If TIME itself is quantum (not infinitely divisible), quantum computing can never break cryptography. Fascinating discussion if you are interested in quantum computing, theoretical physics, and bitcoin.
There have been critics of this but it's as clear as the selling of the "AI" is more than just LLMs and probability language responses, with scraping of the internet and some digital pictures or movies. So stupid. We aren't even close to something like QC, and I think philosophically it's impossible even, just like AI. Also, think of it as a technology, Australia and I have said it, it's literally an invention to cause BAD things to happen. Further showing you it's totally BS and unworthy of any attention.
It is an interesting argument however:
Hash rate and energy consumption continue to increase.
What if fees do not pay enough of a security budget to incentivise mining? Then the users of bitcoin will either pay miners or mine themselves (nation states)
It may come down to nations or citystates competing for hash rate as a form of warfare:
Asset owners typically will pay to secure it. Fort Knox has a security budget to secure gold.
There will never be consensus to increase the amount of bitcoins beyond 21M. It is the only thing that makes it work as perfect money.
How will users (I assume by users you refer to Bitcoin holders) pay miners? Are you arguing that some sort of taxation mechanism will be added to Bitcoin? Or that whales will simply pay miners out of self-interest?
Wouldn't it make more sense for nations to just abandon the network entirely if defending it becomes prohibitively expensive?
This goes back to my first question. Are you suggesting that a means to compel security payments (i.e. a tax) will be introduced, or that Bitcoin holders will voluntarily start sending payments to miners?
But if miners essentially control the blockchain, and miners have a financial incentive to increase the cap, does that not make it much more likely?
While I disagree with your view that Bitcoin is perfect money, I certainly agree that absent a 21M cap, there is literally no argument whatsoever for Bitcoin.
yes, pay miners out of self interest...just like a military budget
It depends on the value of bitcoin, "expensive" is relative -- if it is hundreds of trillions in value, the security budget could exceed military spending
I haven't thought of how to impose a tax, but it is possible.
They don't have an incentive to destroy bitcoin, and they are only one part of the control...node runners and users of bitcoin choose what bitcoin is. If the majority of users reject a change, like during the blocksize war of 2017, miners capitulate or go broke.
exactly why it will never happen...why destroy your own value?
I assume you phrased the question this way because a common argument of why bitcoin has failed (or will fail) is that holding it is not the same as using it.
Our grandparents, our parents, and we, grew up using a currency that was not money. Bitcoin is both a currency and a money. We are judging this from a fiat perspective.
What about holding gold, or silver, is that not using it? It is still a medium of exchange, not between strangers, but from your present self, to your future self. Gold bugs and bitcoiners are simply converting their excess time in the present, into value they can spend in the future.
If Nikola Tesla's whitepaper on electricity had said that it could be used to run electric motors and electric lights, that does not preclude it from being used for AI, computers, and securing the first engineered money.
Quoting the whitepaper's "a peer-to-peer electronic cash system" as some sort of decree from the god of bitcoin that must be honored, is what created BCH. If people want that, they have the option of using it.
My guess is that 80% of the wealth in bitcoin is purely speculators that want more fiat dollars. That is not my use case, but I recognize that as a valid, if not optimal use of bitcoin. I do use it, I make dozens of lightning transactions and probably 2 or 3 on chain per week. Some people only take bitcoin. Some, like my mechanic, give a discount for using bitcoin (he wants bitcoin and hates taxes). Sometimes, bitcoin is literally the only way to get something from overseas (ivermectin and hcq during covid).
Bitcoin is a versatile tool. It's a Swiss Army knife we haven't played with enough to discover all of its uses. It can even fight election fraud.
How The Bitcoin Blockchain Is Fighting Fraud In Guatemala’s Presidential Elections
Guatemala's Supreme Election Tribunal is using bitcoin timestamping to detect fraud attempts in the country's presidential elections.
bitcoinmagazine.com
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One of the biggest misconceptions in broader crypto is the belief that these tokens compete on tech features. People think it's a tech revolution. It's not. It's a monetary revolution. [Brian] Armstrong and others think better smart contracting, faster settlements, and DeFi protocols are what's going to drive value.
Bitcoin is certainly a tech innovation. The combination of proof of work with a difficulty adjustment, distributed consensus, and a hard cap supply is incredibly innovative and enabled by a novel combination of disparate technologies, but what it enables is a superior monetary good for the Digital Age. Once you have a free market for monetary goods, they compete on monetary properties, not tech properties. Bitcoin is relatively slow, simple, and boring, and that's because it needs to be. It limits the attack surface and increases social scalability so it can affect billions of people in a positive way.
Bitcoin's beauty is found in its simplicity. That simplicity makes its monetary properties ironclad. Millions of tokens have come and gone over 17 years, and none have come close to Bitcoin's success.
--Marty Bent
Bitcoin is certainly a tech innovation. The combination of proof of work with a difficulty adjustment, distributed consensus, and a hard cap supply is incredibly innovative and enabled by a novel combination of disparate technologies, but what it enables is a superior monetary good for the Digital Age. Once you have a free market for monetary goods, they compete on monetary properties, not tech properties. Bitcoin is relatively slow, simple, and boring, and that's because it needs to be. It limits the attack surface and increases social scalability so it can affect billions of people in a positive way.
Bitcoin's beauty is found in its simplicity. That simplicity makes its monetary properties ironclad. Millions of tokens have come and gone over 17 years, and none have come close to Bitcoin's success.
--Marty Bent
Yes, as chance has said, it's a slow adoption as we have tons of people, tons of normies, and tons of inertia from older financial types and boomers/dinosaurs.
Good read from the WSJ on the financial scams and corruption enabled by crypto. The involvement of the Trump family in these Jewish-directed financial schemes is really disgusting. You basically have a pair of unscrupulous Jews (the sons of Lutnick and Witkoff) partnering with the Trump sons for their stablecoin grift, which includes receiving $500m in Saudi money and a shady corporate takeover/stock issue, in which the proceeds were used to buy their insider tokens at wildly inflated value, to their personal profit. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.
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