Last year the BBC ran a news article claiming:
> "Currently, the tool estimates that Bitcoin is using around seven gigawatts of electricity, equal to 0.21% of the world's supply. That is as much power as would be generated by seven Dungeness nuclear power plants at once. Over the course of a year, this equates to roughly the same power consumption as Switzerland."
Dungeness nuclear power plant cost £685 million by the time it was finished and opened in 1983, that's roughly £1.6Bn today. BitCoin (mining) collectively uses as much power as Switzerland, as much as £15Bn of UK nuclear power stations.
Do you honestly think it's added that much value to the world?
If so, what, where?
> "It's never too late to get in the industry if you really want to, we're still in the early days - like the net in 1995."
What's the "AOL of BitCoin" - the "way-in" for a hundred million Americans? What's the "ICQ of BitCoin", the thing that let me talk to my friends without having to call them one by one? What are the "webrings" of crypto, the Drewamweavers or FrontPages, getting the interest of normal people to build or create things? What's the email of crypto, delayed messaging which stores and buffers while offline? What's the equivalent of web developers selling small businesses on the benefits of owning a website to reach a national or international audience with much less marketing and advertising cost? What's the equivalent of Stripe or PayPal or Visa or Mastercard? What's the Amazon of crypto that started in 1996 or so? What's the equivalent of universities having large internet connections and server farms and setting up Grid computing for the research benefits? Where are the things you couldn't do at all before now?
One difference of the net in 1995 is that I wanted more access to the net in 1995 and couldn't have it for age reasons, tech reasons, money reasons. Where's the pent-up demand of people who want crypto and can't have it? Everyone who wants it can have it immediately, and could have had it years ago.
What about it is anything like the net of 1995? (Except your intent to make me dream big about the future growth and associated riches).
If you're a company and you accept bitcoin, it makes life harder for you, for approximately no customers, and the payment you get might lose half its value by next month or be stolen in ways you don't understand with no oversight or regulation and law enforcement with little experience of what to do next. If you're a normal person, it's a less convenient way to pay for things. Why should you give a damn? Smart Contracts better be really good to make up the rest.
The easy counter is "no wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame" and I must be blind to its benefits. The easy counter-counter is Sturgeons Law, most things look like crud because most things are crud.
What else did you know about in 2008, not get involved in, which turned out to be crud?
