> move from having government control to having oligarchic control.
Government control is oligarchic control. With the bank bailouts in 2007, it became clear the government wants to keep the oligopoly of banks in charge, instead of freeing the resources to companies worthy of them.
Bitcoin makes no change from this perspective. Taleb says "that the distribution of holdings of bitcoin follows a power law with tail index ≈ 5/4, no different from the distribution of wealth in the U.S." [1]
> If the supply of currency doesn't keep up with demand, the price skyrockets. This discourages investment, since you get more value just by holding onto it.
Indeed, the demand is affected by speculative bubbles. I hope that demand stabilizes, and that people realize the potential gain from trading against short-term sentiment.
But the supply might be a good predictor of price. [2]
> A proof-of-work cryptocurrency must at all times expend energy proportional to the value represented by the cryptocurrency, or else be vulnerable to attack.
I agree. PoW expends a ridiculous amount of energy per transaction, and gains security by essentially outspending any attacker.
But to some extent, Bitcoin developers are at fault here for refusing to increase the block size (thereby limiting the blockchain space and increasing the reward for miners).
We have the means (ostensibly) to voice concerns to representatives in an attempt to incite change. Private oligarchies with 0 oversight never act in the user's best interest, and you have no recourse to do anything about it.
> Bitcoin developers are at fault here for refusing to increase the block size
This, of course, is nonsense; they increased it significantly beyond what some reasonable research showed was safe. The current best-available research shows both that a fee market must exist for long-term Bitcoin security (it is unstable in a post-subsidy scenario without either an uncapped supply/subsidy or a strongly-limited block size.)
Neither is the PoW measurable on a per-transaction basis, since current PoW continues adding protection to all transactions that have ever gone before, Lightning exists, and offchain exchange volume (for Bitcoin) isn't totally faked.
Indeed, a fee market exists and should exist. But I would not increase the block space indefinitely, only as long as there are no double-spend attempts that succeed.
The current cost of a 51% attack is roughly $1M per hour [1], which I find an obscenely unnecessary and wasteful amount of security.
Government control is oligarchic control. With the bank bailouts in 2007, it became clear the government wants to keep the oligopoly of banks in charge, instead of freeing the resources to companies worthy of them.
Bitcoin makes no change from this perspective. Taleb says "that the distribution of holdings of bitcoin follows a power law with tail index ≈ 5/4, no different from the distribution of wealth in the U.S." [1]
> If the supply of currency doesn't keep up with demand, the price skyrockets. This discourages investment, since you get more value just by holding onto it.
Indeed, the demand is affected by speculative bubbles. I hope that demand stabilizes, and that people realize the potential gain from trading against short-term sentiment.
But the supply might be a good predictor of price. [2]
> A proof-of-work cryptocurrency must at all times expend energy proportional to the value represented by the cryptocurrency, or else be vulnerable to attack.
I agree. PoW expends a ridiculous amount of energy per transaction, and gains security by essentially outspending any attacker. But to some extent, Bitcoin developers are at fault here for refusing to increase the block size (thereby limiting the blockchain space and increasing the reward for miners).
[1] - https://nassimtaleb.org/2021/06/bitcoin-currencies-bubbles/
[2] - https:///@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-with-scarci...