> The mining process provides network security all on its own, transactions or no transactions.
The mining process provides a fixed amount of network security. $125,000 per 15000 transactions. The fact that it would still cost that much money even with zero transactions is not a feature. It's not a good thing.
Each individual block is secured. You can't just add more and more transactions to each block without reducing security.
> Bitcoin competes with the traditional financial system, including all the people and infrastructure involved in cash handling.
Right now bitcoin competes with practically nothing. How much pizza is bought with bitcoin vs cash? You're effectively assuming that all those other functions are either irrelevant or that bitcoin can somehow do them for zero cost. Neither is true.
> And that is a cost borne not just by the United States federal government, but every government with physical currency and every bank on the planet.
60% of global federal reserves are in dollars. Dollars are the world's dominant currency. Compared to the massive disparity in energy use, it doesn't matter if even only 10% of global currency is in dollars. Dollars win.
Plus, if you're trying to compare with the places where cash really matters -where they can't use VISA or cell phones to transfer money- then bitcoin is certainly at a huge disadvantage after you have to buy computers for all those people.
> The idea that doing all this with physical objects is less power consuming than doing it with data is ridiculous.
Again, you're not replacing coins with data. You're replacing coins with USB sticks.
But you're right! It IS ridiculous, because it's completely insane how pathetically inefficient bitcoin is.
>The mining process provides a fixed amount of network security. $125,000 per 15000 transactions. The fact that it would still cost that much money even with zero transactions is not a feature. It's not a good thing.
Completely wrong, you cant know exactly how many transactions are processed per bitcoin block. The introduction of the lightning network and other 2nd layers mean any one of the ~1500txs per block could in reality be a batch of a 1,000,000 or more transactions being settled. There could easily be 15,000,000,000,000,000 txs per block, think about what that does to any $/tx calculation.
Bitcoin is cheaper than visa because it is designed to process infinite transactions for a fixed security cost.
Lightning network and other Layer 2 solutions are a joke. Those are only created because the Bitcoin network was intentionally designed to be slow and congested, to make it artificially expensive, and waste ridiculous amounts of electricity in the process. If those things actually worked then someone could make them work with anything else as a settlement layer, even traditional currencies. There is no actual reason for them to use Bitcoin.
So, the reason these systems use something like Bitcoin (or Ethereum, whatever) is because the goal is to build programmatic money, and you can build that on Ethereum and you simply can't directly build that on a "traditional currency" without first writing an adapter (such as some stable coin, as either a centralized regulated entity or as a decentralized protocol) to some decentralized programmatic system that you can then piggy-back on top of as a settlement layer.
The way that then, for example, (and this is really glossing) Lightning works is to provide a number of hypothetical signed Bitcoin transactions that rely on each other in a way where, if someone attempts to screw you over, you can put down one of the other transactions and move to a different state. You make it sound like Bitcoin is purposefully crippled to prevent this kind of performance enhancement, but one of the few and subtle big changes to Bitcoin was to support this!
The mining process provides a fixed amount of network security. $125,000 per 15000 transactions. The fact that it would still cost that much money even with zero transactions is not a feature. It's not a good thing.
Each individual block is secured. You can't just add more and more transactions to each block without reducing security.
> Bitcoin competes with the traditional financial system, including all the people and infrastructure involved in cash handling.
Right now bitcoin competes with practically nothing. How much pizza is bought with bitcoin vs cash? You're effectively assuming that all those other functions are either irrelevant or that bitcoin can somehow do them for zero cost. Neither is true.
> And that is a cost borne not just by the United States federal government, but every government with physical currency and every bank on the planet.
60% of global federal reserves are in dollars. Dollars are the world's dominant currency. Compared to the massive disparity in energy use, it doesn't matter if even only 10% of global currency is in dollars. Dollars win.
Plus, if you're trying to compare with the places where cash really matters -where they can't use VISA or cell phones to transfer money- then bitcoin is certainly at a huge disadvantage after you have to buy computers for all those people.
> The idea that doing all this with physical objects is less power consuming than doing it with data is ridiculous.
Again, you're not replacing coins with data. You're replacing coins with USB sticks.
But you're right! It IS ridiculous, because it's completely insane how pathetically inefficient bitcoin is.