Bitcoin's market cap crosses $1T milestone for the first time(theblockcrypto.com) |
Bitcoin's market cap crosses $1T milestone for the first time(theblockcrypto.com) |
Your figure is off by an order of magnitude. Greyscale alone has purchased more than that amount.
The relevant figure is total paid-in, minus total withdrawn, to be more precise.
And probably we can't know, given that entities like Tether refuse to show their books.
No matter what you think of bitcoin, you must admit this has been successful beyond anyone’s wildest expectations only 12 short years ago. It’s rise and acceptance into the deepest reaches of traditional finance and conservative institutions like BNY Mellon is absurd in its speed and their willingness to accept fundamental change. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift to open financial protocols and huge innovation in capital markets. On to the next decade of crypto!
Also, financial protocols!= currency.
It gives people locked out of the global financial system by the warrantless financial mass-surveillance regime, aka the global AML regime, a lifeline:
https://www.coindesk.com/money-reimagined-ugly-side-kyc-aml-...
>>At a 2015 blockchain event, Nairobi-based bitcoin pioneer Elizabeth Rossiello answered an audience question about the impact on Somalians of a recent shutdown in remittance inflows after the U.S. government had labeled the country a “high-risk jurisdiction.” The AZA Group CEO’s answer was blunt: “They starve.”
Remember, under financial-mass-surveillance (AML) laws, you're guilty until proven innocent, and your nationality and residency can be considered as proof of guilt.
Proof of work does a good job contributing to increasing problems with global warming and wreaking havoc on the computer hardware market.
There's talk about major cryptocurrencies switching to proof of stake. Good luck on that, because the current powers that be would hate to see their cash cow affected.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. A bunch of early adopters are getting VERY rich because everyone else is FOMOing hardcore. That's never a good reason to buy into this charade.
Our species is so greedy, we will do whatever it takes to fuck everyone else and get ours, I guess. We created a monster. I wish we could own up to it before it's too late.
That alone is a huge global market and it’s barely started.
I think a best case scenario is something like the Lightning Network grows in scale and popularity and becomes a defacto standard for online and mobile purchases.
It has high upkeep costs, requiring you to have your LN node online to receive payments, and for your node to have access to the LN funds via a connection to the private keys, which is a security liability.
To monitor for fraudulent channel closes in order to be able to react in time to challenge them, it also requires you to have an always on-line node, or a trusted third party delegated to do that on your behalf. And if you want rapid/automated reaction to fraudulent channel closes, that node needs to have access to the private keys to your LN funds.
Then there are routing issues when the topography of the network changes with every transaction, and where the existence of routes is dependent on sufficient capital being locked up in channels.
There's a reason why there's 100 times more BTC locked up for use in Ethereum dApps than for use in the LN. Ethereum-based scalability solutions could, ironically, provide BTC with the scalability needed to gain mass-adoption as an instrument for peer-to-peer payments.
Idk where this will go, but I will ride the bubble/pyramid.
Bitcoin was a daring experiment in game theory, open-source protocol, and human incentives, and is a success by any common-sense measures:
- Adoption of the protocol
- Money devoted to protol
- Human attention given to the project
- Number of computers running it's code
You must be joking re eth scaling. ERC20 tx's presently cost $20USD https://etherscan.io/gastracker A low priority btc tx currently costs 57 sat $4.40 https://mempool.space/
Currently 5x the price to transfer a fake bitcoin token on eth to a BTC L1 tx, whereas transferring a real bitcoin on lightning might cost a few satoshi.
I think some elements of eth are interesting, but are unlikely to actually achieve whatever it is they want to achieve. Proof of Stake isn't secure. Lets see if they are able to retain consensus with EIP-1559. I suspect it will cause another schism.
These are not using the recently launched scaling technologies. For example zk-Rollups, which are now operational on Ethereum mainnet, can process 2500-3000 ERC20 transactions a second on-chain. Once these gain a critical mass of users, Bitcoin, in the form of WBTC, can be widely used in payments by way of Ethereum's zk-Rollups.
The LN's limitations are too many, and it has thus far failed to gain traction for that reason. Zk-Rollups have none of the limitations of off-chain payment-channel networks.
Rollup is just another name for sidechains. I agree, the sidechain model works today. The BTC Pegged liquid network also does zero knowledge (confidential transactions) exchanges of BTC between exchanges. But ultimately it is still kicking the can down to another blockchain. Rollups are not 'off-chain', They are on another chain. We need to think beyond this for true scaling.
If you're really set on payment/state channel networks like the Lightning Network (Bitcoin), Raiden (Ethereum) or Connext (Ethereum), you can put them, ON A ZK-ROLLUP!
You get a 100X scalability boost, without increasing the block size, which makes payment/state channel opens/closes a couple orders magnitude lower, which massively increases a payment channel user's options and improves the functionality of the payment channel network. ZkRollups also reduce the cost of on-chain payments which lets a user switch to on-chain for an application that the zkRollup-based PCN is ill-suited.
All-in-all, reducing the cost of on-chain transactions, as zkRollups do, have significant advantages, so there is absolutely no reason to not adopt them.
And Liquid is a centralized sidechain dependent for its security on trusted third parties, and completely incomparable to zkRollups, which have 100% of the security of the mainnet and are only reliant on 51% of the hashrate being honest for security.