Quote from: JorgeStolfi on February 26, 2015, 08:23:31 PM

Does not translate. The replacement of barter by money transactions hugely improved the flow of goods and services, by breaking down complicated multi-party trasactions into independent two-party steps, that could be widely separated in time and space.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, has not yet brought any significant contributions to commerce. The benefits of bitcoin are, at best, the saving of a few percent in the price of international payments. That is counted as a benefit, because otherwise the payment of those extra fees would have meant waste of work by bank staffers, for services that (allegedly) were not really necessary. All those saved fees together may barely add up to 10 million dollars.

The losses caused by bitcoin include, first, all the wealth consumed by the "bitcoin phenomenon": the bitcoin mining equipment and electrical energy used by miners, all the time spent by bitcoiners looking at charts, trading bitcoins, and watching Antonopulos videos, all the time and equipment and electricity consumed by bitcoin companies, all the time spent by non-bitcoiners listening to bitcoiners and trying to understand the thing. We should also add all the losses and hardships suffered by victims of bitcoin thefts, scams, and collapse of bitcoin companies. Even if we discount from the latter the losses of wealthy people (which, a communist might argue, were just cases of thief stealing from thief), we can easily get to a billion dollars of damages.

1) the bitcoin mining equipment = do the mining companies and their suppliers and their employees burn the money they earn?

2) and electrical energy used by miners = do the energy companies burn the money they earn?

3) all the time spent by bitcoiners looking at charts, trading bitcoins = do websites and exchanges and traders burn the money they earn?

4)and watching Antonopulos videos = does you tube burn the money they earn from ad revenues (a tiny bit of which come from admittedly a very few btc videos in the grand scheme) or the people that make the videos? or the video cameras?