If an application that uses a lot of energy is very valuable to people than it's a competitive advantage to also service that need with cheap energy.
Having sound money is not at odds with the environment.
If an application that uses a lot of energy is very valuable to people than it's a competitive advantage to also service that need with cheap energy.
Having sound money is not at odds with the environment.
The problem with Bitcoin is that energy waste is inherent in its design. As Bitcoin value goes up, the value of a Bitcoin relative to energy changes, which encourages more mining, which results in higher energy spend and emissions as the algorithm difficulty adjusts to the new hash rate.
Generating 10,000,000 bitcoins could be done at low energy with a few miners - but the more valuable they become the more energy they use.
My issue with Bitcoin is that while other industries try to save power, Bitcoin tries to waste it and waste is built into the algorithm.
And the more popular Bitcoin gets, the more our planet gets polluted trying to make magic numbers on a ledger.
You can use energy that would otherwise be wasted https://cointelegraph.com/news/oil-companies-will-dominate-b... or clean energy like Nuclear
> What you call energy waste others would call effort
This is my whole issue with it - effort doesn’t have to be tied to wasting energy, but it is in Bitcoin. Why would people call wasting energy ‘effort’ in a system where wasting energy wasn’t intrinsic to the system itself.
Nic Carter has a good piece on this: https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co...
Is PoS strong enough to still be 99% as useful?, I don't know, these are all experiments
If you are looking for it to be a currency, traditional currency seems to perform better.
If you are looking to invest in some speculative instrument on the basis that the value is going up then Bitcoin and poppies seem to be good ideas.
Venezuela is the living proof of a government that makes decisions with the only objective of keeping power, WHATEVER IT TAKES, even if it means to the reduce quality of live to a 10% in less than a decade.
So bitcoin, and many cryptocurrencies, are at least neutral in monetary emission. Yes, it's not based on economic analysis, therefore is sub-optimal, but equally predictable by every actor, full transparent, no possibility of inside information or conflicts of interest.
From my view, and despite the initial promises of Bitcoin, it’s being used by people of means to get even more money than they already have.
Indeed, though I don’t see how BTC could help — it’ll just be one more currency you’re not able to convert local money into, surely?
It’s not that I don’t regret not putting £10,000 into BTC when it was worth $250/coin (I absolutely do!) it’s just that I expect that degree of variability to work in both directions.
In the US, people who wanted to donate to Wikileaks were forbidden to do so.
It would definitely be better if the learning curve was shallower and the UI's easier, so that more people could be saved.
The system pays for itself via transaction fees, which are used to "lock" the transaction history in a completely decentralised way.
Bitcoin is very useful to those who understand it, but if it weren't so hard to understand to common people it would be an even greater success, it would be a practical option to those who have internet and smartphones, that's still a minority in the country, but not as much as zelle.
Despite that almost everyone have heard of bitcoin in venezuela, another big reason for the undeveloped potential of it is the black-mailing from local authorities to anyone they knew had bitcoins, mostly when price went up fast. There's fear in letting know authorities you have cryptocurrencies.
I'm not in Venezuela anymore, but I still use bitcoin on a monthly basis to send money across borders to my family.
And the security of it gives me a guarantee not offered by anything else, by far!!!. I won't get my money blocked, like it happened to me with a US bank account, for trying to spend all of my money at once (~2k$).
So theoretically a central authority should be able to offer all of that, but in practice, they're all made of human being's decisions, which rules change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and susceptible to whims. In other words, unstable and not trustworthy. We have also lived what those central authorities can become
Once you've understand how truly secure money can be, it's hard to go back.
It’s the only cryptocurrency that has institutional financial support.
Denmark, famous for its wind farms and for having too much renewable energy at times, only has 6.1GW of wind capacity, which is is a few gigawatt short for the Bitcoin network.
So no, there isn't an abundance of energy when you decide to throw it all away as fast as you can.
Also because of how the Bitcoin algorithm and economics work, if energy is cheap then the market will scale up mining thus the Bitcoin algorithm will scale up difficulty. Cheap energy results in more energy waste from Bitcoin.