People like to say that bitcoiners are speculators, gamblers etc. But what is not owning Bitcoin?
It’s betting that fiat money, a system devised by bankers and politicians for their own benefit, it the superior form of money, and that it will win on a free market of currencies.
I’m sure somebody will reply hurr durr, I don’t own fiat, I own stocks, property, things that yield returns, yadda yadda. Well guess what, then you already don’t trust fiat money.
deleted by creator
I ask questions about inherit problems bitcoin had (likely still has). Maybe some breakthrough happened. So far I’m hearing personal attacks from you.
All I can imply now is that you’re invested in this fool’s gold and trying to find other people to sink with you.
deleted by creator
I had to look it up. It’s still practically useless to mine on anything other than ASIC. ASIC isn’t something an average Joe will buy, unless he explicitly wants to mine on the network. The crypto is not by the people for the people it seems… Just corpo for people just like the bank.
Another serious problem is deflation actually. The currency doesn’t lose value, therefore it’s not useful to “spend”. It’s more or less the primary use for it.
Another issue is not being able to force take away from a vallet. If there is a criminal who scams people away, he is impossoble to punish for his actions, since memory based cold vallets are possible.
And for the finale… Global warming. The bloody proof of work thing still exists it seems. All the devices heavily use energy for this crypto. Democratic central currency often does look like a better alternative to tackle that.
I really hope for a better currency, but bitcoin just doesn’t still seem to make it. Lightning and pruning is cool.
deleted by creator
Never said you need ASIC, just said that bitcoin is not democratic, because the average Joe does not participate in mining.
Before today’s currency mercentalism reigned supreme. Accumulation of wealth was seen as the primary objective. For an average person it was very limited on what he could get. Most of items and products had to be produced locally. Currency today actually encourages trading. (Whether that’s good or bad is up for debate remarking on your last point)
There are many countries, where bitcoin use maybe could be used as an alternative to “dollarization”. Yet the only time I actually saw it happening was during the Ukraine invasion, when Russians traded roubles to bitcoin after leaving the country, since their currency more or less collapsed in the international market.
It uses 0.2% of energy and still does not facilitate daily trade. While the whole banking sector (ATMs, banks, cyrrency production, datacenters) use around 0.4% of global energy.
Take VISA for example, it does around 24k transactions per second, while bitcoin does around 100. That’s 240 times more. By this it looks that you would need half the worlds energy production just to come closer to daily use as a currency.
deleted by creator
Lightning is cool as a concept, but it’s limited by base layer itself. Opening a channel requires a bitcoin transaction. Because of that you would need much larger block size. Bitcoin doesn’t want large block size. Almost every time the network forks because of it.
Lightning network had problems with minting non existant coins and due to internal state errors, actually locking up bitcoins forever.
Distributed networks are extremely difficult to implement, and they suffer from the traveling salesman problem. It’s insanely difficult to find the shortest route.
deleted by creator
Sorry for swingingkoala, i promise we’re not all this unhelpful x3
Not quite, as the network is governed by the participating nodes, not just the nodes with miners attached to them. You can produce all the blocks you want, but if they dont comply with the rules they wont be accepted. A good article explaining governance is here.
Theres a couple projects that aim to create a circular bitcoin economy, like Bitcoin Ekasi in South Africa, Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador. Theres also miners supporting local energy development like Gridless.
If by “daily trade” you mean daily purchases like coffee, then yeah, the base layer isnt the best for that. Thats the task of the Lightning network, which allows for near-instant settlement with much lower fees compared to the base layer. The base layer is closer to wire transfers or cash than Visa.
100 is a big overestimation, i think base layer TPS is 7-12? Which is why Lightning exists, because who wants to wait an unknown amount of time before their coffee payment goes through (and spend almost a dollar in fees at minimum)?
Also, transaction count doesnt equate to energy usage. Whether theres 100 transactions or 1,000,000, the network will use the same amount to process them. The energy usage depends on the number of active ASICs, and on the number of nodes in the network.