Have you ever read someone defending Bitcoin and winced internally because the person is using an easily dismissed type of argumentation? In a way it's worse than saying nothing at all, because it makes the criticism look stronger while making the whole Bitcoin community look weaker... Like, if you can't come up with a better argument than that, then it sort of implies that maybe whatever the criticism was might actually be valid.
My pet peeve example of this is what's often referred to as "whataboutism".
I have seen this many times around Bitcoin's energy use. "What about clothes dryers??" "What about Christmas lights??" Nobody cares. That's not a persuasive argument.
A persuasive argument gets to the heart of the criticism and weakens it. Whataboutism is a quick, lazy attempt to distract without providing any substantive response to the criticism.
Of course it's much easier to just scream "clothes dryers!" than it is to patiently dismantle the opponent's claims. And most people end up doing both. But I'd say the overall impact would be stronger if the whataboutism were skipped.
But whataboutism is just one example of weak/cringe argumentation.
What forms of weak pro-Bitcoin argumentation make you cringe? Got any recent examples?
I'll play the devil's advocate here.
The point about bringing up things like dryers and washing machines using energy is pretty simple: Using energy is not a bad thing. You, person who is arguing against bitcoin because of its energy use, are actually in favor of using energy for lots of things. So the mere fact that bitcoin uses energy is not an argument against it. Because you yourself use and do lots of things that use up energy. Get the point? Calling it "whataboutism" doesn't challenge the point. When someone brings up the energy use it's a perfectly relevant thing to bring up that they themselves use energy all the time. Why do they do that? And why is it a bad thing in this particular case and not in all the other cases where they are in favor of using energy?
Ahh because it provides utility. Now we can get on with the argument: what is the utility of bitcoin? And why does it require energy? And is the energy expenditure worth whatever we're getting out of it? Using the logic which you dismiss as "whataboutism" we can get to the point of what the utility of bitcoin is and what role energy plays in that.
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