A billion people using a hair dryer 10 minutes per day uses the same yearly energy as Bitcoin mining. Why can't she just let her hair air dry?
The technical reason is: POS mining cartels get easier to maintain over time, while POW cartels get harder to maintain over time.
Decentralizing twitter is second importance only to decentralizing money. Lots of "never again", examples to choose from. One of my faves: unity2020 shutdown.
I think you miss my goal. I am not trying to win argument with someone like Peter Schiff (who argues in bad faith), I am trying to help someone who argues in good faith but doesnt know much about bitcoin get past an obvious tripping point which otherwise shuts down their curiousity. Lots of people have trouble understanding why Bitcoin should have value given that no authority is backing it with an obvious commodity like gold.
And the timestamp server use case is a pretty fascinating use case to think about. It proves who knew (or agreed to) what when. This is a bottleneck of the legal / financial system, which makes some projects too difficult to coordinate.
The timestamp server function of Bitcoin removes this bottleneck, and may amplify the effectiveness of the legal/financial system to fund projects that would have been unthinkable before.
I think it's a fair question to ask about the non monetary use cases. Without a clear explanation of what those are, people have a hard time believing that it's value won't simply collapse at some point.
Asking what it's "backed by" may not be the best phrasing, but there is a well posed question hiding in there.
Bitcoin's non monetary use case(it's a timestamp server) is the right answer to people who ask what bitcoin's value is "backed by". I will die on this hill.
Keeping the growth rate of the Blockchain small is important so that lots of people can afford to run a full node. If it's rare for people to run full nodes, then the government can go after the few people who do for not respecting the ofac address black list. Also, unless you run your own node, you are telling the node your wallet connects to every uxto you own everytime you open your wallet and it tries to verify your balance.
Centralized in the sense of hashrate spread out over pools (not important) or in the sense of it being cheap to run a node (all important)?
I think Lionel did a great job of explaining how the fragility of our financial system should worry us more than climate change in the short term. And how nothing works once our trust in money erodes.
However, I think her "the government can do anything" point is sloppy thinking. If it could, it never would have allowed the internet to flourish the way it did. It's going to be a lot harder for the u.s. to ban bitcoin than she thinks.
Hello everyone.