Blockchain Bubble or Revolution: The Future of Bitcoin, Blockchains, and Cryptocurrencies

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

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.

Another well-known potential solution is called the Lightning Network, which aims to do most transactions “off the blockchain” to avoid the fees and delays of transactions put on the blockchain. Each pair of people tracks their payments to each other on a digital scratchpad; they only “settle” their balances once in a while.

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.

In short, tangible money is insecure, inconvenient, easy to fake, and impractical for digital payments. Middleman-mediated money, or M3, solves these problems, but introduces problems of fees, lack of accessibility, and a different form of insecurity. Right now, we have to pick our poison.

print money and adjust interest rates

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

Chinese pools control over 80% of the Bitcoin network’s hash rate and thus mine 80% of the world’s bitcoins,

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