Nic Carter, a crypto investor and commentator, writes on Bitcoin, mining, and the financial system.
HN commenters cite his piece on the White House climate report to rebut Bitcoin energy claims. Others use his posts to defend Bitcoin's settlement role.
As usual, there are a lot of negative comments here on what seems like a good news given how bitcoin is criticized for using chinese coal-based energy for mining. Let me respond to the most popular ones I've read in this thread and hopefully, I'm able to at least get some rational skeptics to at least re-assess their priors
Too Volatile To Be a Store of Value: Volatility alone doesn't make something not a good store of value. Gold, a popular store of value is much more volatile than the US dollars but if you held gold from 50 years ago, you'd be up 37X against the dollar [0]. What makes something a good store of value is how scarce and easy to transfer both across space and time it is. Bitcoin can't be blamed for the casino mentality, it's up to market actors to use bitcoin as a store of value and from what I've observed, that's going to be the long term outcome.
Bitcoin is slow: The argument that bitcoin is slow and expensive is a fallacy. Bitcoin is a settlement layer and when evaluating the speed of a settlement layer, the emphasis should be on speed of settlement assurances and transaction finality[1]. Bitcoin being an open decentralized settlement layer makes this even more important. Comparing bitcoin to visa or sepa which don't settle instantly is disingenuous at best and ignorant at worst. If you want faster transactions, use a layer 2 solution like the lightening network which is orders of magnitude faster and cheaper than visa [2].
Bitcoin is ponzi scheme: This…
I think the slow and expensive argument can be rebuted fairly easily.
The traditional financial system is formed of many layers. At a high level, it is: central banks, commercial banks, then card processors.
You have to change your view to see Bitcoin as the settlement layer of this new anti-establishment currency, similar to how central banks settle today. That doesn't need to be fast, it needs to be secure.
Bitcoin is pretty fast in settling relatively speaking, at least compared to other currencies.[1] It's important to look at the amount of value (electricity, power, money) that backs the block, instead of the raw block speed. People mistakenly compare block-time - look at Litecoin, it doesn’t matter if it has 4x faster blocks when 4 Litecoin blocks are worth many many times less than one Bitcoin block. The cost to reverse (51% attack) a transaction is much lower.
If you agree with that view, then the Lightning Network[2] can be a promising solution to the slow and expensive argument. It isn't a 1:1 replacement to Bitcoin (someone else will likely need custody your coins if this scales to a global level), but it does solve the problem.
As for the volatility, I think it's entirely expected to have extreme volatility as a currency is monetizing[3]. There's no real way for it to get from $0 to $2T of market cap in less than two decades (and perhaps go toward $20T) without large price appreciation and subsequent busts. Look at Apple stock as comparison. And it's not a…
> 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 not my job to chase up every tiny detail for you. You have to be curious enough to look into it and verify for yourself. I've given you enough information to research it for yourself. You've shown zero good faith curiosity that would encourage someone to help you understand it any further, and you're getting pissy at me? That's rich.
But I'll give you one last thread to follow. Beyond that you're on your own.
https://medium.com/@nic__carter/comments-on-the-white-house-report-on-the-climate-implications-of-crypto-mining-8d65d30ec942
> And that difference is... what exactly?
Every other crypto is a product released by a company with a CEO, investors, VC funding, a marketing team etc. and all based on dubious promises of "utility", "defi", or "yield", faster transactions speeds, or "web3". It's all a bullshit affinity scam riding on the coat tails of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is literally just an open source protocol for an open, neutral, and permissionless global monetary network, similar to how TCP/IP is a neutral communications protocol for the Internet. There's no CEO or "foundation" like in the case of Ethereum and other cryptos. Companies are building up businesses around this open and neutral protocol. If you can't see the potential behind that combined with its application to demand response, load balancing, methane capture, AND the humanitarian benefits [1][2], well...
“If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.”…
There's evidence that Visa and Mastercard tried to prevent Apple from building their own network, including DOJ antitrust complaints in 2024 and a more recent suit in July 2025. The fact that antitrust allegations failed to make it in court despite it being such an obvious antitrust case against the duopoly very much suggests that there is something more going on behind the scenes. This seems like such an easy antitrust case to win, especially when it was used successfully in the Visa vs. Plaid case (another case where a potential competitor was prevented from building an alternative to Visa/Mastercard) - Plaid dropped their plans to build a network after their acquisition was cancelled.
There's no way that I can take such strange goings-ons at face value - Apple only gains by disintermediating Visa and they clearly tried at some point, but something stopped them. What stopped them? Too hard for Apple? They already built the infrastructure for it with Apple Pay and Apple Cash. What stopped them from going all the way? I'm convinced something more powerful stopped them.
See here: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/apple-visa-mastercard-win-dismissal-merchant-antitrust-lawsuit-over-payment-fees-2025-07-10/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
There is plenty evidence of shadowy forces shutting down payment systems, just look at Marc Andreessen's public statements about crypto founders he invested in getting…
Um no.
I show you this to prove to you that 1 eth confirmation isn't equal to 1 bitcoin confirmation. If it was anywhere equal in security, there would not be a >10X difference. And also multiplying confirmations by average block time and seeing that it is lower than bitcoin doesn't mean coinbase thinks it is more secure. It can also mean that the value of the average eth transaction on Coinbase is lower.
A 51% attacker will be able to churn out 100x the number of confirmations if confirmations were made 100x smaller. It doesn't matter how fast you make them or how many tricks like GHOST you add.
These are some helpful websites/articles on understanding confirmation security.
https://medium.com/@nic__carter/its-the-settlement-assurances-stupid-5dcd1c3f4e41
https://howmanyconfs.com/