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Not owning Bitcoin
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this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Bitcoin
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Bitcoin is the currency of the Internet: a distributed, worldwide, decentralized digital money. Unlike traditional currencies such as dollars, bitcoins are issued and managed without any central authority whatsoever: there is no government, company, or bank in charge of Bitcoin. As such, it is more resistant to wild inflation, corrupt bankers and politicians. With Bitcoin, you can be your own bank.
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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.
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.
Man... an ASIC costs like a few K. Are you saying the average Joe can't buy a car?
In your previous comment you said lightning is cool. Go read what it is?
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.
A few hours ago you didn't know anything about bitcoin or lightning, and now you're a lightning expert?
Entirely wrong.
Should we stop using credit cards because of credit card fraud?
I've looked into what you're saying. Most of the information online seems to be marketing with no negative sides mentioned. Last time I've heavily read and tried to understand the bitcoin crypto was in 2016. Lightning network was only proposed as a solution to the inherit scalability problem all PoW cryptos have back then, and even then being slowed down by bitcoin itself was identified. It was clear that you would have to work with a hub and spokes model in order to more or less solve the routing problem. In the end it starts looking like casual banking and returning to a system that is in concept identical.
The only place where bitcoin is heavily encouraged seems to be El Salvador, and by some PPPeter channel on Youtube it seems it's not exactly working. People still rather use dollars for convenience.
Bitcoin cash seems also to support my idea that you would need larger block sizes.
Nobody ever claimed bitcoin is the dominant payment network, you're just stating a truism.
bcash: $245.45
bitcoin: $30135.00
That tells you how much bcash matters and how right their ideas are.