I’m watching the show Power, so maybe that clip was funnier to me than it should have been. https://www.reddit.com/r/cryptocurrencymemes/comments/928o78/when_you_make_0001_btc_trading/
For the past 3 or 4 days the entire market cap of crypto has been on a slide. https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/
Not as big a slide as that by any means, but certainly enough to cause a noticeable dip on Bitcoin. However, for the present Bitcoins price has still been somewhat stable. This is because Bitcoins market share of that overall market cap has been increasing at the same rate or close to the sliding overall market cap.
48.3% now. Gained nearly an entire percent in the last 24 hrs. https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage
Someone fixes their CoinBase. As you can see: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/93cht4/i_fixed_my_coinbase/ They now sell Bitcoin, nothing, Ethereum and Litecoin. Pretty creative.
Today I would like to talk about a post on /r/cryptocurrency which I thought was a really interesting argument. Link to it below in case you want to pause and read it first.
The TLDW of it is, miners suck. Fees suck. Centralization sucks. Energy wastefulness sucks. Ethereum is better.
I think at the crux of it, this is correct to a degree. I don’t mean to refute any of these points, as they cannot be. These things do suck, but there are redeeming qualities of each of these.
To the first, energy wastefulness sucks. Maintaining Bitcoins network has been estimated to use 42 terawatt hours a year, that’s more energy in a year than New Zealand uses. That’s 20 megatons of CO2 emissions, or roughly 1 million transatlantic flights. And it’s rapidly rising, as more and more hash power is being added to the network.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/17/bitcoin-electricity-usage-huge-climate-cryptocurrency
How are you going to attempt to see any redeeming quality there?
Not easily. However, it’s important to realise that the true value of a blockchain is immutability and censorship resistance. Otherwise you might as well use a centralized server. The Bitcoin network is the most powerful computer network there is. Provably the most attacked there’s been, and provably the most secure. The fact that a 3rd party cannot just buy their way into being able to shut down the network means that some people will find that a valuable redeeming quality.
But why not just use PoS? Not as provably secure. I’ll link an article below detailing why if you’re interested. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1382241.0 But by all means use another coin that has PoS if you want to. You vote with your wallet in this free market. There doesn’t have to be just one coin in existence.
What about fees then? The original poster describes how if you are to exchange a gold coin with someone in the street, there is no magical part of that coin going to an intermediary 3rd party.
This one is actually pretty easy to see the redeeming quality. First of all, the fee should be miniscule, if not something is going wrong. But fees were introduced in order to protect the network from spam attacks. There is a limited number of transactions per second, so making attacks on the network costly actually is an effective security model. Satoshi described this in the beginning and was actually worried about it. In an ideal world we wouldn’t need to worry about that true, but we live in the real world. Also, you need to incentivize people to secure your network for you.
Lastly let’s talk about probably the final point which is ASIC mining monopoly. Which does suck and has next to no redeeming qualities. Andreas Antonopolous gave a talk about this which I’m not sure where it is, but essentially, he talked about how Bitmain who are the biggest miners on the network have the first movers advantage and Bitcoin right now has it’s mining centralization peak. In the future it should fall from here. What Bitmain did is throw hundreds of millions into research and development to get the best mining fabrication system in the world. They were the first to do it. They have no reached a die size so small that they have hit moores law and can no longer improve massively in effectiveness like their previous productions did. Now the rest of the world will catch up. Japan springs to mind as they are currently funding research and development on their own machines.
Not trying to redeem this negative aspect of Bitcoin, but assumably the situation is at it’s worst right now but will improve in future.