Quote from: hugeblack on April 16, 2018, 03:21:52 PM

With the price of the Bitcoin rising, fears are mounting that the mining centers are consuming too much electricity (to the extent that some call it an environmental disaster).
Smari McCarthy of Iceland's Pirate Party says"We are spending tens or maybe hundreds of megawatts on producing something that has no tangible existence and no real use for humans outside the realm of financial speculation"[1]
Although the main use of Bitcoin is not speculation, [for example, in some countries, bitcoin used to request medicine and food from outside of the country because of local currency problems] however, the consumption of this amount of electricity is not justified.

If electricity consumption is the problem, why miners do not focus on renewables?[for example, In Iceland, electricity supplies from renewable sources are so abundant that they can be distributed free of charge][2].But if the use of bitcoin mining from renewable sources increases, does that threaten the future of energy? "We will not have enough energy for future generations"

Source:
#1 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/in-iceland-bitcoin-mining-will-soon-use-more-energy-than-its-residents/
#2 https://www.ecowatch.com/iceland-worlds-largest-clean-energy-producer-per-capita-1882105880.html

No, it will need to change or regulators will make it illegal to mine / transact Bitcoin, here are a few problems with Bitcoin

The BIG Problem With Bitcoin

Many people believe that Bitcoin is the future currency of our world, others argue that it is a store of value. Whilst both could be true, there are fundamental issues with Bitcoin that need to be changed in order for it to scale to mass adoption.

In this article I will be listing the top 3 issues that Bitcoin faces in terms of scalability.

1. Energy consumption

A study from Digiconomist found that each transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain uses 236 KWh worth of electricity, this amount is enough to power 8 U.S households for an entire day.

Now to put things into perspective, there are over 300,000 transactions per day. At this rate, Bitcoin uses more electricity per year than the whole of Nigeria and this is only increasing.

Read more here: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index - Digiconomist

Proof of work is vastly uneconomic and damages the environment at an alarming rate.

2. Scalability issues

Energy consumption will hinder the scalability issues of Bitcoin, however the other issue that arises with POW mining is that with the increase in cost associated with mining BTC it is less economical to mine Bitcoin. This would limit the distributed nodes (miners) globally and allow a larger percentage of control to the dominant mining pools / farms.

This would lead to a more centralised blockchain, where they can change the rules of BTC as they please.

The supply of Bitcoin is finite, capped at 21 million. Eventually (currently predicted for 2140) Bitcoin's supply will run out. Once this happens, miners will no longer receive rewards for completing blocks but instead will be given fees. The fees will be drastically high in relative terms, and people will stop using the blockchain.

Also, if miners decide that this is uneconomical for them to process the transactions and use their computing power elsewhere the speed of transactions for Bitcoin will drastically slow down, rendering one of the fundamental values of a Bitcoin (speed) useless.

3. The unknown future

Bitcoin is not a superior blockchain, there are hundreds of projects that are faster, cheaper and more valuable than Bitcoin. Bitcoin has market dominance because it is one of the first and most topical cryptocurrency (did you know that the price of BTC has a direct correlation to the amount of google searches). Here are a few things that could really end Bitcoins dominant era:

I) Blue chip company coming into the markets

This is more so for all cryptocurrencies, but Bitcoin in particular. Its not a matter of if but a matter of when a blue-chip company such as Facebook, Amazon or Google decides to implement their own cryptocurrency, they will dominate the market.

The consumer's trust is already with these big companies, and they have the power and capital to influence the entire market.

Another possibility is a potential world coin which global governments will all agree on using, this may seem unrealistic but it is definitely not impossible and many benefits would arise from having such a currency.

II) Quantum computing

Bitcoin is said to be Quantum resistant, on the whitepaper it mentions that:

To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they're generated too fast, the difficulty increases.

This may seem quantum resistant but it is important to understand that the difficulty is changed every 10 minutes and this is more than enough time for QC to mine all of Bitcoins remaining coins.

The other issued that QC represents is that there is a possibility of QC calculating peoples private keys for their BTC wallet. I do not know the technical details of how this is done, but from what I have read this is possible.

III) Bitcoin bubble

My last point for this section is that Bitcoin is not being bought as a store of value or a currency by most people, for most people Bitcoin is a speculative investment hoping to make a fortune on something they really dont know much about.

Once the bubble reaches its peak, and people start panic selling, Bitcoin will inevitably crash with that. After all, Bitcoins price is determined by demand vs supply.

In the light of a fair argument, I would like to point out that Bitcoin can change to tackle these issues and substantially increase its long-term survival. Bitcoin has a massive passionate community behind it and this reason why Bitcoin has grown to where it is today.

Thanks for reading,