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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17900388
The City of Santa Monica is making history by opening an official Bitcoin office. The city council unanimously voted to pilot the office in partnership with the nonprofit Proof of Workforce at no cost to the city.|
I'm referring to the cryotocurrency scam/fad being in the past. It is strange seeing this in 2024.
Oh. Well, to your credit, most of crypto is outright scams. But Bitcoin is not "crypto". Bitcoin has a transparent supply and issuance schedule and has continued to grow for 15 years in a row whether you are measuring transaction volume, number of nodes, market cap, etc. Just because it hasn't been in the news as much doesn't mean stuff isn't happening. It's not controlled by any entity, board, corporation, or government, it's just a money and payment system that enables you to send money across the globe in under a second for pennies in fees (thanks to the recent Lightning upgrades) with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection. It never takes bank holidays and has operated 24/7 without a single hour of downtime or hack. Its market cap is bigger than Sweden's GDP, it moves billions of dollars of value every year.
25% of Americans own crypto of some kind, most have a Bitcoin-compatible wallet on their phone (Venmo, Cash App, Strike, Paypal). The SEC approved the first Bitcoin ETF this year. Big banks are investing in it because they see use and potential. But if you think it's a scam or a bubble or whatever maybe on year 16 you'll finally be right!
Cool, that's a lot of text, but block chain is extremely energy intensive and there are no benefits over regular currency. Just because some people have it doesn't lend it credibility.
Moving value around isn't free. It takes money and energy and human time. Bitcoin is more efficient than the traditional banking system in many ways. You just don't see headlines about how much energy is used by the stock market or remittance services because it's not good clickbait. "BITCOIN IS BOILING THE OCEANS" however is novel and sounds good. But it's just clickbait.
Bitcoin uses <1% of global energy, mostly from renewables, at off-peak times since it's the cheapest energy. Miners have to use the cheapest energy (as mining is extremely competitive and low margin), so they don't compete with regular energy users. What they do is even out demand curves, which ultimately incentivizes the addition of renewables to the grid by ensuring there will always be a buyer for the electricity. This keeps prices down for regular users as well, since they aren't paying for un-used capacity. Proof-of-work is essential to Bitcoin's security, other schemes have been attempted but do not stay decentralized as well, are less secure, and tend to lead to concentration of wealth.
That's all to secure "main chain", but a single main-chain transaction can open a lightning channel which can contain billions of transactions, none of which need to be mined, all of which settle in under a second for next to nothing in fees. Main chain "secures" these transactions but doesn't need to actually process them, which means lightning transactions take about as much energy as sending an e-mail.
If you're interested in learning more about Bitcoin's energy use see https://endthefud.org/ or for a more friendly and less academic site see http://bitcoin.rocks