Given that the current world exchange currency requires 43 aircraft carriers and 6,185 nuclear warheads (+ all the support they need, thousands of very worhtwhile human lives a year, etc), any electricity consumption seems a small problem. Not to mention that the oil-to-electricity transition would require ridiculous investments anyway.
It is not a hypothesis and it is not about the US. It is a fact that the current global currency is USD and it is enforced thanks to the role of the global policeman and unquestionable military might. However over the (many) years it has caused growing problems both inside and outside the US.
P.S. I think that the US was playing this role very well over the past 76 years and am perfectly happy with 90% of what has been done.
> US would never switch to BTC as legal tender because they can't control the supply of BTC
Most evidence shows the U.S. no longer benefits from the dollar as a global reserve currency. And lots of governments have currency boards or currencies they don’t control.
1. The currency board countries are very small players, mostly beaten to blue and also not all currency boards are tied to USD.
2. The bulk (I guess 90%+) of global lending is still in USD - a currency which the Fed can debase at will - as has been happening since 2008 and happened at a grande scale in 2020.
This brings only frustration and bitterness - the last two things you want in international relations, especially in the post-nuclear age soft-power days.
Maybe we can focus on crypto that requires democratically elected consensus - save regulatory capture - which would then allow us to focus on crypto that doesn't unnecessarily transfer wealth from later adopters weighted toward earlier adopters.
Yea it's called every western government which is already a democracy. USD is the democratic coin. Bitcoin isn't democracy. It's the opposite. Absolute property rights removed from the state
Maybe when someone invents a “free” consensus scheme that actually competes with PoW’s security properties. There are plenty of reasons to suspect this isn’t possible.
If proof of work is necessary, how much work does proof of work need to do fundamentally? Is there any reason a cryptocurrency can’t be made that uses very little energy?
The structure of your comment suggests you don't grasp the fundamental point of proof-of-work, which is precisely to prove that a certain amount of (physical) resources were expended.
> Is there any reason a cryptocurrency can’t be made that uses very little energy?
As far as proof-of-work is concerned, if you don't use enough energy, you are vulnerable to 51% attacks.
As far as other schemes (e.g. proof-of-stake) are concerned - none of them have the same desirable security properties as PoW.
