A reminder that this metric—number of new addresses—means nothing. Addresses should never be reused, so modern wallet software should be making new addresses with every transaction, no matter the nature of the transaction. And with blocks consistently full, the number of transactions doesn’t change much.
The metric I'm watching is Google Trends[1]. So far it's hardly budged and is far below its peaks in 2017 and 2019. That indicates to me that this run up in price could be just beginning. I expect that if an all time high is reached then a wave of publicity will propel the price much higher, as it has several times in the past.
I don't see a 10x price increase like 2017 though. I expect less extreme price movements now that bitcoin's market cap is so much higher and more large investors are involved. I think it would take something huge to move the price that much, like a bitcoin ETF approved by the SEC.
How many servers are powering banking mainframes, VISA and Mastercard services?
It's not wasteful if it's providing transactional security.
Just for perspective, there are THREE MILLION ATMs globally. And that's just ATMs, totally ignoring the infrastructure for the 60,000+ global banking institutions.
Well an easy way to know this makes no sense is that if you scaled up Bitcoin power consumption to visas current transaction volume it would require more power than the entire world produces and generate more e-waste than the entire world put together. Then multiplied a few times in both cases.
No need to do any of that if people adopt a Layer-2 solution like Lightning.
Also, no one is happy about the energy consumption and the centralization of miners in China and subsidized dirty plants, which makes an eventual change to a Proof-of-Stake protocol likely as it matures.
When we get to that point, are you going to start using crypto or are you just going to find another reason to bash it?
Lightning is vaporware, it’s been coming for 5 years, it’s not coming. A layer 2 network does not require Bitcoin you can tie any asset to it. Gold works just fine.
Bitcoin is actively user hostile, has a worse wealth distribution than any banana republic, the majority of it is in the control of criminals and shady actors, no I don’t want them to be the wealthiest people on earth while the rest of us fight for scraps. Currencies benefit from their ability to respond to shock, and to the addition of new market actors. Deflation only serves to entrench existing wealth.
There’s literally nothing to like about crypto. Nothing. People deserve better than what you’re shilling.
> the majority of it is in the control of criminals and shady actors,
Crime, corruption and fight for power exists independently of what people use for currency. "Criminals and shady actors" also control significant amounts of paper money yet you are not here trying to argue against people to use paper money, right?
> I don’t want them to be the wealthiest people on earth while the rest of us fight for scraps.
Are you living in North America or the Euro zone? Then you are already top dog, dude.
> Deflation only serves to entrench existing wealth
Do the existing inflationary policies are helping out in reducing inequality? Who were the greatest beneficiaries of these recent stimulus packages, QE, etc?
> There’s literally nothing to like about crypto.
I'm pretty sure there are, you just don't want to acknowledge it. But most importantly, the question that I pose to every perennial-crypto-critic: Do you think that the status quo is the best that we can do? If yes, have you stopped to look at all the existing issues with the global financial system and can you honestly make a case that they are all insurmountable problems? If no, do you accept that we need to have people experimenting with alternatives?
The wealthiest people in crypto are all criminals down to satoshi who is likely Paul Le Roux.
“If you’re living in North America or the euro zone you’re probably top dog”
What? I’m saying that the overwhelming majority of Bitcoin is owned by a small cluster of criminals and everyone else has to fight for scraps of the chain. Those people aren’t who should be wealthy in the new world order. That’s not better than the existing system, it’s worse, and we deserve better.
“Do existing financial policies help reduce inequality”
It requires a combination of fiscal and monetary policy but I do know that moving to deflationary strictly makes the problem worse by rewarding people who sit on money and don’t move it.
I reiterate there’s nothing to like about crypto. It’s all hot garbage. Is the existing system better? 100 times yes. Is the existing system perfect? Lord no. But I don’t think we should replace it with something strictly worse for the sake of a change. We all saw how 2016 played out. I’m in no rush to 2016 our money.
I don't want get into a technical argument here, because clearly you are arguing with the amygdala now.
The one thing that I'd like to point out is that most of your arguments are either exclusive to Bitcoin (not crypto) and/or a social-economic-political issue that has nothing to do with the technology of crypto or blockchain.
Take your speculation of the identity of Satoshi. Let's say it's Le Roux. So what? First, he is in jail, which is more that we can say about a lot of other Criminal Lords. Second, having a bitcoin stash does not get him out of there. Third, even if you pull the "he can use his stash to order bad things to happen" argument you know that the same thing would be true if he was in control of a gold stash or a Swiss account. Lastly, even if managed to get out and managed to prove that he was Satoshi, he would not be a leader of a "new world order" were his ethics and morality would suddenly be glorified.
Also, you confusing Bitcoin with crypto leads to the interesting position where you sound both as a Bitcoin maxi and a Buttcoiner. Case in point: if you are right about "small cluster of criminals owning a lot of Bitcoin", there will be no need to "fight for scraps of the chain". What will happen is simply is that those will start using another chain. When Tether does go out in flames (which I am with you and I hope they do as soon as possible), Ethereum will go on. Fuck, even if you are against ETH you can still use ETC, so where is the part that people are being forced to adopt one chain over another?
To sum up: don't throw the baby with the bathwater. It's not because Bitcoin at this point in time has a lot of issues that crypto/blockchain should be considered "all hot garbage". Your attitude is reactionary and leaves no room for any kind of change.
Great so let’s just dial it up! Easy! When does it take effect? Right yeah, it doesn’t, and it won’t for all the same reasons it hasn’t yet. Including ideological zealotry about how you should be able to download the entire blockchain onto a USB drive. Among many other reasons.
You misunderstood when I asked "when does it take effect" I meant when will they go ahead and make that change, then followed up with the assertion that they will not ever make that change and therefore this feature isn't particularly relevant.
I think a lot of that energy would have otherwise been wasted (e.g. surplus power from times of the day or season), and I remember reading that the vast majority of it is at least renewable energy. At least it seems a lot better than assets too? Like take gold, people are happy spending up to the spot price in order to extract it from the earth, environmental damage be damned.
There’s no such thing as free magical wasted energy that just happens to only be good for Bitcoin mining lol, there’s plenty of other things that can be done with it. Gold expends energy to mine but is essentially free to store, bitcoin costs money to store proportional to its market price. Socialized across block reward in the form of inflation.
When that ends of course nobody will pay the actual $80-100 per transaction in electricity actually required to secure the network making it vulnerable to a 51% attack.
> Gold expends energy to mine but is essentially free to store, bitcoin costs money to store proportional to its market price.
It's not really that simple. There is a different breakdown when you look at individual vs global costs. There is a cost to an individual for storing gold - e.g. building a vault, hiring a guard etc. This cost was the original incentive scheme behind the early banks - if we pool our gold storage then we can pool our security costs. Beyond that individual cost there is no additional global cost for storage.
Bitcoin is free to store for an individual. Once funds are stored at an address in the blockchain they will stay there. Although the global cost is huge it is invisible at the individual level - nobody needs to participate in mining the chain to hold bitcoin.
History suggests that individuals favor situations where the costs have been socialized and are not visible at the individual level.
The cost to store gold is an empty building and a few kalashnikovs. That scales roughly constant.
The cost to store Bitcoin is the cost to secure the network, and its outrageous. Further it scales linearly with the price of Bitcoin as block reward value does.
Well, it’s a special kind of stupid to introduce renewable energy without using it to displace fossil fuels.
Science says we’re already pretty much fucked if we don’t go full-on panic mode, and here we are, still wasting this opportunity, if not to keep our feet dry, at least to keep our chin above water...
Each transaction requires enough power to run an average household for 22 days (or to drive a Tesla from San Francisco to New York) and produces as much ewaste as hucking half your iPhone out the window along the way. [1]
Not to mention it likely makes international arms and drug dealing Bond villain Paul “Solotshi” Calder Le Roux the wealthiest man on earth.
How much resources does it take to bring 1 kilo of gold out of the earth? You are saying it is wasteful without any comparison to something similar to bitcoin.
That's a false comparison. If gold miners were to stop digging, global finance would continue just fine (with some temporary shocks to commodities markets, but nothing permanent). If Bitcoin miners were to stop wasting electricity, the entire operation would immediately stop working.
What's misleading about this is that the electricity is not consumed per transaction. The amount of electricity miners buy is proportional only to the block reward, which is fixed, plus transaction fees, which are small, times the price. The block reward is large now but halves every 4 years and eventually rounds down to zero, so the electricity consumption of bitcoin will eventually fall with certainty.
Also, that guy is not Satoshi. Satoshi is almost certainly dead, and was probably Hal Finney.
your first paragraph is a round about restatement of the fact that it consumes exactly as much electricity and produces exactly as much waste as I said it did. Once block reward gets to zero, unless people pay the $80 in power it costs to operate the network as a transaction fee it’ll be vulnerable to a 51% attack, so poof. Rip.
Ok I provided a detailed article explaining why Paul Le Roux is probably Satoshi and you responded with nothing.
> unless people pay the $80 in power it costs to operate the network as a transaction fee it’ll be vulnerable to a 51% attack
Your $80 is based on the current block reward which was set totally arbitrarily and is not in any way an estimate of the actual amount necessary to prevent 51% attacks in the future after the block reward disappears.
Right but after the block reward goes away lol, you’re going to have to pony up or 51%, and until the block reward goes down in 1500 days it’s 100% fair to say what I did about what a transaction costs.
Now imagine how wasteful physical currency is, the infrastructure to store it and transport it, the useless Chase/BOA/WellsFargo branches and ATMs that exist everywhere. They could almost all be replaced with digital wallets and apps.
The real cost of a fiat currency is not in printing bills or running ATMs. It's the law enforcement and ultimately military might required to enforce scarcity and value of the currency. The cost of enforcing scarcity in Bitcoin pales in comparison to the amount the US spends defending the dollar globally.
The army is a fixed and utterly irrelevant cost because in a world where bitcoin is the only currency, and I can't stress this enough, you still need an army lol.
Fun fact you can calculate for yourself that your argument carries no water. If you scale up Bitcoin to just what visa provides (not all cash, no MasterCard not the rest of the economic order) it would expend a few times more energy than the entire world produces today and produce a few times more ewaste than the entire world produces today. Therefore it cannot be by definition more efficient than traditional finance.
Seems like Ethereum may be a much better bargain right now. It's trending upwards as well over the past few months, but is even less of a % of its 2017 peak price compared to Bitcoin.
Addresses do frequently get reused, though- people send to the same addresses, and last time I checked, the bitcoin.com wallet defaulted to reusing receive addresses
FWIW the bitcoin.com wallet (and really bitcoin.com) is borderline malware. It exists solely to leverage its official sounding name to constantly nudge people towards deceiving people into buying "Bitcoin cash" which is largely unrelated to bitcoin. When ever they're called out for doing it too blatantly deceptively (e.g. spent months calling "bitcoin cash" the real bitcoin, and bitcoin "bitcoin core"), they just walk it back slight enough to not get outright banned on platforms.
It might be poor choice of words, but I think it gets the point across. It's barely worth more than "bitcoin SV" (another coin that shares the same transaction history with bitcoin to the same point) that's controlled by a painfully obvious and blatant scammer and his backer.
Bitcoin cash is more bitcoin than the current BTC is. It continues the idea of peer-to-peer cash, payments on the chain. Read the whitepaper. Where's BTC is being pushed into a strange, lot less useful, "store of value" niche.
The wallet is not open source (they made a private fork of bitpays wallet as part of their strategy to shill "bitcoin cash" a relatively worthless coin that cashes in on bitcoin.com's official sounding name)
This is a contradiction - if the number of transactions isn’t increasing, and mew addresses are created from every transaction, then the number of mew addresses shouldn’t be increasing.
So something most be changing - either wallet software is preferring to use new addresses more often, or something else, like more distinct users.
The metric is: "The number of unique addresses that appeared for the first time in a transaction of the native coin [sic] in the network."
They're not excluding old, never-reused addresses, so the number of addresses is always increasing as every transaction adds more.
What they tweeted was that this rate of increase has itself increased by about 20%. Since blocks have been full during this period, this means the difference lies in the type of the transaction. If the current transactions are more of a fan-out (pay multiple parties) and less consolidation (sweeping payments made to the same institution), then that makes sense.
And indeed, right now there is a larger than usual outflow from exchanges. Maybe people are getting nervous about holding increasingly more valuable bitcoin on exchanges and are pulling their funds off? That alone could explain a 20% increase in this meaningless "address count" metric.
