Well, Musk did it again. He tweeted an image of a broken heart next to the word "Bitcoin" which seems to imply the love affair he apparently had with Bitcoin is over, or something - a move that coincided with the price of Bitcoin dropping a few thousand dollars before quickly recovering its value prior to the tweet. The rapidity of the bounce demonstrates, at least to a certain degree, that the market has either already priced in Musk's ongoing shenanigans or is in the process of doing so. Though Bitcoin has, of course, not recovered to the $50k level that it had sustained before Musk began his antics, it is nevertheless a good sign that this single man is quickly losing his ability to affect the Bitcoin price. With each passing day, Elon Musk is increasingly becoming a parody, a buffoon who isn't humorous, ironic, or even a very good troll, insofar as the memes he employs are not only unfunny, unsmart, but unsophisticated to meme connoisseurs such as yours truly. "Stick to space, Elon", sell your Bitcoin, and leave the crypto ecosystem entirely lest you risk falling completely off the cliff of credibility and relevance. History has proved that it does not go well for those who once allied with the efforts of Bitcoin but later turned their back before they could truly understand what the asset is and what it is trying to accomplish, which, make no mistake, is the overthrow of the central banking fiat system and the global corruption that such a system engenders.
On that topic, how is Bitcoin's architecture - specifically its protocol layer - designed to do this?
As I have stressed continually, Bitcoin achieves a certain level of "intrinsic value" by way of the energetic/electrical conversion that occurs through Bitcoin mining, occurring at the protocol level. Bitcoin's high energy costs are not the problem, per se, but rather they are indicative of investor demand. 76% of miners use renewables in their energy mix. Why? Because it's usually the cheapest energy source, aside from areas where fossil fuels are cheaper and easier to obtain. If fossil fuels are, at present, a cheaper energy source than renewables, that should tell us something about the immature state of renewable technology. Unfortunately for Bitcoin miners who inhabit a ruthless world of the rawest form of capitalism known to man, where only the leanest, most efficient, adaptable, fastest, and most profitable entities survive, they do not have the luxury of placing their moral and ethical concerns before market competition, lest they get left behind by those who continually commandeer the cheapest energy source available to them at any given time. Should we demonize Bitcoin because its miners are simply doing what they must to remain in business?
If there's any demonization, it should probably be leveled against the decades-long irresponsible largess and limitless hubris displayed by the banking elite and their nation-state lackeys, for it was in response to the 2008 banking crisis that Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin in the first place.
Of course, it's not that simple or providential. Bitcoin development was in the works well before the 2008 crisis - the crisis merely sped its development, amplified its release, and highlighted certain key reasons why it was created: to give individuals a stable, sound, scarce, and simple way to store and transact their wealth without a trusted third-party intermediary such as a bank or financial institution to give them permission. This was and still remains the ultimate reason for Bitcoin, "to provide humanity with a decentralized, distributed monetary network to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions", never mind the endless talk of "DeFi", Ethereum, altcoins, shitcoins, tokens, blah, blah, blah.
With this idea of Bitcoin as "the trustless, permissionless, decentralized bank of the world" in mind, let's go back to the features that make its protocol layer important.
Bitcoin is notoriously slow and unscalable, while the development community, node validators, and long-time influencers are extremely resistant to change - all of which are not "bugs" but actually "features" of the protocol. Returning to an analogy I referenced a few weeks ago concerning Bitcoin's resistance to change, what if God as the creator of the universe constantly altered the underlying laws of nature and physics with the same frequency that Ethereum changes its code and hardforks from its earlier iterations? Would not our world be unsafe and unstable, unfit for life? A global, decentralized form of money, at least in my eyes, needs to be as consistent, predictable, and boring as possible so as to provide a sound foundation for societal, psychological, and emotional stability. It can't be a "work in progress" like Ethereum and all its innumerable derivatives and knockoffs.
"Slow" transactions and small block sizes are also features, not flaws. I have explained many times that Bitcoin achieves its decentrality primarily because it is the node validators who have no financial incentive to run a node that is cheap and relatively simple to set up and operates autonomously who call the ultimate shots insofar as they collectively decide the validity of the blocks, uniqueness of the transactions, and act as the record keepers of the blockchain. Without the small blocks and comparatively slow settlement speed, running a bitcoin node would be expensive, difficult, and impractical. Node validation on the Ethereum network is complicated and expensive and thus tends toward centralization. Its migration to proof of stake will only amplify Eth's tendency toward centralization.
Also, and importantly, everyday transactions such as coffee, groceries, gas, etc., do not need a place on the blockchain in the first place. The protocol layer should be reserved for wealth transfer, fiat conversions, sizeable transactions, large investments, international trade and so forth - not coffee. Layer Two technologies such as the Lightning Network, liquid chains, and side chains have been designed for coffee. The Lightning Network can already facilitate an almost unlimited number of instantly confirmed and near zero-cost transactions which occur "off-chain" and are collectively settled on Bitcoin'sblockchain a few times a day, freeing up all that block space that would have otherwise gone to superfluous microtransactions.
Layer Two technologies are made possible because Bitcoin's base layer is slow, hard, changeless, stable, and, most importantly, secure. In the world of crypto, security comes in the form of the cost associated with attacking the network, measured in money and time. Small market cap coins are insecure because it wouldn't cost much hash power to overwhelm their networks to carry out a 51% attack or other such activity. At the same time, newly launched projects usually always have exploitable bugs and holes in their protocol that hackers can easily find and exploit. It doesn't take a skilled hacker much time to do this. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is virtually unhackable now, even against quantum computing - indeed, security issues are almost exclusively the fault of end-users who do not practice proper "opsec" (operational security) and leave their laptops, internet browsers, and password exposed to malware, bugs, maliciousness, or misplacement.
For me, I want the majority of my wealth stored not in a vault in my closet, or a hole in my backyard, or, God forbid, a safety security box at a bank - to say nothing about a bank account, but in a digital Fort Knox. I want my wealth protected by inconceivable amounts of energy and electricity, unbreakable cryptography, and I want its surity underwritten by a truly decentralized, distributed network beyond the manipulative grasp of central banks and craven nation-state actors who rely on war and violence for their own version of "proof of work" which the world must "validate" and submit so as to not be bombed or invaded.
NSV
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