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Charlie Munger calls bitcoin 'disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization'
- Thread starter Chrome Hyena
- Start date
- News
I agree on that at least.
The financial systems the world runs off are massively, massively outdated. I believe anything that is a potential advantage of crypto currency could be done without it (and will), but it is also true that it isn't being done today.
Anything that pushes change and innovation in that regard is welcome, so long as the end result doesn't have the same negatives.
Currency holding value is an incorrect expectation. Mildly inflationary currency is a benefit and good design. You don't own currency you own assets. It does not "bleed you dry" you are fundamentally misunderstanding the purpose of currency.
Nice admission that your ideal currency would have crashed the entire planet into famine. The death toll from deflationary currencies would have been MASSIVE.
You keep confusing a store of value (which literally could be anything) with currency. Bitcoin is a store of value so are comic books baseball cards and NFTs and tons of random shit that people think has value. Means absolutely zero and can turn on a dime because it's connected to nothing. Currency is connected to a countries GDP.
crypto is not stable as a store of value or as a currency. It's HIGHLY speculative and several high up people in our current govt have said specifically crypto may not be legal in the futureand that at minimum it will be regulated.
the biggest mistake crypto fans make is assuming crypto has intrinsic value or thatit will always recover. That is not a thing. You could wake up tomorrow and lose half or all. It's tied to nothing. That's why it's so unstable and will always be unstable.
I've bought weed with USD but not bitcoin.
I fear the art market has made money laundering easier for far longer than bitcoin.
If you want to focus on decentralisation then a better analogy is that asking everyone to move to crypto is like telling everyone to buy a car instead of taking public transport. Similar resource and environmental implications too.
I appreciate that. I think one good way forward is to continue testing its efficacy, but urgently consider the risks of the energy greenhouse gas costs. There may be a way to mandate Bitcoin's PoW mining to green electricity production exclusively. There are many large corporations these days that are trying to achieve net-zero emissions, but they can keep improving here toward not just net-zero but zero exactly. I believe that is more achievable than the concept of across the board banning of the technology altogether - I just don't see how the world could feasibly do that.
I'm not a fan of any crypto that doesn't use PoW - I feel like the PoS, PoST, etc. alternatives introduce many of the same issues that Bitcoin intended to solve in the first place. I also don't think there's a need for any other crypto than simply improving the Bitcoin protocol and higher layer stack.
I don't think there's a realistic scenario where humanity overall decreases or even maintains its current electricity consumption. At the same time, I don't think electricity consumption itself is useful to criticize as the most terrible root-cause of climate change or ecological impacts. Accelerated efforts in reducing the emission-cost of electricity production is far more useful an endeavour, and in my view actually feasible and achievable in the short term even with the increasing adoption of energy intensive crypto mining. Be that some sort of combination of government policy, solar, wind, hydro, salt/nuclear, etc.
I just wish all those such as yourself suggesting that there is a path toward these potential advantages alternatives that Bitcoin is actively achieving (which I believe are not only necessary but urgently required), could put forth specifics on how. I said before I'm not a doom and gloom kind of person, but I'm also not happy or confident with the way the global financial system has worked toward that whatsoever - in fact I feel like it's accelerating toward the opposite. I'm all ears and fully willing to admit I could be brutally wrong here.
I can tell you as someone who works in the field of finance, there's a heavy resentment towards cryptocurrency from a lot of people in this industry just due to the sheer annoyance of being asked about it all the time by laypeople. I don't even tell people what I do anymore because if I do I know what coming: "Oh hey, should I buy Bitcoin? What do you think about it?" Every damn time it happens. It doesn't surprise me to see Charlie Munger give a very impolitic answer, he's trying to give a shareholder briefing about his business and he has to be asked about it. He's probably asked about it in every interview now.
Alright. So can you please define the purposes of currency that don't agree with my assessment? It would be more useful than just saying I'm misunderstanding. Help me, and others like me, to understand. Explain it.
Can you provide an example of a deflationary currency? I'm curious, because if that would be the result, surely there is data and examples that you can provide to prove your claim. I'm not saying you're wrong, but please at the very least show how you came to that conclusion.
I'm not confusing a store of value with currency. I explained my view of the difference between money and currency by first stating the best money would be the best store of value. Can you please explain how money not storing value best is beneficial to it's purpose? And then also explain how currency losing value over time is beneficial?
I think you are confusing crypto with Bitcoin and would appreciate if you could make the distinction going forward as it would be helpful considering I agree in most respects as it relates to non-Bitcoin cryptocurrencies/tokens, etc. My criticism is in particular with the "high up people" in government or otherwise in the first place. So I'm not sure using their opinions is a very useful counter argument, but if you could provide them I am willing to learn.
I don't agree that it is tied to nothing. It is tied to the verifiable security of its entire network and the volume of movement between itself and goods/services, etc. that it is being used to transact for them. You could wake up tomorrow and any fiat currency could be half as much. Inflation and hyperinflation are prime examples of exactly this occurring, far more often than people seem to keep suggesting. In what ways does the current global fiat system solve the issues that Bitcoin purports to solve better? You're not being specific enough in my opinion. Instability is tied to speculation and also the value of fiat itself (which I consider irrelevant over the long term).
I'll agree that over the short term during this "bootstrapping" process of adoption of new technology that instability seems to ring true, but over the "long" term of its own existence, the instability has trended upward +~200% YoY for 11.5 years now. It's being tested and it's working. How can anyone say with a straight face it is not? Everyone so far who has said what you're saying in the past has been wrong. Every single person claiming that has been proven wrong - so far. That's ignoring the alleged ethical or moral implications, but for the sake of the discussion let's be fair here. It's stored value better than any other asset, commodity or currency in history over its period of existence, and though it's somewhat instable trending toward that (for a variety of reasons I'm willing to go into in depth), it has trended upward that way nonetheless. To me, over that period, that's not only stable, but unprecedented and growing similar to any disruptive technology's adoption curves in history.
The use of cryptocurrencies to circumvent the financial limitations of oppressive governments or private companies is undeniably an advantage. But it's misleading to call this "democratisation", which implies a guaranteed and equal ability to have input on decision-making.
I'll be up front and say I'm not interested in a prolonged back and forth on this, so apologies if this does end up a few replies deep and I check out, but this post is a good example of how people can clearly have done a lot of reading and put together their thoughts coherently whilst also getting a bunch of fundamental stuff about money completely wrong, presumably because of a selection bias in sources. This is one of the reasons that almost no serious scholars of money, whether they're Marxist, Keynesian or even libertarians, are on board with many of the claims of cryptocurrency enthusiasts, because they often veer into "not even wrong" territory. A few points:
The distinction between money and currency is both less clear-cut and less useful than many believe. This is a longstanding issue; see this Goodhart paper for an overview of the Currency vs Banking schools. I'm not sure what meaning of "fractional reserve" you're using above but in general it is an erroneous concept.
There is no such thing as "economic energy" that can be stored. Money is always a social technology, dependent upon relations that flux and unfold over time. Every commodity money in history has collapsed. Fiat currency is not all speculative, which in a financial context refers to a purchase made with the intent to on-sell at a profit. But if you mean "speculative" in a broad sense, then you're sort of hitting on an important point, which is that some of money's functions, and decisions regarding it (see liquidity preference), relate to the fundamental/radical uncertainty that we all face of an unknowable future in a complex social system. No monetary technology can erase that.
Fiat currencies, with their flexibility, backstop-ability, nominal consistency and enforceability actually have a number of advantages in providing certainty in such a complex system, which is partly why they are one of, if not the most dominant social technology on the globe today. This is a state of affairs that I am far from uncritical of myself, for what it's worth. But the idea that a system where hoarded money always increases in value is somehow a corrective to the influence of the rich is completely off-base.
This especially. Who's going to back up bitcoins value? Fiat is so powerful because it has actual really value. the value of states and eventually their military. You don't want pay a chinese debt in yuan or american in usd? Good luck with that. And everything I've seen about people "accepting" bitcoin is that their doing it because it can be turned into USD as long as that true people will take it. when it can't be? nobody is going to take imaginary money that doesn't have legal backing or the backing of a real physical government who by law can force you to take back the debt in what ever currency it tell you.
It's all built on a libertarian idea that states aren't going to matter in the future. it's all going to be p2p libertarian imaginary nonsense.
Well crypto has a long road ahead of it, the US Dollar is the Number One choice for thieves, murderers, illegal activity and this is not just for USA as it's worldwide
This whataboutism argument completely falls apart with two seconds of thought about how cryptocurrency solves every problem criminals have trying to launder and hide US currency.
I don't want to ruin it for you but I still remember all these suicidal posts when bitcoin crashed in 2017.
Don't put in money you can't afford to lose & don't treat it as a short term/daily trading thing, if the people posting pink wojaks in 2017 just sucked it up & held, they would have quite a bit of cash right now.
Of course you can invest too much & hope to get a quick return in a few days, it's still honestly safer than any other form of gambling, Doge almost recovered to it's ATH for example.
This advice sounds like it's being given in regards to a commodity, not a currency.
these people made those disgusting amount of money by passing off the hot potatoes to the next chump. (and burning shitload of rainforest in the process)
Yeah, I really don't get it.
"Well, the most commonly used currency in the world was far more popular before this new, completely untraceable, currency popped up and provided a new, easier, way to money launder and hide transactions! That old currency is still the most commonly used! Ignore the fact that crypto is becoming more commonly used for those other things as time goes on."
this aspect of it bothers me from all of the coin enthusiasts. ive seen this weird narrative that these coins are going to solve or reduce a society's poverty but surely they have to know better. there will be some people in lower classes who make great money off of it - that's the case in many schemes and its important to the story of each project, whether its Herbalife or Luluroe or capitalism in general etc.
What I don't understand is how cryptocoins will not end up exclusively in the hands of very few. What makes this currency more likely to solve poverty than other money? How will it become more democratic? Is there a psychology in the crypto holder that makes them more likely to share?
I don't know how true it is but some tech guy on the news said Bitcoin isn't actually untraceable but perhaps he means cashing out and not just buying and selling.
And that's why we get all these crypto evangelists praising its virtues all the time. They want to rise in the pyramid and to do that they need to convince more people that crypto is the future and will make everyone rich. It is disgusting in so many ways.
and just like a house of cards, eventually they all come tumbling down.
It takes a serious level of cognitive dissonance on the devout crypto evangelist's part to on one hand argue crypto is better than fiat currency due to it being an unregulated money system with a theoretical higher resistance to inflation, yet at the same time ignore the fact crypto's current value is heavily derived by how much fiat you're able to get for it in an exchange.
Like what?
There were a couple of big bitcoin traders here in the Netherlands. Then the government tightened laws against money laundering. All the bitcoin traders closed up shop and moved abroad. This tells me all I need to know about the current state of bitcoin.
Yes, we plebs are.
I've made money on doge, bitcoin, and etherium.
That's the rub. Very little value is directly generated into cryptocurrency so it'snot far off a zero-sum game. The only thing potentially generating value in crypto at the moment is NFTs which are laughable in their own way.
The biggest problem with crypto as a currency, which no one will ever admit to, is the wild swings in value relative to every other currency. How is anyone supposed to be paid in it when the value of what they're given can change from day to day or even minute to minute.
Let's say I'm doing a job that pays 20 bitcoins an hour. Depending on the day I get paid I could either buy a yacht or not have enough to pay rent. And that could change the next day and again the day after that.
The value in fiat currency is that it generally has a steady value. Sure, inflation is a thing, but the dollar I found in an old jacket I haven't worn in ten years is still going to have the same purchasing power it did ten years ago. I can still buy a snicker's bar with it. The value of any individual cryptocurrency swings wildly from week to week, if I find an old bitcoin wallet from 2010 with 20 bitcoin in it I might be a millionaire today.
It's never been a currency, it's always been a commodity. Only it's a commodity that has no worth outside of the speculation surrounding it. Gold, silver, diamonds, I can turn all that into useful things. What can be done with crypto other than speculate on it's value? Hell, the stockmarket has more practical value than crypto because at least a company can get funding to do stuff through the sale of their own stock.
As a software engineer who unfortunately has to work with cryptocurrencies. Let me tell you the technology stack is a hot dumpster fire of burning shit.
God help us if this shit doesn't get shut down by governments.
I also need to further qualify. As a software engineer it is true that most things built on tech are actually a house of cards of shit spaghetti. But cryptocurrency tech is on a whole new level.
Luckily the technology will never garner the public support it seeks on a person by person basis because it is very user unfriendly and not at all intuitive to use. No regular person is going to understand what a wallet address is and how to properly secure it, what cold storage is, or why their funds don't show up immediately in their wallet, or what a satoshi or wei is or why they lost 0.00001 of it because it got "lost" in a transfer.
God help us if this shit doesn't get shut down by governments.
I also need to further qualify. As a software engineer it is true that most things built on tech are actually a house of cards of shit spaghetti. But cryptocurrency tech is on a whole new level.
Luckily the technology will never garner the public support it seeks on a person by person basis because it is very user unfriendly and not at all intuitive to use. No regular person is going to understand what a wallet address is and how to properly secure it, what cold storage is, or why their funds don't show up immediately in their wallet, or what a satoshi or wei is or why they lost 0.00001 of it because it got "lost" in a transfer.
Nah I fully agree with them.
Crypto is some of the most cynical and insidious late capitalism bullshit, contributing more and more to the acceleration of climate change for the benefit of few dipshits in well-off countries, beneficial to scammers and other more unsavory sorts and is not even that more useful as actual fucking money. It mostly benefits a select few to the detriments of millions.
I don't care that crypto peeps want to vibe, The negatives around cryptocurrencies and its subsections is well documented, and to happily oblige in it means you just do not care, and will be judged for it. My only wish is that it gets so heavily regulated into oblivion
This is where I am. I don't even like to discuss it or see people promoting it because it makes me feel even more hopeless about the future of humanity than I already do.
It's such a blatant, naked manifestation of human greed and short-term thinking that has already gotten us to where we are in the climate crisis. Crypto generating extra emissions on such a scale is the last thing the planet needs right now.
Anyone who promotes it is implicitly saying they don't give a fuck about the future of humanity or the environment. It's so depressing.
The whole idea about an immutable database already sounds idiotic to me as a dev. Sure, immutability is nice when writing code, but there should always be a backup option to fix stuff. What if illegal content ends up a chain? Or think about European privacy laws, where companies have to remove customer data when they request it?
Only someone very ignorant, in a first world country with no real problems doesn't see the value blockchains can add to the world.
Lmao, now I remember why I don't post on this forum anymore. What an absolute bizarre thing to say.
Also, just because Bitcoin made blockchain as a concept more well known, that in no way means that because it uses the technology that it makes it a good thing. Blockchain by itself has value, using it a justification for a pyramid scheme is not one of them.
I dont care what you think of cryptocurrencies as they are. But saying that cryptocurrencies provided 0 value to humanity is just wrong.
I'm sure he's crying into the 12bn profit he made in the last quarter
I said 0 positive value, they sure bring a lot of negative value.