| > Bitcoin/Ethereum does not consume more energy as more people use it. Eh... you are correct that capacity is separate from the number of miners. You are incorrect that the number of miners don't increase as chains get more attention, and incorrect that miners don't increase as new chains get created. Somewhat worse, we're both kind of glossing over the fact that mining cost/profit is what puts a limit on the number miners more than anything else including demand. That means that widely available cheap electricity becomes something of an impossibility under this system because as electricity gets cheaper, more mining operations get set up. As coins go up in value, the cost/benefit of mining changes, and more miners get set up. There isn't really a version of this world where coins become tremendously valuable or renewable electricity becomes cheap and widely available, and we don't have any new miners entering the system. In fact, quite the opposite, the system relies on that not happening -- if electricity and GPUs get too cheap, the network has to scale or it becomes vulnerable to attacks from rich actors. > videogames are less important than having a decentralized monetary system. Now what? What's now is that you haven't got a decentralized monetary system, all of it has been a pointless waste. Bitcoin's fees are too high for normal transactions and the transaction speed is too low, the Lightning Network hasn't really worked out the way people hoped it would and has helped re-centralize parts of the chain and make it less secure. The ecosystem is fragmented because people fork chains when they're not high-enough capacity and build new ones, and the vast majority of Bitcoin holders are treating Bitcoin as a speculative asset, not as a daily currency -- which the government has bowed to and now recognizes for the purposes of tax returns, making the 'currency' wildly complicated to use legally as a normal transaction method. Far from being a general-purpose asset, NFTs commonly have double-digit transaction fees to work with or mint, making them unsuitable for the vast majority of artists who are interested in them. They're plagued with copyright issues and asset theft, which has demonstrated that these so-called decentralized systems actually rely a lot on traditional centralized power-structures like governments to force legal norms and to prevent scams. And half of your community is running around saying things like "energy is security", which really does not bode well for the future of blockchain or the environment. So you've spent all of this energy and wasted all of this power and you didn't even get the subjective thing you wanted out of it. At least the rest of us can actually boot into Crysis today with our GPUs. |
And I don't understand how does LN centralize the chain. Who gets more control and what exactly can they do with that control? Can they print more bitcoin? Can they seize funds? Can they censor your transactions? No.
>Far from being a general-purpose asset, NFTs commonly have double-digit transaction fees to work with or mint, making them unsuitable for the vast majority of artists who are interested in them
So they are beneficial only to a subset of artists, not all of them. I can live with that.
upd:
>There isn't really a version of this world where coins become tremendously valuable or renewable electricity becomes cheap and widely available, and we don't have any new miners entering the system. In fact, quite the opposite, the system relies on that not happening -- if electricity and GPUs get too cheap, the network has to scale or it becomes vulnerable to attacks from rich actors.
This can be said about any industry that has to consume energy to create profit. All the actors compete for energy and try to outbid each other, eventually finding an equilibrium. The solution is to get more energy, so that there is enough both for mining and for videogames.