It's a strictly worse monetary system by any measure. It's massively more expensive to transact, it's unbelievably inefficient - requiring as much power as Thailand and generating as much e-waste as the Netherlands to scribble 2-3 tx/sec into a ledger. That's 60 days of power for the average US household and 1 iPad of e-waste per transaction. [1] [edit](97% of all mining hardware will be thrown away without ever winning a single block reward).

If adopted as an actual currency it would immediately lead to a deflationary spiral savaging the job market. [2] Even the dictator of El Salvador wasn't nuts enough to adopt it as an actual currency. All pricing continues to be in USD and exchanged for BTC at the point of sale - and the point of a gun. (Keep in mind legal tender laws in ES require everyone to accept your Bitcoin for purchases or you face criminal charges).

To call it wholly unfit for any purpose except exchanging for black tar heroin would be an understatement.

[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deflationary-spiral.asp

Given the capacity of the BTC blockchain, if everyone one earth finally adopted BTC (as some people dream about), everyone could get in about one transaction in their lifetime.

(3 tx/sec = 3 tx/sec * 31m sec/a = 100m tx/a = 10bn tx/100a, so the network supports 10 bn transactions in about 100 years, and there are about 10bn people on earth, each living around 100 years.)

This is also one of the reasons Lightning is not a viable scaling solution. If you don't get your LN channel open soon, you'll be waiting until the year 2120. This will also of course consume 100% of the remaining block reward and almost a trillion dollars in electricity.

That, and the quadratic routing complexity.

All of these issues can be overcome by upgrades and borrowing ideas and proven tech from other coins or just by moving to those coins if needed. I think it would be orders of magnitude easier to decarbonize bitcoin than it would be the petrol dollar backed by the thirsty U.S. Military machine.

Visa or PayPal are quite expensive to transact. It ranges from one to three percent overhead on every purchase you make. I don't think btc is that high is it?

21 billion in mining rewards / 100 million transactions per year is about 210 dollars per transaction. You'd need an average transaction size of $7,000 for a 3% fee to be comparable which it most certainly is not.

Mining rewards are not fees. They're the initial distribution mechanism (as a fairer alternative to pre-mining). The median transaction fees[0] which users actually pay are much lower: about 65¢ currently. With Lightning transactions they're negligible, potentially as low as 0.00000001 BTC (0.064¢). You can expect this to increase over time as the mining rewards drop, but there is no need to replace all the mining reward with transaction fees, and simple economics says that people wouldn't pay fees that high anyway. Instead the effort expended on mining will drop, resulting in a lower mining difficulty. We're in a "gold rush" phase right now due to the initial block rewards; that won't last forever.

[0] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-median_transact...

Miners are incentivized to keep adding hardware/electricity until total cost = revenue. To pay their bills, they have to sell their new bitcoin to people which is effectively like a fee as their selling of 21 billion dollars in new bitcoin supply to pay their bills reduces the price of bitcoin acting like a fee on buying it.

> To pay their bills, they have to sell their new bitcoin to people which is effectively like a fee …

No, that's nothing like a transaction fee. The person submitting transactions to the network doesn't pay the seigniorage for minting new bitcoins. There is inflation due to the mining rewards (currently less than 2% annually, and set to decrease over time) which places some slight downward pressure on prices. That inflation is a cost for those holding bitcoin, not those spending it—not that anyone would notice it given the way the price has appreciated.

> 97% of all mining hardware will be thrown away without ever winning a single block reward

And fewer than 50% of Thoroughbred horses ever win a single race. This is a silly clickbaity statistic and you know it. Come on, you're better than this arcticbull ;-)

Horse racing is actually a pretty good analogy here, in that it's essentially pointless and an awful lot more money goes in than comes out. The big difference is that at least horse racing produces a fair bit of entertainment value, and that a lot of people truly love their horses.

Is that actually a real statistic about horses? That's fascinating. I wouldn't build a currency on it though ;)

Step right up to Horsecoin, fastest horse gets the block!

It's true for any endeavor that falls on the bell curve that only has one winner. And this analogy ignores the fact that mining rigs win every day just by pooling their efforts

I'm not sure that has any bearing on my comment though.

Yeah I should have replied to the parent above. I would have loved to use horsecoin to purchase human ivermectin from India last night.

All the feed stores in my area have locked up the paste and I have only the toxic to ingest orally pour on cattle versions readily attainable.

You can get by with rubbing it on the fatty areas of your body but dosing it is hit and miss.

Anyhow back to the guys in India, they would only take pay pal and the demand was so high, I had to pay an extra thirty five dollars just for pay pal processing. Crazy times...

Anyhow, I hope the mods don't burn this post. What if ivm is the real deal and I need it to save my life because my country with free health care can't fund any other kind of useful early treatment? It costs about two thousand from what I've read and there's no way they can print more money to cover this for the masses.

I'm not trying to get around vaccines even though the first one I took clotted on me and almost killed me. You should see my face right now, there's a huge scar on my forehead where my plastic surgeon ripped out a hardened clot from a vein in there last week. I'm just looking for early treatments for all of the people's no matter the vax status.

Pay pal will almost certainly shut this company off in India when they find out what he's doing. Horse coin will be the only way after that.

There is value in having a useful monetary system.

That ship sailed (multiple times) during the block size debacle for bitcoin, and there isn't nearly enough adoption with other cryptos to make them a useful payment system (aside from Monero if you're doing illegal activities)