patricius

New to Bitcoin, I guess?

I think it comes down to, if you read the history of the American Medical Association, that some doctors simply didn’t like a free market pushing down prices for their services.

No, not something better designed. Something augmenting Bitcoin to make it cheaper to transact while maintaining a base layer for final settlement that is secure and decentralized.

You leave out other characteristics that make Bitcoin an attractive economic good, when you think that matching or exceeding the security at a lower cost is a valid argument against Bitcoin. If it was all about power consumption, Bitcoin wouldn’t keep increasing in demand and price.

Look, you can theorize all you want about the inefficency of Bitcoin, but the market has spoken and continues to speak.

The miners pay for the power, and they believe it is not a waste to do so.

What you call inefficiency (I guess in terms of power consumption) is a misuse of the term in a world where value is subjective. It is efficient and necessary for the use case and value it provides. You can argue it is ineffecient compared to Proof of Stake for example, but Proof of Stake is a completely different system and has a completely different incentive structure.

I’m saying also that L2 (and L3, … Ln) is a way to scale the number of users without increasing power consumption. Every time you add a layer, there are other trade-offs for the benefits gained. But at the base layer you still have the benefits of not having a central authority censoring and controlling exchange of an economic good.

Maybe Lightning Network will scale, maybe not. But VISA or Mastercard could build on top of Bitcoin and allow many more transactions than the base layer does. You would use the base layer for final settlements.

Already now you can get a VISA/Mastercard and use that to spend Bitcoin. But of course, every layer on top of Bitcoin presents its own set of trade-offs in terms of trust and security.

What constitutes waste is completely subjective.

Value is subjective, so it is by definition wrong to say that something is objectively a waste. It depends on who you ask.

Your first mistake is assuming that the power used to secure the Bitcoin network is a waste. It is clearly not, since thousands of people believe it is worth paying for.

The second error is implicitly assuming that the number of people Bitcoin serves is correlated with it’s power usage. You could serve the same number of people as the banking sector does now without increased power consumption when you bring layer 2 or 3 solutions into the picture.

Really deep analysis. Thanks!

I know I’m welcome to escape the plantation, thanks. Still doesn’t make slavery right though.

The same way that ransom is the fee you have to pay for the privilege for someone to stay alive?

What more do I need? I just need the world to get rid of extortion.

He means that there is no good argument for getting the money needed for the things you mentioned through taxes, since taxes are theft.

Use fzf for file navigation and perhaps vim-vinegar. When you open Vim, use :cd to change to your project directory and you’re ready. Use :term to start stuff, e.g., a local web server or whatever. Use fzf to navigate between open buffers.