Paypal and Venmo are now trading in proof-of-work cryptocurrency. The virus is now fully normalized, and there is nothing now to stop its climate change contribution from growing without bound.
It is necessary to pass laws to stop use of proof-of-work cryptocurrency— now.
Conversation
Square and CashApp are doing it as well, including that whole new "myths" site where they try to trump up environmental concerns as myths that don't apply
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It's not really the same because they allow you to withdraw Bitcoin instead of it existing purely as a way to speculate on the price like PayPal.
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I mean, sure, but they're still enabling crypto payments and I very, very much wish they wouldn't. Whether you can withdraw as crypto or not, they're still adding transactions to the block chain and causing everyone to pay that energy cost
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Transferring around Bitcoin with PayPal doesn't result in any on-chain transactions. The only on-chain transactions would be them buying and selling it in bulk to grow or shrink their reserves as needed. They don't need any significant amount of transactions for what they do.
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They provide a way for people to speculate on the price, not to make any on-chain transactions. You can't use PayPal to make a Bitcoin transaction. You can use it to make a PayPal transaction based on the price of Bitcoin, like other currencies they support.
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Ah, interesting. I hadn't realised they were operating as a reserve broker, though either way I really don't want them or anyone else encouraging the use of cryptocurrencies.
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Specifically, I don't want to create a distinction between transactions-within-broker and transactions-between-brokers that further mask away and confuse the impacts that the use of these currencies incur
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On-chain transactions are only usable as a settlement layer. The fee for sending 1000 BTC is the same as 1 BTC if both were a single UTXO. The arbitrary limits on block size and time don't accommodate doing on-chain transactions for absolutely everything. Have to use 2nd layers.
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Nothing prevents making Bitcoin support 1000x as many transactions by having 10x faster block time and 100x larger blocks. It isn't a viable way to scale it up to support every little transaction though.
Resource use for mining isn't directly related to transaction throughput.
If it supported 1000x as many transactions, it would need 1000x more storage space, so it would be much harder to run a node. There would be more space, so more transactions, but lower fees. Miners would end up getting near zero money from fees until it filled up to 100% again.
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It would seem this is why Libra (or whatever it's called now) is explicitly architected to allow throwing history away.
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