[matheusmoreira]

There's no benefits to mining bitcoin specifically. You're right about that, it buys us nothing. Wouldn't mind even more energy being spent to secure the Monero blockchain though.

Also, scams are only common in the smart contract networks. People create useless shitcoins and spam telegram groups in order to generate some quick hype and exit with as much money as possible. I'd certainly like to believe nobody would be dumb enough to actually invest massive amounts of capital into these scams but that's exactly what they do.

[theturtletalks]

The cost users are paying is the cost of decentralization. One single entity will always be cheaper than blockchain decentralization, but the cost can be spread across millions or billions of users.

Now if the cost is worth it remains to be seen.

[matheusmoreira]

Bitcoin is not decentralized. You need specialized hardware to mine bitcoin and the entry costs are enormous. One CPU one vote is history. As a result there are relatively few miners. Just look at how much bitcoin suffered when countries started banning mining activities. A truly decentralized coin would simply shrug off attempts at regulation because there are so many independent nodes no single country could possibly ban them all. What happened instead is one country banning BTC put a stop to a huge chunk of the network.

[theturtletalks]

I mean decentralization in the "proving ownership" way. Right now, a bank can be the central authority on how much money you have in your account. With Bitcoin, people collectively determine how much each person has through the blockchain. A bank doing it will always be cheaper, but then the bank has too much control. How much are people willing to pay to make sure one entity does not have too much control or power?

[matheusmoreira]

> With Bitcoin, people collectively determine how much each person has through the blockchain.

That's how it was supposed work. The current reality is small highly centralized group of miners maintain the blockchain.

[theturtletalks]

Do you think more miners will join if Bitcoin gains more adoption? Their is a cost to even find out if decentralization (through blockchain) is even worth it.

[matheusmoreira]

How? They can't. My PC, laptop and phone can't mine bitcoin.

The way to achieve true decentralization is ASIC resistant mining algorithms and some form of diminishing returns to force miners to operate at small to medium scales. We need lots and lots of small miners running on commodity hardware that people already own, not a few large scale operations running on expensive custom silicon.