Bitcoin Wastes Its Holders’ Money

Ether (the currency of Ethereum) is to bitcoin, what bitcoin is to gold.

Ethereum is far from the only blockchain that has these modern features, but I'll just focus on ether vs. bitcoin.

PoW (what Bitcoin uses) uses billions of dollars in energy toward solving useless math problems. Bitcoin holders indirectly pay miners to burn their money. PoS (what Ethereum uses instead of PoW) is cost efficient and benefits holders. Ether holders can outpace ether inflation through staking their Ether (which anyone can easily do like depositing money into a Savings account). Bitcoin is always slightly inflationary (until the network stops producing Bitcoin which would make the network less secure).

The base gas cost (the general cost to make a transaction) in Bitcoin only benefits miners. Those transacting on Bitcoin pay miners to burn even more of their money on useless math problems. The base gas cost of Ethereum gets burnt. Those transacting on Ethereum indirectly pay all ether holders through deflation.

For holders, Bitcoin is at best slightly inflationary that nobody benefits from (because that inflation is spent on solving useless math problems). For ether, it is at worst slightly inflationary that only stakers benefit from. Ether is at best highly deflationary (although that would be the result from huge gas costs).

A charity towards reducing emissions might get the best ROI from renting enough cloud computing for an hour to prove PoW is not immutable.


And, that doesn't even mention Turing complete smart contracts which could allow for decentralized bridges which could allow for 1 million+ transactions per second in the future.


I'm far from an expert on cryptocurrency, but I at least know that much.