They are banned in the EU, and are slowly being banned in the US.
Like ACH, Venmo, wire transfers, etc?
Bitcoin is like CFL bulbs. An unfortunate ecological misstep while trying to improve what was available. I'll agree the parallel is clunky since CFLs still saved energy, bit bitcoin burns through it.
There are also other PoW chains, like Monero, that are “cheaper for now” — but if everyone using Bitcoin switched to those, they’d be just as expensive as Bitcoin is.
PoS chains (including maybe PoS state-channels for PoW base chains) are the good alternative — everyone in the space can see that. But they’re not ready yet.
> Bitcoin is like CFL bulbs.
I agree: like CFLs, Bitcoin is better than what we had before in some ways, but worse in others, and we can clearly see that we’re going to need to replace it. (The bad-actor analogy even holds up: both CFLs and PoW chains have externalized consequences. CFLs put mercury into the environment; Bitcoin contributes to climate change.)
But we didn’t try to muscle CFLs out of the ecosystem. They just disappeared from relevance — and production went to 1/1000th of peak — once we got good, cheap LED bulbs into the market. Until then, the market concentrated on CFL bulbs, because they really were a (rational-selfish-economic-actor) “better” option than incandescent. It made economic sense for property developers and other mass-buyers to fill their lighting neeeds with CFLs. And then — once LEDs were good and cheap — it didn’t.
Yes, and they are being banned, in many places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_ligh...
They also enable trade to continue between nations that trade-sanction/blockade one-another, which is usually seen as a global-economic net good (in the sense that a trade-sanction/blockade is essentially an infinity% tariff, and economists have analyzed to death how tariffs hurt both the target and source economies.)
(Some countries accomplish this by just using some other country’s physical currency — e.g. Venezuela using USD. But in really authoritarian [and technologically-modern] countries, any type of movement of physical currency exchange is heavily tracked, so this isn’t usually an option.)
And we can say "it will be banned in 1-2 years, you have the time to change the underlying tech.
With those premises the value will not change much, and the global advantages are big.
And which one of those Proof-of-Stake forms are you already heavily invested in?
But we’re not at that “fully commercialized and in mass production” inflection point yet with Proof-of-Stake networks. They exist, but none have the transaction load (and thus the network build-out to absorb the transaction load) that Bitcoin has.
Forcing a switch to PoS now, would be like trying to force a switch to CFLs or LED bulbs only a year or two after they were invented. What would you imagine would happen as a result? The incandescent manufacturers would go out of business, and the CFL/LED manufacturers wouldn’t yet have been able to absorb the demand. Nobody would be able to buy lightbulbs. This kind of a ban is effectively just demanding to kill the sector as a whole.
Once an old technology is on its way out in the market anyway — and it’s only stubborn locked-in enterprise hold-outs, rather than greenfield adoption, continuing the relevance of the old tech — then it can be banned, to force those enterprise hold-outs to switch over to the new tech. That’s entirely appropriate. But the market knows when tech is mature, and the market itself switches over when that happens. Trying to force the market is just acting without the same distributed knowledge the market represents. It’s central top-down allocation trying to solve distributed problems, like the failure of the USSR.
To be clear, I’m a developer for Proof-of-Stake ecosystem tooling myself. But I think all PoS developers would agree that there’s no Proof-of-Stake mainnet network that yet has the capacity to absorb all of Bitcoin’s transaction flow—and there’s no reason that one or more governments saying “you have a year to transition to PoS” would change this.
The existing PoS chains are at the level of infrastructure development now, that the CFL+LED bulb industries were at around the year 1990. Do you think they could have suddenly achieved their 2014 (= the year Canada banned incandescents) level of infrastructure development in one year, if people just threw money at them? Technology—its productization, its operationalization, and ecosystem tooling adaptation—takes time.