Readit NewsThere's absolutely no need to artificially incentivize spending. Humans naturally require and desire goods and services. Allowing people to store their economic energy without risk of devaluation would actually help bring people out of poverty. Inflating the money supply incentivizes high time preference behavior like excessive spending and borrowing. This leads to boom and bust cycles, and an increasingly growing wealth gap.
All inflation does in terms of growth is increase the nominal value of things in the economy. It does not encourage the growth of real wealth. The increase of wealth we experienced is due to the markets functioning despite an inflationary monetary policy and excessive regulation.
The real reason why the government is in favor of a "slightly inflationary" monetary policy is because they're incentivized to do so. They can spend it before price adjustments due to the new inflows of cash can happen in the wider economy. Its essentially a hidden tax. Governments, central banks, and their political/economic allies can benefit from this effect at the expense of everyone else in the economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cantillon#Monetary_the...
The merge is freaking incredible. Switching the engine of a $60 billion financial network in-flight. Permanent power savings the scale of a country. An incredible coordination between a huge number of diverse parties all over the world. Everything open source. And all we get is a rehash of tired old arguments against cryptocurrencies.
This was originally a forum for hackers, makers and entrepreneurs. It does not seem like that anymore.
Because every bitcoin transaction costs $60 in electricity. That is a monumentally stupid amount to pay. It's $125 per kB.
Proof of stake incentivizes capital directly. Proof of work incentivizes capital via the ability to find prime numbers, which limits you to people who are willing to spend $1000s to millions of dollars to do it efficiently. Limiting the validators like that drives up costs massively.
> Bitcoin mining is increasingly being used to prevent methane emissions in stranded gas reserves. Having an economic incentive to not flare or emit methane but instead using it for generating bitcoin allows Bitcoin mining to become net carbon negative.
No, it is not. Projects like that may be branded with bitcoin, but bitcoin miners are buying the same electricity as everyone else. The rising cost of electricity is causing new sources of power to be exploited.
Instead of being used for something useful, that electricity is being turned into waste heat.
Its incredibly fallacious to measure the cost of electricity per transaction on Bitcoin. Blocks can be completely full or utterly empty and still use the amount of power. You're also missing the point of the power consumption. Its not used to move capital from one person to another, its used to secure the network from attacks and preserve its integrity. Measuring the cost of electricity per transaction is like measuring the amount of energy bank vaults and the US army use per dollar transaction. Stats like the one you quoted don't take into account the number of Lightning network transactions happening off-chain but is secured by a past on-chain transaction.
> No, it is not. Projects like that may be branded with bitcoin, but bitcoin miners are buying the same electricity as everyone else. The rising cost of electricity is causing new sources of power to be exploited.
> Instead of being used for something useful, that electricity is being turned into waste heat.
One, value and usefulness is subjective. Because something is "useless" for someone like you doesn't mean its useless to others. I, and many people around the world, find Bitcoin to be incredibly useful and worth the electricity. Secondly, if oil and gas companies could profitably monetize flared methane, they would have already. They don't because trapping and transporting the methane would lose them money. Its an industry standard to simply release or burn the methane instead. So Bitcoin IS useful in that respect.
Bitcoin has been doing 24/7 payments since 2009 and instant payments since at least 2018. Not to mention Bitcoin is decentralized and not reliant on government and bank bureaucracy to function.
The Fed is a little late on this one.
SEC and similar are likely granting BTC "commodity" status purely because it is so utterly controlled and unthreatening, completely divorced from its original intent of addressing the central banking charade, that any energy they can push into it is energy they won't have to deal with being directed to a legitimate decentralised cryptocurrency that actually works and over which no such control exists.
Core devs and exchanges do not entirely control the project direction. Non-backwards compatible changes cannot be made to Bitcoin without the miners AND node operators adopting the new client. It takes the cooperation of the devs, miners, and node operators to make a hard fork. "The Blocksize War" by Jonathan Bier documents a bunch of failed hard fork attempts that were backed by a good number of devs, large miners, and large exchanges. They failed because the node operators were not on board.