Worth saying clearly before the usual dismissals start.
For anyone who hasn't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/K-oX9mWYXNA
Keen isn't Schiff and he doesn't have a predictable agenda. He's a complexity theorist who built dynamic models of the economy and called 2008 before almost anyone in his profession did, so his argument deserves a serious answer rather than ridicule.
His case is straightforward. Bitcoin's security model requires proof-of-work to be expensive, because it has to cost more to attack the network than to defend it, and that means sustained, large-scale energy consumption. His contention is that climate policy will eventually make that politically untenable.
The difficulty is that he's treating Bitcoin's energy use as though it were a fixed quantity, and it isn't. When energy becomes expensive or heavily regulated, miners operating on thin margins leave the network, hash rate falls, and the difficulty adjustment mechanism recalibrates automatically. The network reaches a new equilibrium at lower energy consumption, which is a straightforward consequence of how the protocol is designed, not a theoretical possibility.
There's a second thing his argument doesn't account for. The renewable energy transition he's pointing to as the threat is simultaneously generating vast quantities of stranded power, meaning electricity produced at times or in locations where it simply cannot reach the grid, and miners are already the natural buyer of that energy. The same policy environment Keen believes will strangle Bitcoin is, through a different pathway, providing it with some of its cheapest and most abundant fuel.
Keen has precisely the analytical background needed to understand Bitcoin properly, particularly feedback loops, non-linear dynamics and complex adaptive systems, and the frustrating thing is that he's applied those tools to the wrong model of what Bitcoin actually is.
I've been working through this in some depth in a book published this month, The Satoshi Strategy, which applies System Dynamics formally to Bitcoin's economic architecture. Interested to hear whether anyone here has a formulation of the energy argument that actually survives this kind of analysis.
(My book available in paperbook and ebook: https://www.amazon.com/Satoshi-Strategy-Bitcoin-Dynamics-Architecture/dp/B0GXSTGYTB/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0
Steve Keen just went viral saying Bitcoin goes to zero. He predicted 2008 and he's no fool. But he's got this wrong.
byu/ChrisBattle2000 inBitcoin
Posted by ChrisBattle2000
9 Comments
Who?
>Keen has precisely the analytical background needed to understand Bitcoin properly, particularly feedback loops, non-linear dynamics and complex adaptive systems, and the frustrating thing is that he’s applied those tools to the wrong model of what Bitcoin actually is.
LMAO
Anyways, who?
Bot post
Boomer says: “Bitcoin is finished”
Ok. And now he needs to get in line with all the other thousands of other “inflencuer” boomers who also said it. Adios boomer!👋
Keen is a doomer predicting the collapse and destruction of everything.
He’s also predicting there will be world famine in 3 months because of the Iran war.
Random nobody trying to look smart by telling the world will end, that has predicted 76 out of the last 3 black swan events.
His option about bitcoin holds zero weight. It’s a waste of power and data to click on a link and read it.
So has Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.Just because someone is accomplished at something doesn’t mean they can be counted on to better understand something that is not in their purview.
Keen has also been predicting the collapse of the Australian property market since the beginning of time….
Bitcoin only goes to zero if quantum computers get enough qubits before Bitcoin implements quantum resistance. But if that happens any time soon then the entire financial system is fucked.
**Tl:dr; You cannot convince a person of something that their salary depends upon them not knowing.**
The only reason he says this is because his core audience demands it. His entire status and social capital is built on providing pseudo-sophisticated arguments for what a large cohort want to believe for emotional reasons. Its pure motivated reasoning, and there is nothing about intelligence that inhibits a person from engagement in that sort of bullshit. The more intelligent you are, the better you can be at generating arguments to support conclusions that you have decided to take or committed to already. But if you have committed to those conclusions before you start thinking then all of those arguments are corrupted.
Steve Keen is like a private key that has been exposed to an internet enabled device or left out on a counter top during a gathering in your home. The Bitcoin might still be there, but the keys are compromised.
Steve Keen looks and sounds competent and reliable, but he is fundamentally compromised by commitment to his own priors, and prioritises his income over the truth.
Australian Steve Keen is mocked and derided throughout Australia for predicting Australia’s housing market crash was imminent in 2008 and selling his house in anticipation. He was basically laughed out of the country.
He is a fool. The kind of fool who is so enamoured with his own intellect that he cannot fathom being wrong.