Nice try, FBI

They issue “convertible notes”, which this coindesk article explains far better than I could because I am not a finance head and honestly do not fully understand them.

Alright, well in the spirit of you not thinking it’s a scam and merely listing why others may think it is, I guess I’ll respond to your compiled list.

the proof of work aspect encourages miners to keep adding more hash rate to the network so long as it is profitable to do so and not whether the network actually needs it. It takes crazy amounts of energy for simple transactions.

TL;DR I think this is a valid argument. But let’s break it down to really know what we’re saying. If you take the estimated global mining power of 175 TWh at an average 3,000 transactions per block, it works out to 1.1 MW/transaction. Which is a ton, easily arguable as far too much. The problem with this argument are IMO threefold, although they do amount to mere caveats:

1. It ignores sidechains like lightning, a federated network that handles the majority of small bitcoin transactions. Anecdotally speaking, most purchases of goods and services that I’ve ever made in bitcoin (Mostly software and game passes, a few coffees) have been via lightning. Potentially billions of lightning TXs can tether behind a single on-chain transaction. I do not believe lightning processes this level of volume today, but as it’s an immeasurable federated network it casts heavy doubt all power estimates. I would not be surprised if the ratio of side-chain to on-chain BTC transactions is already 100:1. Which is still too much power per tx but…
2. …The power argument gives a free pass to even more expensive proof of works that already exist, which are normalized enough to us that we do not think of them as the proof of works that they are. What is the single largest consumer of energy on the planet but an energetic protection of the value of the USD? There is a reason that the US military is several times larger than the next 9 world militaries combined, and it is not territorial expansion or defense. I’m not naive enough to think that a deflationary currency can stop a nation state from committing military violence on a mass scale so long as it wants to, but every time I hear that “proof of work is a waste” I get frustrated at what I see as misdirection.
3. Mining intensity plateaus over the long term due to several factors. Decreasing block rewards, regulatory catchup, and industry crowding put a cap on participation. The one and only force pushing back against these weights is increasing bitcoin value, which itself plateaus over time or at least S-curves off. When the price spikes, you are right that miners respond to the profit incentive by growing. But these spikes become less pronounced year over year, and with them the industry has already begun to level off. It’s growth is not exponential like some believe, and certainly not runaway.

Proof of stake algorithms (like Ether) is just a plot for the rich to get richer and favor early adopters who have more coins.

I agree with this. I feel that PoS breaks the holistic system that bitcoin’s whitepaper outlines. But Etherium is not Bitcoin, and I would not bother arguing for it’s sake.

It’s controlled by technology and not laws and can’t be fixed.

Just plain wrong. We have plenty of very strict laws that control software use. We can and should have laws surrounding bitcoin use, especially ones that pertain to steering the mining industry and taxation.

Someone stealing it is more likely to get away with it because it’s not like a company can just revert fraud.

Conditionally true. If the thief is in Russia or one of a handful of other nations that stand contrary to global financial regulation, then yes it would be relatively easy for them to get away with it. But outside of those jurisdictions it would be a matter of time before a motivated law enforcement agency tracked them down, as just about all on/off ramps are now regulated and value movement can be tracked along a chain of wallets - Including tumblers / mixers! - On the public ledger. Still conditional though, because the funds could be spent long before the thief is caught. This is one of the main reasons why I think multi-sig wallets are going to become the norm over the next decade.

it doesn’t hold value. Stocks do hold value because you own a portion of that company and if they don’t reinvest their profits you get dividends. Money does hold value because even in the absence of a gold standard we’ve been using it long enough that it’s so ingrained in everything and everyone agrees it has value. Money has value in that the massive amount of financial regulations surrounding it creates a more stable value. Not everyone agrees crypto has value. Crypto is hardly regulated. Crypto wildly fluctuates in price.

IMO this argument is completely vapid, and illustrative of my main gripe about the way that people criticize bitcoin. Bitcoin is money, all of the arguments made for “money” that you relay here can be made for bitcoin, and the fact that bitcoin is money is not a strength, it is the one single ACTUAL heavyweight criticism that can and should be leveled against bitcoin. But when it’s time to argue against bitcoin, all the leftists suddenly transform into liberals. Arguing against bitcoin from the position of defending money, rather than arguing against money, including bitcoin, on the basis that not only is bitcoin money but that it is accelerated, hyper-financialized, straight-into-your-veins money that intensifies all the typical immiseration of workers under capitalism! I can’t believe that people actually argue that “bitcoin isn’t money and that’s why it’s bad” instead of “bitcoin is the most money that ever did money and THAT is why it’s bad”! It eclipses any and all other criticisms, rational or otherwise, yet we fail to make that one argument.

it is often used in scams and makes it easier for scammers to be anonymous and lock down funds they steal.

Merh, I don’t find this argument compelling. I really don’t think that most scammers are anonymous or need to be. Most of the scams I see in the world are right out there in the open. The scammers successfully pushing their scams with their real faces. Crypto as a whole does attract scammers. But again, most of them have known names and addresses.

Anyway, since these aren’t necessarily all your arguments I’d be interested to see how your own opinions of them compare to mine. My fingers are sore, that was a lot of typing.

Oh, I completely forgot about that. Speaking out my ass. Thanks.

No, it’s your accusation. You tell me why you think this FOSS software protocol is a scam and if I don’t think your arguments hold water, I’ll tell you why. You’ve got a navigator avatar, dev in your username, and a programming home instance. I imagine you’re capable of educating yourself enough to make some sound arguments on the topic and a bit of factual contribution to the discussion.

People can all have different reasons for a thing and yet all still come to the wrong conclusion. Bitcoin just doesn’t meet the criteria for a scam. It’s one thing to not like or trust it for legitimate reasons. It’s another thing to denounce the thing you don’t like or trust with an invalid accusation.

There are definitely elements of this administration that want to see their particular shitcoin approved. We’ll see. It was quite the epic legal battle to even get bitcoin through that door. The SEC has rules for financial fundamentals that bitcoin legitimately met, which other coins would have a much harder time proving. But, this is the anything goes administration…

edit - See other user’s comment noting that actually Etherium was also approved for use as a security last year.

That is not what’s stopping people from paying for things in bitcoin. When you buy something in BTC you pay the equivalent to whatever you would have paid in the local fiat. And on the vendor side, merchant services often convert that paid BTC into fiat in the moment after the sale. Both parties are insulated from volatility in the context of the exchange. What actually keeps people from paying for day to day goods and services in BTC is Gresham’s Law, the observation that nobody wants to pay for purchases with an appreciating asset, so long as there’s also a depreciating asset they could pay with instead.

Bitcoin is the only crypto that has been approved by the SEC to be included in ETFs. So far.

It’s not a scam. It’s also not immune from valid criticism, but people who call it a scam don’t understand it well enough to make those criticisms.

Their value-add is that they financialize their bitcoin holdings to grow their bitcoin-backed shares faster than the bitcoin itself. Higher risk than just holding bitcoin or ETFs that just hold bitcoin, but something like 30-40% better returns.

In good times. We’re yet to see how they do in a bitcoin winter.

You can run plexserver as a service outside of docker. That’s how I ran it years ago, before I got comfortable with docker.

Excuse me but what did I write that’s misinformation? I wasn’t describing Taler, I was describing bitcoin / crypto. Nothing I said was incorrect, and I was correcting your own misinformation (Mind you it’s not your fault that you were misinformed and I don’t think you were doing so intentionally, it’s easy to pick up misinformation about unpopular subjects because people are more likely to take facts at face value).

Regarding mixers, I have a friend in US gov that says they’re not immune to targeted investigation. You can hide in them only until you catch institutional attention, wherein they have a big enough database of inputs and outputs to simply know who you are. However apparently Monero is truly a pain in their ass.

And saying “a ledger is public doesn’t protect it from illicit use” is kind of silly seeing as you can use any currency for illicit use if you want. What matters is if you can be caught, and its extremely easy to be caught doing something illicit if you do it with bitcoin as the transaction history is right there in front of the world.

The first claim is the most incorrect, as bitcoin is a single permanent public ledger where all transactions are verifiable by anyone, and on/off ramps are almost 100% regulated. I would argue that it’s actually the hardest currency with which to evade taxes, though in the early days where onramps didn’t do KYC and government wasn’t as aware of it, that would have been more true. Physical fiat or Monero (A crypto that anonymizes sender and receiver) are probably the easiest currencies with which to avoid taxes.

The third claim is conditionally incorrect. Bitcoin transactions all have a clear sender and receiver party. Though I figure maybe you refer to some kind of regulatory tax assignment, in which case that would happen outside of the protocol and is up to the local government to decide.

The second claim is just kind of … Hard to parse? I’m not sure what you mean by centralized exchanges. Exchanges of any type are almost always private entities that are themselves a centralized organization, and most currency exchanges process both fiat and crypto. Guessing I just need more context for this one.

Anyway, hopefully that had some new knowledge.

I’m not interested in defending bitcoin, but that is mostly misinformation. If you want to truly condemn bitcoin you should target it’s actual harm, the fact that it’s accelerated low-friction financialization of capitalist money, so therefore immiserates the working class faster than fiat. Come at it with the good old Marxist critiques of capital, because that’s all it really is. If you argue against it with flimsy falsifiable claims like you just did, a true believer will make you look like a fool.

We’re referring to decentralized management, not decentralized distribution. Fortunately I don’t think anyone in this thread is pretending that any kind of money is going to make the world better.

Yes I agree with this completely. Ethically-minded libertarian capitalists who have convinced themselves that bitcoin will neuter the ability of the state to commit violence are either fooling themselves or haven’t bothered to step back a bit to examine the nature of power. I was just pointing out that bitcoin does provide a way for a money to be managed in a decentralized and automated fashion. That’s the actual technological novelty that a blockchain enables, and IMO that is the only novelty is can or will provide. As all money does in capitalism though, yes it will continue top concentrate and cause harm.

Well then hell yea, it’s likely you won’t be coerced into it’s use. Though sticking to my original prediction, that means you won’t be the demographic it gets marketed to or pushed upon.

No.

Productive or intelligent for whose benefit? If it’s so that you can perform better under wage labor conditions, that’s coercion.