Bitcoin

is accused of having no inherent value; which is true, but it’s true for both the US dollar and, to a large extent, gold.

“Bitcoin has no inherent value” they say. “It’s just numbers on a computer, created from nothing” If this is your argument against Bitcoin then you should give me all of your US Dollars which have no inherent value either.

is actually more, not less transparent than US dollars, and because the ledger is public, immutable, and visible forever, law enforcement agencies can more easily track illegal behavior conducted using Bitcoin.

In fact, because the Bitcoin ledger is public, immutable, and visible forever many law enforcement agencies are finding it easier to track illegal transactions made through Bitcoin.

is frowned upon because of slow, energy intensive transaction times, but this is like judging the internet based on dial-up modems - in short; layer 2 solutions will improve it greatly.

Transaction times are slow and energy intensive but “Layer 2” solutions to Bitcoin and Ethereum are in development and coming soon. ETH2.0 is expecting 100,000 transactions per second throughput capability and a 99.95% reduction in energy usage.

is often blamed for the criminality that occurs using it. This is as unfair as saying we should ban the internet or telephone or US dollar because of fraud practiced using these.

People said the same thing about the internet. Should we outlaw the internet because criminals use it? How about cars? It was true then and it’s true now – Criminals did use the internet and they use Bitcoin, but that doesn’t mean we don’t use them too.

is often falsely claimed to be tied to transaction volume (it is not) such that it will use up vastly more energy as the network grows.

energy usage is not tied to transaction volume. Meaning the amount of energy used in mining will NOT scale up based on the number of transactions. So all of the breathless headlines about “amount of energy per transaction” and “if Bitcoin continues at this pace by 2040 it will eat the world” are just misleading. Bitcoin can and will scale to many millions of more transactions totally irrespective of the amount of energy used. If you don’t understand how this works, you do not understand Bitcoin.

J.L. CollinsThinkers

J.L. Collins