Ledger does not replace need for accountants.
We already have a bunch of software for ledger (that also doesn't require to burn huge amounts of energy).
Banks are ledger and if somebody like a government want to get info from that ledger it has been quite easy recently -- even Swiss banks relented and have been forced to submit information.
Accountants are people who specialize in knowing how to categorize stuff before it is put on a ledger in a way that meets requirements of local law and makes business more easy to conduct.
I don't see any possible way in which bitcoin is making this easier.
>I don't see any possible way in which bitcoin is making this easier.
Who says it has to be easier or better? It does the work of handling transactions and keeping track of balances.
With bitcoin as a user you only have to pay a very tiny transaction fee in order to keep track of your account value and handle the transfer from one account to another. Is this better? Well you don't have to pay somebody to operate software and as long as you can access the bitcoin network there aren't any impediments to doing transactions.
But the point isn't if bitcoin is better or best or even good, just that is does the thing and doing that thing has value.
Bitcoin does not provide value, it is just one of possible alternative to use to make transacting easier.
Unfortunately, bitcoin also burns energy at a rate of small country which is quite unnecessary but will make every person poorer (if only for making our environment worse).
You might want to look into how much our existing banking systems consumes in terms of total energy. It might shock you.
Bitcoin mostly only contends with two costs – energy (computing hashes) and resources (making mining rigs). Meanwhile, traditional banking systems have crazy high energy and resource costs from: building physical banks, vaults, armored cards, paper money, coins, bank clouds, stock market clouds, cheques, payment networks (Visa / MasterCard)... the list goes on. Additionally, classical banking has incredibly high human capital costs – think of all the innumerous people involved in just maintaining a system of trust compared with the near-zero human capital cost of the Bitcoin network.
Actually working for a bank, I can tell you that banks do a lot more than just keep your money.
If you are not convinced try to move your entire financial life to bitcoin and tell me how you get cash, how you pay for fuel at gas station or pay your taxes.
Does bitcoin have inherently web application for you to log in and manage your account?
Does it have a call center for you to call to block your credit card?
What about a host of other services banks provide you just conveniently omitted?
If I want to convert ETH to BAT or whatever, I just authenticate (using the same wallet as used above) to a thin wrapper around the network and everything happens on the Ethereum network itself. Meanwhile, if I want to convert USD to GBP, the layers below whatever service I actually use (let's say TransferWise) as the consumer is deeply nested, probably involving somewhere between 5 - 10 different entities.
What exactly do you mean when you say something does not provide value?
I mean that it is accomplishing a task which has utility to some person.
If something "provides value" it means it generates net benefit after inclusion of various costs and risks.
If we take "provides value for humanity" it means bitcoin would have to make net benefit for humanity.
But that is not the case. Almost all people have other as convenient ways to transact money. So we only have actually very small minority of people who see the actual benefit.
These are mostly people who use bitcoin not to transact but rather to speculate on it -- they don't benefit on it because it makes transacting easier, it is just a pure game on whether the value of bitcoin is going to go up or down.
Another class of people for whom bitcoin creates value are the ones with access to capital, cheap energy and silicon to play the game of burning money for bitcoin.
Everybody else (ie. almost all people in the world) is left with no benefits and a disadvantage of worsening environment.
The energy must be produced somewhere. Even if the particular MWh for mining was produced from renewable sources, it could have been used to offset some non-renewable MWh, but now is lost to the space. The capacity to produce energy is being wasted.
Even if humanity produces 100% energy from renewable resources we are still long way to repairing our environment and that energy could have been used to maybe sequester some CO2.
"Normal" coin on normal account does not require so much energy to be burned.
Cheating on exams only provides value for the chater, but everybody else has to pay some price for it.
That these things have any value attached to them is only due to people agreeing to it and believing it. Which makes them no different from seashells. While seashells would be a lot less practical in todays world they have been used in the past.
Or are you dividing the cost of that banking system by the number of transactions it processes? I.e. comparing 1 transaction to 1 transaction?
On a per-transaction basis traditional banking uses a lot less energy than Bitcoin. Including the cost to run the bank's servers, the air conditioning in their buildings, the Christmas lights their employees put up, and everything.
How can I make such a bold claim? How could I possibly have calculated the energy usage of all those things?
Simple. Bitcoin does about 8.5 TPS which works out to around 268 million transactions per year. Bitcoin uses 0.55% of the world's energy production per cbeci.org.
The ACH network (US direct deposit system) processes around 23 billion transactions per year. The European SEPA network does about 22 billion. The UK's BACS accounts for another 8 billion or so.
So just counting those 3, that's 53bn transactions per year, which is 197x what Bitcoin does. If their energy cost per transaction was as bad as Bitcoin's, then that would take 0.55 * 197 = 108.35% of the world's energy production. There literally isn't enough energy in the world for the banks to be as inefficient as Bitcoin. And we're only handling direct bank debit/credits in the US and Europe so far, we haven't even touched on credit card stuff, international wires, anything in Asia, etc.
This is false.
Let's say I am shady business that launders money.
Is bitcoin helping stop my laundering?
No... I just use regular money which can't be tracked so easily...
In essence, bitcoin makes it easier to track money of people who don't mind their money is being tracked or are inept enough to understand their money can be traced.