[random28345]

> Like virtually everyone in the world, I pick #1.

Then why Bitcoin? If you add regulation compliance, replace the block reward with higher transaction fees (which is built into the protocol as an inevitable end-goal), and remove (pseudo-)anonymity, what good is it? If you take away the ability to use it for illegal activity, why waste millions of dollars of electricity to sustain it?

[stevenh]

I don't care about the Bitcoin argument either way, but I'm annoyed by how you keep bringing up its use of electricity. There are over 877,500 bank branches in the world, each consuming a nontrivial amount of electricity every day.

[tptacek]

Those bank branches burn electricity to keep lights on so that people can work, and to run computers that keep track of the same information you'd need to track in a hypothetical all-Bitcoin economy. Bitcoin burns electricity to solve a math problem of escalating difficulty and cost whose solution has no intrinsic value.

That's overthinking it, though; really, the dig about electricity simply comes from the fact that Bitcoin is essentially a competition between "miners" burning escalating amounts of cycles.

[aliakhtar]

Bitcoin's transaction rate is also 3 transactions per second. That's laughably low for using up the same amount of power as an entire small country. Something running on a Pentium 3 could have a higher TPS.

[tptacek]

I agree. I'm not a Bitcoin believer.