> How many do not die each year because of government?
I'd honestly like to see any kind of attempt to quantify that, I've seen a few for example that gave credit for removing lead from fuel to the government and then tried to by extension say that the positive externalities from that should be attributed to government. Which of course runs afoul of the point that the government was responsible for promoting leaded fuel to begin with, right up to the point of suppressing alternatives. Which in turn begs the question, what will the government actually do generally speaking? And as far as I can tell the answer is work in its own interests and accrue benefits to those on the inside at the expense of those on the outside, and that's all. If hundreds of millions die in the process, that's totally fine.
That almost everybody accepts that entity should have a monopoly on violence and basically unlimited power strikes me as increasingly crazy as every year goes by and it does progressively more insane stuff and we slide closer and closer to the possibility of an extinction level event war.
> Meanwhile bitcoins thirst for coal kills thousands per year and achieves literally nothing.
I'm not interested in defending BTC generally speaking, as I despise it. I should however point out that proof of work has no intrinsic "thirst for coal". Merely the lowest possible cost of energy, right up to the point of subsidising alternative renewable low cost energy projects, which many POW miners have done and why hydroelectric power is such an oft-constituted part of their energy supplies.
My point in the first half is that you can’t look solely at the costs without looking at the benefits - unless you evaluate both you can’t make a meaningful judgement on the efficacy of a system. Yes for sure the government is the largest source of death — but only because the government stamped out all other sources of death. Removing the government would shift that death to elsewhere and not remove it. And if history is anything to go by, dramatically amplify it. That’s why government needs to be iterated on not removed.
Re: renewables in bitcoin, it’s all greenwashing. Every kWh wasted guessing nonces on renewables isn’t spent decarbonizing the grid where we do actual productive things. While generating inordinate quantities of e-waste. I mentioned in another reply 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out, burned, crushed or buried all without ever mining a block successfully in its entire useful life.
I know there are other consensus mechanisms but they just rely on feudalistic control of the supply and just create systemic inequality without accountability.
There’s no good that comes of this. In basically every case decentralization and permissionlessness is not what anyone actually wants or needs.
> My point in the first half is that you can’t look solely at the costs without looking at the benefits
There is no benefit from a political authority wielding entity which has not been provided by an entity that does not wield political authority. Therefore the political authority is not necessary for those benefits.
> Removing the government would shift that death to elsewhere and not remove it.
Removing the hundreds of millions of people who were killed in the name of national security and the maintenance of political authority would not magically make them die for some other reason instead.
> That’s why government needs to be iterated on not removed.
Whether you call providing the benefits of typical governments without their horrendous costs an iteration or a removal is semantics. My concern is that it gets done.
> Every kWh wasted guessing nonces on renewables isn’t spent decarbonizing the grid where we do actual productive things.
This would assume that those energy forms restricted to specific geographic locations are not so restricted. This is not true.
> I mentioned in another reply 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out, burned, crushed or buried all without ever mining a block successfully in its entire useful life.
Most e-waste won't mine a block successfully in its entire life. If it could contribute to the peaceful destruction of the state, hard to imagine a better use it could've been put to, given the statistics.
> I know there are other consensus mechanisms but they just rely on feudalistic control of the supply and just create systemic inequality without accountability.
You mean like being born economically so deep underwater it's impossible to ever even break even because of the economic mismanagement of your political authority wielding organisational unit? At least ledgers using those consensus mechanisms only levy debt on people who choose to participate.
> There’s no good that comes of this. In basically every case decentralization and permissionlessness is not what anyone actually wants or needs.
It's clearly what a whole lot of people want, as to whether they need it or not, time will tell. For all the aforementioned reasons, I think the case couldn't be clearer that they do, however.
> Removing the hundreds of millions of people who were killed in the name of national security and the maintenance of political authority would not magically make them die for some other reason instead.
Citation needed. This institutionalized protection system is actually exactly how we got government in the first place.
But also, in the last 50 years, which hundreds of millions have died? If there's clear trajectory that deaths are decelerating, why are we now more than ever eager to overthrow the system?
> Whether you call providing the benefits of typical governments without their horrendous costs an iteration or a removal is semantics. My concern is that it gets done.
Again you only speak in terms of costs and refuse to speak to or quantify benefits. That's not an objective evaluation. It's like saying computers are bad because people get hacked, and therefore we should throw out computers and start over from the abacus. You must quantify the good and the bad to evaluate.
> You mean like being born economically so deep underwater it's impossible to ever even break even because of the economic mismanagement of your political authority wielding organisational unit? At least ledgers using those consensus mechanisms only levy debt on people who choose to participate.
I reject the former premise and the latter isn't a reason to participate in a distributed ledger system.
> It's clearly what a whole lot of people want, as to whether they need it or not, time will tell. For all the aforementioned reasons, I think the case couldn't be clearer that they do, however.
Respectfully disagree. The overwhelming majority of participants are just speculators. They couldn't care less so long as number go up. The overwhelming majority of holders bought on an exchange (off-chain) and never, ever transact. They may as well hold micro BTC futures.
> Citation needed. This institutionalized protection system is actually exactly how we got government in the first place.
I'm not even sure I understand your hypothesis here. In the absence of the organisational units that engage in the mass killing of their citizenry in order to sculpt their polities to the ideology which holds sway within their murderous structure, those people will still die because "reasons". Please expand on "reasons" here.
> But also, in the last 50 years
Nobody ever did anything wrong if you can arbitrarily timeslice it in order to make your case. And even there, if you look at the things done under colour of political authority in the past 50 years, you'd still be hard pressed to find a bigger villain on the planet. It just looks good in comparison to the preceding 50 years.
> Again you only speak in terms of costs and refuse to speak to or quantify benefits.
Because once again, no benefit provided under the banner of political authority has ever failed to be provided absent the banner of political authority. When the apparatus in question reduces to an entity that has a monopoly on force in order to compel people to engage in transactions that they otherwise would not of their own free will, it is hardly surprising that all of the good things that apparatus has ever provided might in fact be easily done by the free will of the participants in question.
> I reject the former premise and the latter isn't a reason to participate in a distributed ledger system.
You can reject it all you like, but you're wrong based on the mean economic output per capita vs their debt calculated at birth plus their lifetime cost. And that is indeed a reason to participate in a distributed ledger system, the former basically guarantees collapse, it is only a matter of time, therefore moving to a system not so afflicted of your own free will is access to an easy yield in the meantime.
> Respectfully disagree. The overwhelming majority of participants are just speculators.
The participants in question is not the reason I say it's clearly what a whole lot of people want, it's because of the amount of times the exact conversation we're having about destroying the state being the exact reason any given participant in the cryptosphere is there, including myself. There is indisputably a great degree of desire to do away with political authority.
> How many do not die each year because of government?
I'd honestly like to see any kind of attempt to quantify that, I've seen a few for example that gave credit for removing lead from fuel to the government and then tried to by extension say that the positive externalities from that should be attributed to government. Which of course runs afoul of the point that the government was responsible for promoting leaded fuel to begin with, right up to the point of suppressing alternatives. Which in turn begs the question, what will the government actually do generally speaking? And as far as I can tell the answer is work in its own interests and accrue benefits to those on the inside at the expense of those on the outside, and that's all. If hundreds of millions die in the process, that's totally fine.
That almost everybody accepts that entity should have a monopoly on violence and basically unlimited power strikes me as increasingly crazy as every year goes by and it does progressively more insane stuff and we slide closer and closer to the possibility of an extinction level event war.
> Meanwhile bitcoins thirst for coal kills thousands per year and achieves literally nothing.
I'm not interested in defending BTC generally speaking, as I despise it. I should however point out that proof of work has no intrinsic "thirst for coal". Merely the lowest possible cost of energy, right up to the point of subsidising alternative renewable low cost energy projects, which many POW miners have done and why hydroelectric power is such an oft-constituted part of their energy supplies.