| "if you want to actually make money you should build a regular banking ATM network that uses Bitcoin/altcoins in the background for transaction processing. That would actually disrupt the industry and allow you to undercut the other networks' pricing models." How exactly is this cost-based "disruption" supposed to work when Bitcoin and friends are outrageously expensive per transaction? One of the funniest things about the entire Bitcoin movement is the way that self-styled experts babble on and on about how amazing a technical revolution cryptocurrency is, despite clearly not understanding the first thing about cryptocurrency technology. Bitcoin is an experimental attempt to solve the classic Byzantine Generals' Problem, which can be boiled down to "how can a public transaction ledger maintained by its own users (with no central authority) be resistant to attack by bad actors". The Bitcoin "solution" to this problem is, in essence, for each node on the network to provably waste energy in an exceedingly flagrant way, in hopes that the costs of taking over the network are too high for any individual bad actor. Well guess what, my friend? That means Bitcoin ends up chewing ridiculous amounts of energy doing no useful work on the desired end product of the system -- the ledger of transactions. Trust-based systems (you know, the kind deployed by, say, a bank, which would like to believe it can run its own system) do not need to waste energy, because they aren't built on deliberately wasting energy. Bitcoin only makes sense if you are fanatically dedicated to the notion that Gibsonian dystopias (wherein the collapse of public institutions requires development of cryptocurrency) are either inevitable or desirable. It certainly isn't going to disrupt the existing system by being more cost- or energy-efficient. It isn't, it can't be, and that's by design. (Since Nakamoto couldn't figure out a less-bad way of solving Byzantine Generals.) |
This is like saying, "The traditional banking 'solution' is to have a bunch of lawyers and government agencies waste time, paper, and ink drafting up and verifying documents, in hopes that the costs of taking over the system are too high for any individual bad actor." Obviously it's not perfect, but neither is any other financial system. They both serve a purpose: addressing problems that haven't been solved any other way, so it's not a waste.
I'm not even as rabid of a Bitcoin fan as some others, but it's just silly to read "OMG, mining costs energy!" when so does any other activity. At least put out some numbers to show how much more wasteful mining is than other systems, in your opinion. And who appointed you to decide which uses of energy are dumb/immoral/wasteful? Why do you care if miners are willing to buy electricity and electric companies are willing to sell it?