On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 4:12 PM Jason Resch <[email protected]> wrote:
>> So bitcoin can avoid problems if they can just find somebody that >> everybody agrees is a saint. But you could say the same thing about the >> US dollar if everybody agreed that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is a >> saint. >> > > *> You don't need a saint. That's the genius of the protocol design, a > trusted system without any trusted individuals. You just need no majority > of the nodes to be working against the system.* > Bitcoin is between a rock and a hard place. If the number of miners is reduced the energy efficiency increases but the security declines because it allows the elite to spend one of their Bitcoins and keep it too. If the number of miners is increased the security gets better but the energy required to complete an economic transaction increases. If you use Bitcoin or anything like it and you want honesty then you're going to have to expend a ridiculous amount of energy every time you buy a candy bar. *> Bitcoin allows one to freeze something of economic value (in this case > energy) and convert it to money, after which it can facilitate an unlimited > number of transactions basically for free and indefinitely, until it is > lost/or destroyed.* > As the number of bitcoins approaches 21 million the amount of energy required to mint a new one will increase exponentially and will approach infinity asymptotically. That's just not going to work. When Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin I doubt if he gave energy a single thought, but then I don't imagine he ever figured it would get as big as it has. *> Note that this same process underlies the creation of money in existing > monetary systems: E.g., invest energy in mining gold. The amount people > will spend to mine new gold is related to the price of gold.* > Energy cost is one factor that determines the price of gold but not the only one nor the most important one. And gold is irrelevant, it hasn't been an important factor in the world economy in over a century, but paper money has. And unlike Bitcoin it doesn't take an exponentially increasing amount of energy to run a printing press. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> vhe -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv28Cp89zWGoof2ibZGs3TChdeqS-45jf4_h2gXGhTS8SA%40mail.gmail.com.
