Yes, which is why I didn't say anything about horses.
Opposition to cars, like opposition to bitcoin, isn't rustic ludditism. There are modern solutions to transportation that are superior to cars, like rail, frequent busses, and bike infrastructure, but lose out in funding and hype because they're not prestigious and utopian like cars are.
Likewise, Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction network technology can't solve, but it gets all the attention because it's flashy and new and utopian.
And if you think cars aren't utopian, tell me the last time you've seen an automobile ad that showed somebody being stuck in gridlocked traffic in the lincoln tunnel inhaling gas fumes for over half an hour. I will contend that there does not exist a single automobile advertisement that shows the average car owner's typical experience of driving, certainly never in an urban setting.
But do you think we ever could have gotten to electric cars if we hadn't used gas-powered cars as a stepping stone? I'd probably agree with you if you were to say that it's taken too long, but I'd argue that the crappy fuel-burning stuff is a necessary milestone on the transition to something better.
I see Bitcoin as the Model T of new currency models. Decentralization is the future of currency and contracts, even if Bitcoin itself is wasteful and inefficient as a v1 product.
The fact that cars burn gas is one of the least harmful parts of them. Electric cars are just as bad as any other car.
The real harm of cars is in how they forced cities to spread out, putting miles of asphalty moonscape between every destination, forcing people to spend thousands of dollars a year on vehicles that they shouldn't need, driving greenfill development that doesn't raise enough revenue to support itself, forcing cities to develop ever more automobile suburbs for the immediate revenue to fulfil their maintenance obligations on the old ones, going into massive debt to keep up appearances on what is effectively a ponzi scheme, not to mention the human cost of traffic violence.
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Decentralization is not an advantage for currency and contracts. The problems that decentralization "solves" were never problems in the first place.
Nobody was asking for a new way to store their money that doesn't have any identity verification besides a single digital key, which doesn't have the ability to dispute or undo transactions, and which takes multiple minutes to clear transactions.
To quote Kai Stinchcombe
> There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve that problem, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast. ...
> Nobody went out and did a survey about whether most credit card users would be willing to give up their frequent flyer miles in return for also losing the ability to dispute a transaction.
I didn't mean to get caught up on the specifics of electric cars vs. other technological innovations. I clarified a little more over here[1].
As for the decentralization aspect: I think a lot of people in countries outside of the US would disagree with you that trust is not a problem with the banking system. Not everyone out there can just get a credit card with 2% cashback that's backed by the rule of law I enjoy in the US.
I think you've also sidestepped the issue of inflation. Just because the American public hasn't yet learned that their money's value is being printed away doesn't mean that they're not going to be the ones feeling the hurt in 5-20 years, particularly if UBI et al don't keep pace with their decrease in purchasing power.
I saw another one of your comments allude to the idea that democracy is a solution to this, but I don't ascribe to the idea that we should shirk technology solutions because political ones might exist. In many cases, technological innovation drives demand for political action. I don't want to debate the merits of Uber as a company, but I think it's hard to ignore the idea that the introduction of car-hailing apps created demand for governments to completely rethink taxi monopolies.
Ultimately, I'm not trying to make a case for Bitcoin. I'm trying to make a case for the idea that the adoption of and furor around Bitcoin is going to significantly influence the vNext of our banking system, even if that just means e.g. that the near-instant clearing of large Bitcoin transactions is showing folks that ACH is garbage, or that T+1 stock settlement is achievable.
If you think that deflationary monetary policy is a good thing, you are welcome to vote for politicians who promise to implement it and convince everybody else to do likewise.
The reason monetary policy is inflationary is not because there's a shadowy cabal of evil people who want to make your money worthless. Inflationary monetary policy is necessary to incentivize commerce and investment.
If money increases value at rest, then everybody will just hoard it, which is exactly what happened during every deflationary period of American monetary history: the economy ground to a screeching halt because everybody with money to spare stopped spending.
I feel like the bitcoin speculation bubble has led enthusiasts to forget what currency is supposed to be for. No, the purpose of money is not to be a number on an account sheet that goes up and makes you happy.
What're you talking about?? Before payment options like Zelle were available, I regularly had trouble settling small debts with my friends. Then Ethereum came along and made it easy, cheap, and cool
Nowadays it's a lot easier to just use a bank-sponsored method, and cryptocurrency transactions have gotten pretty expensive, but there definitely was a use case that made me like cryptocurrency.
Venmo does not work without a bank account or Government Id.
Venmo does not make cross-border payments.
Venmo does not allow me to take a loan or to borrow money to anyone that has any kind of collateral.
Venmo can seize my funds.
Venmo (or Paypal, Stripe or any payment system) won't accept to work with me if I sell things that are perfectly legal but deemed risky.
Venmo (or Paypal, Stripe or any payment system) won't accept to work with me if I sell things that are perfectly legal but deemed immoral.
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Okay, I get that the standard crypto "enthusiast" keeps talking about it like it is going to replace everything and that therefore they will get in to become quadrillionaries.
That's a naive view. Crypto is important even if doesn't replace all of the existing institutions. It is important because it increases optionality. If a centralized system works for you, great. But for some people it doesn't, and these people still need a way to invest, save, make commerce, etc, etc, etc...
> But do you think we ever could have gotten to electric cars if we hadn't used gas-powered cars as a stepping stone?
That's probably not a good example, considering that electric cars predate gas powered cars. By the start of the 20th century, 40% of the cars in the US were steam powered, 38% electric, and 22% gasoline.
Yes, but do you think we would have reached the innovations and supply chain capabilities required to make modern electric cars if not for the supply chain build-out of trucks, the commutes of folks researching these technologies, etc.
And even if my specifics are wrong, my point is that some technology may be impossible to leapfrog because we build on the innovations and rollout of past technology in order to innovate further.
And again, you can debate that modern electric cars could have been more capable earlier if we had distributed more towards innovation than to rollout of old tech (e.g. would a carbon tax on gas cars 20 years ago that went towards battery research have accelerated us towards our current position more quickly?). But my uber-point is that gas cars were probably required for some period of the last century. Maybe even to make, like, internet, smartphones, and all kinds of stuff
I need to haul an old kitchen oven to my dad's house so he can cook dinner, since his failed. Dad lives deep in the mountains at the end of a dirt road, far from any train station.
I've got a 20 foot fishing boat sitting in my backyard. I want to take it out on the lake.
I'd like to visit my in-laws who live on a farm in a rural town without bus service, 200 miles away. The temperature is a few degrees above freezing and it's raining.
I can't use a car, either owned or rented. What superior transportation solutions exist that allow me to do them?
The question to ask, is why your dad and in-laws live so far away from civilization. Probably because cars make it convenient. No matter the weather (excepting extreme conditions) they are not far from any of the comforts of civilization and benefits of dense living. In a way, their relationship to density is parasitic… they receive a great deal (electrification, roads, security, plus many other benefits) and pay relative pittances. Even their votes tend to count for a great deal more than urban votes (which perhaps explains the large benefits they receive).
No-one's arguing for an outright ban on cars everywhere in all circumstances. I'm pretty extremist but all I want to see is an end to using public space for private car storage, zero-parking buildings as a norm where land costs warrant it, single-vehicle-width shared streets (Americans would probably perceive them as alleyways) as a norm in cities where land costs warrant it...
There are still genuine uses for cars, and I doubt OP would disagree. But in urban areas your example situations aren't relevant. The point is that cars are inefficient in most if not all urban cases.
The anti-car brigade's argument always hinges on assuming everyone lives in urban areas, and only has to go to urban areas. If you constrain the problem space that much, then yea, nobody needs cars. In the rest of the universe, they are indispensable.
The vast majority of trips in a car aren't for transportation of kitchen ovens to houses deep in the mountains at the end of a dirt road guarded by an eldritch Being.
It’s a huge luxury to be able to live like that and still have access to modern amenities. These people usually don’t appreciate how much their lifestyle is subsidized, largely because their votes can be worth 25-30x as much as an urban voter.
> And if you think cars aren't utopian, tell me the last time you've seen an automobile ad that showed somebody being stuck in gridlocked traffic in the lincoln tunnel inhaling gas fumes for over half an hour.
I don’t think this is as ubiquitous as is suggested here - there aren’t really any tunnels in a lot of places, and New York has one of the best park and ride systems around if you have to make that trip regularly and want to avoid this scenario on the daily.
> I will contend that there does not exist a single automobile advertisement that shows the average car owner's typical experience of driving, certainly never in an urban setting.
I think it all depends on where one lives and their lifestyle. There are plenty of places, urban or otherwise, in America at least, where the picture painted preceding this quote is not a regular experience for people. I would venture to suggest the urban traffic grind is probably not the experience for a large majority of people. A ton of people drive in rural or suburban areas and run local errands and things as is depicted in many car ads.
Overall, I understand the importance of alternative means of transportation, but cars are one of the most personally efficient modes to get from Point A to Point B directly.
> Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers; mass transit is less flexible. So they aren’t strictly superior.
Mass transit in much of the world is perfectly acceptable. You build cities around transit, walking and biking instead of giant chasms between buildings. This is not a problem that exists in Europe.
You don't have to get rid of all cars, just most of them. And the best way to start is by getting rid of free parking, which is a regressive tax on the poor.
> How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?
That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets. So long as wages keep pace with inflation, which they do, this is not an issue. In fact if you purchase your necessities on a credit card the 0% APR until your bill comes due makes inflation work for you.
Exactly, you purchase BTC instead of watching the value of your fiat drop every day. Apps like Celsius offer far superior APY than traditional savings accounts. Also, look at all the institutional BTC purchases near BTC ATH. Are they all wrong?
Literally anything you buy is 100% inflation resistant. Literally. Anything. Shoes, gum, dryer lint, stocks, real estate, crypto. Once you're not in fiat currency the only thing that matters is ROI, not inflation.
Anything offering you 15% APY for "no risk" is a great way for you to go bankrupt because obviously something hasn't been priced in. If the benchmark interest rate is 0% ask yourself why on earth you're getting 15%. If someone offers you something that seems too good to be true it absolutely is.
I'm actually known as quite an optimist when im not dealing with speculative manias :) I would caution you however that such replies aren't in the spirit of site rules. I suspect that is why so many of your comments are flagged and deleted.
I'm sorry you still think it's a speculative mania. Optimists don't go out of their way to put down things that are seemingly useful to others. Just because you don't find it useful doesn't mean it's useless. Bitcoin is a decentralized, non-state asset and the market is valuing it appropriately, and it will continue to do so.
What you seem to be saying is that the market participants are idiots and are in a state of mania, and that you somehow "know better" than them. This is equally bad, maybe HN rules should add this in too, because the condescension is tiresome.
I'm not sure why you felt the need to "caution" me about the way I write my posts on here and point me to the rules, but I'll have you know that the "fake points" I gained were a (large) order of magnitude greater than the "flagged" posts.
Optimists aren’t optimistic about everything haha, there’s very few optimists about global warming or oil consumption. Optimism isn’t blind support of technology no matter what evidence appears. It’s taking early signs and pushing good ideas forward.
Speculative mania doesn’t mean participants are idiots it just means they’re playing musical chairs, and once the music stops whoever’s left without a chair is left with nothing. And yeah some people get swept up through confirmation bias, seeing number go up and convincing themselves there’s something where nothing exists. Those will be the ones most likely left without a chair.
As for “knowing better” I have my theories which I back with evidence.
I’m not into keeping score here just saying net karma of 0 is not the objective per se, I’m pointing out your post was clearly not in the letter or spirit of the site rules, this isn’t Reddit.
It’s been 13 years now and even the most hardcore blockchain enthusiasts have been unable to point to a single measurable concrete thing achieved better with blockchain that a classical solution. Not one and no path in sight. Only number go up and money laundering? 13 years of time from some of the smartest most ambitious and optimistic folks in all of the tech world. And nothing.
This is ill informed and not in the spirit of HN. I don't even want to argue against this because you haven't done the bare minimum in terms of "research", speaking of confirmation bias, have you considered that you may be confirming your own biases by spouting things like "number go up and money laundering"? really? bitcoin is probably the worst way to launder money. You are yet another irrational critic.
>just buy assets
What?
You think like that everyone can JUST buy assets that is preposterous
Moreover and in regards to your arguments no the wages of lots of people do not go up with inflation like have you ever talked to anyone that isn’t in the software industry? Lots of jobs don’t do that and that set of people want to be saved against inflation if inflation is not a problem for you that is one thing but it sure is for a lot of people
> You think like that everyone can JUST buy assets that is preposterous
Who's "everyone" exactly? My comments are broadly speaking applicable to a US audience as I don't have sufficiently deep first-hand knowledge of other markets. If you don't have money, then you don't have anything to invest and it's not really a problem. If you do have money, you shouldn't have any trouble with services like Robinhood, Acorns, Betterment or Wealthfront.
In lower-income countries, a $20 fee may be as much as 10% of GDP per capita, and therefore totally unsuitable.
Do you challenge that assertion?
> Moreover and in regards to your arguments no the wages of lots of people do not go up with inflation like have you ever talked to anyone that isn’t in the software industry?
This is tracked by the BLS. [1]
> Lots of jobs don’t do that and that set of people want to be saved against inflation if inflation is not a problem for you that is one thing but it sure is for a lot of people
Which is why we need meaningful social policy changes, such as a $15 minimum wage and one that's indexed to inflation. Changing the currency to one that doesn't inflate will simply lead to a flat or reduction year over year in nominal wages. What matters isn't the units, it's how much of what they represent that people get to take home.
You need to make social policy changes, not monetary ones to achieve your goal. Your cause is noble but your target is off.
> So long as wages keep pace with inflation, which they do, this is not an issue.
Lots of workers don't get inflation adjustments to their wages. And even if they do, you'll still lose money because a larger share of your income will go to taxes unless the tax brackets are adjusted for inflation very frequently, which they're not.
> Mass transit in much of the world is perfectly acceptable.
Thats a good demonstration of ignoring the interests of everyone who doesn’t share your opinion, but it’s not how representative government is supposed to work.
> That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
Then you can go back to ignoring bitcoin.
> Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets.
Again, this is not an answer for the problem, and pretending it is just ignores the reality that billions of people live with every day.
> Thats a good demonstration of ignoring the interests of everyone who doesn’t share your opinion, but it’s not how representative government is supposed to work.
No, not really. Democracy relies on the idea of majority rule. Frameworks for ensuring minority rights aren't trampled on are created but for the most part it is in fact the needs of the many that take precedence. That is mass transit, not individual transit.
> Then you can go back to ignoring bitcoin.
I'm actually short CME Bitcoin futures from 56,000, so I'm paying a lot of attention. Don't wanna end up on the wrong side of that one, it's a spicy meatball!
> Again, this is not an answer for the problem, and pretending it is just ignores the reality that billions of people live with every day.
This assertion is completely unfounded. Generally folks who have no money spend all of their income on necessities as they receive it. Folks who have money have access to places to park it.
> Apparently the many disagree with you, and like their cars.
Many people were into CFC refrigerants. Many people are into coal. Many people are into fossil fuels. An idea that enjoys a lot of support isn't automatically a good idea. We need to be prepared to argue ideas on their merits without appealing to the status quo.
> You can keep pretending that things you don’t like don’t exist.
Well, I was referring specifically to the massive roadways between buildings devoid of value - in that American cities were designed around cars whereas European cities tended to be designed around walkers and horses. Public transit is also substantially better on the whole, and so is walkability and bikeability. I'm confident it's not perfect but I was trying to focus on concrete things.
>> How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?
> That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
The distributed ledger isn't even secure. Just look where the cheap electricity is, create a network partition and all the other transaction will vanish after the network partition doesn't exist anymore.
What makes you think you alone will find that cheap electricity, that is so much cheaper than anywhere else that it allows you to beat everyone else that is also mining?
>Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers
My e-cargo bike with a trailer can hold more stuff than my sedan ever could. Did an Ikea trip with it last year, carried home a filing cabinet, a desk frame, and a small table.
> mass transit is less flexible
frequent mass transit is plenty flexible. If a bus comes by your stop every 5 minutes, you never need to worry about planning.
> distributed
multi-node database. Done.
> resistant to inflation
Not something that sane people should want. Economies grow from commerce and reinvestment, not people jealously hogging every dollar they can find so that they can stash it under a bed to be used at higher value later.
> frequent mass transit is plenty flexible. If a bus comes by your stop every 5 minutes, you never need to worry about planning.
I never once missed my car when I lived in London. Pop along to the end of the street for a bus every 5-10 minutes, or just a little bit further away and I was at a tube station where I could be on a train within 10 minutes that took me right across London far faster than any car could.
The one or two occasions I needed a car, I could rent one, and still be better off than if I'd been paying the month-to-month expenses of keeping a car on the road (insurance, MOT etc.)
Car rentals are even easier these days than they were back then.
And deflation, where the value of your cash increases constantly if you do literally nothing with it, leads to good allocation of assets?
There have been two major periods of deflation in the history of the US dollar. 1930-1933, and 2007-2008. When the value of money increases, people don't spend it, they hoard it, commerce stops, and the economy grinds to a halt.
Just look at your beloved bitcoin, who is actually using it to buy and sell anything (besides illegal goods and money laundering)? The price is entirely propped up by speculation and fake Tethers, and because it is increasing, everyone who has any knows they would be a fool to use it, which is the whole point of currency.
What use is a deflationary distributed ledger to anyone? We've had 12 years of Bitcoin and no killer app for a reason. It's simply not a useful technology.
Let's see how easy this game is to play, now I only need to claim that any advantages you bring up are either irrelevant or not unique to PayPal. At least that's how every argument against Bitcoin usually goes.
A speculative store of value that everyone has coordinated upon is utility, and this has little to do with the quality of the underlying technology. The fact remains that I can pay merchants of varying degreees of shadiness in BTC much easier than I can send them a wire transfer. Now, you might not think this is good for the world, but it certainly is utility.
Because BTC is what they take. The coordination is more important than the tech. Granted, this is only because I don't patronize the super illegal Go To Jail Go Directly To Jail Do Not Pass Go type of merchants, but the point stands.
If you just need unfreezable funds and pseudonymity, not total cryptographically secured anonymity, you'll use Bitcoin instead of a dozen better methods (which are all crypto anyway, so wouldn't really count as a point against crypto, just BTC) because everyone else is using it.
So it's utility is for sketchy (but not too sketchy!) merchants in which a much cheaper wire transfer or free visa/mc payment would be unacceptable, but not illegal because it's a permanent public record of the transaction. Got it.
I mean, yes, they exist. And the public record is fine because you just create a new address for every transaction and cash out. Just because phone companies keep a record of who's calling who doesn't mean phones aren't useful for crime. You just use a burner phone in the full knowledge that the police can track you down, but won't because you're small fish doing minor crime.
To take one example, the global counterfeit brand market is worth trillions. They don't trade exclusively or even mainly in BTC (mostly you'd sell with physical cash), but they do use it for the reasons I mentioned above.
To be fair that argument could be made about any speculative asset. Art, classic cars, watches, etc. With btc currently the barrier to entry is lower. I can buy some satohis for a few bucks in hopes that they appreciate in value. I cant buy a piece of a Picasso or a Rolex. It is a speculative investment much like those, just one that has a wider audience.
For me its a speculative investment. For others your answer may vary. Doesn't really matter though, no one is buying it with an expectation that it wont appreciate so it can be a currency and a groundbreaking technology while still being a speculative investment.
It seems to me that it's a speculative investment for almost everyone, because the case for anything else is extraordinarily weak. And the case for it as a speculative investment is based on the other cases.
A single car lane can move 600-1600 people per hour while a two way bike lane of the same size can transport 7500 people per hour (https://nyc25x25.org/#report)
Proof of stake will give pervert the incentives of the network. It'll allow large stake holders to control the network, we don't want that. Proof of Work will ensure that nobody has control over the network and everyone is incentivized to participate honestly.
Unfortunately it requires one Argentina of power to do the work of a single raspberry pi, and I suggest environmentalists and the government won't look the other way indefinitely. Carbon pricing for instance makes the whole thing topple over.
bitcoin works just fine with any power source, not just conveniently located grid energy. you can mine bitcoin in a remote place and transmit the network data much more easily than you can transport/transmit energy. you could raise the price of fossil fuels by a factor of 1 million and crypto mining would be the least affected of any industry. so go right ahead and try it.
Is proof of waste not a suitable name? It's proof a huge quantity of resources were wasted on deriving some random garbage you can append to a piece of data to obtain a certain number of leading zeroes on a SHA lol. 600kWh per transaction. Horrifying.
I'm sorry, but how is you being "horrified" an objective measure of goodness? You described the process and just said it's horrifying, what do you expect me to respond with?
That may be the case for some car fanatics, but by and large the average person simply wants easy and flexible transportation. If public transportation were better, lots of people would opt to take the local train/bus/ride share because it would be a fraction of the cost, with ideally only slightly more friction as a passenger.
I really don't this this, I think the average person really wants a good reliable car. Cars are pretty nice to have. Travelled to an Airbnb 3 hours away with my dogs and kids last weekend. No way I could have done that in 3 hours with public transportation. Even if I took a train that allowed my pets, you still face the issue of the last mile or 5 from the terminal. There are also no crazy people in my car and I don't have to worry about someone sitting next to me coughing. If anything this pandemic has made me appreciate cars all the more so.
Without a car, everything transportation related has to be planned and weighed.
Coming from someone who grew up in a car culture city, learned to drive at 18, bought my first car at 19, and drove most days of the week... I'm much happier without a car. I don't want to have to own one again. In hindsight, car culture feels like a jail that I didn't realize I was born into.
I moved to Tokyo 5 years ago. If I want to get somewhere, I walk to one of three train stations within a 10 minute walk, hop on the train, and am there in – usually – about 30 minutes. There's always the option to take a taxi, but they're often no faster than train. I can still drive out to the mountains if there's no train to the one I want to climb, because there are more car rental shops within walking distance than there are train stations.
Sure, there are cars in this city. They're useful tools that make a lot of sense for many people to own. But the average person chooses to live without one, because in a city designed for people instead of cars, life can actually be better that way.
I am very possibly incorrect in my assumption and if so I apologize but it does sound like you don't have kids. For me the idea of having kids and not having a car is choosing to play a first world life on hard mode. I know there are a million other issues in the world but not having a car to move my kids / pets / groceries / hardware is just a complicating factor I dont want.
With that said, more power to those people that don't want or need one, life is all about what works for the individual.
For commuting to work, sure. But if you are going to get groceries for your family or buy anything large (furniture, TV, lumber, etc), it's very nice to use car.
Horses are well adapted to living in very cold weather. How do you think they survived in the wild? It’s only because we decided to close them inside that they need to have a cosy spot and blanket when they go out.
When they live outside, they get a thick coat, which is very good at isolation. Even if they get wet from rain, the water is repelled so it does not get to their skin. A good indication of this isolation is that snow will not immediately melt as it hits their fur.
The only thing they need is enough to eat, as they still expend more energy to keep warm.
Source: my SO and I have 2 horses at home and they live in the open all the time. Their only shelter is a small roof as an extension to the barn, so there’s a dry place for the food.
