Like with a company, it takes a ton of work to make a good software product (equipment, staff, time, etc).
But then, it takes minimal work to send that software to 1,000,000,000 users compared to 10,000 users.
High base cost for it to exist + tiny cost per marginal user.
Bitcoin's overall energy usages does go up with adoption as a store of value as its market cap grows, but in a nonlinear way as it matures. It needs to be secure to function, but from there, its marginal cost per user is efficient. swanbitcoin.com/bitcoin-fee-ba…
However, the bitcoin network can only handle a finite number of daily base layer transactions. From there, secondary layers can multiply that number arbitrarily.
In other words, if 10x more people use bitcoin in 5 years, it won't use 10x more energy than now.
Dividing "bitcoin's total energy usage" by "number of transactions" to determine "energy per transaction" falsely implies that your decision to spend bitcoin or hold it, linearly affects how much energy the bitcoin network uses that day, whereas it doesn't.
The only way that individual transactions on goods/services affect energy usage in the long run is by affecting the fee portion of miner revenue, but that remains a minimal part of bitcoin's energy usage.
And secondary layers, like Lightning, make that even more efficient, and further eliminate the additional marginal energy usage per transaction.
The marginal decision to make a Lightning transaction has close to zero impact on anything. Like sending an email.
This is different from, say, making the marginal decision to fly a private jet somewhere. Your decision to fly or not fly the jet will linearly affect how much C02 gets emitted that day.
This is not the case for deciding whether to hold or spend a bitcoin (or send an email).
Bitcoin's store of value aspect is what mostly drives the total energy usage of the network, since that is what mainly drives the market cap up.
The medium-of-exchange portion of that network, if successful, is very minimal in terms of additional energy usage.
Much of the criticism around bitcoin's energy usage misinterprets the scaling mechanism and which factors affect bitcoin's total energy usage.
Buying it and driving up market cap does indirectly increase energy usage, nonlinearly.
Spending it vs holding it, however, not really.
Plus, due to the incentive mechanism for miners to find cheap energy, the energy that is used for the bitcoin network is increasingly renewable or wasted/stranded energy, which is good to strive for.
Congrats to @JanBlachowicz for his successful title defense. Commentators were pretty biased against him during the fight but he had a near-perfect conservative approach. The champion was the betting underdog and even during the fight, he didn't get enough respect. #UFC259
There's a lesson in here about markets somewhere, probably around the topic of bias.
Imagine a fight where one person objectively lands more hits in every round (and bigger/harder), and yet commentators and viewers think the other person is winning.
Partly this is from charisma/narrative momentum going into the fight, and then also how they "look" while fighting, with one looking crisp (but getting hit more lol) and never really putting the other in danger, and the other looking slower (but hitting more, and harder).
Unless Yellen changes plans, then during the next several months, over $1T from the Treasury General Account is going to pour into bank reserves.
Despite massive T-bill issuance, there is actually a shortage of T-bills out there now relative to capital (complete opposite problem of late-2019 repo spike).
Short end of the Treasury curve is falling due to collateral shortage, while long end is rising.
For example, after the 2019 repo spike, the problem was too many t-bills vs cash. The Fed's transition from repo support to outright QE (T-bill buying) in was predictable a couple weeks in advance.
If the private sector has to buy it, yields likely go higher, which all else being equal puts pressure on growth equity valuations.
If the Fed has to step in and buy more Treasuries for lack of sufficient demand, that's kind of Minsky Moment for the dollar.
This will require monitoring all year. The problem was going to start earlier, because Treasury was planning a ton of issuance in 1H2021, but under Yellen, the Treasury revised that down on February 1st to draw down TGA for now instead. So now more like a 2H2021 issue.
Some responses are fair (e.g. the hash rate chart wasn't ideal), while other ones I still view differently.
The core thesis of my article (Eth still very early on in development; changing the underlying structure while building on top of it) doesn't appear to be disagreed with.
My recent article on Ethereum provoked a lot of responses in favor and against, which is good. lynalden.com/ethereum-analy…
One of my goals is to identify what is an institutional-grade blockchain, and what is not yet one.
For example, when I bought BTC in April 2020 at $6.9k, this ended up being right ahead of a wall of institutional money that came into BTC throughout the year.
The risk/reward ratio was very strong. Not the highest absolute return (could have bought TSLA yolo calls), but great.
More importantly, I like the BTC project, the ecosystem, what it enables, and the options that it gives to people around the world.
Permissionless payments and self-custody stores of value are important for the world to have.