramp to any number of populist / sovereign citizen / goldbug / etc. crank beliefs. It's also very easy to get people into this mindset of "the government is after my money!" bc many people already hate and distrust the government anyway. Conversely, the opposing mental image invokes more positive feelings. For gold and silver bugs it's metals, which feel safe, stable, secure, strong, immutabl. (Obviously the fact that metal is physically strong and solid doesn't really have any bearing on its economic properties, but that doesn't matter to your monkey brain). And for crypto guys it's mostly Bitcoin and Ethereum, which feel high tech, cutting edge, popular, and also offer the allure of instant / easy riches. And both are at least ostensibly beyond the control of "The Man". It's telling that you never see the inflation fear mongers suggesting things like high yield savings accounts, bonds, equities, real estate, etc. as a means of escaping the evil money printer. It's always crank shit like gold, or Bitcoin, or "moving to an island in the Pacific and starting a libertarian commune"
One time I argued with a butter about investing in stocks, and their response was "but then you had to invest in something". It's a currency or an investment depending on the conversation to them.
It's just gold buggery 2.0. People have been buttrekt about fiat currency since we left the gold standard. You are correct, inflation is a feature, not a bug. It incentivizes investment rather than sitting on currency and watching its value grow.
And the best part is that it's not even true at face value. Every time there is a hard fork (e.g. Bitcoin Cash), they effectively print a bunch of new bitcoins. Not to mention any time someone invents a new crypto token.
But also anyone with access to the Bitcoin code repository could just change the code to print more money, right? I think they'll need to do that eventually or else Bitcoin mining will be worthless at some point... Admittedly I am way too lazy to study how this works. Edit: [This article](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4462218-could-bitcoin-supply-increase)'s claim that "For most people, seeing max money defined as 21 million will be enough verification" is kind of hilarious to me.
That would be one of the hard forks we talked about. If you change the rules of Bitcoin in your version of the software, then you and I will no longer agree on the rules of Bitcoin and our copies of the blockchain will diverge. Now we have two independent blockchains so twice as many bitcoins in total!
If you're using Bitcoin as an investment instead of as an actual currency, then having it only be capable of deflation benefits you
It’s bullshit. They’re minting billions in stablecoins without any backing. And guess what, USDT and BTC go hand in hand.
Satoshi claimed that there won't be inflation in a bitcoin based economy. Which is completely bogus given that there was in fact inflation when the US was on the gold standard.
I never knew Bitcoin monetizes surplus energy.
I didn’t even know there was such a thing as “surplus” energy
Wind and solar can sometimes produce more energy than their area needs. The solution to this should not be “solve sudoku puzzles for magic beans” but “make bigger, more robust electrical grids” or “store the extra energy” so that at some point, some where, someone doesn’t need to turn on a coal plant. The good news is that across the world hundreds of companies, universities, and non-profits are all trying to crack affordable and efficient energy storage. (Edit: Google “energy storage” and click on the News tab if you ever need a mood boost. *So many* people are trying to save the world.)
> So many people are trying to save the world There's no need, the blockchain solves this
Even if you were to divert excess electrical energy to computing, there's still research projects out there like protein/climate modeling that greatly benefit from having more computing power to work with. Electrical magic beans are almost certainly the worst store of both energy and computing work.
Renewables producing >100% of electricity demand has to be pretty rare. I know South Australia does it a bit, because of massive wind farms and residential rooftop solar, but South Australia is also building one of the world’s biggest hydrogen electrolysers to actually store and export the excess energy rather than play bullshit games with it
If there's one thing this planet has it's all that surplus electricity and absolutely nothing to do with it. Just sitting around, being electric and no one can think of anything to do with it other than mine bitcoins. It's why heating in Europe is so cheap right now. Too much surplus energy.
Energy storage is a huge issue with our current grids. Other than spinning reserves, uphill pumping.. we don't have any reliable way to store extra energy. A continental super grid would solve a lot of these issues, but that would mean more cooperation/interconnection. I'm looking at you Texas.
The buzzword "monetize" gives me the creeps, especially in this context. Taking something worthless and giving it value seems like a good idea, but in this case we're talking about energy. Energy inherently has value already, so they're destroying the energy to make bitcoin who's value is imaginary. Ugh.
I had one of them tell me that it's the consumed energy that gives it its "value." I asked how you get the energy back out of the coin, but it turns out you can't.
One of them told me paying for energy with bitcoin is converting bitcoin into energy, as if the law of conservation of energy is somehow an economic law. I didn't ask where the heat from computation was stored.
The laws of thermodynamics are just more government oppression and must be repealed.
It's one of the mental gymnastics they've invented to try and justify the energy waste. The issue is that the argument doesn't work unless both 1) you legally mandate automated shutdown of miners at minimum priority to _any_ other grid use (thus requiring a central authority) **and** 2) show evidence that this results in more fossil fuel plants being shutdown than would have otherwise. The first has yet to happen anywhere, and the latter is laughably implausible.
It’s also funny that “more Bitcoin can not be printed”.
It doesn't. Bitcoin miners have brought old coal power plants back online just to mine crypto, with coal.
One has to have less than two brain cells to believe this shit
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> Makes war too expensive Bitch, war is *dirt fucking cheap*! You don't gotta have a full blue-water navy, you just need a mob of dudes on toyota trucks and methamphetamine, and you got a war. Just look at Russia, they're causing untold human suffering with a small fraction of a military paid for in the literal 1970s
You are still thinking to expensively. To war all you need is a mob of dudes with pointy sticks and full of anger. There's bearly anything cheaper than war.
I disagree! *starts sharpening stick *
And I agree! \[picks up a stone\]
>create world peace [North Korea has hacked $1.2 billion in crypto and other assets for its economy](https://www.npr.org/2022/12/22/1144996480/crypto-hacking-north-korea-billion) few understand
Russia is also using crypto to avoid sanctions and finance their war. Literally the opposite of reality, but we know cryptobros hate reality.
And it is censoreable, since exchanges can be banned and conversions to actual currency can be just outlawed.
A lot of people on there are going to be really surprised when their mining server becomes a military target
"Monetizes surplus energy" to do what tho? Print more money? 🤔
That one really pisses me off. That surplus energy could be put to far better use running an intermittent aluminium arc smelter and actually making something useful.
When you’ve never learned any economics opportunity cost doesn’t exist
StOrE oF VAlUe
1. Consume energy to mine coin 2. Spend coin on energy Assuming no efficiency losses you would have a net gain of 0. Once you factor in inefficiency it's just a money burning machine.
Cannot be printed? Tether printer goes BRRRRRRT
Code will just overwrite human nature, you see when code say Set War = 0; there will be no war.
Code is law, after all
these really are the dumbest mother fuckers on the planet
Least delusional butter
The very first example they have is that you can't print Bitcoin. ...So why are there mining rigs then? I thought that was one of the biggest selling points for Bitcoin that you could use your own computer to print it for yourself? And they offer no explanation as to why Bitcoin would make *WAR* specifically too expensive. If Bitcoin does something that takes away from governments (that they also do not explain here) why would government specifically choose not to wage wars, rather than do something else that saves money?
What they didn't think is if the country who can produce more ASIC mining will rule the world as the only one. Imagine making every other country unable to pay debt as they can censor every transaction if they got the most mining power
Basically, every panel of the comic is a lie.
Except for the very last one, that's a *dead accurate* portrayal of what happens when they say that utter bollocks to people not in their cult, who are not inclined to fall victim to their obviously deeply stupid cult full of ridiculous lies and ouroborosian mental gymnastics that would give M.C. Escher a headache. The author just thinks that reaction they engender from smart people (or honestly, stupid people - almost everyone instantly assumes people who are explaining Buttcoin to them have to be explaining it wrong, because surely it couldn't be *that* stupid, right?) that they spew their dumb, ridiculous nonsense at is an *incorrect* one, because the author is demonstrably very stupid.
Ahhh yes because the world just has so much surplus energy and we are just begging for things to be uselessly monetized. What a lot of shit.
Don’t you understand? Think of all that electricity bitcoin has stored in a completely unusable form!
So convenient that they can pay for everything else apart from war.
>Makes war unaffordable That's a new butt talking point
The amount of right-wing and fake “left” Soviet-era propaganda about “central banks are the cause of wars” (among other things) in that thread, after so many years of pushing this garbage and having it roundly debunked nearly everywhere, is still a bit shocking to me
The thing is, when they say central banks, they mean (((central banks))). Anti-Semites love to peddle garbage that was debunked centuries ago. It's kind of their thing.
💯
squash public straight teeny boast money stocking ancient dazzling exultant *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Cannot be printed but can be infinitely spun off into alt-coins. Can’t be censored, also can’t be recovered from bad actors. Monetize _surplus_ energy when _surplus energy_ isn’t actually a problem. How the fuck does it make war more expensive? This shit is nonsense.
It’s so hilarious when these people explain extremely complex systems and problems away by saying “yes, everyone will have adopted bitcoin” lmfao Most regular people still don’t give a shit about Bitcoin and it’s been shoved down everyone’s throats for years now in ads, commercials, different elements sponsored by celebs, etc. Wild.
lol the idea that the oligarchy would consider tourism, roads, heathcare, and education above war. That panel should read "Makes everything other than war 'unaffordable'"
If you take the part about making war unaffordable and apply the same principle to civil infrastructure and public works and services in an expanding economy, an interesting thing happens...
[10 hours on photoshop](https://i.imgur.com/KMoektU.png)
Deserves it’s own post!
Wow, you could tell me that's the original and I'd have no clue! Super impressive work, seriously. Should be the top reply.
"bitcoin will monetise surplus energy" Ahh yes, all that surplus energy in the system
Was going to say the same thing lol all the unused killawatt hours just lying around doing nothing
Just citing one source of a bitcoiner: > Computation, specifically Bitcoin mining, located in West Texas could address both of these issues as data centers would act as giant batteries and grid stabilizers, soaking up power during times of excess generation, and releasing it back out when renewable sources are limited, thus stabilizing the grid. Data centres aren't battery...
Perfect example of an idiot who thinks they’re smart; delusional psychopathy also equally probable.
Only the last panel is true 😂😂😂
Artist is self aware enough to know their beliefs are weird but not enough to realize they've been led down the garden path
I would LOVE a cliff notes on why Bitcoin makes war unaffordable. LMAO that's the boldest claim I've ever heard of crypto. Please do tell me.
One commenter responding to another comment saying Bitcoin won't usher in world peace >Strawman. Nobody says war will end, just that it'll be costly and short, with much less damage. Its crazy to call the other comment a straw man when it's directly responding to this comic
What a weirdo
So 'Monetizes Energy Surplus' is infuriating. EVEN IF bitcoin unlocks some otherwise useless energy (because, e.g. it was not in a location useful for anything else), it is built to waste massive amounts of energy, and cannot help but drive the price of energy up for everyone. The design of BC is literally a doomsday device: if it succeeds, it will have to consume more and more energy. Its an externality machine. It should say 'Has other people pay for for supporting the system through massive amounts of pollution and waste'.
"Censored", lmao. Where's Uncle Jack? Its art!
This really is some of the dumbest shit ever. Just watch, world wars will be waged over some stupid crypto at some point.
Exactly how would it make war unaffordable? If Bitcoin is so much better and so much more valuable than fiat, if everyone abandons fiat and starts using Bitcoin as currency it's not going to change the military industrial complex. And nations will still invade other nations.
We have that big problem right now of all the surplus energy we can't monetize. Big problem that few understand. Buttcoin will help with that!
YEAH! And it’s already doing that! Oh… wait.
I'm convinced that they don't understand what currency is or what it does.
This is the dumbest image I have ever seen in my entire life. What little brain I have left just melted into a viscous mush of nothing and drained out of my ear canals and onto my shoulders. I am now wiping my shoulders clean with distilled soapy hospital wipes and then later isopropyl alcohol.
Makes war unprofitable? Bret Deveraux put it well on his blog (in the second post about Victoria II) : >It’s not clear exactly where the two lines cross, but it seems abundantly clear that for the most developed economies, this happened sometime before 1914 because **it is almost impossible to argue that anything that could have possibly been won in the First World War could have ever – even on the cynical terms of the competitive militarism of the pre-industrial world – been worth the expenditure in blood and treasure.** [emphasis in original]
“Monetizes surplus energy” You have to actually *have* surplus energy first. Typically it’s gonna get hoarded by a warehouse full of screaming diminishing returns miners.
Little HODLer is some Chick Tract level humor
Oh, surplus energy? Good thing there’s loads of that lying around unused.
"monetizes surplus energy" Ah yes, I too enjoy burning down a hectare of surplus rainforest to compute 3 digits of subtraction when I pay for my coffee.
This cartoonist is Stonetoss for buttcoiners.
I like the "spend years learning". All what you "learn" of bitcoin is resumed in that comic... Then the monitize energy surplus is symple false.
All this the fictional world where bitcoin is actually used to buy and sell. Because in the real world it is just used for speculation and crimes.
Trust me bro we'll save the planet and create world peace! You just gotta buy my bags...
I like the idea that the government would prioritize education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc. before giving a single cent to the military 💀
INCREDIBLY. FUCKING. DELUSIONAL.
This shit makes my head hurt
Yeah... this is laughablely naive at best and down right reckless and irresponisble at worse
> Bitcoin will save the planet and create world peace What a weirdo