Jameson Lopp

> It still seems like a valid metric, you just need to multiply the number of bitcoin transactions with some factor for the average number of outputs

Nah. You don't need to double and triple down on wrong ideas and metrics that are scientifically spurious. You know calculus so you know multiplying by averages won't tell you what you want to know.

Transaction count relative to energy usage doesn't tell you what's valuable about the observed system and its energy consumption, which is its decentralisation, censorship resistance, assurances, and trustlessness.

Assuming you care about logic, simply update your broken mental model.

Because batching will increase as Bitcoin grows, and has practically infinite throughput, its efficiency improves exponentially by securing more value relative to energy consumption.To secure ever more value using the Bitcoin network, humans are incentivised to find and build more efficient energy sources.

Further, an arbitrary number of transactions can occur securely offchain and get aggregated and finalised on-chain i.e the settlement layer. In fact this is how the future will be. See Lightning, Liquid, other L2 designs. The order of operations is first to have a bulletproof settlement layer.

Bitcoin was designed to be the single planetary currency. Spend time studying it and you'll realise that Satoshi was smarter than all his current critics who all imagine they've brilliantly and uniquely perceived some fatal flaw in Bitcoin's engineering,…

> Yet there is the belief that you can somehow create a coherent experience into a “whatever”. Whatever it is actually. My first mastodon instance was de-federated by accident from my current instance. I moved to that instance though because many other hackers in the Open Source space did, and unlike Fosstodon it seems to allow non English content which I do care about quite a bit. (After all my life and household is multilingual and I don't live in an English speaking country.) Yet that instance still defederates qoto and I'm guessing because qoto permits unpopular opinions and does not block servers itself.

Given the history of email, I'm surprised there hasn't been more about the economics of spam, blacklists, and so on.

Substitute the email-specific parts of the following article with Mastodon-specific terms and concepts, and it doesn't paint a very pretty picture.

https://blog.lopp.net/death-of-decentralized-email/

> It's bad for the environment

Not any more so than other forms of energy consumption. If anything, Bitcoin incentivizes the use of clean renewable energy. https://niccarter.info/topics/

> bad for crime

Hard to even parse what that means given how much crime is committed via dollars. https://unchained-capital.com/blog/bitcoin-is-not-for-criminals/

> bad for laymen

Meaningless drivel.

> undemocratic (vote with money)

Bitcoin is both undemocratic AND is not a "vote with money" type of system. Governance is unrelated to who holds it. https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information/governance.html

> no knobs to adjust monetary/fiscal policy

That's a feature.

> it poses as an alternative to government institutions that serve society with things like roads and health care.

Also a feature. https://www.coincenter.org/a-human-rights-activists-response-to-bitcoin-critics/

If you want to start hacking right away:

I started with setting up my own Bitcoin/Lightning node with LND/BTCD, since I was a little more comfortable in the Go ecosystem. Nowadays I would probably use Bitcoind since it is the de facto standard.

As a wallet I often hear about Wasabi and Samourai to be relatively comfortable.

If you want to read/listen first, there are some good podcasts, e.g. Stephan Livera. And Jameson Lopp has a good collection of links for every purpose https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information.html .

Bitcoin development is focussed on building a maximally decentralized store of value and thus rather careful.

Only if you do not care about monetary value and just want to play around with crazy ideas that may or may not prove useful in the future, take a look at Ethereum or one of the other altcoins.

Agree. I am so happy that Dorsey's other open protocol (nostr) went another route. There is no 'official' client, there is just a whole bunch of competing clients, some of which have even attracted some small funding strategies to maintain a development team for the forceable future.

But none of these clients are big enough to push through locked-in features. They all have to play nice (for now, like SMTP and IMAP once did) and be interoperable.

For info, check out Lopp's blog: https://blog.lopp.net/why-nostr-matters/

Bitcoin is already storing over $1.1 trillion of the world's wealth which would currently put it in the top 10 global assets [1], as well as the top 10 global currencies based on M1 money supply [2]. It is also the best performing asset over the past 10 years [3]. It appears to already be a store of value.

[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/assets-by-market-cap

[2] https://www.lopp.net/m1/rank.html

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-becomes-best-performing-asset-132208120.html