Do you know that Tether and Bitcoin are different things? Because it seems like you don't.
I think the best solution would be to properly tax carbon. That way Bitcoin miners would either become unprofitable or move to greener energy.
I think cap and trade can be a good idea, the problem is getting all the countries in the world to sign onto it. Any country that doesn't ends up with a competitive advantage. But if you somehow got them to all agree, blockchain actually provides a perfect way to build a cap-and-trade system that every country can participate in, transparently, without having to trust one country or group of countries to run it honestly. That's the essential problem blockchain solves: administering systems trustlessly.
Bitcoin miners do by and large use green energy since it tends to be the cheapest (off-peak hours from over-provisioned grids). If electricity gets more expensive, it doesn't mean it becomes unprofitable to mine, that's only one side of the equation. The other side is how much people are willing to pay to get transactions added to the blockchain, which is a number, on average, that has increased year after year. Not that you ever need to make an on-chain transaction, with Bitcoin lightning you can do transactions off-chain while getting much of the security of on-chain transactions. You can move money internationally in under a second for pennies in fees. And it works just as easily as venmo. In fact, if you have cash app on your phone, you already have the ability to use the lightning network, though it's a custodial wallet (meaning you are trusting cash app not to take/lose your BTC).
Um.. we very much had ransomware and viruses before crypto. Bank wires have been irreversible.. forever. Before crypto, ransomware also demanded gift cards and prepaid debit cards. 99% of the crime on earth is paid for using fiat currency, not Bitcoin.
Some have tried, they have all failed. Bitcoin is international. A 51% attack is so implausibly expensive that nobody really has the resources to pull it off. Even if you had enough money and energy to burn, there is the small problem of acquiring enough of the specialized hardware to do it (ASIC miners), and potentially the specs and fab to make that hardware. People will see it coming a mile away. Don't want to use ASICs? Enjoy at least a 100x increase in energy and equipment costs. And it gets more expensive every year. If you had that much money to put into destroying Bitcoin, it would be much better spent on an ad campaign telling people Bitcoin was bad than doing a 51% attack.
A 51% attack doesn't prove Bitcoin is broken, it proves the protocol is working exactly as expected. A 51% attack causes a temporary fork. This happens all the time organically when two miners find the next block at the same time, it's a natural part of the protocol. That's why for really large or important transactions on main chain, you wait a few blocks before considering them fully secured.
Bitcoin's value to society is the ability to easily transfer money from point A to B and having a clear fiscal policy it has kept to for 15 years, 365 days a year, 24/7 without a single hour of downtime, a bank holiday, or getting hacked. There's a reason big money like hedge funds and private banking are investing in it: it's actually useful and has massive potential. The market cap of Bitcoin is 850 BILLION USD, that's bigger than the GDP of Sweden or Israel or Vietnam. People use it to move over a trillion dollars of value a year. You can debate how much of that movement is trading & speculation vs use as a currency, but it's a trillion nonetheless. I personally pay for things regularly with Bitcoin, you'd be surprised how many places you can spend it when you start looking. And it's available to anybody with a cellphone and halfway reliable internet access, including the billions of people who are "unbanked" and lack access to stable banking infrastructure.
Transactions on Bitcoin lightning occur in under a second and cost pennies in fees. That's to send it across the room or across the globe. Remittance services and bank wires use just as much energy and cost 10x-1000x as much. And they waste not just energy but human capital as well, we no longer need humans manually sending bank wires like it's 1910. You just don't see headlines about the energy impact of bank wires or western union because it's not novel, we just accept it as a cost of our financial system.
That's not even getting into the secondary costs to the environment of running a society on an economy based on an inflationary currency which requires that currency be rapidly spent because it's getting constantly devalued. That's a great strategy to rapidly industrialize the world, but it's not a great strategy on a globe with limited resources. Tell me, if you knew your dollar would be worth 10% more next year, would you be more hesitant to spend it? Might you consume less if you knew saving money in your bank account would actually cause it's value to stay the same or increase over time? Might you focus your spending more on quality products that will last instead of just buying the cheapest thing because if it breaks, you can just buy a new one? This isn't just on a personal level, this same kind of calculus is used by big investment firms to build everything that won't last. Buildings, stadiums, entire cities, financed with money that is constantly losing value. Bitcoin's value relative to goods and services will fluctuate like any currency does, but the supply of the currency does not increase. There are 21 million which will ever be minted. Your 0.1BTC will always be 0.1BTC and will always represent 0.1/128M% of the total supply. If the Bitcoin economy grows, you share in that growth and the value it produces instead of seeing the difference printed away and given to whoever controls the money supply and whoever they want to give it to.
Look into BOINC. It's a free open source software for distributed computing ("map-reduce"-type problems). Runs on all platforms, handles computation at the petaflop scale. Large Hadron Collider (CERN) uses it to distribute computational work to volunteers. It's also a way you can contribute your computer's spare capacity to cancer research. !boinc@sopuli.xyz
Have you looked into nostr? It offers most of the same features of Mastodon except that:
- Your identity is not tied to your instance. If your instance closes up shop, you keep all your followers, followees, DMs, etc
- You can send encrypted DMs, so your instance admin can't read them
- Cool tipping functionality so you can tip people if you like their posts. Or don't use it. It's optional.
- Most nostr clients have some built-in filtering functionality to block out things that are NSFW, crypto-related, etc. Different relays have different moderation policies, much like mastodon instances.
You can run your own relay of course.
True. There are some pretty good effort estimates out there, idk what they are, but there are definitely some lost keys.
Why not? It's a thing people can buy and sell on the open market just like stocks or futures or whatever. There are dozens of exchanges you can use all around the globe that publish their data openly, that is where average price and market cap comes from, just like a stock. Those coins being sold on exchanges and the prices they are being listed are are determined by real people (or companies or whoever) who own Bitcoin. They set the price they are willing to buy/sell at. The protocol doesn't sell any itself, there's not some massive reserve waiting to be sold.
If one exchange is fudging the price, that creates an arbitrage opportunity which is immediately exploited by trading bots. We are well past the point of the market price being found on exchanges somehow not being real, we passed that point like a decade ago. One can argue how real the reported trading volume is, but price per coin and therefore market cap? Nope.
A stock is a promise/asset, enforced by the legal system, saying you own part of a company. You can trade it with other people and use it to vote on shareholder resolutions. Bitcoin is a currency/asset whose ownership and system of rules is enforced by a decentralized protocol. You can trade it with other people and use it as a currency/use it to send value from one place to another. You could use stocks as a currency, of course, they're just kind of cumbersome to use for that purpose.
re the 2 billion: Massive buys and sells change the price just like with stocks or other assets. The market cap is not the real amount you would pay if you tried to buy (or sell) all the available supply because that number is uknowable. It's just the current value of one unit of the thing times the number of units in existence.
They handed over their own BTC over to the government. If you have the private keys, you control the coin. If you don't, no amount of money or guns can make that coin move thanks to math and physics. However, a $5 wrench rammed repeatedly into your head may make you divulge those private keys. Strength of encryption is rarely the weakest link in any modern cryptographic system. But that wrench used on anybody who doesn't know the keys? Useless. It's pretty powerful stuff in that regard.
If this sounds like a big number, keep in mind this is roughly 0.02% of the Bitcoin in circulation. The eventual total supply of BTC is 21 million BTC. Bitcoin's market cap is around 800 billion USD, which puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. Next to switzerland, bigger than Norway, Sweden, Vietnam or Israel. (GDP isn't the same as market cap, just trying to give an example for scale).
That's good to know. Sounds like it doesn't totally solve the portability issue but definitely a step in the right direction.
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