In either of these situations it seems like hodling until victory pays off. The real loser is, well, the planet as the network continues to consume more and more power.
Bitcoin could go the way of any number of other cyptos; back to zero.
In any case, nobody uses Bitcoin as a currency because it's logistically harder for 99.9% of people, and nobody uses it as a store of value because its insanely volitale. Bitcoin is really just a speculative asset.
I just made a transfer to someone just yesterday that had never dealt with Bitcoin before. Beyond explaining why "confirmations" were needed, it was surprisingly simple to get a total beginner set up with an account somewhere suitable, and even though I was transferring from an exchange account where I had to get verified (the account predated new KYC requirements), it tooks ~10 minutes to complete the verification process.
So it may be logistically harder, but it's doable enough that it was worth it to avoid having to do an international wire transfer with banks in many cases still stuck in a world of paper and faxes (my bank manager actually boasted about the amount of manual, paper-based back and forth setting up my business account required when I opened it two years ago).
I recently helped a techy friend with this and there were a number of pitfalls when dealing with the addresses and the long confirmation timed. The UTXOs abstraction is super unintuitive. Ethereum's account system is much simpler.
Still eithet are a piece of cake and lightning fast compared to normal banks.
> If I attempted to buy an ice cream cone with Bitcoin, will the money be transferred before the ice cream melts?
It will not.
>What costs more, the transaction fees or the ice cream cone?
There have been times where the average transaction cost was about $20. It's hovering around $0.80 cents now, to the best of my knowledge. So it depends on the market.
I belief that the current strategy is to convince others that bitcoin is a great transaction medium for everything under the sun (i.e. ice cream) and then cash out in dirty fiat once the price reaches a target so you can buy Lambos full of ice cream. It's really not a sincere attempt to create a currency as it is to masssively enrich early adopters by encouraging use by normal people.
Bitcoin as a great transaction medium WAS the strategy in the early years. This was the big promise.
As price and transaction fees rose the transaction medium for everyday things(like me paying for Namecheap hosting/domains in BTC in 2013) went away.
Many big vendors such as Steam actually stopped accepting BTC directly(or through 1 step processor such as Bitpay). It was too much trouble/risk and annoyed customers.
Cheaper/safer/more convenient than bank transfers. That Bitcoin promise has not been fulfilled.
SEPA is way cheaper/more convenient/safer than Bitcoin in Europe. Even in countries with troubled banking systems such as Venezuela, it is not normal to pay for regular items with BTC.
So Bitcoin "pivoted" to store-of-value strategy. Promise that offchain solutions like LN will handle transactions "any day now".
I am not sure why nobody else mentioned this but there is a second layer called Lightning currently running very well ontop of Bitcoin. It enables basically instant transactions with fees at thousandths of a cent and people are using it Right Now to pay for VPNs and other goods online.
At this moment, the recipient of the payment will receive notification of an unconfirmed transaction in about 10 seconds, and the fee will be about $0.63.
>>If I attempted to buy an ice cream cone with Bitcoin, will the money be transferred before the ice cream melts?
The transfer is instant. To get a guarantee of settlement takes 6 confirmation, or about one hour, which is much quicker than the 6 weeks it takes for a credit card transaction to become irreversible. Unless you're purchasing something like a house, you don't need the payment to settle to complete the purchase, with either cryptocurrency or credit card payments.
Ethereum's confirmations take 15 seconds, to Bitcoin's 10 minutes, and you need about 12 to have a virtual guarantee of irreversibility.
Only the large-cap cryptocurrencies can provide a high assurance of irreversible payments:
>>What costs more, the transaction fees or the ice cream cone?
In (small-block) Bitcoin, at any reasonable level of adoption, the transaction fee, which is why small transactions could only be economical using an off-chain protocol like the Lightning Network, which has been in development for several years and is still largely unproven as a full substitute for regular Bitcoin transactions.
Bitcoin (Cash) guarantees low fees into the future as a result of a high maximum block size. With Bitcoin Cash, there is a higher risk of settled transactions being reversed with a 51% attack, given it has only 10% of the hashrate of (small-block) Bitcoin.
Ethereum's transaction fees are currently much lower than the cost of an ice cream, but that wouldn't persist with higher levels of adoption. That could change once it implements sharding, with promises to increase maximum transaction throughput 100X, or has the sub-chain plasma protocol deployed, which potentially enables virtually infinite scaling.
Nobody uses Linux as an operating system because it's logistically harder for 99.9% of people. It's still incredibly important and foundational, and will continue to be, even supposing this never changes, even if that same 99.9% of people never know what it is.
Nobody used the Internet in its early days because it was logistically hard for 99.9% of people. However it made completely new things possible and over time, companies figured out how to make it not logistically hard to use for the majority of people, who enjoyed these new possibilities without having to worry about the complexity of the system underneath.
Actually everone uses it and you don`t even realize. Cellphones are all linux/bsd derivitives. All financial transactions will eventually be on a cyptocurrency but maybe nobody will realize it.
Bitcoin's absolute power consumption isn't at a critical level yet — Bitcoin consumes as much power globally as a single large power plant, and roughly 10% of the world's data centers.
However, I agree that its rapid and consistent growth rate is concerning and can't be ignored.
It's an area I'm really interested in and have been reading a lot about, because most of the news and "analysis" of the issue on both sides has been obnoxiously biased.
I tried to write a balanced summary article of the situation (below). Long-term, Bitcoin's electricity consumption could really go either way i.e. flatten or continue growing indefinitely. There are some causal factors like price that are out of our control, but there are others like the Lightning Network that are both feasible and in our control, and could significantly moderate Bitcoin's electricity consumption.
> Bitcoin consumes as much power globally as a single large power plant, and roughly 10% of the world's data centers
Well first of all, according to your own blog post, it is not as much power as a single large power plant, but as much power as the single largest power plant in the entire US. And thats just an estimate. It potentially uses twice that amount.
And 10% of the power of all the worlds data centers is absolutely bonkers. That isn't a small number, its spectacularly large.
And all of this for something that has yet to be adopted by 99.9% of the people on the planet.
I think your point about US power plants is a nitpick – The largest power plants in the world are not located in the US, and either way my point still stands because it's meant to be a rough approximation.
Unlike data centers where electricity consumption is directly correlated with internet usage, Bitcoin's electricity consumption is instead directly correlated with its price (which attracts more miners), and is very indirectly correlated with the number of users or transactions.
It's very possible that Bitcoin could be adopted by a significant (e.g. 10% or more) percentage of the world population even as its price remains fairly consistent, which would mean its total electricity consumption would remain fairly consistent as well.
As mining is an economic investment, they want cheap electricity. Cheap electricity is where there is excess that is not being used and would be otherwise wasted. That's why there aren't many large mining operations in NYC but there are in upstate NY near hydro.
