I'm surprised that the energy usage axis does not come up in this summary of his thoughts. Isn't that likely to be a factor in bitcoin's growth and long-term survival?
if there was some successful state-sponsored or populist uprising against bitcoin’s energy then the energy use will decrease and bitcoin will continue functioning as normal
it just incentivizes more efficient hardware or lower yield for miners
the network can decrease in difficulty or have steady difficulty forever
the value that the network can support is still several orders of magnitude higher, and there are at a lot of gigawatts of energy to tap into before it reaches said maximum
If there's an uprising about Bitcoin's energy usage in the USA (just for example), neither the US gov nor people will be able to force miners in, say, China to use less energy.
But that might provide a good excuse for the government to regulate Bitcoin in whatever way they choose.
I can see Bitcoin hardfork to POS once the tech has been proven in Ethereum. Bitcoiners only care about the 21 millions hard cap and a secure network, not the exact consensus algorithm used.
You can just get it in majority of exchanges. In case your exchange doesn't support it (like me, Coinbase and Gemini, NYC, don't support Cardano), just use swapping service like changenow.io, so buy ETH from Coinbase and use changenow.io to swap it to ADA
I've been using changenow.io and it always works. As always, don't send in really large transaction, but one by one, maybe like 3000 ADA each time (this is what I do).
No, the energy usage is proportional to its economic value. If energy prices go up or down while nothing else changes, bitcoin's energy usage will go inversely. If bitcoin's value goes up or down while nothing else changes, energy usage will go the same.
bitcoin can almost double (2x) in value every 4 years without an increase of energy usage by miners (if you put a wide enough filter)
- I guess most understand that the reason is the supply halving finding place every 210.000 blocks (roughly 4 years), and nothing to do with technology/moore's law or anything else
- this will probably be true (more or less... lets say 1.8x -2x) for another 2 halvings
- then the rate [1] will decrease from about 2x to 1x while fees rapidly start to be the predominant source of revenue to miners, and less and less the newly minted coins)
[1]: rate of possible increase in value for the same amount of energy consumed
PoW uses energy consumption for security. PoS uses staking for security. Every analysis I've seen agrees that PoW is more secure than PoS, precisely because of the energy requirements. Those who favor PoS argue that it's still secure "enough"; those who favor PoW disagree and prefer the increased security it brings.
Here something to read for those really interested in knowing both sides of the argument (PoW side in this case, as the potential benefits of PoS are clear to everyone):
if there was some successful state-sponsored or populist uprising against bitcoin’s energy then the energy use will decrease and bitcoin will continue functioning as normal
it just incentivizes more efficient hardware or lower yield for miners
the network can decrease in difficulty or have steady difficulty forever
the value that the network can support is still several orders of magnitude higher, and there are at a lot of gigawatts of energy to tap into before it reaches said maximum