Bitcoin consumes 4,000,000,000 W of power to process four transactions per second. A single Raspberry Pi with a database can do an order of magnitude more on 5W. Think about that next time you wonder if it's a good design.
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And to all the inevitable "but decentralized but instant but global but whatever" repliers: if you think any of those require and are worth a NINE ORDER OF MAGNITUDE overhead, please never be an engineer.
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I made a little diagram just to put things into perspective. This is how much energy Bitcoin uses compared to another globally distributed system.pic.twitter.com/XuVeCdn69y
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*goku 9000 meme*
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But the alternative isn't a Raspberry Pi. It's bankers. You should be comparing to that.
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Pi is unfair analogy. Traditional banking system uses more power, higher fees and slower (weeks for a global transfer), and centralization is almost always objectively bad. Bitcoin also represents the absolute worst tech of any coin available.
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Traditional banking wastes *nowhere near* the amount of power per transaction that Bitcoin does - that's obvious to anyone. At normal eletricity prices (i.e. what banks would have), a transaction would cost $33 with Bitcoin level overhead. Which they don't.
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but how else would you do it? proof of work is definitely wasteful when there are enough members competing, but how would YOU created a peer to peer payment system with no central authority and no double-spending?
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For starters, without a ~4 transaction per second, hardcoded, design limit. That particular design "feature" is the biggest problem with Bitcoin right now. Yes, Bitcoin pioneered a lot of interesting concepts. It also has some glaring, ridiculous design flaws.
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I understand the problems Bitcoin solves. That doesn't mean it isn't fatally flawed in other ways. I also know other designs might fix these problems. I'm talking about Bitcoin, not cryptocurrencies as a whole.
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Have you ever researched bitcoin?
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Yes. It's a neat proof of concept with lots of good ideas. It also has some catastrophic flaws.
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