Quindecillion

Do you have any suggestions for an effective way to bring them down?

Perhaps building alternatives that can replace them on run in parallel is the best way to do that?

Damus was one of the first apps and is pretty good.

Lots of people also like Primal. It's well polished and replicates Twitter/X reasonably well.

It's still pretty niche. Built mostly for and by bitcoiners, but has potential as a new way of doing social media that isn't reliant on major tech companies.

I really hope this is satire.

Without being an expert on the topic I'm going hazard a guess that it's due to regulatory moats that keep challengers out of the arena, and banks endlessly lobby to maintain that regulatory capture.

What's wrong with energy consumption?

I think you might be confusing it with greenhouse gas emissions.

They provide a legitimate demand response service i.e. when the grid is generating excess energy that there's no other demand for, Bitcoin miners buy what no one else wants/needs.

Buyers of first and last resort.

This is the first time I've come into a crypto thread on HN and the pro-crypto people seem to outnumber the anti-crypto people.

Is there a vibe shift happening on HN?

[looks side ways as central banks and the state]

> Inflation encourages investment because if you just sit on your money it gets eaten away by inflation.

People shouldn't be penalised for saving money.

"Oh, but just invest it!"

With investment comes risk. Why shouldn't people be allowed to save without risk or having their savings melted by lost purchasing power through inflation?

Inflation is a hidden tax and theft of those furthest from the newly "minted" money to benefit those that are closest to the source i.e. banks and large borrowers.

Why did the gold standard fail?

Was the inflation observed with the gold standard ever as bad as what's seen with government/central bank-issued money i.e. fiat?

ChainOfFools is tilting at windmills.

100 million baht in 2 years? So about $1.5m USD in a year.

That's not exactly "staggering" or significant in the context of the Bitcoin network. Unlikely that such operations have any meaningful control over the network or liquidity, even if it's just 1% of what's known.

You seem to think that these sorts of operations are somehow connected in a large coordinated cartel the controls the industry, but given that they're illegal, isn't it far more likely that these "black market" operators are fairly small by comparison to the legitimate players in the US?

The mining ban in China a couple of years back gave us a pretty good indication of the size of the legitimate industry in that country, and it absolutely DWARFS the biggest of the illegal examples you gave.

Interesting way to word it too, "illegal mining". They're just stealing electricity. If they used that stolen electricity for heating, you wouldn't call it "illegal heating", would you?

There's a lot of problems with your post, but I'm going to focus on the one that bamboozled me the most.

> illegal mining

What exactly is "illegal mining"?

> you cannot build scaling technology that inherits the self-custodial, permissionless, and censorship resistance qualities of the underlying ledger

Correct, and yet you seem to still miss the point. There are tradeoffs. You can't scale AND maintain those properties. This is why Bitcoin scales with layer 2 solutions like Lightning (and more ideas like Enigma, Ark, Cashu etc.), or things like RGB or Taro for expressiveness. Separation of concerns.

The best attempts to have their cake and eat it too have failed in crypto.

There is very little innovation to be had in the core function of what a blockchain was designed to achieve. There's plenty of innovation ahead of us for the layers that are built on top of it.