“So how did you make your fortune Alice?”
“Well Bob, I polluted the world a bit at the cost of enough power to light up a city for a week.”
This is exactly what I had hoped, too, but it hasn't materialized yet, and I'm losing hope it will. Instead of inventing some ultra-smart general purpose supermachine people stucked to producing very specialized hardware able to do just one thing.
There is some glimpse of hope: now that it's less and less profitable to use electricity, the miners might have more incentive to use different forms of renewable energy rather than anything else. This can have various unpredictable consequences though...
The actual math amounts to a best effort guess in a lottery for write access to a database.
The network would function just as fast with 3-10 computers as it does with 3 billion times the amount of "computing" power.
In summary, Proof of Work is designed to waste as much energy and capital input as possible.
What can you do with a Bitcoin when no one wants to buy it from you? Try smoking it? A better analogy to Btc using cigarettes would be collecting the heat from burning cigarettes and trying to sell that.
Also, if the cost of Bitcoin falls to $0, I will want to collect all of the coins for free. But then someone else will probably offer $0.01 for them, so then I'd need to offer $0.02. But then maybe someone else will offer $0.03. And so on and so on. The price would only drop to zero if everyone decides there's no useful utility behind Bitcoin that makes them desirable to hodl or use. I just don't see that happening.
> then video games are bad! Checkmate!
> assuming people assign BTC value then BTC will not reach zero value
> I don't think that will happen so it won't happen.
> > assuming people assign BTC value then BTC will not reach zero value
Please explain to me what's wrong with this. If there's still at least two people who value BTC enough to pay to own it, how can it reach zero value?
It's true people can assign value. It's not necessarily true that they will.