After all these years of growth, Bitcoin's market cap becomes its own unique edge. One simply cannot transfer significant amount, say tens of millions of dollars, easily in any other crypto currency.
The cost of energy is minuscule compared to alternative means of achieving the same: vaults, guards, banks, lawyers, etc.
Is it though? Gold in vaults easily outstrips the value assigned to all bitcoins and I doubt these vaults use even 1 Twh/year. Vaults are only environmentally expensive in construction. And since we have a surplus of vaults and bunkers (from digitization of stock trading and the end of the cold war, respectively), the only cost is protection. A few guards and some cameras and high security doors can protect >$10mio worth of gold, probably not using more energy than a few households. Managing a farm of ASICs for Bitcoin generating that amount is probably more labor intensive.
That's only because Bitcoin is still relatively insignificant blip in the world of trade, mostly a pastime for gamblers and scammers. It's footprint is actually absurdly huge compared to value it provides.
The real problem is scaling. Vaults, guards, banks, lawyers scale somewhere around O(n) to O(n logn) with the size of the market. Bitcoin's proof of work - the means of securing it - scales, to the best of my understanding, as O(n!) with the number of miners. That's not something you can run a global economy on.
On the contrary: the purpose of private banks is almost exclusively for billionaires to move their wealth around, while externalising costs to all of us. Many financial market interventions in the past are the society bailing out billionaires who bet irresponsibly and cannot bear reducing themselves to millionaires.
Compared to a free domestic ACH or wire?
Internationally you have to pay exchanges on the receiving end >1% fees to convert it to something you can actually spend.
I'd guess you'll lose far more than doing the same with gold, because the market slippage due to lack of liquidity far exceeds the cost of those vaults, banks, and guards.
A trade of $10M, or 1250 bitcoins, would move the market by 6%
I agree with some of the sentiment of the article, bitcoin's energy consumption is something to keep an eye on and if we can seamlessly move to an algorithm that's greener then so be it but you have to realize the tremendous amount of good that bitcoin is doing for the world and will likely continue to do as it becomes scarcer and scarcer, don't knock a technology that can single handedly lift a continent like Africa out of poverty.
*edit: Nothing like defending bitcoin on Hacker News and getting downvoted to oblivion, hey rather than downvote why don't you point out exactly what you disagree with so we can have a discussion
The Bank of Canada found that a Bitcoin based economy would have the same amount of drag as a 48% rate of inflation [1].
A 2% rate of inflation is trivial in the near term, and in the long term encourages productive allocation of capital. Inflation literally only matters to people sitting on cash -- and that's the point! If you invest it in anything inflation stops mattering and the constant-dollar return starts to matter.
[1] https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/swp20...
"If you have cash, you should gamble it by investing it in stocks or business."
but that's risking the money I earned. I don't want to risk it, I earned it, I just want to save it and not have it evaporate over the years.
We at least know the names of big corporations. Otherwise "we're forced to play the BitCoin game which just consolidates power to big anonymous holders and leaves a lot of people all over the world left behind".
85% of the BitCoins have already been mined. It's beyond the reach of people to participate in mining. What's left is pure speculation, based on the available supply. There's also a "culture" of HODL which means the actual exchange rate is determined by very few (big) sellers.
Wouldn't it be better if your money (that was BitCoin <sic>) increased 2% a year instead of decreased 2% a year?
Countries that don't have reliable forms of currency also don't have reliable power or internet access.
Yes, the causality of "create too much money -> inflation" is plausible (but note the emphasis on "too much").
However, we live in a world of endogenous money, where money is largely created by commercial banks in the form of loans to private entities. When prices increase, those loans get bigger. So there is also the causality "inflation -> create more money".
At the same time, there are other factors that can drive inflation, such as workers and companies exercising price setting power (which Econ 101 likes to pretend doesn't exist, but plays an important role in the real world).
So yeah, the causality that you're casually throwing out there hasn't actually been proven as the driving factor here.
At the same time, the widespread belief in it and similar misunderstandings causes us as a society to make extremely damaging macroeconomic policy decisions, in particular the decision to attempt to fight recessions using monetary policy instead of fiscal policy.
We had 4 years with 4x the reward, 4 years with 2x the reward, and about 3 years with the current reward, which makes for 1/(4x4+4x2+3) = 1/27 inflation.
I agree the infrastructure isn't there yet but problems with national currency is a government issue, infrastructure issues can usually be solved but governmental issues tend to be a lot harder and all countries that rely on fiat currency are subject to inflation
You can tell that Bitcoin, and its advocates, are from developed countries. No one who has lived in a developing country and seen crushing poverty would make such arguments.
The bitcoin guy is not going to accept 1 Zimbabwe dollar to 1 USD any more than your black market dealer who has USD. The real currency conversion rate is the problem, not the act of obtaining actual hard currency.
yes, there are a lot of fungible ways to transfer hard currency over the internet... once you acquire it.
again: acquiring it is the hard part, because nobody wants to trade a zimbabwe dollar for a USD.
Bitcoin does nothing to help your zimbabwe dollars be less worthless than they are in USD, therefore they don't help the currency conversion process at all.
I might order a raspberry pi from The Pi Hut and a hammock with 50% off for paying with BTC at another site.
Many server, VPS and web hosting services accept Bitcoin.
You can buy giftcards for many sellers with Bitcoin.
And there are Bitcoin-funded debit cards.
there really aren't any significant (legal) north american/european transactions that occur in BTC