cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16448198
Globally, people are losing faith in our institutions. Our financial institutions, our governments, our media, our medical systems, even democracy as a concept in many cases. And for sound reasons. Proposed upgrades to Bitcoin’s protocol would enable use of the chain (and L2s) for things aside from just money. On the world’s most secure document: the bitcoin ledger. It will change everything and here’s why.
The root problem is that we are building systems which rely on trust and time and time again, that trust has been broken. We have to trust that the people elected or appointed to those positions will do their jobs faithfully. But, of course, like us, they are humans and fallible. Subject to stupidity, greed, misdirection, and error whether through malice or accident. Take money, for example. Money has to be trust-able, so it is entrusted, for all its faults, to the most stable and neutral institutions humanity has ever created: the state. And yet, the state often abuses that authority to print money they shouldn’t leading to inflation and hyperinflation, particularly for unpopular wars of conquest. Every failed state ends in hyperinflation, because it’s a tool in the state’s toolbox and they will use it when they have no other options. They’ll turn on that money printer if they need to. And time after time, they have. There are ways to create trustless systems, where we do not have to trust individual actors to administer them faithfully, only for them to be mostly rational actors subject to the same laws of math and physics as the rest of us. Instead, the system administers itself according to some form of protocol. Bitcoin did this for money 15 years ago, it was created by Satoshi in the wake of the nearly total collapse of the global financial system (2008 financial crisis) to create a system which could not suffer the same fate. We all had to bail the banks out because they were “too big to fail”, which was true, Bernanke won a nobel prize in economics for his analysis of this and the bailouts likely prevented the worst economic period since the great depression had the entire banking system be allowed to fail. You may not know who Bernenke is, but if you were alive during this time period, you know his face, he was the guy who had to sell the bailouts to the world as an idea. The reality is, fractional reserve banking is a ponzi scheme, and had the banks failed and people realized it, it would have stopped functioning. Our debt-based world order would have collapsed. No credit could be issued to build roads or fund schools or do anything because there would be no money in the banks to use as collateral and nobody would trust it. Just like in the US great depression. You can argue it’s a sneakily beautiful ponzi scheme which drives the engine of human progress if you are a die-hard capitalist, but you can’t argue it’s not a ponzi scheme.
The crazy thing is, Bitcoin worked. It has kept every promise it made. For 15 years, it has faithfully administered a financial system with a known, transparent, limited supply of 21 million coins which can be transferred across the globe in seconds for pennies in fees. And it has continued to grow no matter which metric you measure it by. Through pandemics, wars, international conflict, attempted bans by major world powers, tick tock, next block, the blockchain continued to function. Not a single hour of downtime, not a single bank holiday, not a single hack or breach of security or protocol. Now, it has a market cap of over 1 trillion USD, which is bigger than the GDP of Israel, the Netherlands, Turkey, or Switzerland, countries with tens of millions of people. It’s been consistently over 800 billion for a while now. It moves hundreds of millions of dollars of value on the regular. I can send a transaction to anybody on the planet with a cell phone and halfway reliable internet for under a cent in under a second.
Nobody can make Bitcoin print money it’s not supposed to print. Nobody can transfer money without the private key of that coin. Nobody can force the network to do anything outside of its protocol, even if they bought every Bitcoin in existence. Even if they had a trillion dollars and 1,000 people with AKs ready to die for it. It’s mathematically, computationally, financially, and logistically infeasible. I think the question is, long-term, how can be we build political and social systems which are equally trustless where we don’t have to put people in positions of power. Just like democracy did to monarchy in spreading power around and reducing the damage one corrupted individual could do, we can now do that again in an order of magnitude greater in the same direction towards greater democratization. Whether you’re a capitalist, a communist, or a member of the federation of planets, this tech has serious promise for making your ideal global vision come true. It’s a matter of setting up the system correctly and getting adoption of it. It can be used for voting systems, for the collection of taxes, for the administration of public funds, goods, and markets. It can be used for a lot more than just money. With smart contract functionality, Bitcoin will be the ledger upon which all this is built.
I’m excited to be here with all of you. We are early. Most people I know don’t own any crypto. The future is coming. Thank you Satoshi for your gift to the world.
Moving money and value around costs energy. Bitcoin uses < 1% of global energy, almost entirely from renewables and stranded electricity since those tend to be the cheapest electricity available. How does that compare to even just remittance services like Western Union? Think of all their branches, their offices, their kiosks. Let alone banks and other services which are being made obsolete. Printing money and managing national treasuries and doing cross-border or domestic value transfers doesn’t take zero energy. There’s just no headlines saying “Once again, financial sector consuming 1% of humanity’s energy usage!” because it’s not new and interesting.
Bitcoin mining is actually helping fund the development of renewable infrastructure by flattening out demand curves and being a buyer of last resort, insuring that there will always be a buyer for that renewable energy, which is exactly what a government or power company needs to know so they can invest in more renewables. Learn more about how that works here: https://www.citadel21.com/bitcoin-is-the-first-global-market-for-electricity-and-will-unleash-renewables
Additional resources: https://endthefud.org/energy
Everyone uses normal money. Less than 1% of people use bitcoin. (using non crypto promoting data). Per transaction and per capita, the energy used by banks is way less.
Also I don’t lose all my funds from someone getting my keys.
K don’t use it then. Its value and adoption has increased, on average, for 15 years in a row. But you’ll finally be proven right on year 16, right? It’s all a bubble? Or a scam or some kind? Or doesn’t have any ‘real utility’? Lol. Imagine if you’d had the opposite perspective 10 years ago. You’d be retired by now. I changed my perspective on it when I learned more about it because I realized I was wrong about it. I wonder if you are equally angry at other financial instruments, do you hold such strong negative opinions about bonds? Stocks? Derivatives?
Big banks are investing in it. Small nations are exposing their national treasuries to it. Some US states accept it as payment for taxes or expose their pension funds to it. Payment providers like Cash App are incorporating it. But they’re wrong too, right? Good luck to you friend. Have fun keeping your money in USD/EUR/whatever and watching inflation eat it away. Let them print money, expanding the supply, decreasing your % of it. While the .001BTC I buy today will always be .001BTC and be the same % of the supply. Nobody can expand the supply. 21 million coins. That’s it.
We have literally seen
DOZENSTHOUSANDS of people get rugpulled the fact that more people are “adopting” this environmentally destructive scam is not a good thing dude.