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by polio 1637 days ago
If Bitcoin can be spent, its owners can be coerced to spend it, so it can be stolen. Regarding excess energy, I'd rather have energy storage firms be that buyer.

Cryptocurrencies may have a part to play in the future of humanity, but Bitcoin will not be it. It's a proof of concept that's overstayed its welcome.
1 comments
Centmo 1637 days ago
A person's Bitcoin holdings can be distributed across any number of wallets. How does the thief know (1) their mark owns Bitcoin, (2) how much Bitcoin they are stealing, and (3) whether they have coerced the owner to hand over the keys to all of their wallets?

Energy storage is inefficient and expensive, so a new renewable project based around this is less likely to be funded and built than one that can directly monetize the excess. Profit and greed is the incentive structure for much of human society.

Bitcoin has all of the properties we need in a store of value for the base layer of a digital monetary system of the future. The energy expenditure is required to provide the highest level of security and decentralization which is needed for a global reserve asset. Any other system is vulnerable to attack or centralization, which will inevitably succumb to human greed like every fiat system in history.

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UncleMeat 1637 days ago
> A person's Bitcoin holdings can be distributed across any number of wallets. How does the thief know (1) their mark owns Bitcoin, (2) how much Bitcoin they are stealing, and (3) whether they have coerced the owner to hand over the keys to all of their wallets?

Are the unbanked really going to operate a number of different wallets, including decoy wallets, to prepare for this scenario?

> Bitcoin has all of the properties we need in a store of value for the base layer of a digital monetary system of the future.

Its parameters were picked on a whim by somebody nobody can ever find. "Completely unchangeable parameters handed down from the equivalent of God" is not a property that I look for in a monetary system.

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Centmo 1637 days ago
The safest and most effective method for storing wealth that the unbanked currently have is to bury gold jewelry somewhere. Gold holds its value better than fiat, but is not easily divisible and there is a large cost to converting it to/from fiat. Bitcoin keys can also be buried, but if necessary they can also be memorized and transported across borders without risk of seizure. Also, having multiple wallets is not complicated; you may be underestimating the cleverness of the unbanked.

The parameters of the Bitcoin code are changeable (and have changed multiple times since inception) via hard-fork based on the 'voting' of the nodes which verify all new blocks and number in the tens of thousands distributed across the globe. The parameters of the protocol are set such that anyone can run a verification node on only a couple hundred dollars worth of hardware, thereby encouraging decentralization.

https://river.com/learn/can-bitcoins-hard-cap-of-21-million-...

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UncleMeat 1637 days ago
> The parameters of the Bitcoin code are changeable

In principle, yes. But look at the clusterfuck that was the BCH fork. Something as basic as blocksize led to an outrageous amount of venom and two communities hating each other. Now imagine if the core devs wanted to change things that more directly affected the relative wealth of early adopters. Could you believe the anger if they proposed that we double the number of eventually mined bitcoins?

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