Blockchain Bubble or Revolution: The Future of Bitcoin, Blockchains, and Cryptocurrencies

It’s somewhat heartening to hear that, per one report, 80% of all Bitcoin mining uses renewable energy,[305] but still, using excessive energy — of any form — is worrisome.

“gentlemen’s agreement” to not use extremely powerful computers to mine,

Anyway, investors would use their voting tokens to vote on startups they wanted to invest in, and winning startups would automatically get a slice of the fundraising pie. It was a radically new model of venture capitalism: partners and hierarchy were out, and democratic decision-making was in.

This lines up perfectly with Bitcoin’s hodling epidemic: people hold on to their bitcoins because they know each bitcoin’s value is slowly increasing over time.[165]

Bitcoin is a strange financial instrument that is both a currency and an investment. You can use bitcoins to buy and sell things online, or you can buy and hold (or hodl) bitcoins in the hopes of turning a profit.

villagers’ shared memory of past payments.

The University of Cambridge estimates that Bitcoin’s annual energy consumption skyrocketed from about 6 terawatt-hours (roughly the annual power consumption of Luxembourg) in 2017 to over 80 terawatt-hours (roughly the annual power consumption of Finland) in 2020.

This should worry any proponent of decentralization: the software that’s at the heart of Bitcoin is primarily owned and maintained by a small group of people that are employed and funded by a single company. The potential for conflicts of interest and user-hostile changes by Blockstream is high.