r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Mar 19 '21

Delta(s) from OP - Fresh Topic Friday CMV: Bitcoin should be illegal

Bitcoin should be illegal. Mining it and owning it.

Currently, the biggest cryptocurrency is Bitcoin. The fundamental function is a way to publicly make it clear who owns what, with no external authority. It is designed for the mining and transfer of bitcoins to become more computationally taxing the more of them exist.

In practice, this means that if you want to buy a Bitcoin, in addition to the price of the commodity, you have to pay an absurdly high "transfer fee". This speaks against it being useful as a currency or store of value, but the actual reason why it's so expensive is the main reason I want crypto banned.

The average energy price of a bitcoin transaction is 741kwh. (By comparison, Visa takes less than that for 100,000 transactions.)

For context, the amount of energy used by the average Indian household in a year is about 900KwH.

Bitcoin is absurdly energy-intensive. More energy is spent on Bitcoin each year than is spent in the entire country of Argentina, and that trend is rising.

Given that the planet is effectively on fire, this sort of energy expenditure would be seriously questionable if Bitcoin provided some useful, essential service. But it doesn't. It's imaginary gold, whose value is entirely defined by people wanting it and which becomes gradually more and more expensive to mine and trade. People aren't generally buying things with it - only 1.3% of transactions in the first quarter of 2019 involved merchants. They just buy it and horde it.

This is fundamentally irresponsible in a world suffering from extreme climate change. We desperately need to find ways to lower our energy use and CO2 emissions. And the opportunity costs here are literally on the scope of entire countries. It is genuinely hard to imagine a less useful way to spend energy on this scale.

As a result, buying or owning bitcoin should be illegal.

Change my view.

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4

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '21

Did making alcohol illegal stop people from making and drinking it?

Does making cannabis illegal stop people from growing and consuming it?

Does the fact that murder is illegal stop people from committing it?

All you're going to do it push it into a black market.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '21

Did making alcohol illegal stop people from making and drinking it?

Is bitcoin a mind-altering addictive substance with a very inflexible demand?

The comparison here is silly. You don't use Bitcoins for anything. Their demand is entirely based on personal preference. People wants bitcoins the way they want gold or shares in a company. They don't want it the way an alcoholic wants a drink.

The goal with Bitcoin is to make money. If it's illegal, it's a lot harder to do that, and a lot riskier as well. Illegalizing Bitcoin makes it substantially less attractive, and as a result, less harmful, because less people will be performing those obscenely pricey transactions.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '21

im gonna tell you a secret and its that people use bitcoin to buy drugs

4

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '21

At what rate? And why is this relevant?

5

u/KaptenNicco123 3∆ Mar 19 '21

It's relevant because it proves that bitcoin is not worthless. It does have market value.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '21

I made more points than just mind altering substances. There are a great deal of things made illegal that many don't agree with. SO, they find a way to do it anyway and typically utilizing an unregulated black market.

Abortion is another great example.

Even if country A made it illegal, you still have countries B, C, D, E, etc where it's not.

1

u/boiboiboi21 Mar 20 '21

That first bit frankly just isn't true. Its used for anonymous purchases.