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You make a good point wrt. physical cash (coins and bills) versus electronic currency. I think it's sensible to analyze the two separately. Also, it's importan

by runeks 6y ago

You make a good point wrt. physical cash (coins and bills) versus electronic currency. I think it's sensible to analyze the two separately. Also, it's important to consider that commercial banks do much more than just keep track of "who owns how much USD". Banks are primarily middle men in the credit markets, and this is not related to establishing people's balance (which is all the Bitcoin network does). If Bitcoin persists then BTC credit markets will also develop, which would be very different from just keeping track of "who owns how much" (which is all the Bitcoin blockchain does).

arthurcolle 6y ago
I agree, consumer banks (and general financial technologies/innovations offered by private equity firms, private trading companies, financial engineers, etc on the whole) offer a greater breadth of services than crypto-asset financial innovations at present. This is obvious - I'm not sure anyone would argue against the validity of that statement. The largest single asset within the category is bitcoin + the majority of crypto-assets (in market cap terms, in aggregate) are currently PoW based systems (exception of Eth2 if you're just looking at top 5 but the bridge isn't live yet to my knowledge) so it makes sense to take a step back and really try to understand whether we are measuring the same things across both systems - the terms (in a linguistic sense) need to be defined for any serious discussion/analysis can be undertaken. Basically the Fed Reserve system's budget (some % of their budget) + cost of operating basic banking operations across all banks needs to be part of the calculation, at a minimum. Any other terms (in the equation that represents the relative spend across the two systems) could add greater accuracy, but the record keeping seems like the biggest cost that needs to be factored in to accurately reflect the energy consumption differences between the two systems.

by runeks 6y ago

arthurcolle 6y ago

I agree, consumer banks (and general financial technologies/innovations offered by private equity firms, private trading companies, financial engineers, etc on the whole) offer a greater breadth of services than crypto-asset financial innovations at present. This is obvious - I'm not sure anyone would argue against the validity of that statement. The largest single asset within the category is bitcoin + the majority of crypto-assets (in market cap terms, in aggregate) are currently PoW based systems (exception of Eth2 if you're just looking at top 5 but the bridge isn't live yet to my knowledge) so it makes sense to take a step back and really try to understand whether we are measuring the same things across both systems - the terms (in a linguistic sense) need to be defined for any serious discussion/analysis can be undertaken. Basically the Fed Reserve system's budget (some % of their budget) + cost of operating basic banking operations across all banks needs to be part of the calculation, at a minimum. Any other terms (in the equation that represents the relative spend across the two systems) could add greater accuracy, but the record keeping seems like the biggest cost that needs to be factored in to accurately reflect the energy consumption differences between the two systems.