Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin::US government tracking the energy implications of booming bitcoin mining in US.
Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin::US government tracking the energy implications of booming bitcoin mining in US.
How much goes to the dollar?
There’s a powered device or 5 in every store connected to a credit server.
All that energy for bitcoin only supports 7 tx/s. Digital dollar payments do tens if not hundres of thousands per second.
tx/s?
Transactions per second. Bitcoin is slow and expensive to get your transaction “approved”.
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Transactions per second
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Are you paid to post that nonsense?
For those in blissful ignorance: This uses so-called channels between participants. Opening a lightning channel means, basically, putting bitcoin in “escrow” on the blockchain. This requires multiple transactions on the blockchain. Bitcoin doesn’t even have enough capacity to open a channel for each baby being born.
The amount that both sides put in “escrow” is the max payment imbalance that a channel can accept. Say, you want to use a channel to buy a car for $20k, then you need a channel that both you and the other guy have put in $20k in bitcoin.
If some calamity happens, these funds are lost in nirvana.
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I can see that you don’t know how this works. That’s ok. It’s nonsense. No one needs to know about that.
Custodial wallets work just like checking accounts, without the regulation. Crypto victims like to say: Not your keys, not your coins. The custodian owes you the crypto that you have in your account/custodial wallet. You own a debt payable in crypto. If the custodian goes bankrupt and can’t pay the debts, you are screwed (as so many crypto victims have found out to their shock). The money in a normal checking account is covered by a mandatory deposit insurance scheme, so you don’t have to worry about that.
Because custodial accounts replicate checking accounts, they can be just as fast and efficient, in themselves. Having to pay the upkeep of the blockchain in the background means, that they can’t be as cheap as actual checking accounts. If a custodial wallet offers you better conditions than a checking account, they must be gambling with the crypto (that you loaned them) in some way, that a normal bank is prohibited from doing with customer funds.
For the sake of completeness: Exchanges in more regulated jurisdictions work like stock brokerages. They must hold the assets. In case of bankruptcy, they are special assets that belong to the customer and are not used to pay creditors in general.
While Lightning doesn’t need you to open a channel for every new recipient and has smart routing through other participants, I still think it’s an inconvenient solution we don’t have to take.
We have Solana, a 300.000+ TPS Layer-1. We have much smarter Ethereum Layer-2’s that don’t require this bullshit. We have many ways to tackle this problem, it’s the hyperfocus on Bitcoin that, in my opinion, makes people go for Lightning network anyway.
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Solana currently has 1777 validators - which doesn’t look like much compared to Bitcoin, but is actually way more than enough for any practical intents and purposes.
You need the same infrastructure for any electronic payment system.
What you don’t need for anything is crypto “mining”, which is almost pure overhead. That’s what the article is about.
It’s not pure overhead. It’s the means of initial distribution and also mining is the backend for handling transactions. Not that I think it’s efficient by any means. It’s just that it was necessary for Bitcoin to ever become something that mattered.
Mining is barely transactional in nature. Pretty much all of it is calculating hashes, which, on one hand, is super important as part of Proof-of-Work consensus, the most decentralized one we have, but on the other we have other reasonably secure options that waste two orders of magnitude less power.
It’s not necessary to perform any of the functions of crypto, including money laundering. That makes it pure overhead; pure waste. There are offshore banks that facilitate tax fraud and other criminal activity. Crypto, somehow, allows exchanges to escape the scrutiny that falls on these banks. Objectively, there is no good reason why all this waste should let you avoid scrutiny of regulators or police.
This doesn’t mean we can’t do better than both.
We can do better than capitalism entirely. It’s just that we can’t. Gotta get rid of the mentality behind it first.
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Crypto capitalism is super bad idea exactly because it’s uncontrollable, i.e. all the bad stuff of capitalist economy, uncaged.
It encourages money hoarding, which cripples the capitalist economy, it does not allow to control emission, which is actually bad because it’s essential to driving economy out of crises, it does not allow to block criminals’ access to money and transactions, it severely complicates taxation and other important economic actions.
Crypto capitalism has the potential to exacerbate inequality, and cause a giant slew of problems sending modern economy into chaos. But yes, your 500 ADA salary will be truly yours.
I’m pro-crypto, by the way. While posing new risks, crypto can be super helpful as means of unsanctioned money transfer, breaching artificial limitations, keeping governments in check by always being able to support protesters, etc. But making it the world go-to currency is a bad idea.
Ok, but thinking crypto won’t be widely adopted is just wishful thinking. Do you honestly see a reality in the future where it’s not widely adopted?
If so, I would be curious to hear how that would work and what would people use instead?
Uhm…people would use traditional finances? Banking system ain’t going nowhere, and CBDCs make their turn - as dystopian as they are, it’s super easy to force them upon people.
What would be wishful thinking is assuming most countries will happily adopt crypto. And besides - that’s even more of a dystopian scenario.
What makes you think the FIAT system won’t end up in a hyperinflation? And if it doesn’t (lol), what makes you think people won’t wake up and realize crypto only goes up against FIAT and it’s fixed supply? And if we do get CBDCs (which I believe we will, especially since that’s probably the only way they can try to save and transition the current system into something that doesn’t implode), what makes you think people will just gladly welcome them and not opt out for the alternative (crypto)? I hold strong belief we will live in a hybrid CBDC + crypto world fairly soon.
People had 15 years to “wake up” now, yet they didn’t. Partly due to volatility which makes planning near economic future impossible, partly due to scare, but most importantly because they still get their wages in fiat, pay for products in fiat etc., and generally have little left to invest.
The state doesn’t have incentive to change the regulations that favor crypto because crypto is generally worse as actual money as opposed to store of value for the reasons described above.
Crypto bros will shill “crypto everywhere soon” narrative every time they can, and I’ve seen it since at least Mt. Gox era. But until the regulations will be there (and they won’t), nothing is gonna happen.