PlanB

> And those limits come up to the theoretical maximum of was it 7 or so and in practice around 4

> https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second

The link you provided indicates transactions added to the mempool per second! The mempool is a cache of broadcast transactions from which miners pick transactions to be added to the next block.

At the current block height, 2700 transactions were in the block. https://mempool.space/block/00000000000000000007a3688746c1d04d1b9619ebdc4813b843fbf995bc9f0c

> Also PoW is hilariously inefficient. Because the amount of energy one needs to spend is basically related to the amount of value one could grab by cheating

Your statement is entirely unclear. Could you restate it? For Steelman purposes, I'll ignore the non-sequitur about cheating.

You claim that algorithm x is inefficient in absolute terms? Assuming you're an engineer, you know that engineering operates by comparisons and tradeoffs. PoW is how Bitcoin provides final settlement of transactions and unforgeable costliness compared to existing systems of money (e.g. fiat) and money transfer(e.g. visa, paypal, swift) which are all centralised and built for censorship, while bitcoin is decentralised and censorship resistant. And it provides final settlement of transactions every hour for thousands of transactions. "Finality" and "Unforgeability" are the terms you should attend to. These are both tied to hashrate which is tied to the profitability of mining the heaviest…

It's inflationary, since more bitcoin are mined every ten minutes or so.

That's not how it works… think about it.

How can bitcoin be inflationary when the number of coins being produced decreases every 4 years?

There's a fixed supply—over 88% of all the bitcoin that'll ever exist have already been mined.

Yes, every 10 minutes or so, 6.25 new bitcoin come into existence but every 4 years, the block subsidy is cut in half and will continue to be cut in half until the final block is mined. The next halving is May 7, 2024.

The amount of new coins mined will continue to decrease until 2140. You might want to read about bitcoin's stock to flow: https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-with-scarcity-91fa0fc03e25

Sure, the code says that it will stop when 21 million are mined, but there's no real guarantee that the code won't change before we reach that point.

There's over $500 billion (and growing) in market capitalization that is based on the limit being 21 million bitcoin and not ever changing. This was already litigated by the bitcoin community.

Or, the blockchain might fork (again) and now there are double the coins.

Again, this isn't how it works.

There could be dozens of forks; that doesn't matter. Only the longest chain with the most work on it matters. All of the hashing power would continue on the one true bitcoin chain while the forks languish.

Bitcoin is open source; anyone can download the source code, make a few changes and launch a new…

Here's to sound money!

P.S. Also check out their other two posts:

https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/efficient-market-hypothesis-and-bitcoin-stock-to-flow-model-db17f40e6107

https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/bitcoin-stock-to-flow-cross-asset-model-50d260feed12