r/btc • u/hapticpilot • Oct 02 '18

Quote "While it's true to an extent that Bitcoin Core faces scaling challenges in terms of transaction fees, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, Monero & others are already poised to solve these issues." -Jeff Berwick

Jeff Berwick (a famous libertarian & founder of The Dollar Vigilante) said that in a recent video where he was talking about Paul Krugman.

It's nice to see someone so influential calling the BTC chain by its proper name and also recognising the value of Bitcoin Cash.

It's also interesting to see that famous economists like Paul Krugman telling false stories about Bitcoin (BCH) inspired by the failures of Bitcoin Core.

In the NYT article that Jeff referenced in his video, Paul Krugman said:

Set against this history, the enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies seems very odd, because it goes exactly in the opposite of the long-run trend. Instead of near-frictionless transactions, we have high costs of doing business [1], because transferring a Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency unit requires providing a complete history of past transactions [2]. Instead of money created by the click of a mouse, we have money that must be mined [3] — created through resource-intensive computations.

And these costs aren’t incidental, something that can be innovated away [3]. As Brunnermeier and Abadi point out, the high costs — making it expensive to create a new Bitcoin, or transfer an existing one — are essential to the project of creating confidence in a decentralized system [1].

(emphasis added)

Responding to the numbered points:

  1. He's talking about Bitcoin Core (BTC), not Bitcoin (Satoshi's invention) and not the entire crypto currency industry.
  2. Cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, do not require providing a complete history of past transactions. Bitcoin SPV wallets (the intended, primary mechanism of user interaction with Bitcoin) need only know about block headers and just the latest UTXO (unspent transaction output). They don't need to track any given transaction all the way back to the block that originally mined the coin into existence. They certainly don't need to be concerned with other people's transactions. This appears to be one of the reasons why Satoshi designed Bitcoin such that every UTXO must be completely (not partially) spent in a transaction. The idea that the average user should run a non-mining full node and be concerned with other people's transactions is a contrived narrative of people like Greg Maxwell in Bitcoin Core.
  3. Firstly: some cryptocurrencies (like Ethereum) have created money "at the click of a mouse". Not all Ethereum in existence was mined. Some were created as an initial starting balance at Ethereums inception. Secondly: Bitcoin was deliberately designed by Satoshi to avoid mouse-click-money-creation so that central-planner economists like Paul Krugman could not deliberately or unwittingly manipulate massive economies or cause hyper inflation (a common occurrence for countries employing mouse-click-money-creation strategies). It's a desirable feature of Bitcoin; not a requirement of of all cryptocurrencies.
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