It is quite pathetic that a purported 'future of payments' is so inefficient in so many ways. This is why I will never participate in systems like bitcoin that consume hundreds of TwH (and growing) each year.
See xrpl.org if you wanna read more in dept about this. There are plenty other protects using BFA instead of PoW/PoS by now.
Bitcoin only exists in semiconductor systems: its ineffectiveness stems from the extra logical layer (gates on silicon) which, while based on quantum effects, does not utilize quantum effects directly for calculation.
If we had desktop quantum computers, and a computationally hard algorithm on qubits was used for proof of work instead, we would still end up in the same arms race of ever more expensive, ever more power hungry systems do that work.
What would happen if Bitcoins work function (the hardness) was made 10 times easier, would miners use 1/10th the power budget? No, they'd just 10x their mining rate. Why? Because other miners have every incentive to do the same.
Likewise with a quantum algorithm.
As in while it puts the maximum bound of amount of computation per J it doesn’t enforces a requirement that the entropy increase needs to be through a non-information degree of freedom as in heat.
It's more like digital gold. But gold has a track record of holding value over millennia. Bitcoin is only a decade old. Will it hold up over time? Nobody actually knows.
As explained by the famous paper: "Bitcoin: Definitely Not A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"
But I don't like "it's actually meant to be digital gold" revisionism.
Point to the many, innovative, options.
As you said, as a start, anything with a higher TPS (transactions per second) is more efficient, which helps. Some notables, in my mind (not exclusive, of course) ...
The Solana Chain ...
I really love what Cartesi is doing: They are bringing Smart Contracts to the "linux stack", securely (same guarantees than on-chain) but -outside- of chain. This will, obviously, raise efficiencies ...
The Fantom chain is high performance -and- their contracts are Ethereum-compatible (smart!), aside from it being a very nice, well thought out "ecosystem"
The NANO token makes it a point of pride, exactly how -much- more efficient ("Eco-friendly") it is than BTC, and their approach is interesting. (It has got some HN love lately and everything :)
(On a tangent, I am also a fan of what FRAX is doing in the stablecoin space, bringing decentralization and transparency to that space ("Frax is the world’s first fractional-algorithmic stablecoin") ...
(Disclosure: Am currently holding CTSI and FXS and FRAX - All of the projects above have their corresponding tokens.
The points above stand, though :)
Ethereum is more programmable, to the point of being quite easy to shoot oneself in the foot. (Bitcoin is intentionally not Turing-complete to avoid abuse.)
Anything with proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work is going to be less wasteful in terms of electricity. Ethereum is trying to get there but it has been delayed a lot.
The slow pace of block creation has been a problem with Bitcoin for a long time and lots of blockchains have higher transaction-per-second capacities and quicker verification times. Ripple was promising but had some serious scandals and I don't know if it has a future. Anyway, Bitcoin is one of the slowest ones out there now.
Several have improved on the privacy/anonymity aspects. The most famous of those I think is Monero.
We could make an educated guess, however. Gold has intrinsic value, which gives it a significant advantage over a tiny arrangement of bits in an ocean of them.
Bitcoin has a floor of 0 in theory.
I would also guess that makes gold better as a store of wealth. But given that the price rarely ever approaches that floor means it might not matter. And bitcoin is harder to steal (at least you don't have to pay someone to guard it in a vault), easier to divide and transact and verify ownership. I don't claim to know how it will turn out.
Yes, in the presence of high tech infrastructure, but otherwise impossible.
Gold coins carry on working no matter what the nazis do to the internet and the chip foundries.
And - it’s not going to help you against the Nazis if you can’t transact it.
As to gold - that misses the point. Of course it can be taken from you.
However unless that happens, you can still transact it. People escaped the Nazis using gold to pay their way.
It's not clear to me that gold is superior in that use case.
But some gold coins might be a lot easier to hide than computers.
> You could still use bitcoin to buy your way to freedom
Only if you can access the network.
That’s the point.
I don’t see why you say there will be a way to get online. We see coups where the internet is taken down quite regularly.
As far as I know, the only way you can buy gold is if you either buy jewelry or are a jeweler to make said jewelry. Otherwise you’re just buying stocks which could theoretically be lost in the digital wind.
Obviously even bare gold would have a markup, but probably not as much as coins.
Humans have a nearly unlimited desire for luxury goods and always will, quite predictably. They lust after jewelry accordingly and have for many thousands of years. Nothing about that will change. The aesthetic demand for gold will remain so long as people continue to desire luxury goods.
If you drop the price of gold low enough, people will start rampantly decorating their walls and consumer goods with it. It has potent intrinsic support under the price, as much as anything can. It will remain scarce and desirable.
Ironically we go to huge effort to dig gold out of the ground, purify it, and form it into blocks and coins. Then we dig a new home in the ground, bury the gold in there and put guards outside the door. Someone here pointed out how aliens would be scratching their heads over our behavior if they could see it.
Nobody thinks intrinsic value for gold means that the universe likes wearing shiny gold jewelry and that places a floor under its value.
It's actually 7.5%. Maybe you consider that fringe. How does it compare to bitcoin?
If you don't trust the bank our government you can put it on a blockchain. It sounds a little silly to us, but remember half the world lives in non free countries. So trust in government and institutions is a big concern. But then why bother with the gold? Proof of work ensures scarcity. So just drop the gold from the equation and now you have bitcoin.
Edit: I guess the summary would be that cash & gold are decoupled from electricity (even if it takes some to create/mine them), but Bitcoin's entire existence depends on continuous availability of (cheap enough) electricity.
One benefit of ETH over BTC mining is that PoW mechanism (ethash) has, so far, kept most ASICs off the network (1). This has prevented the speed / power race BTC faces. In addition, the fastest GPUs are not necessarily the most ROI efficient, so people aren't EOL'ing their hardware every week. Even better is that GPUs still have life after mining.
(1) Yes, there are ethash asics, but being a memory constrained algo means that at the end of the day, the limiting factor is memory, not asic chips. The other issue is availability... shipping asics out of China is expensive.
Disclosure: very very large ETH miner
Bitcoin is not a nationstate and doesn't have the weaknesses of nation states and their economic systems. It uses far less energy to establish and maintain itself.
I’ve objected to Bitcoin since at least 2010ish, where I mentioned that I didn’t want to turn the polar bears black on Facebook but maybe that it looks epic and brilliant technically.