Bitcoin is a poor solution to the problem of transferring money: it's slow, power-inefficient, controlled by an oligopoly of miners, and vulnerable to scams.

Because it’s not a primarily solution to transferring money, it’s primarily decentralized, trustless and censorship-resistant solution to that. Of course centralized solutions are cheaper and more efficient.

This and that there is a hard upper limit on the amount of bitcoin available. There will be no QE of bitcoin.

until the miners are convinced otherwise

bit like the central banks

not at all like central banks because mining is decentralized. Besides, there are also users and merchants who are just as important and miners don’t dare pushing changes that nobody wants.

Do you realize that of miners decided to fork in favor of a model which is better fit them, there will be a shortage of block mining until the difficulty declines. Which means transactions would be frozen for around a month. I'm not sure users and merchands could stand that fight …

Some already did - bitcoin cash.

Rational miners realize that forcing a protocol change that isn’t acceptable to users or merchants will destroy valuation of the fork they choose to mine, so there is discebtive from such behavior.

But yes, if they do it anyway, there will be period with very slow blocks and that will hurt the project a lot but then difficulty will adjust downward.

Yes, early computer pioneers also engaged in groundbreaking work.

A huge mainframe filled with vacuum tubes seems to fit here. That’s bitcoin, currently, but for “magic internet money”. The bandwidth, throughout, and power utilization are what you might expect from such a first generation technology experiment.

The benefits of bitcoin are eclipsed by the meteoric rise, and this price increase is the basis for most new folks getting on board, not so they can use it now as a currency.

1) those mainframes got people to the moon

2) nothing in bitcoin protocol precludes it from adopting more efficient solutions when such appear, what people seem to miss is that proof of work itself and energy spent securing the ledger will always correlate with value stored

1) So, a worldwide payment solution requires a spaceship, but we have first generation mainframes currently. Bitcoin is the biggest of those mainframes, uses the most energy, etc.

2) You touched upon two independent considerations.

Yes, bitcoin can evolve technologically, but it’s not assured.

Energy spent is based on incentive. Value stored isn’t directly correlated, that’s a result of price which results from buyers and sellers, which results from sentiment. Now we get into disparate supply and demand based on information advantage.

Energy utilization as it correlates to some incentive to expend such energy for monetary gain is indirectly coupled to the stored value. Other factors affect this. The market is not efficient, it behaves, pricewise, like many markets before it.

Greatest bubble of our generation, but admittedly quite the clever one. The truth is that some Silicon Valley insiders amongst other movers and shakers saw bitcoin’s potential early on for such a rise to where we are now (and possibly way more), by design and precisely because they control the narrative. It’s been exploited by smart folks. If you had the means, foresight, and motivation, you were in a privileged position to transfer wealth to yourself. Now, this is not the case.

Real people get hurt by the economic cycles we’ve seen and bitcoin is, for some, a way to be robin hood in that long time narrative.

1) the point is, we’ve just started

2)

How is it not assured that bitcoin will evolve? It evolves all the time. Are you even following the project?

Energy spent correlates with incentive, incentive is based on price, price is based on demand/value. Where is demand/perceived value derived from is debatable.

The rest of your message equally applies to all other endeavors where early movers have profited. Yes it’s a bubble, yes markets are inefficient, yes people get hurt, how is any of that different from the what was happening in other sectors? Cryptocurrencies are here to stay.

1) Yes, and bitcoin isn’t the only player in town.

2) It’s not assured that major breakthroughs will occur within the bitcoin ecosystem, nor that they will fold back into it.

I’m pretty familiar with bitcoin’s current technology developments. There are opinions, theories, and experiments flying around about how to build that rocket ship. Very very early and unclear.

The energy usage is not sustainable; we don’t have “decentralized logarithmically increasing clean energy sources” upon which to build bitcoin’s network to the stratospheric levels needed to achieve moonshot valuations, not without a serious innovation in technology to evolve the usage of bitcoin as a currency. Something better and more energy efficient for a trustless solution could come along.

Most everyone knows cryptocurrencies are here to stay but that’s not directly related to bitcoin, it’s price, it’s tech evolution specifically, and how it may or may not evolve into a viable currency.

It’s energy producing companies that worry about sustainability, not energy spending. Energy spending endeavors only worry about profitability. So it’s absolutely misguided to scold bitcoin over it’s use of energy and not do the same for instance to people heating up their apartments or driving cars or insert your energy spending activity.

Increasing efficiency of bitcoins proof of work will simply bump the difficulty so energy use will remain the same.

There’s a difference between scolding energy usage and pointing out that the design itself, even if efficiency of that design is increased, is what leads to this spiraling energy expenditure that powers massive computational hashing power only to support that currency and nothing else (no other social or technical goals). There are better ways to design such a system to do more than perform endless hashing that is merely self-serving. Furthermore, there could be innovations related to a trustless system that will make bitcoin itself obsolete; the future of bitcoin as leader isn’t guaranteed.

This isn’t related to heating or driving efficiency.

You seem to be convinced there are better ways to implement a distributed consensus mechanism that doesn’t depend on proof of work. Feel free to present it to the world and become the next satoshi. Meanwhile - face the reality. PoW will consume as much energy as is profitable and only market decides that.

I’m convinced people are searching for it. I’m convinced there’s a huge nouveau academic interest in this area. This just helps to estimate likelihood of bitcoin’s longevity.

Yes, precisely, you always need buyers to push price further. Market decides up or down, miners play along as it makes sense to them. Kind of like the swap over to bcash about a month ago, because it made sense financially.

> How is it not assured that bitcoin will evolve? It evolves all the time. Are you even following the project?

I mean, are you even following the project? Very, very basic changes like "let's change this parameter from 1 to 2" are incredibly contentious, leading to hard forks and loud debates and furious accusations that people are shills trying to ruin Bitcoin for personal profit. If we can't even behave ourselves for a trivial proposal like Segwit2x, how could a truly significant protocol change ever get anywhere?

Bumping blocksize is contentious hardfork because not everybody is convinced it is the right way to scale (and i somewhat agree). Segwit otoh was implemented as backward compatible soft fork. Segwit2x is a deliberate attack on the network and i’m happy it failed.

Overall everybody got what they wanted - big blockers have BCH, conservatives have original BTC plus the capacity increase from segwit.