Thread by @ZLOK

@iA Ok, first, please assume only the best intentions from my part towards you. Even if the topic may be touchy, and the tone might sound sarcastic, and Twitter is often used to troll our ridicule. There is zero percent of this in my previous or following tweets.

This being said,

@iA You mentioned several points at once, so I tried to be concise and address all at once. My bad.

a) monetary value
b) energy consumption
c) energy waste
d) disappearance of fiat

Although they are indeed very much connected, they need to be untangled first.

@iA Also, I do realise your tweet was more of a rhetorical rant than an actual question. But coming from someone who famously brings thought process and philosophy to rants, I thought it was not innocent that you tweeted this, and therefore welcomed conversation, even rebuttal.

@iA (Now please let me organise my thoughts for a bit before I answer your many points. Be back in a bit)

@iA Energy consumption for Bitcoin is a feature, not a bug. Don't look at it as an inefficient engine that consume too much, but rather like an open system where everyone can come add another layer of safety and security, by making it harder to attack or control. Also, it adapts to

@iA the site of the network. Think of it as a vehicle that can get as little or as many people on board. Of course when it's two passengers it can be consuming almost nothing with a tiny engine, and as more passengers board, the engine grows, & the efficiency per passenger improves.

@iA It sounds counter-intuitive, but a bus consume much more than a bike right?

Now, what it consumes is electricity. The source of which can be clean or not. The same way saying "electric cars are clean and without carbon footprint" is false and not looking at the big picture,

@iA because the electricity they consume may come from sources like coal burning or nuclear waste producing, saying "Bitcoin is dirty" also makes no sense because mining it with hydrolic or wind produced electricity is not.

Also, it's not a zero-sum game, or maybe it is, the

@iA electricity used is often coming from over-produced energy that needs to be sold so that it doesn't get wasted. Of course not all of it is so pink and beautiful, but that is the same with *all* electricity-powered everything worldwide.

And worldwide, rebrand clean energy is

@iA slowly but surely gaining momentum, which has an effect on all the industry and industries depending on it.

There is a lot of energy waste, starting with electric heaters, which are basically turning energy into heat waste. Bitcoin miners produce great as a byproduct, much like

@iA servers, but serve a purpose, like servers do. For example the many servers and computers used worldwide to secure banking and interbanking systems, Visa & MasterCard, etc.

A lot of energy is used for good mining, which has only less than 20% of extracted matter used for

@iA industrial purposes, while the rest is banking, jewelry, etc. and that's not taking into account the environmental disaster caused by gold mining of course...

So, in short, there is power consumption, but the energy business is a bit more complex than what most people think.

@iA Disappearance of fiat money is not happening yet. It might never happen. It has nothing to do with energy consumption, but convenience and politics, etc. For now, it's as much not disappearing as brick and mortar are not disappearing, even though Amazon is a giant and keeps on

@iA growing. The same way paper money is hard to get rid of, even though most governments want it to die and cards and apps usage is growing everywhere. Even if Bitcoin was 20 years old instead of 10, you still wouldn't expect that it would have replaced the whole central banks

@iA system by now. Let's be realistic, the Internet is how old, and we are only just *now* debating the delicate subject of Net neutrality...

Fiat doesn't need to disappear for alternatives to grow, as easily verifiable by the fluctuating price of the once of gold for instance.

@iA Lastly, Bitcoin cannot go to 0.0 because it used to be without monetary value at the beginning, but the moment one BTC started having a corresponding price in USD, there was no way to put the genie back into the bottle. The price might go to USD 0.01 or less, but there will

@iA always be people who will want to participate in the system, mine, and buy, the same way it was the case at the beginning, when they did even though the value *was* 0.0 at the time. Except, now, the proof of concept is validated, almost 100% uptime for 10 years, many more people

@iA are interested in the tech, the philosophy, and the investment/speculation, and if it goes to 1 cent, someone will give it enough value to pay 1.1 cent in order to have more of it. As it factually happened already.

Bubble-wise, even tulips and Beanie Babies are not free today.

@iA Now, are 99.9% altcoins pure hype and borderless scams at best? Yes, there is bit a single doubt about it. Same goes with 99.9% "Blockchain will solve X or Y" projects raising millions from ignorant speculators. Is there a bubble, of course, just like with any new tech. Like the

@iA dotcom bubble burst of 1999-2000. But if 9,999 pets.com died, there is still an Amazon or two that survived, and a bunch of YouTube and Google who grew from the ashes.

The TCP/IP protocol is still there, so are browsers, so is email.

Bitcoin is not a company,

@iA most of the people who work on it and build it, do so because they believe in it. Most people who have been using it, buying it, even speculating on it before mid-2017, do so because they believe in it. These people are the reason why its price is falling but stays above zero.

@iA End of this thread (for now...) sorry for the storm/wall. Hope this helps bring some clarity and interest.

I sincerely meant it when I welcomed you to the rabbit hole. 🙂

@iA Unroll @threadreaderapp for convenience.