You have to try, even if you know you can't solve all of the problems yet.
When you are trading on an exchange, there could very well be nothing happening in the background. It's instead a process that's just flipping some bits for who owns what in their own database.
The only reason I can think of is in order to evade various kinds of regulation, but presumably that won't last forever.
Moreover, transactions between Segwit-compatible wallets is pretty fast and cheap.
I’m kind of tired to hear people complain about the fees while all they have to do is use a different wallet that supports Segwit.
Edit: Ah, the downvotes. I was expecting them.
And even if it reduced people's needs to one bitcoin transaction per month (say, to deposit their paycheck), it would still reach full capacity with just 8 million users.
Some even celebrated when the blocks became full and the fees started to increase...
I did, several years ago when it looked like a genuinely interesting up-and-coming technology.
At this point though, digital tulips.
(Warning: this will be downvoted because of mentioning Dash. Edit after multiple downvotes: Naive people think that they will be able to stop the (by far) best payment focused cryptocurrency by silencing others. The growth of Dash shows its dominance is inevitable.)
I'd be surprised if it wasn't something like 90%+ men mining, trading, and owning bitcoin. If bitcoin really takes over the world, it's going to look like a bunch of dudes printed themselves a fortune and then convinced the rest of the world to buy it from them.
Well, yeah, that's exactly their fantasy too.
(Not saying one sex is better than another, as in different situations, different traits will succeeded. And not saying that all people of a particular sex must take on these traits, but rather only these are tendencies observed in scientific studies.)
You can say the same replacing "gender" with "age" and "men" with "young people".
You can probably do the same with multiple other grouping criteria.
Just like fiat money.
Why do you want to have a discussion involving logic when all I want to do is signal my virtues?
Then you won't need to worry about things like this as much.
A world where if something is not required it is forbidden is not a world that I want any part of Nobel winner or otherwise.
I just leave that here...
I'll just leave that there :).
So say a fiftieth, for around 450x the daily transactions, and it could handle a lot more if demand existed without a commensurate increase in power consumption.
And you should realize the mining electricity usage is in no way related to scaling Bitcoin.
I finally understood the bitcoin mechanism and I can explain the original paper well just two days ago. I feel dumb reading this paper. Intellectually, I think it's a hallmark of many great inventions in the 20th and 21st century: public-key cryptography (to verify transactions), micro economics - game theory (to incentive people to mine), hashing (bounty), macro economics (to combat inflation), distributed computing synchronization (to trust the system while not trusting any single computer), statistics (to combat fake chains). Only when one has all the pieces of the puzzle together then the whole thing is possible to conceive.
But I feel a sense of achievement when I finally figured the whole thing by myself. If you don't understand bitcoin, I think you should understand bitcoin as a hacker, even you don't need to use it or intend to store money in it.
I only own a small fraction of a coin, I'm not a risk taker. I'm not going to be rich from bitcoins, I have no reason to shill it with memes. It's unlike anything you have encountered before, notably that the only reason why bitcoin is worth money, is because we are better off with it. I do believe the world is a better place when everyone agrees that bitcoin has values and can be traded, because that means many people can buy their own "insurance" should wars happen, which they do. Your money might turn into paper, you might get killed if you smuggle cows, gold, and diamond when you're running for life, but no one can know if you have bitcoins.
In the US, it's not possible to open a bank account without a SSN. How do you get an SSN if you don't work in the US?
Allegedly though, according to the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr, societies tend to move in 40 year periods of either community or individualism. Assuming individualism started in 1980, this would have it end in 2020.
These two books sum it up well:
The Cycles of American History https://www.amazon.com/dp/0395957931/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_hYSi...
The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393313719/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_CXSi...
Also, what does the end of Bitcoin generation look like? If Bitcoin is truly deflationary why would anyone trade it? The interesting thing about inflation is it requires investment to ensure your money doesn’t lose value over time. Would Bitcoin be incentivizing a market where growth is extremely limited due to greed?
Not taking any sides, trying to understand the long term reprucussions of a substantial Bitcoin market.
So I do get the criticism about high fees when paying for a coffee, but maybe that's not the ideal use case for bitcoin. It could've been cheaper with another cryptocurrency but it's a tolerable enough percentage at the moment compared to another widely used solution for international transfers.
Blockchain may be different. Deviousness is not: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/spoiler-alert-the-institution...
