>As far as I can tell, hundreds of millions in drugs and contraband are regularly transacted using Bitcoin
What a hilarious claim. Everything else you've said just confirms you've fallen for the "BTC bad" narrative. I wonder how you feel about you-know-who printing unlimited toilet paper money for their own benefits.
This whole public lynching of Stallman out of absolutely nowhere is suspicious. Hell, even corporations that barely even donated to FSF is virtue signaling. They're all saying the exact same thing about Richard.
Stallman was always right and what's happening now really makes it look like he's on a hitlist.
>There was no immediate explanation provided for the blaze, which erupted just two days after the French cloud computing firm kicked off plans for an initial public offering.
Yep RenVM is a big deal. Iirc they had something called Cafe which demonstrated turning your bitcoins into a privacy coin, ZEC. I remember when REN was only 5 cents. Amazing how much it costs to run a darknode now! Truly a successful project.
Also another cool dApp is DyDx, margin trading platform
This is so cool, I can't wait to see a multiplayer adaption now that it's open-source! Oh please reverse engineer GTA:IV and bring it back to life as well
You're looking at it from a totally wrong perspective. The U.S. government can print as much dollars as they want, whereas BTC cannot. The government does not care about green energy unless they can profit from it. To say that you did not buy BTC because of "wasting energy" is a very odd way to cope.
You guys are so hung up on energy consumption, a meme, that you're forgetting the real intrinsic value of Bitcoin.
Intrinsic: belonging to the essential nature or constitution of a thing [0].
Bitcoin, being a series of bits proving you or one of your financial forebears burnt some spare energy without any material return, has no intrinsic value. Its value is entirely extrinsic and intersubjective, in that it only has value if a quorum believes it has value.
Haha wait wait, so energy consumption is "a meme," but having a fixed supply of money is apparently a totally good idea and not at all a meme. We don't care about deflation, we don't care about monetary policy, we want a gold standard where instead of gold we just burn absurd quantities of carbon. lol
Bitcoin's "intrinsic value" is really value unto itself for the most part, at this point in time. Maybe in the future it'll be used more as a currency, and we've seen that with Tesla, Bovada, etc., but I don't think most governments will allow such a threat to their currency without additional controls.
> Also, "blockchain" is just a data structure that has practically no use besides bitcoin.
I've always felt the other way around actually; I think blockchain will be used more widely and longer-term than Bitcoin. Blockchain as a technology has already been invested in and deployed by firms like IBM and JPMorgan.
Brain wallets are hilariously bad, if you make it up yourself; a randomly generated key is far superior and can still be memorized. Search up "brainflayer" for just one example of a brain wallet cracker.
> Nobody can steal your bitcoin if your private keys are well protected. And of course, the best protection is a brain wallet.
The end result of this is that a huge portion of humans cannot safely store their wealth in btc. I sure as hell don't trust myself to keep that much cash in a brain wallet.
"If your private keys are well protected" might as well mean "if you can do four backflips in a row" to most people.
The best strategy is to use a BIP-39 seed phrase with an additional passphrase. The seed phrase should be written down/etched into a piece of metal and stored safely (with redundancy), and the passphrase should be memorized by yourself and possibly a family member (as insurance if something happens to you).
You can leave a small amount of coins in the wallet using the same seed phrase but with no passphrase as a decoy. This way, if somebody "stumbles upon" your seed phrase, they'll attempt to recover this small amount of money, and you can monitor using only the xpub to discover it has been compromised. You then have some time to move the other coins before anybody could potentially brute-force your passphrase (Since they need to compute PBKDF2 for each attempt).
You can reuse the same seed phrase for multiple wallets, using a different passphrase for each. There is no way for somebody to determine if you have surrendered all passphrases for a give seed, since there could be infinitely many. This offers plausible deniability in the case your thief is the government.
Listen to yourself. Decoys? What percentage of people do you think won't go running away screaming when you tell them that this is how they should store their wealth? If I lose my bank password I can walk into a branch and talk to a human. No need for metal etchings and incantations.
And that'd be fine if btc was a niche product for a few people who want this control but it also comes with extreme social costs in terms of emissions. The power use argument that advocates make is that it'll be fine once btc is used by literally everybody.
> When the US government rules it illegal, or enough people collectively lose interest, btc will no longer have value.
Recall that for the first 2 years of its life, bitcoin had no market price. Bitcoin acquired a price because it has value to some people. That is, its having value preceded it having a price. What that should tell you is that even if a lot of people lost interest, bitcoin would still be valuable. The key insight arrives if you figure out what is valuable about Bitcoin that caused btc to acquire a price.
It's hilarious to see the naysayers about Bitcoin say that BTC is not usable. Now it's worth almost 50 grand and all they can come up with is expensive transaction fees which in hindsight, are really not that expensive, and the energy consumption of maintaining the Bitcoin network.
It sure is a lot better than using human lives, usually & most likely forced labor, to mine real Gold. Right? After all, energy is free when you're using solar power to mine your Bitcoins or any other coins. Does the energy really goes to waste when it provides heating? Etc?
It just seems like people are running out of excuses at this point. I wonder what they'll be saying when BTC hits $100,000.
The State printing fiat money is essentially stealing time from people who have laboured to create wealth. That wealth is pilfered through devaluing the money supply, with those close to central bank who receive the new money first benefiting from it.
Bitcoin fixes this theft problem, and demand for it will continue to increase for as long as this theft occurs.
The only way bitcoin can be stopped is if central banks start contracting the supply of their money, which you and I know will never happen.
> governments can print fiat money at will, with virtually no energy
I get what you're saying, but that's not really true. You have to account for the military spending required to preserve the legitimacy of your fiat currency. Any nation-state can afford the same printing presses you have.
And what is the cost of the massive capacity for and monopoly on violence that nation-states derive this capability to print money out of thin air from?
What a hilarious claim. Everything else you've said just confirms you've fallen for the "BTC bad" narrative. I wonder how you feel about you-know-who printing unlimited toilet paper money for their own benefits.