“Bitcoin mining is a competition to waste the most electricity possible by doing pointless arithmetic quintillions of times a second.”[293]

This should worry any proponent of decentralization: the software that’s at the heart of Bitcoin is primarily owned and maintained by a small group of people that are employed and funded by a single company. The potential for conflicts of interest and user-hostile changes by Blockstream is high.

top 15 pools mine about 95% of all Bitcoin blocks.[383]

In July 2016, the pro-fork activists were tired of the debate and decided to hard fork the Ethereum blockchain, creating a new version of the currency that returned stolen money to investors. This new version, confusingly, kept the original name Ethereum. The anti-fork group continued to recognize the original, unaltered blockchain as the official ... See more

Bitcoin Core stopped expanding as soon as it defeated its last rival. That’s what you usually expect from monopolies.

“gentlemen’s agreement” to not use extremely powerful computers to mine,

Anyway, investors would use their voting tokens to vote on startups they wanted to invest in, and winning startups would automatically get a slice of the fundraising pie. It was a radically new model of venture capitalism: partners and hierarchy were out, and democratic decision-making was in.

Bitcoin is a digital currency, so it’s intangible, and it’s (in theory) middleman-free because it doesn’t rely on a bank or other institution to keep track of people’s money balances. Instead, Bitcoin relies on a network of computers around the world to keep a shared log, or ledger, of every past payment. This “shared public ledger,” as it’s known,... See more

It’s somewhat heartening to hear that, per one report, 80% of all Bitcoin mining uses renewable energy,[305] but still, using excessive energy — of any form — is worrisome.