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There's no digital currency or methods to transact that are more efficient than Bitcoin? Like ACH, Venmo, wire transfers, etc? Bitcoin is like CFL bulbs. An u

There's no digital currency or methods to transact that are more efficient than Bitcoin? Like ACH, Venmo, wire transfers, etc? Bitcoin is like CFL bulbs. An unfortunate ecological misstep while trying to improve what was available. I'll agree the parallel is clunky since CFLs still saved energy, bit bitcoin burns through it.

derefr 6y ago
Those other methods (ACH, Venmo, wire transfers) are owned by companies/banks and thus censorable. The whole thing Bitcoin is doing that everyone is spending all this money/electricity on, is allowing the global market to route around market inefficiencies introduced by government control (e.g. trade sanctions, tariffs, “capital flight” export controls, taxation double-binds [like for dual US/somewhere-else citizens], AML laws, etc.) That’s the base cryptocurrency “value prop” — before you add on the smart-contract programmable-financial-instrument stuff. There are also other PoW chains, like Monero, that are “cheaper for now” — but if everyone using Bitcoin switched to those, they’d be just as expensive as Bitcoin is. PoS chains (including maybe PoS state-channels for PoW base chains) are the good alternative — everyone in the space can see that. But they’re not ready yet. > Bitcoin is like CFL bulbs. I agree: like CFLs, Bitcoin is better than what we had before in some ways, but worse in others, and we can clearly see that we’re going to need to replace it. (The bad-actor analogy even holds up: both CFLs and PoW chains have externalized consequences. CFLs put mercury into the environment; Bitcoin contributes to climate change.) But we didn’t try to muscle CFLs out of the ecosystem. They just disappeared from relevance — and production went to 1/1000th of peak — once we got good, cheap LED bulbs into the market. Until then, the market concentrated on CFL bulbs, because they really were a (rational-selfish-economic-actor) “better” option than incandescent. It made economic sense for property developers and other mass-buyers to fill their lighting neeeds with CFLs. And then — once LEDs were good and cheap — it didn’t.

derefr 6y ago

Those other methods (ACH, Venmo, wire transfers) are owned by companies/banks and thus censorable. The whole thing Bitcoin is doing that everyone is spending all this money/electricity on, is allowing the global market to route around market inefficiencies introduced by government control (e.g. trade sanctions, tariffs, “capital flight” export controls, taxation double-binds [like for dual US/somewhere-else citizens], AML laws, etc.) That’s the base cryptocurrency “value prop” — before you add on the smart-contract programmable-financial-instrument stuff. There are also other PoW chains, like Monero, that are “cheaper for now” — but if everyone using Bitcoin switched to those, they’d be just as expensive as Bitcoin is. PoS chains (including maybe PoS state-channels for PoW base chains) are the good alternative — everyone in the space can see that. But they’re not ready yet. > Bitcoin is like CFL bulbs. I agree: like CFLs, Bitcoin is better than what we had before in some ways, but worse in others, and we can clearly see that we’re going to need to replace it. (The bad-actor analogy even holds up: both CFLs and PoW chains have externalized consequences. CFLs put mercury into the environment; Bitcoin contributes to climate change.) But we didn’t try to muscle CFLs out of the ecosystem. They just disappeared from relevance — and production went to 1/1000th of peak — once we got good, cheap LED bulbs into the market. Until then, the market concentrated on CFL bulbs, because they really were a (rational-selfish-economic-actor) “better” option than incandescent. It made economic sense for property developers and other mass-buyers to fill their lighting neeeds with CFLs. And then — once LEDs were good and cheap — it didn’t.