The biggest non-starter in his original essay was that mining is wasteful. Krugman doesn't understand orders of magnitude.
The mathematical fallacy is that the cost of mining never adds up. The total amount of energy ever expended by all miners that will ever be produced amounts to such a small amount of total power as to be inconsequential compared to the commerce transacted. Krugman should optimize a few computer programs, and then he might understand why he's barking up the wrong tree.
Krugman misses what every nerd, uber or otherwise, sees plain as day. The mining is simply irrelevant. There will be 22M coins, give or take, and the joules to find the hashes simply do not matter. And when the coins are all found, the miners will continue to simply clear transactions, which any network needs, and furthermore still doesn't create any meaningful cost.
Bitcoin has problems, but the mining is beside the point. and his follow on argument is... bitcoin is valuable now because nerds conflate economics with technology, and will soon pop? That's insipid and unarguable - it's just an ad hominem attack on a group.
It's important to note that he wasn't merely wrong about technology. He was more so breathtakingly wrong about understanding the economics of societies in which freer-flowing information and pervasive connection between people exists. In my view, it's the equivalent of looking at the combustion engine or fire and not being able to project a utility or economy of scale surrounding it beyond drying clothes.
Perhaps it's more telling about how enigmatic the technology is, rather than the person making the awfully inaccurate prediction? Just some food for thought.
Considering a person's history of astounding lack of understanding isn't a fallacy. It's telling. It's far more telling than any award given to a person for work that circularly adheres to the vision and acceptance of those who bestow the award.
The only fallacy is when people grant that person's thoughts higher or lesser value while the words don't stand by their own merit and explanation. That fallacy is what happens. Shocking degrees of ineptitude are given enormous weight in society, often through glamor alone.
Ahem. What on earth are you talking about? Krugman explicitly talks about things that he as gotten wrong over the years, the internet thing being one of them and some of his predictions regarding Japan being another. Compare that to almost all other punditconomist, who refuse they admit error. (Btw, one should never rely too much on advice from anybody who has never admitted being wrong. Those people are either liars or deluded.)
In addition to that, he _ALL THE FUCKING TIME_ writes about how recent years have shown that you cannot argue from position (in doing so often joking about "the award") but that your arguments must carry themselves no matter who you are.
So essentially, the Krugman whose blog I read, again and again states the exact opposite of the things that you accuse him and his "adherents" of.
Nothing I've written says that there aren't people who shun such fallacy and always think critically. However, there are a great deal of people who use Krugman as a crutch in thought and in citations, especially due to the prize. If you're not one of them, good for you. My underlying point is pretty simple. Here's a parallel so we're not focused on Krugman.
End-of-the-world predictors, and the like, sometimes recant about being wrong too and may joke about it. What do we take from this? Being wrong about matters that are painfully obvious is of valid consideration, especially when judging future patterns of unsubstantiated claims in the same domains. We mustn't forget the grains of salt.
Krugman's original economic point is not so much that mining is a complete waste, or that it is an environmental disaster (although I think he does believe these things), but rather that mining does nothing to set the upper or lower bound for the price of bitcoins.
This means bitcoins are not a stable store of value compared to other currencies, which makes it difficult to serve a viable replacement, no matter how good a medium of exchange the technology makes it.
People are latching on to the mining issue, and failing to focus on the store of value issue, which is really the big economic challenge for Bitcoin. I think that's the point he's making in this post.
HN disallows duplicate URLs from being submitted (if you try it simply considers your submission a vote for the original), but in this case your variant lacks the trailing forward slash. Which is weird given that the NY Times site automatically redirects URLs that lack that trailing slash, appending it on.
The mathematical fallacy is that the cost of mining never adds up. The total amount of energy ever expended by all miners that will ever be produced amounts to such a small amount of total power as to be inconsequential compared to the commerce transacted. Krugman should optimize a few computer programs, and then he might understand why he's barking up the wrong tree.
Krugman misses what every nerd, uber or otherwise, sees plain as day. The mining is simply irrelevant. There will be 22M coins, give or take, and the joules to find the hashes simply do not matter. And when the coins are all found, the miners will continue to simply clear transactions, which any network needs, and furthermore still doesn't create any meaningful cost.
Bitcoin has problems, but the mining is beside the point. and his follow on argument is... bitcoin is valuable now because nerds conflate economics with technology, and will soon pop? That's insipid and unarguable - it's just an ad hominem attack on a group.