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I'm aware I'm talking very broadly and generally about the "majority" and in many cases "overwhelming majority" of these cases. I know some of my examples are h

I'm aware I'm talking very broadly and generally about the "majority" and in many cases "overwhelming majority" of these cases. I know some of my examples are hyperbolic and a little "loose". I've been meaning to research and document actual numbers and examples to either validate or invalidate my take. Now that I'm really thinking about it because of your thoughtful reply I just might! That said I think banking and payments are further examples. The vast, vast majority of banking and payment activity happens through a relatively tiny number of banks and payment processing networks. The US dollar is used officially and unofficially in many other countries. Europe went to the Euro. As I understand it much of worldwide settlement internationally happens in the US dollar which is also more-or-less the official worldwide reserve currency. Bitcoin currently does about 500k transactions/day worldwide (as best as I can tell). That's probably roughly the number of daily transactions for a mid-sized US city. At a future point in time where a significant number of people are transacting in cryptocurrency multiple times per day an immutable blockchain ledger with no upper bound on growth will swell to astronomical size when a significant number of people are transacting with it multiple times per day. Now your $3 Starbucks purchase is recorded for eternity and replicated across hundreds or thousands of nodes?

_8j50 5y ago
> The vast, vast majority of banking and payment activity happens through a relatively tiny number of banks and payment processing networks. Not by choice of merchants or connsumers, does not reflect demand but incentives > The US dollar is used officially and unofficially in many other countries. Kind if like BTC? > Now your $3 Starbucks purchase is recorded for eternity and replicated across hundreds or thousands of nodes? Great point, hence the demand there created zcash and monero. I would say BTC is akin to ACH and SWIFT not credit cards or cash payment. Whatever the limits of exiting currencies is, it only opens up room for demand. Heck, you can even have central bank crypto (as JPM and China are trying). There is hardly anything new about crypto other than specifics of implementation. BTC does not define or reflect upon all crypto. Currency is not a new concept, using a distributed ledger is new-ish and using proof of work, bandwidth, storage,etc... while these backing value stores are new, having precious metals, livestock, land, etc... as a backing value store is not that different, crypto is just an adaptation of having something difficult to obtain or of value to others and using it as a value store.
- kkielhofner 5y ago
  My example of the $3 Starbucks purchase is not specific to BTC and applies to every distributed immutable ledger technology I've seen. I use Bitcoin because it's the most ubiquitous but generally these same statements and data apply to every cryptocurrency (just at different scale). From the Bitcoin node documentation: "It’s common for full nodes on high-speed connections to use 200 gigabytes upload or more a month. Download usage is around 20 gigabytes a month, plus around an additional 340 gigabytes the first time you start your node." There are roughly 1 billion credit card transactions per day. There are currently 500k Bitcoin transactions per day.That's 2000x for credit cards alone. Bitcoin transactions are at a more or less all time high and it's still a TINY number. Yet, the full ledger is at least 340GB with 20GB added each month. With simple math (and current tech) if credit cards were Bitcoin the ledger would be 6.8 petabytes. Back to my comment about it only being available to well funded large players eventually... In terms of everything from energy consumption, supply chain, manufacturing resources, raw minerals etc there are roughly 13,000 bitcoin nodes online. That's 13,000 nodes using 340GB of storage each with total storage use at 4.42 petabytes. If there were still only 13,000 nodes at credit card scale the global storage resources alone would be 88.4 exabytes. At 500k transactions/day some estimates put Bitcoin's global energy usage at seven times higher than all of Google. Bitcoin is a mid-size US cities worth of ledger activity while Google gets 3.5 billion searches per day alone. That's not even considering their countless other products - GCP, etc, etc. Blockchain advocates always like to point out the energy consumed by the financial system and that's fair. However, if you think it's absolutely vital that the record of your $3 Starbucks purchase needs to be accessible to your great-great-great grandchildren 13,000 times over I think we're just going to have a fundamental disagreement about that.

_8j50 5y ago

> The vast, vast majority of banking and payment activity happens through a relatively tiny number of banks and payment processing networks. Not by choice of merchants or connsumers, does not reflect demand but incentives > The US dollar is used officially and unofficially in many other countries. Kind if like BTC? > Now your $3 Starbucks purchase is recorded for eternity and replicated across hundreds or thousands of nodes? Great point, hence the demand there created zcash and monero. I would say BTC is akin to ACH and SWIFT not credit cards or cash payment. Whatever the limits of exiting currencies is, it only opens up room for demand. Heck, you can even have central bank crypto (as JPM and China are trying). There is hardly anything new about crypto other than specifics of implementation. BTC does not define or reflect upon all crypto. Currency is not a new concept, using a distributed ledger is new-ish and using proof of work, bandwidth, storage,etc... while these backing value stores are new, having precious metals, livestock, land, etc... as a backing value store is not that different, crypto is just an adaptation of having something difficult to obtain or of value to others and using it as a value store.

kkielhofner 5y ago
My example of the $3 Starbucks purchase is not specific to BTC and applies to every distributed immutable ledger technology I've seen. I use Bitcoin because it's the most ubiquitous but generally these same statements and data apply to every cryptocurrency (just at different scale). From the Bitcoin node documentation: "It’s common for full nodes on high-speed connections to use 200 gigabytes upload or more a month. Download usage is around 20 gigabytes a month, plus around an additional 340 gigabytes the first time you start your node." There are roughly 1 billion credit card transactions per day. There are currently 500k Bitcoin transactions per day.That's 2000x for credit cards alone. Bitcoin transactions are at a more or less all time high and it's still a TINY number. Yet, the full ledger is at least 340GB with 20GB added each month. With simple math (and current tech) if credit cards were Bitcoin the ledger would be 6.8 petabytes. Back to my comment about it only being available to well funded large players eventually... In terms of everything from energy consumption, supply chain, manufacturing resources, raw minerals etc there are roughly 13,000 bitcoin nodes online. That's 13,000 nodes using 340GB of storage each with total storage use at 4.42 petabytes. If there were still only 13,000 nodes at credit card scale the global storage resources alone would be 88.4 exabytes. At 500k transactions/day some estimates put Bitcoin's global energy usage at seven times higher than all of Google. Bitcoin is a mid-size US cities worth of ledger activity while Google gets 3.5 billion searches per day alone. That's not even considering their countless other products - GCP, etc, etc. Blockchain advocates always like to point out the energy consumed by the financial system and that's fair. However, if you think it's absolutely vital that the record of your $3 Starbucks purchase needs to be accessible to your great-great-great grandchildren 13,000 times over I think we're just going to have a fundamental disagreement about that.