[Nition]

That fact just makes the enormous use of power on Bitcoin look even worse though. The main rebuttal to the Bitcoin power complaint is "but it's useful as a decentralised currency." If there are other cryptocurrencies out there doing the same thing using orders of magnitude less power, where does that put Bitcoin?

We have a technology that takes thousands - by some measures hundreds of thousands - of times as much power as existing networks for one transaction, that isn't used in a practical day-to-day sense anywhere, and many people are still defending Bitcoin specifically as a successful currency. How much power does it have to consume, how few real-world uses does it have to have, before everyone agrees it could really do with some improvements?

[hulahoof]

Bitcoins usefulness is not just in its utility, but also it's creation and governance. When you highly value a decentralized, trust-less environment it's hard to look past the decade long success that the Bitcoin experiment has been.

Convincing users to migrate to 'alt coins' requires longevity of these chains, amongst other qualities, to prove they can be successors.

[Nition]

I guess what I'm trying to say is, the arguments in these threads mostly go like:

* User A: Bitcoin is bad, it uses tons of electricity.

* User B: Bitcoin is great, and [other thing] uses just as much electricity.

And I'm just confused why User B never says something like "Bitcoin is great, but I agree it really needs to use less power and allow for more transactions."

[intotheabyss]

Because to change Bitcoin means to fork Bitcoin, and 2017 has shown that the community does not want to hard fork to update the consensus of the chain. A bigger question is how will Bitcoin deal with securing the chain once miners rely primarily on transaction fees; especially considering Bitcoin can't scale. Another factor is that spent addresses release public address information which is susceptible to quantum attack exploits. I'm bullish on cryptocurrency (like Ethereum) but bearish long-term on Bitcoin. However, one thing Bitcoin is used for currently is as a decentralized collateral. You can wrap Bitcoin and deposit it on Ethereum and lend it out for interest. This is a fairly good use case in the short term, but Bitcoin the blockchain is not sustainable longterm.

[Nition]

Yeah, good answer. I hope Ethereum can make a full transition to Proof Of Stake. I remember they were already talking about it being close when I was looking into it in 2017.