It only recently occurred to me how potentially dangerous PoW coins are. That's of course bitcoin, but the whole lot of PoW coin have a similar danger to them. This includes a whole lot of top-20 coins. I've always found the waste of PoW silly, but I only recently realized how dangerous this is. I scattered this opinion in a few other posts, but I would like to start a dedicated thread for it.
So there will be some repetition. What if bitcoin wasn't a currency or an investment tool, but rather a waste maximizer, that only USES aspects of investment, gambling, speculation and so on, in order for it to maximize waste production ? Imagine that Satoshi was an entity that wanted to "destroy humanity by waste", but doesn't have bombs, virusses or anything else. He would like to make a device that makes humanity self-destroy, simply with a laptop. How could he do it ? What if he invented a "paperclip maximizer" that turns humanity, by leveraging personal greed, into a big rat race to stop doing useful things, and turns all efforts into making waste ? Something that will only end when there's exhaustion of resources to continue to produce useless proof of work. When humanity will have wasted all of its resources on proof of waste, and there's no more of it.
Bitcoin, being a proof-of-work engine that uses a game of speculative tokens to inspire people to waste more and more resources on doing useless calculations to make less and less of more and more expensive tokens, is right now at least consuming 2 GW (if all hashes are done with the latest antminer S9 class waste-machines). But difficulty hasn't reached equilibrium with the new prices and the new tech yet. We know that mining at this moment is hugely profitable the time it takes for difficulty to catch up with the market. There's about a factor of 5 to be won. So we can take it that bitcoin at current market cap in equilibrium wastes 10 GW and a lot of hardware. That's the power consumption of a country like Belgium. One has to admit that the machine to produce useless waste calculations has done a good job in 9 years time. It is the sole piece of free amateur software that has been able, purely by itself, to inspire people by their greed to waste 10 GW, with as sole return, the right to transact some tokens while wasting even more to a greater fool. Obviously, this thing cannot be stopped any more, as long as it can go up.
Current market cap is less than 1/200 of all of fiat if bitcoin were a currency (it isn't) ; but most importantly, it is 1/10000 of the entire speculative assets market cap in finance (estimated at about $2 quadrillion). Suppose that 1% of all speculative assets are invested in bitcoin in the longer term, or suppose that bitcoin takes a major part of the fiat market. In both of these cases we can hence expect yet another factor x100 in market cap. And hence in electricity use. At that point, bitcoin will use 1TW of electricity: 1/3 of earth's electricity production. It will then also have absorbed grossly all of hardware production on our planet. Most of our economy will be oriented towards producing proof of work: the biggest pile of useless calculations in the world, unstoppably driven by the motor of finance and greed - a decentralized, unstoppable paper clip maximizer. Once it runs out of resources to maximize proof of work, it will be done. And we, with it.
But until then, there's no stopping of it. No big capital will be able to resist. No investment can afford not to be part of it. The harder silly governments will try to stop it, the stronger it will become.
I'm very bullish on bitcoin. This thing will go up to destroy humanity entirely. Unstoppable. Everything will be converted in bitcoin mining. No other form of investment will be able to compete. This is the Armageddon machine that will make many of us rich for a very short period. And then we will find out that we can't eat Antminer hardware.
Why could the economy not continue to produce, say, Beanie Babies ? Economically, you cannot make Beanie Babies with an expected ROI of, say, 5%, if there's an opportunity to have a return of 500% by buying a device that consumes electricity and spits out money. (as must be grossly the case right now for a short period, the time difficulty adapts and competition increases) As long as the market value of the mining rewards is way higher than the cost in electricity and hardware by a significant factor, EVERY sensible investor will only want to finance your activity if you will be using his funds for mining. Any industrial capital will leave Beanie Babies factories, but also farmers, plumbers, supermarkets, and all the rest, if there's a much higher ROI possible by buying devices that consume electricity and spit out money. Or in MAKING these devices (because of course, the high demand for these devices will make them expensive too). So any investor will turn his TV factory into a mining device factory ; any chip maker will push aside anything else but mining chips. Simply because the ROI of these things is so much higher, and so much guaranteed, than anything else, that it would be pure financial idiocy to take another decision, and defend it before share holders.
If there is a large-scale investment opportunity that brings much higher ROI than anything else in the economy, essentially all activity stops to reorient towards that activity and its supporting environment. This is what you can see on a much smaller and much more local scale in gold rushes. Everything but the bare minimum of survival is oriented towards digging gold. In NORMAL economic circumstances, such huge economic ROI are the result of a very high NEED. So it is useful to re-orient the economy towards the relief of that need. The market responds to an important need. However, in this case, the economy is making WASTE. There's simply a HUGE speculative demand for waste. No need is relieved by this economic re-orientation. Usually, these phenomena are too short to damage the world economy, because the potential gains quickly die out. But this thing has the potential to generate such a huge demand for waste, that it can turn a large fraction of our economic potential into a huge machine that makes waste. The paper clip maximizer. In our case, the proof of work maximizer.
If we are talking about "machines that consume electricity and spit out more money than they consume electricity" on a planetary scale, all economic activity will get oriented that way. One has no choice in that rat race. The rat race will end, when the ROI of bitcoin mining will fall to levels comparable to other economic activity. At the expected "end value" level of bitcoin, the only way for that ROI to fall so low, is when it consumes 1/3 of the world's electricity and most hardware. So before the whole economy will have done that, the attraction by high ROI for bitcoin mining will be irresistible for most investors. What dumb-ass is going to make Beanie Babies (or hamburgers), if he can plug in a device that makes him more money ?
One may say: there are the halvings that will save us. The halvings make this waste maximizer seem less dangerous. But in reality, that's not what is happening. At the last halving in 2016, hash rate only blinked slightly and went up again. Note also that fees are becoming a significant part of the block reward. It is not clear whether the halving will give rise to increased speculative expectations of price rise (in which case it is even worse), or will lower difficulty. The halvings may have in fact an amplifying effect. Historical data indicates that halvings never decrease hashrate:
https://blockchain.info/cha...
Look at it in log scale... and think that the end point is now "a small country like Denmark". Does that curve look like it will not gain another factor of 100 or so ? We did a factor of 10 in 1.5 years...
Remember that 1/3 of world's electricity consumption is for "1% of all investment". If there's an expected price rise, that might be more. This can double at the halvings.
Usually, in the free market, greed is a good thing, because it stimulates people to produce VALUE. Bitcoin's inventor is, to my knowledge, the only guy who found a way to turn this into a stimulation to produce entirely useless waste (heat and calculation results that couldn't be less interesting). Bitcoin is the most powerful computer in the world, to spit out the most uninteresting calculations ever, namely funny hash function pre-images. So, was bitcoin simply a device for destruction of humanity's economy on world scale ? We are only a factor of about 100 from global disaster at this moment. Since mid-2016, bitcoin's hash rate increased already 10-fold. Is another factor of 100 really excluded ?
