I am someone who questions everyday things. We wake up, drink coffee, go to school/work, go to a park, a movie, some choose to buy cigarettes and smoke, but why? Do you question things?
If you do, you'd be surprised to find out that many of the things we do are not only bad, they are quite dangerous.
You most likely drink coffee. Did you ask yourself why? Is it because everyone else does it? Is it because you like it? Did you ask yourself, whether you could do without it?
I did ask myself that question and here's what I have found. Let's describe what happens when you drink coffee:
As you buy coffee, you increase the demand for it, which means prices for coffee grow. A Brazilian farmer sees that the demand for coffee grows and what does he do to meet this demand? He chops down the rainforest and creates new coffee plantations. Rare animals and plants are going extinct just because you need a differently flavored water - a flavor which by the way can break your sleep pattern which in itself is bad for health. A very valuable and irreplaceable genetic information is lost, something truly unique that took billions of years to form is lost due to something so imbecile.
The plantations are treated with polluting chemicals, the coffee beans are collected and hauled to ports in large, polluting trucks, from which they are transported in large, stinking ships from Brazil to North America and Europe. These big ships use as much fuel per day as tens of thousands of cars, so, you buying coffee increases the demand for fuel and hence the fuel prices grow and higher prices - as you can guess - are followed by more oil drilling with devastating consequences for life on this planet. Also, with higher fuel prices your daily commute becomes more expensive because you drink coffee. Not to mention the pollution from those ships is huge, all of that just because you wanted your water to taste differently. But we're not done yet.
Once the ship arrives, the coffee has to be transported to a roastery, where it is roasted, again, under the expenditure of energy. That's even more unnecessary, avoidable pollution. Then, with the use of plastics, which again makes other plastic you use on daily basis more expensive and also now there's more of it in the world, the coffee is packaged and transported to a store or a coffee shop. At home or in a café, the coffee is going to be brewed, again under the expenditure of energy with all the same consequences described above.
Now you're finally allowed to drink it.
Don't you think that's a bit too much pollution and loss of animal/insect and plant live for having a flavored water?
Understand, that drinking coffee is one of the most horrendous things you could do. If we are to make it as humans on this planet, we need to become efficient and stop being wasteful. Giving up coffee and many other unnecessary activities (such as smoking) is a step in the right direction.
Bitcoin
And we finally arrive at Bitcoin, which they call a crypto currency even though it's a crypto commodity, because its price behaves like a commodity.
How bad is Bitcoin and why do you use it? A similar question that we have just asked ourselves about coffee.
Understand that mining bitcoin is nothing but setting coal on fire and watching a digital counter go up. That's it. Mining bitcoin uses as much energy as the entire Banking system of Europe, with absolutely no benefit to our society. We are taking coal - because Bitcoins are mostly mined where electricity is cheap and that's all coal - we set it on fire, turn it into energy and we create bits and bytes that have absolutely no use or value for a society.
As of today, it's not recommended to eat fish more than twice a week. This is because the oceans and rivers are so polluted, that fish who live there have a high concentration of a toxic element called mercury, which itself is a product of coal burning. Not only that, coal mining is extremely devastating for nature. Entire forests disappear and become a large, worthless pits of sand.
Understand, that mining, using or investing in bitcoin is extremely bad and has absolutely no benefit to humanity whatsoever.
But that's not everything. It's not just no benefit, it's outright danger: Mining bitcoin increases demand for electricity, which means your phones, TVs, stoves at home become more expensive to operate, because they also use electricity that now becomes more expensive than if Bitcoin didn't exist.
That's not all. I am about to make the most important point about the danger of Bitcoin and other Crypto nonsense, but for this, we'll take a detour of one or two paragraphs.
Imagine a world, in which only one object exists. Let's say a kitchen knife and nothing else. Let's add a $100 bill to this world. So now our world has two objects in it. A kitchen knife and a $100 bill.
Question: How much does the knife cost? Can you answer this simple economics question? Well, obviously it costs $100, as the money simply reflects all the valuable things in the world. Now, let's add another $100 into our world, where we now have a kitchen knife and $200. How much is the kitchen knife worth now? $200! (The same happens when governments print money, the prices grow, which is known as inflation)
What does it mean for bitcoin? If bitcoin is accepted as money, it simply means there's more money in circulation in our world, which means all products in stores, everything imaginable including electricity, milk, bread, cars go up in price.
Everything in the stores goes up in price. The only people benefitting from it are the richest individuals on the planet as the inflation will result in higher stock prices. Politicians being friends with them is the reason there is very little action on crypto. The rich are very smart, they know what benefits them so they act accordingly.
Understand that if we are to survive on this planet and to eventually make it out into space, we need to get rid of inefficiencies like coffee and bitcoin as they are a huge burden on that goal.
The destruction of nature, the disappearance of valuable genetic information (the forests that disappear under brown coal mines are worth thousands times for our survival than whatever we get from that coal (like Bitcoin), and all other misery created by a mostly blind acceptance of everyday things has in the past and will in the future get us into trouble over and over.
Question everything and adjust accordingly. Make the right and efficient choices, be active and share your opinion about dangers of things. Reject things that introduce inefficiency into our society. Question everything. Question everything.
Top comments (0)