teamdonkey wrote: ↑Wed Jul 07, 2021 3:17 pm
Anyone working on a better model?
Sort of, but none seem to be without their flaws, there are some crypto that results in less Kilowatt hours consumed per transaction but then again that might increase as the popularity of the crypto increases. How much energy is consumed globally from the mining/transactions for the thousands of different versions of crypto? Who knows....and how does this compare to the aggregate of payment/currency substitutes? Again, who knows, but you'd need to include fiat currency exchange infrastructure, electronic payments (credit cards, paypal, wire transfers, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Alipay), wholesale swap market, interbank market, etc., all of which use electricity... then other stores of value like gold, commodities (assuming one thinks BTC is a store of value), speculative assets, NFTs, ..the list is long.
The impediments for any crypto to becoming mainstream are many including at least the lack of regulation, too fragmented a market, use by bad actors to hide their dealings, volatility in price movements. Also acceptance by main countries, at least G7, all of which have far more stable currencies than any crypto has demonstrated. Remember when folks were pitching the idea of originating mortgage loans in Bitcoin? Imagine if you took a mortgage out 5 years ago in BTC, say for 75 BTC (call it $150k back then if you converted dollars to BTC)...that mortgage now would be $2.5 million you'd need to pay off. Unless you hedged or got paid in BTC over time during that appreciation, you'd be in quite a hole.