This is what Twitter is in the process of implementing through Strike.
And sorry if I don't trust the self-described "trust-less" money developers to get batching right on the first try. The only reason this isn't being exploited is because no one is using it.
Agree with you 110 Terawatt Hours per year is likely too much, even though it's `less alarming than you might think` (quote from the last paragraph of HBR article). Core of the post was not much on the usage of Bitcoin rather than the trend towards decentralisation. Resource usage of proof-of-work based blockchain is definitely a discussion for a later post though.
I also invite you to look at the source for this number (https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons), which is nuanced, and makes the distinction between electricity and energy consumption.
All of those are truly decentralized with a wide range of implementations and operators, not to mention proven real-world robustness as opposed to Bitcoin's hard requirement on a massive amount of always-on hardware and network capacity.
You're right that there may be better examples but how much of the world's email and DNS content is served by Google/Microsoft, I wonder. People are also complaining in other threads that Cloudflare is actually making the internet more centralized.
Maybe they're talking purely about dollar value, but I'd say more useful information has been passed back and forth with torrents.
That decentralized software aligns much easier with commons than with markets is something that I would consider a feature, not a bug.
We’d definitely have the most comprehensive and accurate catalogue of the musical output of humanity ever created.
Instead now we have Spotify and Apple Music. We’ve only scratched the surface of the good that torrent technology can do.
You're litterally sending this message accross a decentralized system that outscaled bitcoin by many many orders of magnitudes in a fraction of the time.
I don't think cryptobros and the rest of the world have the same definition of "decentralized" because clearly we don't understand each other
This is true of most of the common sales points: for example, you'll see people claim blockchains are censorship resistant or anonymous, beneficial to the global unbanked, etc. with little ability to explain how that's actually true in practice.
I'm guessing that these problems get brought up a lot, but as it relates to this article, I wouldn't build my argument on Bitcoin being a pillar of scaling. Perhaps virality, but I'd argue that has more to do with financial speculation than solving end-user problems.