The network as a whole is consuming too much electricity to mine and the hashing provides nothing (but bitcoins) See
http://bitcarbon.orgMining protects the network. It serves as both a security guard and an accountant. Yes, it uses a lot of electricity. So does the whole banking system behind fiat currencies. Is it ideal? No. Is it a major issue? Not really, IMO.
Most mining equipment won't serve any purpose after their hashrate is obsolete.
Mining equipment only obsoletes when the marginal cost surpasses the income. Right now, most of the cost of mining is in the initial purchase, with marginal costs (power usage) being rather low. It will take a considerable increase in difficulty before it is no longer profitable to leave an already produced miner running. After that, yes, it no longer serves a purpose other than as a space heater.
The Pareto Principle is even worse than in fiat currencies as only a handful of people control a large chunk of the bitcoins.
Agreed. Though I feel this will be smoothed out somewhat as Bitcoin appreciates in price and early adopters start spending part of their stash (either by cashing out to fiat or by spending BTC directly).
Bitcoin is overspeculated and very little used as a currency (it's intended purpose).
Agreed. But I do think a large part of the current high price is due to peoples expectations for future Bitcoin adoption as a proper currency.
Bitcoin is hard to undestand and use even for 60 years old iPad-capable grandma.
So was the internet in its early days. Bitcoin is far from ready for mainstream. Services need to be developed to use the underlying protocol and wrap it in a userfriendly package.
Bitcoin is even harder to trade for non-tech people (also due to high price, satoshis and mBTC).This and previous statement might throw bitcoin to a niche that is almost fullfilled.
Drop the whole BTC denomination, count everything in mBTC, while giving that unit a new name if needed and it's fine. This is just a matter of time and getting used to new terminology IMO.
Trading in centralized exchanges almost entirely defeats the purpose of Bitcoin (also by using banks).
Centralized exchanges are still the easiest way to exchange fiat for BTC. As the commercial use of Bitcoin grows, there will be less need to convert before and after every purchase and a larger part of the economy can be transacted completely in Bitcoins.
Market cap is irrelevant as that money is not the real money in the bitcoin ecosystem.
Agreed. Simply multiplying # of coins with the last exchange price is far too simple an estimate of the amount of fiat money in Bitcoin. It's an okay statistic to track in time, but not to compare to the market cap of, for example, companies.
The whole bitcoin thing blows my mind.
It is both value-less (because it cannot be used at anything) and valuable (because everybody wants it)
Everybody wants it because it's the best speculative instrument but nobody really wants to spend it (hodl for 1000 years).
Hoarding it makes it even more valuable as very few early adopters really exit it (unlike pyramid schemes)
Because nobody really exits bitcoin and nobody uses it at anything makes it valuable and makes everybody want it.
Eventually people will have to start spending Bitcoin, otherwise it loses its point as a currency and merchant-acceptance will decrease. In the scenario where everyone only hoards (except when they exchange for fiat), Bitcoin will only have value as a store-of-value, which means it has lost most of its potential.
