Reddit Posts
My Top Crypto Picks for 2023 and Why
Oct. 16th 2020 BTC was at ~$11.4K and a new bull run was starting. Here's how crypto has performed since the beginning of the 2020/2021 bull run.
With the increase in prices, scams are on the rise. Beware
Bitcoin Skyrockets to 9-Week High as Crypto Market Cap Above $900B
so why the hate on Kaspa (KAS) on this board?
Coins that have no business being in the Top 100 (useless/overhyped/obsolete/etc.)
If Grayscale is forced to sell their balance sheet to cover Genesis' creditors, these tokens would be the most impacted
The vast majority of Top 100 (market cap) coins from 5 years ago vanished from the Top 100 [Data/Graphs]
Made a Youtube video about a BTC/BCH fork from Bitcoin Unlimited (7yr old team) called NEXA, new scaling tech, tokens, nfts, proof of work (gpu currently) and dev team is serious, doxxed and well known.
Portfolio Management Simulation with data from 2018-2022 Jul. Rebalancing a 5050 BTC ETH Portfolio.
What is Bitcoin? It is the title of a whitepaper which gifted the world with invention of a peer to peer electronic cash system.
Bitpay currency usage historical chart update
Cash Rain: A Bitcoin Cash Platform To Rain BCH On The World
What do you think, is Coinbase a safe haven?
Coinbase Wallet Drops Support for XRP, Stellar (XLM), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC)
Coinbase Wallet Drops Support for XRP, Stellar (XLM), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC)
Coinbase Wallet Is Dropping Support For XRP, BCH, XLM And ETC
Grayscale finally decided to tweet about insolvency rumors, confirms BTC is fully backed
PSA: Coinbase Wallet will no longer be supporting the following assets and networks due to low usage: BCH, ETC, XLM and XRP.
Coinbase Wallet will stop supporting BCH, ETC, XLM and XRP, due to 'low usage'
This Can’t Be Good for these Cryptos!!! 🤯🤯“Coinbase announces its wallet will stop supporting BCH, ETC, XLM and XRP, citing 'low usage'”
should I hold my 7.8. BCH? I missed the last crypto bull run, don’t want to miss it again
Longer Investments during this Crypto Winter…
The liabilities are VASTLY SUPERIOR than the assets on Binance's self-reported "Proof of collateral" for at least two tokens (DAI, BCH). Better withdraw just to be sure.
St. Kitts And Nevis To Adopt Bitcoin Cash (BCH) As Legal Tender In 2023
The more i use others crypto the more i love BCH 1.3link for withdraw 146 link such a shame !!😡😡😠😠😠 1.10% cost !!!! with erc20. with BCH it is pratically free. how do you do for trading Link (nice coin) cheaply ?
My friend found a seed phrase from an old wallet (~2017). What’s the easiest way to find which wallet it belongs to?
Found old seed phrase (2017), help me locate the wallet?
Binance publishes proof of reserves website list 611,919 BCH liabilities but links to cold wallet with a balance of only 112,615 BCH. They literally have posted evidence that they have only fractional reserves.
If we were to draw an equivalency to the bear market of EOY 2018 (almost exactly 4 years ago), my gut feeling is that we are at 2018's 5,000-5500 USD range and could still be on the way down. Bullish and Bearish scenarios in this thread
According to coinglass, the negative premium of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust Fund (GBTC) expanded to 40.73%, a new record low. The negative premium of ETH trust was 32.6%, ETC was 62.8%, BCH was 16.09%. LTC was 43.43%.
Fedbois Bust BTC Maxi with 50k BTC, Due to 0.07 BTC Sent to the Wrong Change Address
DOJ seizes $3.36 Billion in Bitcoin from UASF supporter who was a major activist against BCH. Turns out they were a criminal & thief.
Programmer spends 69 nights in 'Bitcoin Cash City' using only BCH
Bitcoin-Cash (BCH) has 2 Yield options. Gemini Earn is paying 5.5% interest to lend to Genesis. BCHG (OTC) shares has a 36% discount to spot BCH price.
Bitcoin-Cash (BCH) has 2 Yield options. Gemini Earn is paying 5.5% interest to lend to Genesis. BCHG (OTC) shares has a 36% discount to spot BCH price.
Question regarding old BTC wallets and forked coins
62% of the total Bitcoin-Cash supply has not moved in over a year. ~45% of the total supply has not moved since the BCH fork and may be presumed to be lost. Since the recent price crash, many BCH holders have not moved or sold their coins since they feel the price is undervalued.
New software for BCH, tokens that can represent asset, concert tickets, art, authentic products to prevent counterfeiting, memberships etc. Are your brand name shoes real? Watch real? it must come with a digital token or it might not be. Killer app.
NFT software for BCH, they can represent any digital asset, concert tickets, art, authentic products to prevent counterfeiting, memberships etc. Are your Nike shoes real? Watch real? it must come with an NFT or it might not be. Killer app.
LocalCryptos, one of the most-used P2P crypto exchanges, is ending operations.
Bitcoin-Cash (BCH) is working on a major network upgrade for new nodes to sync quickly on their big block scaling blockchain.
Summary: BTC - Pros And The Cons of The First Cryptocurrency
How to track real world transactions for BCH and LTC (not just exchange trades)?
Censorship in r/btc: This statistic of ~10% of Bitcoin payments already occurring via Lightning will get you perma-banned there.
Have you lost friends because of crypto?
Crypto Exchange CoinEx Partners With The Rugby League World Cup (RLWC) 2021
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Price prediction 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025:What will be the price of BCH in 2025?
There is no guarantee that your coin will have another ATH
There are still true cryptocurrency pioneers out there and this is one reason why I think crypto is going to be ok in the long run.
I was just tipped in BCH for my dumb comment.
PSA: You can tip with more than moons
BigCommerce Now Allows Crypto Payments For 60,000 Merchants • ProCoinNews: BTC, LTC,XLM, QNT, BCH, Shib, etc.
It looks like some massive entities purchased millions of BCH on futures for $100-$150ea and are trying to arbitrage the position into real BCH. So futures sells for 2% below spot and has sell walls, while spot has massive buy walls that track futures trades.
I roll my eyes at these posts, yet here I am.. Is this a scam?
Currently day traders are buying BCH on dips around $95-$120 and selling these BCH for $130-$160, with up to 70% profit per short term trade, the price is going up and down making this trade repeatable over and over.
ETH Proof of Work (ETHW): The Next Big Thing?
Why is Bitcoin called digital gold but not the BCH? Isn't BCH practically better in every metric?
The advantages and pitfall of meme coins: What are the risks? Can you still capitalize on them? If you're going to jump on them, when is the best time to buy them?
Ethereum might split into 2 chains after the merge- A historical look at price action of previous splits with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Monero
MtGox is *NOT* distributing any coins this week, or the next week, or the week after that. Some verified accounts have been FUDing and creating panic in the market.
Announcement - crushballs.click - Small crypto webshop opening today
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance faces proposed $1-billion class-action lawsuit
In the last 9 years, I've somehow managed to never send any crypto to a wrong address. Here's 5 things I always do to make sure I never mess up a transaction.
PSA: Use a tax free Roth IRA to purchase Bitcoin Cash for 24% below market price. $0.96 is $107 per BCH. Ticker is BCHG
Will we get forked ETHW tokens post-merge if staking on a CEX?
How to take advantage if ETH forks - It's Forkin' time!
Canadian crypto exchanges BitBuy & Newton are imposing an annual buy-limit of $30,000 on altcoins. Do you think such limits should be set in the US to prevent investors from losing money on crypto rugpulls and scams?
BCH Bcash is a total shitcoin, and Canada regulators including this among “Top 4” coins, while imposing limits on other coins shows how regulators are clueless about crypto.
New regulatory changes in Canada will allow users to buy as much BTC/ ETH/ LTC / BCH as they desire while setting a limit of $30k per year for everything else. What?
Voyager Digital has either unknown or stolen assets that need to be accounted for in the bankruptcy proceedings
"Don't Breathe" : An introduction to my story from Darknet Kingpin to Fund manager
140k BTC (~$3b) will be released as repayments for the once-dominating exchange Mt. Gox by end of this month. Will this pull crypto down?
The Ethereum Merge may be a tazable event- prepare yourself!
The Ethereum Merge may be a massive taxable event- prepare yourself
Without a widely use of crypto payments, there will be no real adoption. So what do we need?
What is a hard fork in cryptocurrency?
This Friday's crypto heatmap is looking quite green. FLOW (+48%), FIL (+40%) and OP (+30%) showed the most active growth this week, and QTUM (-15%), BTG (-11%) and BCH (-8%) have dropped down more than others. Bitcoin price is 23k and Ethereum is $1.7k.
This Friday's crypto heatmap is looking quite green. FLOW (+48%), FIL (+40%) and OP (+30%) showed the most active growth this week, and QTUM (-15%), BTG (-11%) and BCH (-8%) have dropped down more than others. Bitcoin price is 23k and Ethereum is $1.7k.
Just done my first Bitcoin transfer in years. Surprised.
5 Years After Its Launch, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Is Worth Just 0.6% Of a Bitcoin (BTC)
Is there a possible solution to the block size/decentralization debate? Or will Bitcoin's blockchain increase at 1MB every block forever?
The TRUTH About Bitcoin CASH And The Anti-BCH Propaganda
What do you think is better: BCH or LTC?
Top 5 cryptocurrencies to watch this week: BTC, ETH, BCH, AXS, EOS
Grayscale removes LTC, BCH, LINK, UNI and DOT from the Digital Large Cap Fund
Mt. Gox Customers Will Receive 140,000 BTC & BCH By August - What Do You Think Will Happen?
It's harder than you think to make face melting gainz: considering one of the easier cases
Pulsechain has by far the most delusional following in the crypto space
Sint Maarten parliament discussing making BCH a legal tender
Sint Maarten Parliament discusses making Bitcoin-Cash (BCH) have legal tender status. Adoption in the Caribbean due to terrible legacy banking.
No flexing for Bitcoin Cash users as BCH loses 98% against Bitcoin
Real world usage, not degen gambling is the future of crypto. Real Estate agent wants to see change and enable asset for asset exchanges with BCH
Mentions
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10kkgfg/daily_general_discussion_january_25_2023_gmt0/).
BCH is the real btc. BTC was never supposed to be a speculative asset. It was supposed to be cash.
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10kkgfg/daily_general_discussion_january_25_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10kkgfg/daily_general_discussion_january_25_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10kkgfg/daily_general_discussion_january_25_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10kkgfg/daily_general_discussion_january_25_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10kkgfg/daily_general_discussion_january_25_2023_gmt0/).
tldr; Bitcoin Cash (BCH) advocate Roger Ver has been sued by a unit of crypto lending firm Genesis over unsettled crypto options amounting to $20.8 million. GGC International, a part of the bankrupt crypto lender, filed the suit against Ver in the New York State Supreme Court on Jan. 23, claiming that the BCH proponent has failed to settle crypto options transactions that expired back on December 30. *This summary is auto generated by a bot and not meant to replace reading the original article. As always, DYOR.*
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10kkgfg/daily_general_discussion_january_25_2023_gmt0/).
You could take the bitcoin contrarian view by buying BCH near its ATL, rather than chasing that BTC monkey.
I just asked ChatGPT which coins to buy - at first it didn't want to because "I am a language model and do not have the ability to predict future market conditions or provide financial advice.", but then I told it, it should pretend to be a financial advisor. Then it just advised me to buy the classics, haha "As a financial advisor, my general advice would be to diversify your portfolio by investing in a variety of different cryptocurrencies. It is important to conduct thorough research and understand the underlying technology and fundamentals of each coin before making an investment. Here are a few things to consider: 1. Bitcoin (BTC) is the largest and most well-known cryptocurrency, and it has a strong track record of stability and growth. It can be a good choice for those looking for a long-term investment. 1. Ethereum (ETH) is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and it has a strong developer community working on its ecosystem. It's also the most used blockchain for smart contracts and decentralized application, that's why it can be a good choice for those who believe in the power of smart contract and the decentralized ecosystem. 1. Litecoin (LTC) can be considered as a good alternative to Bitcoin, it's a peer-to-peer digital currency that enables instant, near-zero cost payments to anyone in the world. 1. Ripple (XRP) is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to secure financial transactions, control the creation of additional units, and verify the transfer of assets. 1. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a cryptocurrency that was created in 2017 as a hard fork of Bitcoin. It has faster transaction times and lower fees than Bitcoin. It's important to note that cryptocurrency investments can be highly volatile and the market is still in a nascent stage, so it's important to invest only what you can afford to lose. Additionally, it's advisable to keep an eye on the latest news and regulations that may affect the crypto market."
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10kkgfg/daily_general_discussion_january_25_2023_gmt0/).
#Cardano Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Cardano Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##**Cardano Cons** > > It has been almost a year since the Alonzo (smart contract) release, which revealed that it's difficult to build a DEX for eUXTO transactions instead of account transactions. Even after the release of SundaeSwap and MinSwap, we've seen issues for DEX development related to slow smart contract transaction speeds. Cardano is currently releasing a much-needed Vasil update to help with smart contracts by increasing throughput and reducing transaction fees. **Overall, Cardano is better than Bitcoin, but much worse than most other newer smart contract networks that have much higher throughput and lower transaction fees, often 100x better than Cardano's.** > > ###Extremely slow network > > * ADA's current **max TPS with smart contracts is ~1.2** based on the [peak network activity and congestion in Mar 2022](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-cnt). Without smart contracts, it's 8 TPS. This could supposedly rise to 30 TPS after the Vasil update and block size and speed adjustments. I see a max of 250 TPS quoted a lot, but it's not valid because that's with major block size/speed adjustments and without smart contracts. Even though eUTXO transactions can process batch transactions and often include multiple inputs and outputs, this is really slow. It's nowhere near the limits needed for global adoption on Layer 1. Many of Cardano's competitors like Avalanche, Polygon, Algorand, and most 3rd-generation EVM-compatible networks, have already surpassed Cardano's TPS by 100x. Their transactions fees are also usually much lower at under $0.01 each. > * The distant Basho update is also supposed to bring further scaling increases, but we don't have any solid details on it. Scaling via Hydra sharding is far away on their timeline. Hydra also uses multi-party state channels, which are not as simple or convenient to use as Layer 1. > * **Storage inefficiency**: [Cardano's average transaction size](https://blockchair.com/cardano) has now doubled to 1500 bytes / transaction since the introduction of smart contracts. [Ethereum](https://blockchair.com/ethereum) is 7x more storage-efficient than Cardano even though Cardano has very little smart contract activity. > > ###Cardano Smart Contracts and DEXs > > - **Programming adoption**: For Cardano's Plutus smart contract, Haskell is not a well-liked programming language and feels arcane in comparison the Javascript-like language of Ethereum's Solidity. It's been difficult to onboard smart contract developers, especially since Ethereum is already so far ahead on adoption. And most other smart contract networks also support Solidity. Cardano is alone on Haskell, making it expensive to develop for it. > * **Tiny Total Value Locked**: The TVL on Cardano is currently [$135M](https://defillama.com/chain/Cardano), which is 400x smaller than Ethereum's TVL at [$56B](https://defillama.com/chain/Ethereum) or 40x smaller than Avalanche's C-Chain. It's about the same size as [MoonRiver](https://defillama.com/chain/Moonriver), which is a test parachain on the test network, Kusama. Cardano's DeFi is a ghost town. > * **DEX rollout** in the past year was an absolute mess. Concurrency failures for the Minswap Dex during their Alonzo smart contract test revealed that it's much harder to develop a DEX on Cardano smart contracts due to the limitation of eUXTOs. Back in September, SundaeSwap published [a detailed explanation of the concurrency issues](https://sundaeswap-finance.medium.com/concurrency-state-cardano-c160f8c07575) plaguing Cardano. Proposed solutions involved centralization of the smart contract and using multiple UXTOs on a higher layer that would later settle on Layer 1. > * **SundaeSwap** finally released [an incomplete and slightly-buggy DEX](https://cryptobriefing.com/sundaeswap-promises-first-functional-dex-on-cardano/) on the testnet after many months of delays. It had [extremely slow speeds on SundaeSwap](https://beincrypto.com/cardanos-first-dex-sundaeswap-fails-to-impress-on-launch/) with a limit of only [9 users operations per minute per scooper](https://sundaeswap-finance.medium.com/expectations-congestion-mainnet-launch-e9da5abfd819). > > ###Competitors > > * Cardano's development has been extremely slow and delayed. There are so many monolithic Layer 1 smart contract competitors that can already do DEXs much more efficiently with higher scalability than Cardano: Polygon, Avalanche, Algorand, Elrond, many Tendermint networks. > > ###Moderately-expensive Fees > > * Cardano Transactions [fees](https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg) are currently about $0.15 - 0.50 USD as of May 2022. While these are cheaper than current Bitcoin network transaction fees of ~1-4 USD and much cheaper than Ethereum network transaction fees of 2-10+ USD, they're way more expensive than those of other many other competing crypto networks. Nano, ALGO, XLM, XRP, DASH, BCH, and MATIC fees are all below $0.01 on average, which makes them appropriate for microtransactions. > * Swap fees on MinSwap and SundaeSwap are way cheaper than on Ethereum, but still expensive at $0.50+ due to processing fees. > > ###Diminishing Staking Rewards in the long run > > * Cardano is currently inflationary to about [5-6% annually](https://solberginvest.com/blog/is-cardano-deflationary/). The inflation by itself isn't bad, but it's coming from a diminishing rewards pool that will gradually disappear by 2030. In just 4 years from now, the staking reward will drop to 2-3% unless transaction fees rise drastically to replace the rewards pool. If it drops that low, people will stop staking Cardano, leading to less security and decentralization. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/tuwvvo/top_coins_cardano_conarguments_april_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Cardano_(blockchain_platform\)) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10kkgfg/daily_general_discussion_january_25_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10jrpkm/daily_general_discussion_january_24_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10jrpkm/daily_general_discussion_january_24_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10jrpkm/daily_general_discussion_january_24_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10jrpkm/daily_general_discussion_january_24_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10jrpkm/daily_general_discussion_january_24_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10jrpkm/daily_general_discussion_january_24_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10jrpkm/daily_general_discussion_january_24_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10jrpkm/daily_general_discussion_january_24_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10jrpkm/daily_general_discussion_january_24_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10jrpkm/daily_general_discussion_january_24_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10jrpkm/daily_general_discussion_january_24_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10iydf2/daily_general_discussion_january_23_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10iydf2/daily_general_discussion_january_23_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10iydf2/daily_general_discussion_january_23_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10iydf2/daily_general_discussion_january_23_2023_gmt0/).
Coinbase has been pumping dumping coins for YEARS Remember BCH listing back in 2017 when it spiked insanely on Coinbase to almost 0.12 ? Ever since that, to.... Just the last month, MAGIC pumped few days before coinbase listing (by pumped I mean it went up 100%), everyone was wondering why its pumping so much and then Coinbase listed it Here is coinbase adding MAGIC on Dec 7th: https://twitter.com/CoinbaseAssets/status/1600532914365677570 And how much did MAGIC pump the week leading up to Coinbase announcement? Take a wild gues.... https://imgur.com/a/YAn593P 150% +.... What a fucking joke
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10iydf2/daily_general_discussion_january_23_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10iydf2/daily_general_discussion_january_23_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining equipment to compromise the Bitcoin network**, and this is a drop in a bucket for many billionaires and nation states. > > What's preventing others from attacking Bitcoin isn't the monetary cost but the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mining equipment. But as halvings continue, if the price of Bitcoin doesn't double every 4 years, miners will eventually sell their equipment. Some nation state or billionaire could acquire them at a discount, short Bitcoin, and then 51% attack the network. **All they would have to do is produce empty blocks, and the network would halt.** The brilliant part of this is that producing empty blocks does not break any Bitcoin protocols, so they would still earn the block rewards. (In fact, during several months of 2015-2016, about 10% of blocks were empty due to selfish mining. After all, why bother waiting to package transactions when only 1% of the reward is from transaction fees?) > > ####**Negative-sum investment** > > Stock investments of profitable companies are a positive-sum investments. Investors buy and sell from other investors. In addition, money flows from customers to the company, and then to the investors in the form of capital, stock buybacks, and dividends. > > In contrast, Bitcoin investors pay massive block rewards (subsidy + fees) to miners, so it's negative-sum investment for everyone but miners. > > ####**Transaction Backlog** > > Because of Bitcoin's low throughput, there is often a backlog during busy periods. The backlog, as shown via the [Mempool](https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count), has gotten as high as 100K+ transactions several times in 2021, which is equivalent to waiting 7-9 hours for settlement on average. Transaction fees for confirmed transactions also rise greatly during these periods. ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/vpuiar/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_july_2022/) to be taken to the original topic-thread or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/10iydf2/daily_general_discussion_january_23_2023_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ##CONs > > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up with other blockchains technology-wise, which have evolved features and efficiencies way beyond Bitcoin. If all the cryptocurrencies were re-released today simultaneously, it is very unlikely Bitcoin would make it into the top 100 by market cap. It's currently #1 because it had a first-mover advantage and has enjoyed the network effect. > > ####**Much too slow** > > Bitcoin is now a **[3 TPS](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin)** blockchain with a **30-60 minute probabilistic finality**. It used to have a maximum of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after the Segwit update. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at cash register for a transaction to go through that's not even guaranteed to succeed. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation, let alone finality. Some transactions get stuck in the mempool for weeks when there's congestion. > > **Competition**: It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Avalanche's X-Chain and Algorand, which can process 4000+ TPS with sub-5s of deterministic finality, with transaction fees under a penny. > > Competition from Traditional Finance has also skyrocketed as payment systems like M-Pesa in Africa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, Clearinghouse's RTP now provide near-instant payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > ####**Batch UTXO transactions have scalability limits** > > Some Bitcoin proponents have argued that TPS is a misleading metric due to UTXO batching. However, you can't just increase useful transfers 100x by batching 100x transactions. This is because UTXO addresses take up space, so there is a limit to batched storage savings: ~40% (160 vbytes vs 258 vbytes when batching 2 basic transactions of 3 UTXO each) [[Source](https://blog.coinbase.com/reflections-on-bitcoin-transaction-batching-b13dad12a12)]. **Even if each block were a single batched transaction, Bitcoin would only increase from 3 to 5 effective transfers per second.** Also, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. Account transactions can batch using smart contracts to save fees and space. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 3 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~260K transaction/day. **If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the 8B global population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 300 days.** Imagine 10% of world using Bitcoin, and each person being able to make a single transaction once every 8 years. > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Each Lightning channel has directional capacity, and whenever that gets exceeded, it will need to be closed and reopened with new capacity. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels opened for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2021, each block cost roughly $150-300K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $100-150 of fees per transaction. **A single Bitcoin transaction uses about the same energy as a typical [US household over 2 months](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)**. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all datacenters globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 60% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. (To prevent miners from stealing block rewards, mining pool servers do not provide enough info to miners for them to be able to see attacks ahead of time.) > > ####**Moderately-high transaction fees** > > Transaction fees have risen over time. Layer 1 transfer fees are currently $1-2 USD and even briefly rose [past $50 in May 2021](https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee) during congestion. That's way more than [its competitors](https://blog.nano.org/cryptocurrency-fee-comparison-which-crypto-has-the-lowest-fees-4e9118590e1f) (e.g. XLM, XRP, Nano, BCH) that have average transfer fees under 0.5 US cents. > > Currently, revenue from the transaction fees are only [1-2% of the block rewards](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html). Thus, when the block subsidy eventually disappears, transaction fees would need to be much higher to make up for the subsidy. > > ####**Chance of reorgs and invalidated blocks** > > Bitcoin's PoW has probabilistic finality, and there's always a chance a previous block could be orphaned and invalidated. This is known as a reorg, which is when the previously-longest chain is overtaken by a new longest chain. **There have been at least 2 reorgs longer than 20 blocks**: 51 blocks in Aug 2010 and 24 blocks on Mar 12, 2013 [[Source 1](https://coingeek.com/what-the-fork-happened-to-bitcoin/), [Source 2](https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoins-consensus-forks/)]. The 2010 reorg actually caused Bitcoin to mint 184.4 billion Bitcoins, way past its 21 million cap. There have also been at least [three 4-block reorgs prior to 2017](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the-longest-blockchain-fork-that-has-been-orphaned-to-date). So the typical 3-6 block confirmations are not guaranteed to be safe. > > ####**Possibility of 51% attacks in the future** > > Bitcoin has a long-term economic incentive issue known as the [Tragedy of the Commons](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and here is one realistic example of how it could happen. Unlike some smaller PoW networks, Bitcoin lacks finality checkpoints. **It only takes $5-10B of mining e