Peaky's avatar
Peaky 4 days ago
Bitcoin defines relations of satoshis and bits as expressed in UTXO set and entire ledger which is around 1TB now. We have PoW which is used to expend energy and get Bitcoin blocks with nonce and hashes, we also get heat of miners as exhaust. This process binds Bitcoin to our physical reality. There are a few constants: 21M Bitcoin, Block itself, 1MB (we changed it unknowingly) blocksize, elliptic curve, PoW algorithm. If you change one of those you alter how energy is conserved within our physical reality. We changed block structure and blocksize and got more spam. What does it mean to change PoW? What does it mean to change elliptic curve? Answer will be revealed in time but we should probably ask questions first. If any constants change, what does it mean to have ledger with history using different regimes and measures? How far are we from fiat if we keep changing the rules? How does it change relation between joules of work and sats/bits by such work. Change one change everything. We better properly understand side effects before committing actions. My 2 sats.

Replies (1)

I think best efforts are made to "properly understand side effects before committing actions". We just havn't been smart enough it seems. How we deal with that decides whether bitcoin survives its infancy or not