[Jabanga]

>There is a pretty big subset of the community that believe Bitcoin is a panacea that will replace currencies, payment networks and so on, regardless of how technically inferior the blockchain is to other more mature distributed databases and networks

But they don't believe it's technically inferior to more mature distributed databases and networks..

You're transposing your own opinion onto theirs.

[hudon]

It's not opinion, it's fact. VISA can easily process over 40,000 TPS today. A single MySQL instance can process 10,000 TPS with very little electricity consumption compared to the Bitcoin or Ethereum networks, which currently use a ridiculous amount of electricity to process somewhere between 2 TPS to 20 TPS.

None of these numbers are hard to find and they are widely accepted as fact, not opinion.

> They believe one day, the blockchain will be just as efficient or even more so

^This is indeed their opinion and not a fact. Do you disagree?

[CyberDildonics]

This is a fundamental misunderstanding that assumes a linear relationship between transaction capacity and electricity usage even though they are completely decoupled.

Here is a comment I made earlier addressing the comparison to Visa with actual resources it takes:

-They don't require everyone to hold the whole blockchain, you can have a thin wallet where the blockchain is held elsewhere.

-An ecosystem of multiple different currencies does create sharding.

-Merkle trees are a hierarchy of hashes so that someone can hold only the parts of the chain they want to look at and know that they are on the right chain by syncing large parts of it with their hash as a whole.

-At Visa level transaction rates of 300 Million transactions per day and the minimum size of about 4 transactions per KB in bitcoin, that means that at current 8TB hard drive prices it costs about $900 USD per year to store all the transactions. This would also require a steady connection of at least 870 KB/s to sync with the chain.

In short, there are plenty of solutions with even the extreme examples of involvement being very obtainable by the average person in a developed country.

[Jabanga]

>which currently use a ridiculous amount of electricity to process somewhere between 2 TPS to 20 TPS.

The electricity consumption is a result of the mining subsidy, and artificially high fees from block space constraints, not fundamental costs for transaction processing.

If you break down the necessary costs (storage, bandwidth, CPU cycles for verification), it's actually very low, at about $0.001 (a tenth of a cent) a transaction:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3332.0

The mining subsidy is a fixed cost that will decrease in relation to the total number of transactions as transaction volumes increase.