Thread by @Molson_Hart

I read this bearish piece on crypto making the rounds.

I’m qualified to debate the points on Bitcoin but nothing else.

Here are his criticisms of Bitcoin and my responses:

https://twitter.com/markrussinovich/status/1492174833945231360

I used to think this was the fatal flaw of Bitcoin.

He’s right that this occurs. Mining is a commodity marker and economies of scale drive concentration, which is bad because it increases the chance of a 51% attack allowing a miner to double spend their Bitcoin.

However, once this occurs, and we would know because you can’t double spend your Bitcoin without someone being on the other side of that, it would cause massive loss of trust not only in the participating miners/their public addresses, but also in the entire network.

In other words, you just built the worlds largest Bitcoin mining network at huge cost so you could double spend Bitcoin which is now worth significantly less because you double spent your Bitcoin.

Miners are incentivized to keep market concentration law to keep btc prices high.

So it’s a Pyrrhic victory to do this for the miners.

Iirc a mining pool did once get over 51% and when this was noticed they had to reorient their computing power to again deconcentrate because no one is going to use Bitcoin if it’s centralized like this.

Bitcoin uses a lot of power.

It’s true it does, however this is mitigated by when it uses power (at night when it’s cheaper) or the type of power it uses (renewables) or waste power (natural gas flares).

Designed or not, the entire piece just focuses on the negatives of crypto but that’s not really the right way to look at it. You have to look at the negatives and positives of both crypto and our current system. Well our current system uses a ton of power as well.

Look at how much intellectual brainpower is dedicated to making finance hum. That random chase tower you see in a small Kansas City. They’re processing transactions. What about our entire legal system of judges, juries, lawyers. That’s power too ans used to sustain the system.

Yeah you can’t reverse transactions when you screw up. It sucks and it’s a fair knock on crypto but I think the tools to reduce these issues are going to keep getting better kind of like how in the late 90s and early 2000s we were all scared of getting our credit card stolen on

the internet. Shit got better and easier. And the same will happen to crypto which, was been around for 13 years. Internet first cropped up in the 60s. It takes some time.

Crime. I agree that it’s a problem for crypto but it’s not like crime doesn’t happen with our current system. Again, I think this negative needs to be balanced with the positive. For me, I prefer to have higher rates or crime than to have government everywhere because for me as a

student of history governments do much more damage than decentralized individuals.

You can read the piece yourself but crypto isn’t going anywhere and it’ll just be an ever larger force in our lives going forward. Yeah prices will fall or rise, but long term, it’s here to stay.