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Comment by tal8d | Hacker News Reader

lol, you seem to be forgetting every other system related to and directly supporting payment networks, clearinghouses, etc... oh, and all the regulatory frameworks. And the FED :)

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virtually all of those services will still have to exist under crypto. Regulatory frameworks will still exist, centralized entities will provide lightning channels to small-fry actors, firms will still host servers to execute trades based on the network, etc.

Yes, but they will be dealing with a currency that has mathematical guarantees - which changes things entirely. Imagine a scenario in which self driving cars are not only the norm, but they've achieved a perfect safety record due to an open source, formally verified, code-base. In that scenario, do you think the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration still needs 600 employees and a 900 million dollar budget? I have no doubt that it would still exist, but it would be addressing an infinitely simpler problem - and the reduction in resource requirements would cut it down to a skeleton crew that would operate much like stubcode in the wake of a refactor.

600 employees is nothing. That’s a skeleton crew already. Yeah they’d probably still keep them on payroll to work on developing and maintaining safety standards.

That aside you’re not operating with facts just speculation. You’ve not quantified what you think the fully realized cost is today or what it would go down to in the future.

I’m not. I’m saying by scaling just one small corner to bitcoins inefficiency it cannot be true as it would use 3x the worlds power supply. It cannot be true by induction. If we scaled those aspects up too we’d be taking hundreds or thousands of times more power than the world generates. By doing that id actually be making my argument stronger.

The only misconception is you can’t scale Bitcoin to visa without a hard or soft fork.

Yep, I agree completely. I’ve seen the argument that the status quo is somehow less efficient on a per transaction basis than Bitcoin is today, and that’s thermodynamically impossible.

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