I think it was inevitable personally. David was working on Safe Network ideas before bitcoin … I expect many others were thinking about it too. Satoshi was the first though so he get’s that ribbon.
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Yes maybe. But I wouldn’t have found maidsafe if it wasn’t for BTC. So I think the community would be much smaller and the funding would have been harder to get.
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The miners are not even an input into my point. I’m not talking about relationships with mining or transfer of energy. I’m only talking about the ability to store purchasing power like any store of value. If you see the work people do as energy then a store of value stores that energy.
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Maybe, or maybe without bitcoin all the attention that bitcoin absorbed would have come to David and maidsafe! who knows though, these what-if thought experiments are super tricky … so many butterflies flapping their wings.
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It may seem pedantic, but it isn’t storing any energy. Better to say it’s an option to influence or control something in the future, which could be energy. But that energy doesn’t live in the token, it comes from an unrelated source.
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Stop calling it a store of energy then, just use store of value.
Because folk stretch it even further, and call bitcoin a battery and a way of transporting solar energy etc… and that’s nonsense at best, greenwashing at worst.
At least lets be open about what it is, worts and all.
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Yes maybe.
I think the other genius thing satoshi did was to disappear and just let it run in the wild. It’s very interesting to see how ethereum grows with vitalik at the top. He can obviously force changes much quicker, but there is a cost to pay with that too.
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I think the term is “store of economic energy”.
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It will never be green even if 100% energy is from solar energy. If you try to get cheaper energy, than there is room for more miners at higher difficulty.
I was thinking of using heat from Bitcoin miners in industry, but the main problem remains. It only leads to more miners with lower price of energy and higher price per Bitcoin.
Anyway:
“Accounting for 50% of global final energy consumption in 2018, heat is the largest energy end-use”
It would work only if people would mine Bitcoins as side effect of turn on heating.
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It does feel like there must be a better way to have digital scarcity than using up ever growing amounts of energy. I think we have witnessed that ‘it works’ but is it optimal?
If we can find a better solution to the digital scarcity problem, it would surely be desirable.
Instinctively, using time feels like a better angle. Not as in hours/minutes, but as in time passing. We can’t speed that up or slow it down (at least not yet, nor likely in many lifetimes). You can’t age any quicker than time allows, no matter how much energy you throw at it.
Of course, you need something to stake during that time. Just waiting costs nothing, so something needs to be offered. Proof of Stake offers one solution and I would say that Safe Network offers a hybrid of Proof of Stake (rewards earned prior to network split) and Proof of Resource (work done by node to retrieve data, route requests, etc). Combined with time taken to produce enough data to require a network split, these create a great time based solution.
Do I expect Bitcoin to die? Not any time soon, but perhaps it will only grow so big before something else catches up and overtakes it. Bitcoin is quite clever, but it’s a relatively crude application. I think the world can do better in the long run.
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Haven’t we? IMO, that’s partly why we are here supporting Safe. The tricky part that IMO will take some time is convincing people to switch.
Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating! 
Yes, I think we may well have.
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There are obviously more efficient ways to do it, or at least them ways are coming, but trying to get the whole world to agree something is valuable is not easy. Once BTC has won that, it is very hard to topple.
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Sounds like a good compromise.
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And my earlier point is that it isn’t a store of value in the way gold is, so it should not be described as digital gold.
I see it as having a much more limited lifetime than most people talking about it are assuming or claiming, so I regard it as an opportunity to speculate and experiment, but not something to regard as a store of value. Therefore, IMO bitcoin has no significant use in the financial sense which many people are assuming or claiming.
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I think we are mainly all coming from an engineers viewpoint without considering the economic and human psychology viewpoint.
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You may be right, but that’s the narrative right now, and some of the biggest investors in the world are buying it. I can’t see a reversal of that anytime soon. It will only grow.
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I don’t contest what’s happening! I point out what I believe to be the fundamentals which will come to the fore, and that this knowledge demolishes the idea it is a store of value.
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If it lived for 12 years, it’s not stupid to expect it will stay for 12 years more. The fact we do not expect Bitcoin live for next 5000 years does not mean we should not call it digital gold. It is now and will be in the foreseeable future.
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Of course, but the disparity will become more pronounced with time. Bitcoin needs huge amounts of energy just to secure the network. Safe Network will need huge amounts of time and only sufficient energy to secure the network and provide data storage/routing/etc on top of that.
Given SNT may just become useful in its own right, it will become harder and harder for Bitcoin to justify PoW. Maybe it could switch to PoS (like Ethereum is doing), but maybe that kills its USP too?
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