My best attempt to orange-pill an influential member of the #EffectiveAltruism movement who doesn't understand #bitcoin and is, unfortunately, heavily involved in shitcoins: 🧵
This is the key point about PoW and what distinguishes it from PoS. If you can do the research to understand why this statement in this tweet is true, you’ll understand PoW and why it's indispensable:
https://twitter.com/dergigi/status/1425203342645637120?s=21&t=knhWpSvwGLkaZTuaWqa_JQ
It’s the first time in history that you can look at information and verify, with certainty, a specific quantity of physical activity (work) that had to happen in the world to produce the specific information you’re looking at.
It bridges the digital world and the physical world. That matters, because the physical world has a property that the digital world never had before, which turns out to be extremely useful when creating a monetary asset: non-copy-paste-ability.
Gold has that property, which is why it has retained its value for millennia, unlike any other monetary good in history. Bitcoin has the same property, but improves on gold in many ways, including divisibility, verifiability, portability, and ease of security.
The lack of these latter properties was gold's downfall. It is not cheaply or safely portable in large quantities, not practically divisible into small values, and not easy to secure in large values, people stored their gold at banks, which issued notes redeemable in gold.
But banks could not resist the temptation to issue more redeemable notes than they had gold to redeem (fractional reserve), and it’s a straight line from there to fiat, the Fed, and to Luna and all the other shitcoins.
Bitcoin fights against all of this, because you can’t copy and paste energy/work. The physical world imposes restraints on the creation of bitcoin, just as it did for the mining of gold, but bitcoin is way way better than gold on so many other features of money. /fin
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