No, your cryptocurrency cannot work
gist.github.com
gist.github.com
The blockchains are all controlled by some kind of plutocracy (people with wealth) as the gist describes. However there is a relatively complex dynamic between the miners/executors, the protocol developers, and the community. A blockchain protocol is a shared contract between them and the power to change that contract requires some kind of consensus between multiple parties. At one point, Bitcoin was using signals from miners to show adoption of a protocol change, which AFAICT amounted to a weighted vote, weighted by mining power. I would argue that makes the miners similar to a legislature, and makes the protocol similar to a legal system. These are the rules for social computing networks, after all.
Whether any of this is really more meaningful than the alternatives, I can't say. You could argue that PoW and PoS tie wealth too directly to the "legislature" membership and we ought to use a democratic vote to decide the miners/executors. Or we should just appoint 3 or 5 different legal entities to run the system, and put each of them under some kind of standards body, etc etc etc. It's hard to say. All of these approaches involve complex tradeoffs.
My broader point is that the original framing of blockchains (that they're not controlled by anybody) was wrong, but the reality is still relatively interesting.
Hence the advent of the DAO for governance alongside the actual utility tokens.
There is that. But nobody seems to be able to make an alternative work. Etherium postponed proof of stake yet again. What was the excuse this time?
Amusing potential alternatives:
- Proof of Space. Nodes have to be some minimum physical distance apart, like a few kilometers, so you can't have "mines". This might be feasible via some low-orbit satellite network you can use to establish approximate location.
- Proof of Hate. Nodes are run by organizations that hate each other, so they won't collude.
POW requires large investments and knowledge (to create a mining infrastructure). POS is a lot easier for people to get involved. Even though the wealthy can just invest more in POS systems there is still a more level playing field as they do not need the logistics of building mining factories and all that. Any wealthy person can simply invest. This dynamic creates the potential for a more distributed network than the POS system, although it still is biased towards the wealthy class. I'd say that this is still more fair (far from being fully fair) than Chia's system where you need hardware and technical knowhow. You're essentially making the space more competitive. Then you have PiCoin's "Proof of click" where you're just proving you can click a button every 24 hours. Wealthy still get control as they can get people to be the "sub-miners" (earning team/pyramid scheme) that normal people can't achieve. Though this is fairly easy to emulate. This still allows the wealthy to just get wealthier.
I think there is still a long way to go to determine the most fair system, but just because there is some consolidation doesn't mean that the systems are equally exploitable by a wealthy class. Ether2 is more decentralized than BitCoin, although there is a fair amount of consolidation. I doubt we will end up with a fully decentralized system (by any proof system) but the question is rather how do we make a proof system that has sufficient competition that it becomes difficult for a single entity to take control? POS is better than POW in this respect and we should note that. But we do need something better than POS.
The article does not make these distinctions and does undermine the questions within the cryptocurrency communities. It is a difficult problem to solve but we do need to be clear that the different proof systems aren't equally centralized. There's probably no way to prevent the wealthy from continuing to get wealthier from these systems, but the question is if a blockchain can become sufficiently decentralized that meaningful collusion will be near impossible to make. We are seeing steps in that direction.
It's of course risky, but cruptocurrencies can be a perfectly valid source of money, as long as you just risk spare money. You don't need to trust it to be a valid investment, you just need to trust that enough people will believe it is.
This is called the greater fool theory.
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages...
> Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything
Fundamentally it's not really any better than cryptocurrencies. We can't easily transact with cryptocurrencies due to cultural reasons. We have coins right now that can be used to transact with complete privacy. People don't do it because culture is slow to change.
Worst case for cryptocurrencies is the whole Tether thing implodes. Not sure it ever will but hey, if the US government will bail out banks when they screw everything up, why not Tether as well?
No matter what you have - the Mona Lisa, gold bars, the hope diamond - they will not accept it. You must sell it to buy dollars.
That is not a coincidence - it is the entire point … and it means there will always be buyers for dollars and they will always have value.
Like all currencies before it, its value will diminish over time. When the US ceases to exist, its value will finally become zero. Precisely because tax payments were the only thing keeping it relevant.
The US dollar has lost
- ~30% of its value in the last 10 years
- ~84% of its value in the last 50 years
- ~97% of its value since 1900
(Value here refers to purchasing power)
Reason for this is that the US dollar is continually being inflated by the US government, precisely because it has no robust backing.
You can't ignore the IRS - you will have to pay taxes. Those taxes must be paid in US dollars.
But noon-techies i know bought an experiment with it and i was kinda suprised. I guess they are going for too big to fail.
A lot of "big money" had joined the crypto thing and it's making themv curious: "eg. all these big corporations can't be wrong".
I don't blame that they try now though, although I warn them. It's really getting surreal.
Note : I left crypto behind me in late 2017 at 18 k. Didn't trust it anymore and nothing changed.
It is fundamentally negative sum, and the narrative of prosperity is driven by existing holders to attempt to claim a larger stake of fiat.
Concretely it would be like treating gold as a productive asset because InteractiveBrokers lets you take out a margin loan collateralized by your gold. Gold remains unproductive in this scenario, IBKR shares would productive. Value from lending would accrue to IBKR shares.
What does "productive" mean? If something has somekind of value/property that is useful somehow, then isn't this "productive" in the sense that it produces that value?
Previously Ponzi schemes were limited in geographic area, so you'd be limited to the number of marks you could go after, either through travel limits or the number of people you could meet through 'friends of friends'. This could grow a bit if you were 'successful' enough and could establish a reputation (e.g., Madoff).
Online schemes do not have geographic limits and so there's always a fresh source of unknowledgeable persons to go after.
Further, most traditional Ponzi schemes are of the form that you'll receive x% returns (e.g., dividends) per year, but Crypto is more akin to:
> In finance and economics, the greater fool theory states that the price of an asset is determined by whether you can sell it for a higher price, at a later point in time. On assets where the theory applies, it is implied that the asset's intrinsic value is less important than the increase in demand, however irrational it might be. The person buying the overpriced asset later on, for a higher price, is deemed the greater fool.[1][2][3][4]
Some cryptocurrencies can survive a major net outflow, but some, especially the stablecoins with weak backing, (i.e. Tether) cannot.
The big lesson of cryptocurrencies is that the market for money laundering services is much larger than previously supposed.
"The scheme leads victims to believe that profits are coming from legitimate business activity, and they remain unaware that other investors are the source of funds"
I believe this holds as I don't think most of the investors understand crypto. It is a magic black box so they don't know where the value comes from.
Bitcoin failed as a general currency but apparently banks are using it to settle accounts amongst themselves. Sometimes things develop in the most unintuitive ways.
> I believe this holds as I don't think most of the investors understand crypto. It is a magic black box so they don't know where the value comes from.
I don't think this is evidence of any scheme. It's just irrational market behavior.
People used to believe that conquests made wealth; gradually they became convinced that productivity made wealth. Productivity is now on the chopping block, since it is seen as something that's killing the planet with inexhaustible resource demand. We're looking for the next way of seeing things. Crypto doesn't make sense now, and I say that as someone deeply invested in it, but it has that kind of potential to change our frame of reference after an awkward transition takes place. Maybe it makes sense if we go further with it. The experiment is in progress, but it's already exceeded the usual bounds of a cult or scam.
It isn't really an economic problem, it is more like a poker game.
The next market crash will probably be from a substantially higher peak and will take proportionately more to bail it out, and it is also going to be complicated by governments taking the opportunity to crack down on it so "regulatory risk" will be very high. 2022/2023 are probably going to have a high risk of the game collapsing.
Won't be 100% though so it could come back and another ~4 years from now we could be seeing yet another bubble blowing up in crypto. I wouldn't get too emotionally attached to hating crypto or believing that a sudden regulatory attack on crypto is going to manage to pop crypto in the near term (and what China did recently was the kind of crackdown that everyone believed would kill it, but its dragging itself out of the hole again).
Right now chances of it popping in the short term are probably very low, and nobody is going to seriously take a run at regulating it because they don't want to be responsible for the fallout (similarly to how nobody did shit about Madoff's Ponzi until he went cash insolvent in 2008 due to the financial crisis).
> Whenever the topic of Bitcoin's energy usage comes up, there's always a flood of hastily-constructed comments by people claiming that their favourite cryptocurrency isn't like Bitcoin, that their favourite cryptocurrency is energy-efficient and scalable and whatnot.
> They're wrong, and are quite possibly trying to scam you. Let's look at why.
And then, 20 paragraphs later, agree they are indeed not wrong:
> The only redeeming feature of proof-of-stake (and many other proof schemes) over proof-of-work is that it does indeed address the energy consumption problem
I think the author has a reasonable point about the centralization problem, but I'm not sure why they spend such a large amount of time discussing the energy usage just to eventually agree with the people they're criticizing.
I don't know that the average person cares about the centralization problem, especially if they don't use the currency, like they do about the energy usage problem. This seems like an odd attempt to connect the two.
It's an incoherent argument designed to provoke an emotional response. Cryptocurrency must represent what, 0.5% of global energy usage? It's literally nothing. Yet we have all these people using their computers manufactured in China to write about how cryptocurrency is destroying the planet.
For the sake of discussion, though, I do actually think the energy usage is an important problem.
There's a lot of things I don't "get", but ultimately most of them don't harm anyone and have nothing to do with me. I recognize many people who see benefit in cryptocurrencies might feel the energy usage is small overall compared to the potential in the technology. For the people that don't "get" cryptocurrencies, the energy usage takes it from "has nothing to do with me" to "it's harming the planet". I think it's important to resolve this issue because it will otherwise harm adoption.
Additionally, proof of stake seems viable. In a world with accelerating climate change, it seems to me increasing energy efficiency should be a moral imperative. Why do something inefficiently when more efficient means exist?
If people want to argue about energy, it's more productive to consider which projects deserve the most resources. The fact so much energy is being wasted on bitcoin is sad. As a currency, bitcoin is of very little value, certainly not enough to justify the massive amount of energy being consumed. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind if Monero miners consumed even more energy than bitcoin does today.
> In a world with accelerating climate change, it seems to me increasing energy efficiency should be a moral imperative.
The real moral imperative is to dismantle big oil and stop trading with China. But how will the western world survive without its cars and cheap chinese products?
Bitcoin != Cryptocurrencies != Blockchain != Sybil mitigation mechanisms != Decentralized ledgers != Distributed decentralized consensus
Each of these will unfold on distinct dynamics and have various trade offs as they do.
One thing I've learned the hard way in life is when something goes on for years that I don't quite understand, and yet it keeps growing and getting more popular, usually I'm the one that's wrong.
Cope is the single worst, dumbest argument you can possibly deploy because it means nothing other than you are unable to or uninterested in refuting any points levied.
It's a strongly left-curve argument to engage with your meme.
While the truth is, if you'd invested in TQQQ the majority of time over the last 5 years you'd have had a better return than BTC. I could make the same exact cope argument about that, but of course, that's a worthless argument.
Every single day you're missing out on an investment that performs just as well as any crypto investment. Investment opportunities are like a bus route: there's always another one coming down the pike.
Let's focus on the facts instead?
I'm led to believe this isn't r/Bitcoin.
[edit] remember: right + broke, and wrong + wealthy are both completely valid outcomes.
If you set your risk-reward profile to "sweet mother of Jesus" in traditional markets you can achieve the same returns with less risk.
I wouldn't pitch anyone on putting their net worth in bitcoin or whatever, but I don't think this is true. If you talk to some quant and the quant tells you to scale your allocations to various assets based on their volatility, then if the underlying assets are not very volatile then you end up really levered and can be wiped out in "out-of-model" events, but if the underlying assets are very volatile then you don't have this issue, and you make a bit of money by rebalancing. Your quant will also tell you, if your plan is to buy and hold a "3x long daily return" ETF, that it is the nature of such ETFs to go to zero, and they can say this much more confidently about the ETF than about bitcoin.
I've also found that one can generate returns similar to the returns historically generated by being 1x long BTC with a really conservative risk-reward profile. My current work is to operate a fund based on this finding.
This is a common trope, and it is in fact demonstrably wrong. TQQQ is up 160X from 10 years ago. UPRO is up like 60X in the same time period.
Leveraged ETFs "go to zero" in the event the index they track bounces around a mean value or stays dead flat. In the event the index exhibits positive directionality, they do the opposite of going to zero, and instead outperform the sticker leverage.
Over its history the UPRO 3X leveraged S&P 500 ETF has actually tracked about 5X the index.
So their confidence is misplaced, and instead, as I mentioned demonstrates their tendency towards low-risk capital preservation strategies. If you believe in the positive directionality of the NASDAQ moving forward, I doubt there's a better risk-reward profile than TQQQ as it caps your loss on downside while simultaneously exposing you to a lot more than 3X the upside.
[edited for tone not reading as friendly as intended] This doesn't look like going to zero to me ;) [1] Could it? Sure. It's risky.
I'd love to see your fund's performance analysis replacing BTC with TQQQ!
I don't think that people commonly buy TQQQ futures at annualized premiums of like 40% one day then sell them at annualized premiums of like 20% the next day, so it's harder for us to use TQQQ as the underlying.
The thing is that crypto is the only one which doesnt have a huge barrier to entry.
In any event you are right, the only thing that matters is your confidence on what is gonna happen, then even if the movement in price isn't as big as crypto then if you are absolutely sure you can use leverage and make the same amount.
> right + broke, and wrong + wealthy are both completely valid outcomes
True but man, must be great to be individual with the lowest IQ in the hood and have the biggest house.
The happiest people on Earth are the people who succeed out of pure luck, but they are so self confident that they are not aware of that.
Have you met Robinhood?
> True but man, must be great to be individual with the lowest IQ in the hood and have the biggest house.
> The happiest people on Earth are the people who succeed out of pure luck, but they are so self confident that they are not aware of that.
Now that I agree with you on :)
Before us, uncountable incredibly smart people got mistaken. As Elon said, the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. And guess what, entertaining outcomes are unpredictable. He might be wrong, which ironically illustrates what I've just said.
> There are no useful cryptocurrencies today, and there will not be any at any time in the near future.
Clearly criminal enterprises have made good use of cryptocurrency in the past few years.
[1] https://protos.com/mafia-italy-bitcoin-monero-paying-colombi...
The only argument less persuasive and over used than that one is “think of the children!”
The government should have access to everyone's financial data when presenting a warrant. If the current system doesn't work that way, we should reform the system. Not throw out a useful tool for enforcement of law.
I agree with you. Bitcoin and most other coins have this flaw and it's a problem.
> Really only Cash and Monero avoid this yeah?
Yes. Right now Monero is closest to the original cryptocurrency dream. It's everything bitcoin should have been. It's a shame that bitcoin is still king.
> The government should have access to everyone's financial data when presenting a warrant.
Warrants are for specific persons, not everyone. Yet the government essentially has full access to everyone's banking records. They're still not satisfied, they keep demanding more.
> Not throw out a useful tool for enforcement of law.
They can't be trusted with these powers. If they want to catch criminals, they should have to go out there and do real police work instead of imposing their abusive surveillance on everyone.
Real police work like collecting records for transactions to piece together how a crime happened?
Governments have proven again and again they won't respect these rights. So people will make subversive technology to defeat them. Cryptography has that kind of power. They'll have to increase their tyranny in order to stop it. Is there a limit to how tyrannical they're willing to become in order to control their subjects? We'll find out.
Otherwise you're just surrendering to mad-max anarchy.
I don't think so. These are arms races and they happen all the time, even in nature. This particular struggle is about principles.
For example: many people, myself included, think advertising is morally wrong. Are we going to ask the billion dollar industry to cease and desist? That'd be pointless. Better to make ad blocking technology that solves the problem whether they want it or not. They develop countermeasures, people develop countermeasures against their countermeasures. It goes on and on. We're winning so far.
In this case, it's a politico-technological arms race. People don't agree with whatever it is the government's doing so they make technology that prevents them from doing it. Government makes new laws to neutralize the technology. People make new technology to work around the new laws. And so on. With every iteration, the government must become more tyrannical in order to maintain the same power it previously enjoyed.
Technologies such as Monero actually bring the world closer to the principles the US was founded on, principles it apparently forgot about. Will the US remember its roots? Or will it turn into China? That's the political choice the existence of this technology forces the government to make.
> I suggest that instead technology be devised to help expose the information necessary to pursue crime and criminality under mutually reasonably circumstances.
That's idealistic. Every day governments prove that they are not fit to have this power. That they'll twist those circumstances until they are no longer mutually reasonable. They are corrupt. They will abuse this access for personal reasons. Global surveillance personnel are frequently caught spying on the people they know for personal gain, including their spouses.
I refuse to give them any power at all if it means even one person will be abused. Suffering at the hands of crime is one thing, suffering at the hands of the people who were supposed to protect you is an indignity without measure.
Or if you prefer, how is the mafia supposed to get anything done is they can't pay off the politicians?
This will be an excellent test for Monero's privacy features.
The idea behind DeFi is to power the financial system using auditable, open code, and to be able to switch between these systems with little friction.
Flashbots (more generally MEV, miner extractable value) are an ongoing research problem, I'm not familiar with recent progress there.
In the end it's like any software; everyone can run whatever version they want. When open-source software is combined with monetary policy, it gets little bit more interesting. No user is willing to run a version of monetary policy that makes their money worse, thus it's guaranteed to be the best form of money, now and forever.
Energy use is the cost that has to be paid for predictably sound money and global monetary network that is open to everyone. If 0.1% of world's energy goes into securing it peacefully, then it's a very low price to pay.
I can assure you that that has become more and more difficult and risky over the years thanks to speculative vultures and the dynamics described in the gist. If anything, this should tell you that I'm not some armchair complainer who doesn't understand how it works.
I'm also not sure why you seem to be implying some sort of conflict of interest here, since I am arguing against it.
This is a common misconception. Miners are not tied to a single mining pool and can switch on a whim.
Preventing double spending is the reason for all of this hullaballoo, no more, no less. It's easy to create a distributed ledger, but hard to create one where you cannot double spend, hence mining and staking.
You can't double spend physical cash because you can't give someone else a physical object and have it too.
You can't double spend your fiat because your bank says to your counterparty "trust us bro, he didn't double spend" and your bank is pretty trustworthy.
You can't double spend your bitcoin because to do so you'd have to have more than half of the computing power in the world, which is pretty tough to do, and even if you did actually succeed at double spending it would render your investment worthless, because all transactions are public and someone might notice the double spend and the value of bitcoin would plummet.
Soon, you won't be able to double spend your Ethereum because if you did, everyone would notice, point it out to everyone in the network that you double spent, and then everyone would automatically slash your Ethereum stake to zero going forward and carry on without you.
That's all. It has nothing fundamentally to do with voting or economic distribution or proving ownership of scare resources or anything like that. It's about preventing double spending on a distributed ledger of transactions.
If you solve double spending, then yes, your cryptocurrency will work.
(reposting this from the github)
The difference is, if a cryptocurrency is mismanaged, people can sell their holdings and buy a better-managed currency, decreasing the value for those who have the most to lose.
That provides a selective pressure towards good economic governance, which doesn't exist with too-big-to-fail central banks that can require you to use their product because of legal tender laws and tax payments.
Also, programmable money is inherently more valuable because of new use cases it enables, like smart contracts. That is why diversifying into cryptocurrency is better than simply diversifying into a foreign government-issued currency.
Full disclaimer: I do not own, and have never owned, any cryptocurrency.
But if there's one thing that most cryptocurrency investors usually don't want, it's inflation. Actually, the more deflation the better.
And that's the catch really, because there's nothing forcing you to use a cryptocurrency like you have to use a government-issued currency, the cryptocurrency has to reward early adopters if it wants to become popular. This in turn makes cryptocurrencies, IMO, have patently bad economic governance, since the deflationary spiral makes them unusable for anything beyond pyramid schemes.
>Also, programmable money is inherently more valuable because of new use cases it enables, like smart contracts
Meh, smart contracts are not so smart, and not so contractual. It's just a very inefficient scripting mechanism that doesn't really buy you all that much. Suffices to see all the modern cryptocurrency "dapp" that run on centralized, trustful chains just because they're unusably expensive to run on true decentralized blockchains.
See all the stuff running on the BNB chain that's 1/ not decentralized and 2/ just a bunch of pyramid/ponzi schemes with no practical use beyond speculation.
You can so the same with fiat, which is why people in badly managed countries tend to use USD instead of their worthless currency.
The fact that Americans are not flocking to Euros, British Pounds or what not shows you that only a minority think that dollars are worthless paper. And yes, you need to buy bread and pay taxes, I'm talking about savings which americans keep in dollars.
Selling requires buyers. If everyone decides to dump the currency, who do they sell it to? Maybe someone is willing to take the risk on it, but if so, likely at a small fraction of what many paid to buy in.
That doesn’t sound like a safety mechanic to me.
Aquaman?[0]
No, fair point, I didn't think that through. I suppose I thought that the whales would try to prop up the price (and increase their control) by buying out those who had lost confidence, but you're right that this isn't guaranteed, and nor is a return on investment for those leaving.
> That doesn’t sound like a safety mechanic to me.
Even if the doubters aren't able to exit without taking a loss, the risks of the cryptocurrency losing value should still provide a strong incentive for good management by those who hold a lot of it.
Note that the same argument can be used to demonstrate that monarchy works - i.e. kings have no incentive to mismanage their country, as they'd be crippling their own finances.
Monarchs and currency regulators and social networks and operating systems tend to get away with as much mismanagement as their monopolies allow.
Make the best out of it because the system is not designed in your favor.
Crypto works fine in a world that is not addicted to burning fossil fuels.
Unfortunatly, we live in a world that is not only desperately addicted to them, but literally subsidizes the consumption of fossil fuels.
If you believe there is value, you must simply disagree with the implementation, degree of centralization, principles, etc. I'm curious which project you think has the best qualities.
If not, you should have no qualms with leaving the network.
My guess may be wrong, as I don't have any of the above, but I think that your analogy overlooks the interoperabilities of the systems you are comparing. To some extent, the lack of interoperability is the only thing keeping people on Facebook.
At no point has anyone said anything useful about the interoperability of either system, let alone how they compare to one another. All we have learned is that everyone is equally free to have a bunch of accounts, whether they be social media accounts or cryptocurrency wallets.
* Just saw your edit with the coins listed. I agree, but I also think it's just a matter of time before a DeFi system gets more attention than Bitcoin.
There is harm when people get swindled out of money.
There is harm with criminal organizations have ways to get huge amounts of capital.
Crypto miners produce nothing of value and the high energy consumption is a feature of the system.
Because this isn't already the case...
You don't fight this on the demand side. You fight it on the supply side.
> There is harm when people get swindled out of money.
Take responsibility for your life. The government is not your friend.
> There is harm with criminal organizations have ways to get huge amounts of capital.
This is happening in the current economic system, and would be easier to fight if all transactions were on transparent ledgers.
I've actually wondered, greenhouse gasses aside, if the sheer amount of direct and incidental heat generation in a modern civilization, doesn't contribute to global warming. Even on 100% carbon-free electricity, when you run a 500-watt mining unit, it's still kicking out 499.99 watts worth of heat into the air.
> Take responsibility for your life. The government is not your friend.
What is the purpose of government if not to enforce laws and social standards like "don't swindle people"
To use a simplistic thought experiment, imagine that all the world's electricity production today came from photovoltaic solar. Would the world be hotter or cooler due to the electricity production?
Obviously the electricity usage doesn't cause more solar energy to reach the Earth from the Sun (unless we start using energy-beaming satellites), and any processes on Earth can't turn a Joule of solar energy into more than a Joule of heat, so the heat balance stays the same.
Except, of course, that by not burning fossil fuels (which are stored reserves of solar energy), we would actually reduce the amount of heat released on Earth, causing a slight cooling effect.
There are cryptocurrencies that do not use as much energy as Bitcoin.
Really, none of your points are problems without solutions.
Bitcoin is an energy hog, but not every cryptocurrency has to be Bitcoin. Ethereum doesn't use as much energy.
Criminal organizations use regular banks too. In fact, many financial organizations are undistinguishable from criminal organizations.
I would argue that the only climate crisis that exists is a distinct lack of imagination. Nuclear Energy has already solved all of humanity's energy needs for decades and does so in a far more environmentally friendly manner than any renewable energy solution that currently exists.
> There is harm when people get swindled out of money.
Fiat currencies do not protect people from inflation. In fact, they're designed to enable it and systematically rob you of your savings and purchasing power without you even seeing it. Who's swindling who?
> There is harm with criminal organizations have ways to get huge amounts of capital.
Do criminals sometimes use crypto? Of course.
Do you know what they use far more of? Dollars, Euros, Yuan, Yen, and other fiat currencies.
Criminals get a lot more mileage out of fiat currency than moving their funds around on a public ledger.
1. tokenized: we care about moving 'units' of 'value' between 'accounts'
2. ledger-based: having an immutable record of previous state changes
3. distributed: progression of state is determined by many participants who may not share a common goal
4. consensus mechanism: this is what the system gives us: a set of rules which if followed allow parties to agree on the contents of the ledger.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/majority-salvadorans-do-n...
To have a bitcoin transaction mined within roughly an hour on sep 6 2021 costs $11.44[2], making bitcoin unusable for many Salvadorans, especially for small transactions. Yes, lightning network and centralized payment platforms exist on top of Bitcoin, but these defeat the purpose of bitcoin and add complexity.
1 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... 2 https://bitcoinfees.co/
It's important to note that the "centralization" of lightning (a statement that I somewhat disagree with, but can understand the basis of) doesn't mean that other parties can steal your money. You the sender decide what route your payment takes, and as such the worst a participant can do is block your payment from arriving at the destination. And, if this occurs, you can just find another route, or open a direct channel to the node you are trying to send to.
People realized this was a mistake long ago. Monero was updated to use new algorithms to ensure CPU mining remained viable. It's easy to mine monero as a result. More people do it and as a result the network has a greater degree of decentralization.
Shame that bitcoin will never be dethroned. It's a shitty coin.
Edit: clarification of meaning no mining
Operating a financial institution with permits, and identification of participants might not draw the ire of the US government.
With the transparency and lack of anonymity I would imagine the usefulness to criminals would be minimal.
Makes his whole essay kind of silly since he leads with this big energy argument that then crumbles immediately and he tries to use this kind of sleight of hand misdirect instead of acknowledging that entire argument doesn't matter when discussing cryptocurrencies in general and not just Bitcoin.
It really hurts his case.