Hector Martin

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.

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.

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?

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.

Bitcoin is an experiment run amok. It should've never been used in production. Then again, this is how we got IPv4 too. Humans will never learn.

I don’t understand. What is “production”? Are you saying you think everyone adopting Bitcoin is wrong, and you are right, because of the low transaction speed? Or because of the energy consumption? Both?

"Production" is the real world, at scale. Nobody is adopting Bitcoin for what is literally the first sentence of the abstract of the paper that introduced it, today. Its design was never capable of achieving what it set out to achieve, at scale.

If the authors of Bitcoin didn't know this would happen, they were idiots. More likely, they did know, but never expected it to actually become as big as it has, today - it was probably intended to be a prototype for something better.