We have been polluting and overheating the planet to make virtual characters eat pills and rescue princesses for over 30 years.
What's the utility of that?
What's the utility of that?
Bitcoin does none of that. At its very very best it's a way to buy hallucinogens on the internet with massive external consequences.
At best its an alternative finance system that works around the captured, corrupted, and rent seeking finance systems of the world.
The reality is there is no consumer demand for crypto as a means to purchase things.
I feel sorry for anyone that expects bitcoin to actually be anonymous. Given that we can use statistics and timing to determine the memory contents and instructions run on different cores in a CPU, anyone that uses a currency that keeps public global transaction log and thinks they can anonymize themselves by just mixing their money in a pool is in for a rude awakening at some point. For any useful amount of usage, my guess is they're just kicking the de-anonymization can down the road a few years.
(Also, the slightest movement in those coins would likely cause a massive drop in the value of bitcoin, as rational people realized a huge cache of previously assumed out of play coins might start being sold and everyone using it as an investment rushed to exit ASAP to avoid beat that).
Edit: As suspected, it's not a silver bullet.[1]
1: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoins-taproot-upgrade-wont...
The industry is growing like crazy as well.
Bitcoin was 122 twh/year I believe.
Both gaming and bitcoin kill the planet and are not necessary until global warming under control.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285396475_Taming_th...
If game consoles/PCs get more efficient, they use less power for the entertainment value delivered to the world. Or, if renewable tech makes energy cheaper, the fixed amount of energy gaming uses becomes less of a big deal.
If ASIC miners get more efficient, difficulty and hashrate goes up, and they use the same amount of power for the same amount of security delivered to the blockchain. Or, if renewable tech makes energy cheaper, miners will use more of it.
The "W" in PoW means work but it could equally mean "waste". The whole reason it's secure is that you look at the total hashrate of the network and go "wow, that is so expensive, nobody would ever burn so much energy just to double-spend some bitcoin". No matter how good hardware gets or how freely available energy gets, it must always be incredibly costly to operate the network, because that's the premise its security is built on.