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Bank of International Settlements: Bitcoin is a Bubble, a Ponzi Scheme and an Environmental Disaster

posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 27 2018, @12:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the my-bubble-is-bigger-than-yours dept.

cafebabe writes:

As reported in the Evening Standard, the Bank of International Settlements published an annual report with four criteria to continue economic growth. However, it was rather overshadowed by a statement in the appendix (reported here, here, here, here, here and elsewhere) where cryptographic currency was described as a "combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster".

I agree and so does a Canadian electricity company.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 28 2018, @04:13AM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 28 2018, @04:13AM (#699653) Journal

    If you think that spending as much electricity as Austria and Iceland combined is "o.k." for entertainment

    As has been noted, entertainment consumes a lot more than that - which indicates the importance of entertainment.

    If a super-hero story "rift to another dimension" opened up outside Berlin and our crack scientists had to devote that much electrical power to keeping it from destroying the world, people would be screaming bloody murder about the disaster, how many billions of tons of CO2 are being released into the atmosphere to keep it from growing, etc.

    Well, I wouldn't be one of those people complaining about the mild side effects of saving the world.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 28 2018, @11:45AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday June 28 2018, @11:45AM (#699766)

    As has been noted, entertainment consumes a lot more than that - which indicates the importance of entertainment.

    At the moment, Cryptocurrencies appear to be consuming perhaps one order of magnitude less energy than streaming video entertainment... but the prime difference I see there is: streaming video entertainment has more or less reached market saturation, whereas cryptocurrency transactions are 5+ orders of magnitude short of current financial transactional volumes.

    There's also the "comparable alternative" view, where people sitting home streaming video are, on average, consuming less energy / emitting less CO2 than they would otherwise be if they were, for example, driving motorcars into the city for a night on the town. Here again, POW cryptocurrencies falls many orders of magnitude on the undesirable side of "comparable alternative" forms of transaction processing.

    In 2013, it was a trivial thing, experimental, investigational, interesting, worth exploring. At this point it needs serious examination before it grows another order of magnitude larger, and if past performance is any indication of future growth, that might not take more than a year or two.

    Freedom of choice: yes. Freedom to suffocate the biosphere because people enjoy speculation/gambling? A line needs to be drawn.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]