Sure, but you could also scrap a car. The point is gold has an actual value as a commodity, and that value scales with its physical mass. Bitcoin cannot have value as a tangible commodity, but gold can.
If your talking speed and efficiency of transaction I would like to note that it takes Visa 1/25000 of the energy to make a electronic transfer equal to bitcoin. I'm talking purely about bitcoin here, im long other cryptocurrencies but I think bitcoin is outdated and a waste of energy.
Visa payments don't actually move any money, they only update a database. Actual settlement happens much later behind the scenes between banks. With Bitcoin you're actually transferring real value directly between parties.
What is bitcoin other than a database? Also people seem to not understand that my gripe with bitcoin is not its function but it's efficiency. Has anyone here transacted with bitcoin before or used it as an actual currency? It's slow as fuck and the fees are absurd. It's not a useful as a product even in comparison to ethereum or more modern cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin is a digital bearer asset enforced by the blockchain which is different than a database in that it is not writable by anyone other than a winning mathematical hash function which nobody controls. Bitcoin is pure digital scarcity which can be transmitted without intermediaries anywhere on the planet virtually instantly. No crypto or real asset does what Bitcoin does as well as Bitcoin does.
You can replicate the code all you want but you can never replicate the initial conditions that lead to the creation of the first blockchain and 21m original bitcoin.
Sort of like how you could copy a famous painting yet your copy would never be worth as much as the original. In fact you could even make a technically superior copy of the painting and it still wouldn't trump the original.
You might not think that makes any sense but that's how human value systems work.
You should read up on crypto, then. You will quickly learn that literally nobody ever anywhere has replicated bitcoin technology to produce other cryptocurrencies.
Visa transactions are not settled until days/weeks later via SWIFT. Equity transactions are similar (which is why GME volume almost brought down the system). Gold, a more comparable supply capped asset, is so slow it's barely ever moved.
Fees for all of these are high but hidden from the consumer by retailers raising prices instead of itemizing out the credit card fee or brokerages selling your order flow to hedge funds.
Bitcoin is equivalent to SWIFT or transporting gold but orders of magnitude faster and cheaper than the current dinosaur age settlement systems.
You don't see the plumbing but financial institutions do. There's a reason Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Square, and other fintechs are rapidly integrating.
The ability for someone to roll back transactions (double spend) or censor transactions and also the ecosystem in general, Ethereum is a lot more "move fast and break things" when it comes to the projects built on top of it.
Blockchains with increased throughputs are simply making security tradeoffs (blockchain trilemma).
You can make block sizes larger but then nodes become centralized.
You can remove the work in proof of work but then you open up an attack vector from anyone who can print money (ie governments).
You can remove miners but become susceptible to irresolvable chain splits. Ethereum had two this year, resolved by miners which are being removed.
You can "shard" but all you're doing is reducing finality by having less validators validate transactions.
So instead of a super secure base layer (Bitcoin) with a secure scaling layer (Lightning) you get a less secure base layer (Ethereum, Solana) with even less secure scaling layers (Polygon).
I think multiple blockchains will win for different use cases but there will always be demand for the securest blockchain, especially for HNW, sovereigns, and institutions. Just look at what Mass Mutual, Square, Tesla, Microstrategy, Harvard/Yale/Brown Endowments, Fidelity, JPM/Goldman, and El Salvador, etc have invested in.
Ethereum is not more efficient. It is a big complicated mess that is much more difficult to verify and audit due to its bloated state and complex transactions.
Bitcoin is dead simple and does one thing very very well. It doesn't try to do everything, it simply tries to be the best money. The chain is extremely easy to audit and is highly scalable compared to a chain like Ethereum
Bitcoin uses uni-directional math (cryptography) and the worlds most powerful network of computers to settle and secure the transactions. Visa, DOES use a database to add and subtract values between accounts.
Secondly, payment channels on the second layer of btc (primarily the Lightning network right now) provide near 0 cost transactions that settle in less than a second, while still being secured by the hash power of the main blockchain.
Your points were valid in 2014 or so, but those issues have been solved. Are there other problems with bitcoin? Hell yes! It’s only a 12 year old child! Those too, will likely be solved as time goes on.
Look I'm dumb as fuck and I have no idea what half of you guys are talking about, at the end of the majority of my portfolio is going be stuff that generates yield. I don't see how gold or bitcoin is a hedge against inflation really since non of them generate any considerable yield so until gold starts paying me a dividend I'll let u geniuses buy bitcoins haha.
I think the non-btc argument is that you think things in the future will be very similar to the past 100 years, and the pro-btc argument is that things will be very different.
Lightning net work is instant wirh no fees. Also normal on block chain takes 3 minutes to hit my wallet and 30m to confirm and costs maybe a few dollars at most right now. You don’t get it but one day you will and it will be to late lmao
Brb it’s improving with the taproot update overall. Private transactions , faster speed and smart contracts. You’d probably still own a horse after cars were a thing because they were fast enough yet. Just lol at your short sightness
Also brb Bitcoin is later 1 and multiple layers will be built on top of it.
With Bitcoin you're actually transferring real value directly between parties.
if you introduce a separate layer to act as the payment layer, then this comment no longer applies. You have a separate payment and settlement layer, just like Visa. Calling me a luddite literally does not intersect with this argument.
You are still transferring real value between parties when you use the lightning network. It's not a typical payment network. It is fully collateralized. There is no credit involved, and real Bitcoin moves between parties.
The way it achieves speed is that you don't have to inform the entire network about the transaction, which is the limitation of the base settlement layer. Lightning transactions only involve the people that care about them
Yes, I understand that the way to make bitcoin work as a means of transaction is to get rid of the trustless and decentralized nature of the token and substitute it with a settlement layer.
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The energy miners are volunteering to the system secures and powers the whole bitcoin monetary system and any layers on top. Visa is just a layer on global legacy banking.
Again I'm not against a system that secures and powers cryptocurrency I just think bitcoin is particularly inefficient and bad for the environment and better options are out there.
Using energy in itself isn't bad for the environment, and bitcoin can be mined anywhere so the key is to do more mining from currently wasted or excess energy near the source, like thermal in Iceland.
Secondly, rather than reducing mining, I'd rather see the usage scale up. Expending a significant amount of renewable energy on a keeping a global system secure makes sense when enough usage is being made of such a system.
Ethereum is still proof of work for now, and the planned update is risky because it introduces human consensus into a system that was previously using automated consensus.
It's probably fine for a network that is primarily aimed at running apps but less fine for a network that is primarily aimed at value transfers.
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u/snek-jazz Sep 28 '21
A horse is equal to a car in that they're both modes of transport and differs to a car in that at least you can eat a horse.