Bitcoin makes the least sense of any of these schemes. Proof of work is just proof of sota ASIC ownership, which is just proof of stake by another name. Why not just use POS like everyone else and avoid dumping the carbon? Bitcoin is going to be one of those things in the history books that will seem utterly incomprehensibly irresponsible to future generations.

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earnesti 6 days ago | parent [-]

Bitcoin makes a lot of sense, if you don't want central banks to print your monies and devalue it. If you don't care about that, then it doesn't make sense for you. But really, the 21M cap is about only point that matters about BTC, the other features have to be there but are secondary.

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idiotsecant 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Nope, still no sense. There are plenty of crypto projects out there that are less centralized, don't dump entire countries worth of carbon into the air, and still manage to have the same logarithmic distribution that Bitcoin does.

BTC was a first draft that somehow metastisized into a literal meme virus that consumes a stupifying proportion of the world power supply.

It's idea cancer. The fact that it continues to exist is a sign of a faulty memetic immune system in our species.

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anthem2025 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Bitcoin makes a lot of sense if you’re a libertarian weirdo who thinks fiat currency is the worst thing ever.

It makes no sense in the real world.

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logicchains 6 days ago | parent [-]

The "real world" includes countries with double or even triple digit inflation, and if you live in such a country bitcoin absolutely makes sense.

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idiotsecant 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Phew seldom have I heard such a wrong thing. Bitcoin makes absolutely no sense as an actual transacting day to day third world currency because A) it is completely incapable of scaling to the task due to the projects allergy to sensible development hobbling it to 20 year old technology B) because of A, the transaction fees are many times the weekly salary or even yearly salary of those target users.

Bitcoin was an interesting idea. 20 years ago. It's entirely without merit now, but it will take decades to fade into obscurity, pumping out carbon the whole time.

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Zpalmtree 4 days ago | parent [-]

Current bitcoin fees are 17 cents. Not anywhere near weekly salary.

Regardless, they don't need to use bitcoin for their day to day transactions. Just somewhere to put their savings that won't be inflated away. USDC would make much more sense of course.

	▲	FireBeyond 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Half of the world's population lives on less than US$2.15 a day. You're right, nowhere near weekly salary. Just three transactions a day will only use up 25% of their earnings. > Just somewhere to put their savings that won't be inflated away. What fucking savings? And uhh, what are they doing, then, just making periodic conversions to fiat that is, as you point out, "inflated away"? You're trying to have it both ways, "crypto is immune to inflation problems, that's why it's important to a lot of the world", and then when someone points out transaction fees, "Oh, you wouldn't really use crypto daily, you'd still use that fiat with inflation problems, you'd just keep your "savings" in crypto". It is laughable how much fervor goes into these kind of statements that have had little to no critical thinking applied.

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idontwantthis 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Until a single tweet from Musk or Trump causes it to lose half its value.

	▲	logicchains 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Empirically speaking the Bitcoin price has always fully recovered within a year or two, while there's not a single instance of a highly inflationary fiat currency regaining its original value (which would entail significant deflation).
	▲	cindyllm 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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