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by mrb 1941 days ago
«For one that’s horrifyingly wasteful - you say it like it’s a good thing but it’s really not. »

It is a great thing: it means Bitcoin can scale without increasing energy consumption. See, that's my problem with the way you phrased your post. You misrepresent the system. You imply transactions consume energy when they don't.

2 comments

> It is a great thing: it means Bitcoin can scale without increasing energy consumption. See, that's my problem with the way you phrased your post. You misrepresent the system. You imply transactions consume energy when they don't.

You pretend they don’t but they obviously do! You’re green washing one of the biggest environmental tragedies since CFCs.

It could in theory scale past where it’s at but the core team won’t let it making your argument no more useful than my unlimited coins argument. In what way exactly is it different? Yes if we pretend it’s efficient, it is. But only in our imaginations.

Even if they did increase block size fundamental inefficiencies mean even at maximum scaling it can’t hold a candle to visa or even a raspberry pi running MySQL.

Not really. It means Bitcoin _currently_ scales negatively on market cap rather than transactions. Considering that bitcoin seems to be advertised primarily as a store of value and that there is little effort to push adoption for transactions, that is a very bad thing : it means that, in case of success, bitcoin performance per transaction will become worse.

In the long term, if transactions count doesn't rise fast, we will also see significant issues, either with transaction fees going to absurd amounts, effectively banning btc as a payment medium, or with the miner pool decreasing to counts where decentralization becomes inexistent.