Is Crypto Finally Dead?
Yes, I know that it still exist, and yes, decentralized currency which utilizes distributed, cryptographic validation is not actually a strictly bad idea, but...
Is the speculative investment scam, which crypto substantially represented, finally dead? Can we go back to buying gold bars and Pokemon cards?
I feel like it is, but I'm having a hard time putting my finger on why it lost its sheen. Maybe crypto scammers moved on to selling LLM "prompts?" Maybe the rug just got pulled enough times that everyone lost trust.
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Bitcoin (as it uses proof of work) is incapable of handling all transaction of the world without creating insane amounts of wasted energy.
Updating the ledger (actually writing down transactions) is only a fraction of the total computing resources it consumes. Most of it is just spent doing random hashes over and over again (the proof of work part). This is computing power that does not actually do any of the money related tasks, it's just there to keep the ledger trusted.
This is an awesome idea in theory, but completely unscalable in reality.
Other Blockchain technologies like proof of stake don't have this issue of energy waste, but they have other hurdles.
But Bitcoin as it is implemented now can never be the money of the future in my opinion.
Trust is one of the most fundamental parts of any monetary system, so brute forcing hashes in this case is directly related to it.
Bitcoin can easily serve the world on 100 Mac Minis. Probably even fewer. The fact that currently people beat themselves into burning ridiculous amounts of electricity to run Bitcoin nodes is a function of the profitability of doing that. If that profitability decreases, so will the electricity burned. If I remember correctly, the protocol is designed to reduce that reward over time and unless the dollar value of Bitcoin dramatically increases, the energy waste should decrease long term.
A secondary point on energy consumption is how that of Bitcoin compares to the traditional financial transaction systems. I don't have the numbers at the moment but last time I checked it wasn't pretty for the latter.
With all that said, if PoS is proven to be as robust as PoW, it would probably be adopted by systems currently on PoW, like Bitcoin.
I think you're missing a critical part of how blockchains function: If Bitcoin was running on only 100 Mac Minis, there is nothing stopping someone buying 101 more Mac Minis, becoming dominant in the network and suddenly they can decide to just print their own bitcoins for themself.
The profitability of running Bitcoin miners is proportional to the market cap and the value of Bitcoin itself. For Bitcoin to remain stable, the total value must remain less than the cost of hardware to dominate the consensus algorithm.
Can you elaborate on how one could print bitcoins if they controlled 50% of the network?
Bitcoin miners validate transactions on the network, so if one entity controls a majority of all miners, they can validate their own fraudulent transactions
One couldn't, somebody who controls 51% might get away with a few double spends until they are caught, that's all.
"A few double spends" is underestimating the impact. When this has happened in the past, the whole network gets fragmented, and at some point everyone needs to decide which version of history to throw out, allowing potentially anyone to double-spend in that time frame. A bad actor with enough compute could cause a network split and put whatever they want in the ledger. Getting caught isn't really a concern if it's all anonymous wallets, and it only takes 1 unnoticed transaction to move millions.
The entire basis for trust in Bitcoin (and any proof of work blockchain) is that the network is so big, no single actor has the resources to become a majority and influence the ledger.
I don't know if you've heard about Lightning Network, but this is a layer on top of the bitcoin blockchain that is much more suitable for small payments. That's how I do most of my bitcoin payments now, and while it's still a maturing technology, it mostly works well. Transactions are fast and inexpensive.