> Your first mistake is assuming that the power used to secure the Bitcoin network is a waste. It is clearly not, since thousands of people believe it is worth paying for.
This is a logic error: securing a financial system is not waste but paying more than you need to is. If my bank secured my money by paying an army of dudes with guns to sit around watching cash and did transfers by putting a check on the corporate jet, I’d say that was wasteful, too.
Similarly, the argument that the current system could be matched by L2 systems is both speculative and conceding defeat: even if that worked as well as the sales pitch claims it’d be using more power, and we know that there’s no plausible scenario where usage goes up while power consumption goes down.
The argument that L2 systems is the answer is also directly undercutting your earlier marketing pitch. If the justification for the inefficiency is that it’s needed for security, telling people that they should switch to your I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Bank is either admitting that the security benefits are either not real or necessary, or that they can be provided more cost effectively.
The only people who are committed to using Bitcoin are the people who’ve already bought in: everyone else is going to look for advantages relative to what they’re already using. It’s not just enough to handwave about how the system might at some point be less distant from parity, you need a serious plan for being better at something before you’ll see any significant adoption. Parity might seem like a far off goal, and it is, but it’s not enough to get most people to switch.
What you call inefficiency (I guess in terms of power consumption) is a misuse of the term in a world where value is subjective. It is efficient and necessary for the use case and value it provides. You can argue it is ineffecient compared to Proof of Stake for example, but Proof of Stake is a completely different system and has a completely different incentive structure.
I’m saying also that L2 (and L3, … Ln) is a way to scale the number of users without increasing power consumption. Every time you add a layer, there are other trade-offs for the benefits gained. But at the base layer you still have the benefits of not having a central authority censoring and controlling exchange of an economic good.
> What you call inefficiency (I guess in terms of power consumption) is a misuse of the term in a world where value is subjective
No, it’s simply recognizing that competing systems match or exceed on security without the same cost. You’ve effectively acknowledged this by saying that the system will be more usable and affordable by using something better designed which eventually clears in Bitcoin to reduce the number of expensive transactions.
No, not something better designed. Something augmenting Bitcoin to make it cheaper to transact while maintaining a base layer for final settlement that is secure and decentralized.
You leave out other characteristics that make Bitcoin an attractive economic good, when you think that matching or exceeding the security at a lower cost is a valid argument against Bitcoin. If it was all about power consumption, Bitcoin wouldn’t keep increasing in demand and price.
Look, you can theorize all you want about the inefficency of Bitcoin, but the market has spoken and continues to speak.
This is a logic error: securing a financial system is not waste but paying more than you need to is. If my bank secured my money by paying an army of dudes with guns to sit around watching cash and did transfers by putting a check on the corporate jet, I’d say that was wasteful, too.
Similarly, the argument that the current system could be matched by L2 systems is both speculative and conceding defeat: even if that worked as well as the sales pitch claims it’d be using more power, and we know that there’s no plausible scenario where usage goes up while power consumption goes down.
The argument that L2 systems is the answer is also directly undercutting your earlier marketing pitch. If the justification for the inefficiency is that it’s needed for security, telling people that they should switch to your I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Bank is either admitting that the security benefits are either not real or necessary, or that they can be provided more cost effectively.
The only people who are committed to using Bitcoin are the people who’ve already bought in: everyone else is going to look for advantages relative to what they’re already using. It’s not just enough to handwave about how the system might at some point be less distant from parity, you need a serious plan for being better at something before you’ll see any significant adoption. Parity might seem like a far off goal, and it is, but it’s not enough to get most people to switch.