A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger doesn't have to be public to be trusted. When I swipe my card at the grocery store, I'm not shaking in my boots with my fingers crossed, doubting whether the transaction will be recorded as transmitted or not.
If for some looney toons secret agent reason you need a transaction to be public, you can tweet a picture of the receipt. Or, even better, you can mail it to yourself, the postmark is legally binding.
Bitcoin uses almost as much energy as the entire global banking system, with its associated costs in capital, emissions, and e-waste, to process less than 0.001% the transaction volume of Visa alone, while providing no additional benefit.
Of course, because as the customer nothing bad happens to you if it’s not. Worst case scenario, the merchant doesn’t accept your payment and you either have to pay with cash or not buy anything.
The worst case scenario for the merchant is substantially worse. If the payment doesn’t go through, they lose money. This could happen days or weeks later if the customer decides to chargeback the merchant. There are countless stories of payment processors siding with customers, placing holds on a business’s funds for extended periods of time while conducting investigations, etc.
I would actually take the opposite stance. Unless a ledger is public and independently verifiable, there is no reason to trust it at all. Nearly every instance of financial fraud has relied on people trusting a private ledger.
Second of all, abusing chargebacks when a vendor upheld their side of an agreement is a crime, and if you can prove that you delivered the goods as the consumer requested, the chargeback can be reversed. This is not a problem with the system.
The way that blockchain "solves" this non-problem is by making the transaction record immutable, so that no transaction can ever be undone, no longer how fraudulent or illegal. That's why the main users of blockchain technology these days, aside from speculators, is scammers and theives, because once you have somebody's crypto money, it is technologically impossible to ever return it to its rightful owner, even with a court order.
Theft on the blockchain has already surpassed all other financial theft in the world pre-2016. Getting access to people's keys, or tricking them into authorizing a transaction, or writing malware into smart contracts has enabled a golden age of theft that cannot be undone.
Immutability does not imply correctness.
> Unless a ledger is public and independently verifiable
You say this as if those things are connected. They are not. Your credit card transaction ledger is already independently verifiable, with the magical future technologies known as "receipts" and "bank statements".
A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger does not need to be distributed to be trusted. See above.
If, for some looney toons secret agent reason you need a transaction to be in a lot of places, you can ship out usb sticks, put copies of it on different data centers.
Or, just use a regular-ass bank. They already have distributed ledger systems for redundancy and responsiveness. What, you think that out of all of Chase's data centers there's only one server that has any transaction data on it?
Blockchain adds nothing that existing database and data transfer solutions don't have, but it always comes with cost and immutability (which is not the same as correctness- the >1 billion dollars stolen out of people's crypto wallets per year since 2018 is testament to that).
Yes, unfortunately mining is too profitable with the current prices, we need it to go back to a much lower price. Probably won’t happen for a long time (bubbles can exist for decades). Bitcoin can in theory transact more volume than VISA while using the same energy as it is now since the block time is always 10 minutes.
You swipe at the grocery store, what's Visa gonna do, not record your transaction? Why is that the only part of the exchange that you're worried about?
Why is it them you want to stop trusting, and not the POS terminal manufacturer who could be lying about the total on the screen?
Or the grocery store you're buying from who could be selling you poison, or who could refuse to carry out a delivery you ordered after taking your money, or who could mischarge you for the items you bought?
And how is your situation improved by switching away from the payment processor with legal responsibilities and administrative controls, to an immutable system that will never, ever, ever let you get the money back in the event of any of the other parties to the transaction turning out to be untrustworthy, even if a court orders it?
Immutability is not correctness. In fact it is the opposite, because in any system that takes input from the real world, errors are guaranteed, whether malicious or accidental. Eliminating the possibility of error correction from the system decreases it's trustworthiness.
> Bitcoin can in theory transact more volume than VISA while using the same energy as it is now since the block time is always 10 minutes.
No it can't. The bitcoin block size is fixed at 10mb, and they've been full for years.
It is theoretically possible for consumption to go down as people exit the network, but that won't ever happen, because the POW system is inherently a power-consumption arms race. There is not, nor can there ever be, a disincentive from buying more hardware and consuming more power. If you crunch more than the other guys you're going to win more blocks and be financially rewarded. The protocol guarantees that the ROI is always positive.
what scares me is that I dont really have any idea of what the really good useful investable things are underlying all this bullshit, because I trained up in computer programming and time series analysis and trading and machine learning not crypto. so while I can squint and see that like in authentication maybe, or maybe tokenizing assets, or maybe that distributed name service, some of it is interesting, but why are we putting billions into all this crap instead of electrolysis or better fission reactors, or biotech to create chemicals without oil, or ammonia, we are investing in this behavioral social tech which feeds off of, and amplifies, our worst social traits?
it doesn't even help us with our number one collective behavioral shortcoming which is how to reach consensus about externalized problems. it just encourages more externalization so that VCs can make money. I love money but I dont like society choosing only to solve the easy problems while neglecting everything else.
I dont think we can live in crypto fantasy land for example while all the new supply chain problems create real new challenges which require trillions of investment to fix. "how I pay for things" kind of pales in comparison to "why cant we manufacture electronics"
Maybe I am wrong
To match Visa alone you'd need to increase that by a factor of 250 - you could reduce block time, increase block size, whatever. But that would also by necessity increase the storage requirements of each node by a similar factor.
The whole reason that Bitcoin has smart contracting is to enable this kind of scalability without compromising the security. After all, all that fancy decentralized stuff wouldn't be useful if you had to go use a centralized server (or abandon security) to make use of it.
Imagine you, me, and some of the other posters here decide we'd like to transact efficiently amongst ourselves without the resource expenditure of telling others about our transactions but we don't trust each other, so we establish a set of rules about the records we need to keep when doing so. If there is never a dispute great! But if there is a dispute, we take our agreement and our transaction records and head off to court to settle the dispute.
To apply that to Bitcoin: the rules and records get made machine interpretable. Transact as you like, and if there is a dispute you take the relevant records to the blockchain and it enforces according to them. Because the enforcement is automatic and untamperable there isn't any reason to cause a dispute in the first place (which creates some challenges for software Q/A)... so then when channels are used globally broadcast transactions are only needed to enroll or unenrole coins in a scheme (or in the event of a dispute or a software fault).
You could, of course, instead have some insecure trust based way of exchanging coins-- that is, after all, how all legacy banking technology works. But with Bitcoin you don't have to. The system offers a spectrum of different ways to transact, each with their own costs and benefits.
This whole idea falls down once you realize that the blockchain knows nothing about what was actually transacted. Say I give you a piece of bread in exchange for 1 Satoshi, but never receive that Satoshi. A court of law can, in principle, coerce you to pay what you owe me, but the blockchain can do no such thing. Similarly, if you do pay me that Satoshi but I never give you the bread, you'll also never be able to convince the blockchain to reverse the transaction or make me give you the bread.
HOWEVER, you're not entirely correct for two reasons:
(1) There is a much wider class of transactions that can be made cheat proof than you might expect. If, for example, I were purchasing machine validable information from you that could be made resolvable https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-conting...
(2) Even when that's not possible-- when you transact you can use excrow transactions to specify that any monotone function of additional key holders can release the funds. In the simpliest form, the transfer requires you me and an arbitrator. So you could make it so that if there is a dispute one or more other parties have to approve the outcome-- which could be a court or a private arbitrator (or some quorum of arbitrators, if you like). There the third party isn't eliminated, but it's made very flexible.
As an aside, in US legal tradition civil courts do not usually award specific performance -- I might get my money back and damages, but they won't make you give me bread you promised to give me. (2) is similarly limited, but (1) isn't if applies and you don't choose for it to be.
Ethereum has it's EVM. Monero has it's RandomX algo to prevent ASICs, and it's Ring signatures to prevent tracing.
Some coins are pure Proof of Stake and try to solve scaling differently, see Algorand and Cardano.
There are altcoins that are just clones, referred to generally as shitcoins.
The thing is that you don’t need more than this one online currency though, right? It’s also the safest in terms of PoW [1]. I don’t see any reason for all other altcoins to exist other than charting and trading on exchanges (which is certainly fun, but does not provide value).
[1] https://howmanyconfs.com/