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> electricity usage has an upper limit of $37m per day

I don't see how you compute such an upper limit given that it depends on the transactions fees. You're talking about the profitability if miners don't mine any transaction, and maybe this used to be a reasonable approximation, but as the block reward halves it will become less and less accurate. The profitability limit can be just as arbitrarily high as the transaction fees.

> We are getting money that is unforgeable, uninflatable, irreversible, uncensorable

The article convincingly argues that it's not irreversible nor uncensorable given that it's centralized, and that any similar permissionless blockchain would tend towards such a centralization.

> capable of millions of transactions per second

Are you saying that the 14 cents a month would cover the transaction fees? That's not the case right now with way less transactions, I don't see how that will ever be the case if the number of transactions increase to this number.

transaction fees are currently very small percentage of miner's income, and probably will be so for another ~3 halvings. By that time, protocols would evolve so that you won't need a mainnet transaction at all to create a second layer wallet.

>> The article convincingly argues that it's not irreversible nor uncensorable

Not convincingly at all. Not a single tx has been reverted on BTC network in 13 years (well, except of couple of early bugs that caused network split), maybe you are confusing with some other network. No one is able to prevent a tx from going out, as we just witnessed - FBI wasn't able to revert a $3.6B theft transaction without getting hold of private keys.

>> Are you saying that the 14 cents a month would cover the transaction fees?

I paid a tx fee once, two years ago, to fund my Satoshi Wallet, and haven't paid another satoshi in tx fees for about a hundred of purchases since then. So I don't see why everyone can't do that. As to the initial funding of the wallet for everyone, I don't see why it can't be done off chain as well in the future.

> Not a single tx has been reverted on BTC network in 13 years (well, except of couple of early bugs that caused network split)

The article mentions that the networks tends towards centralization, at which point the guarantees BTC was supposed to provide no longer hold. You can say that the big miners still won't do it for $REASON, but the point stands that it's not irreversible nor uncensorable, due to this centralization.

> No one is able to prevent a tx from going out, as we just witnessed - FBI wasn't able to revert a $3.6B theft transaction without getting hold of private keys.

The money stolen is not relevant, the budget they were willing to spend to retrieve the funds is. I don't think this was in the billions as you implicitly state. Preventing the transaction from being mined is also completely different from reverting it several blocks after it has been mined. See also my last paragraph in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30313344

> I paid a tx fee once, two years ago, to fund my Satoshi Wallet, and haven't paid another satoshi in tx fees for about a hundred of purchases since then.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network#Limitations you still need a "watchtower" to ensure things won't go wrong, so if you consider everything, it's not completely free. I don't want to guess what the exact price will be because it's a futile exercise (we'll see soon enough if it gains traction), but this suffices to show that you're sweeping some costs under the rug.

Did you just divide the bitcoin electric costs by the ENTIRE population of the Earth, as if all 8 billion people are currently using bitcoin???

The beauty is, even if everyone started using Bitcoin today, the electricity consumption would stay the same. And it is feasible, with the already functioning Lightning Network (second level network over Bitcoin network).

How would billions of new users get bitcoin to start using it if the supply is limited? They would have to buy it from people who already have it, driving the price up and with it the the ceiling on electric costs for profitable mining -- these scale together.

Of course price would increase if everyone uses it, but, technically, high price is not necessary for everyone to use Bitcoin. For rough estimate, there are 12 billion of $20 notes in use, which is $240B, which is 6M Bitcoins. $20 bill comprises the bulk of money circulation. There are more $100 bills, but they are mostly used for savings.

I have invented food pills. They have a whole list of advantages. We'll convert the entire planet over to eating food pills. Everyone's stomachs will atrophy, as well as the practice of farming. But that's ok because the pills are just better, ok? Except that in a decade, some drawback becomes apparent.

Blithe assurances are a sure sign of bullshit.

Using the word bullshit is a sure sign of bullshit.

Your claim of $37M is horrifying given in slide 4 they estimate real transactions at 5/min or 7200/day.

I’ll leave you to calculate the cost per month (it’s much higher than 14c).

> their operation becomes unprofitable

That assumes that everyone needs to spend more than they get in crypto for it to be worth their while. If I had $100, and I gave it to you, and you gave me back $80, that would be a bad deal for me, right? Except if that $100 is "dirty", and the $80 is "clean", that might be worth it to some.

It is theoretically possible, but I doubt it really happens at scale. If it were, we'd already had front page articles about it.