Hello Murray,

Are there any advantages doing so?

Thanks

Thank you for enlightening me.
Buford Taylor

"I haven't invested the time because it is basically a thankless task"

Well I think this might be your issue. It is most certainly not a thankless task.

There are a couple really great books that might help you (The Bitcoin Standard and Inventing Bitcoin are good places to start).

But to be blunt, Bitcoin doesn't need you to invest your time in learning it. Plenty of other people already have and many, many more will.

It's still early, but if I were you I would get started today.

> Proof of Work cryptocurrencies are backed by and tied inversely to the cost of energy.

I don't see how this is an issue, especially if you look at the paragraph below. Seems to me that it's an advantage to secure something digital using physical real world goods (energy/hardware). Unlike the scam coins you mention, which are orders of magnitude less secure. It doesn't surprise me you think the ability to hop chains has a benefit. To me, it just means you believe those chains are not secure enough and most if not all the value will eventually end up on the most secure blockchain, which, is bitcoin.

Yes, PoW will over time always relocate to where energy is cheapest, meaning locations on earth where there is a surplus of energy and since ASICs don't care about geographical location(not taking into account heat), only about power, that's where they will go.
There is a geographical component to the price of energy. 1GWh is worth more near a city or an industrial area than at a remote location, say Greenland. Bitcoin makes it so that even locations where excess energy previously had no value now has value and a use case.

The entire Bitcoin blockchain is around 450 GB right now, and growing at about 400-600 MB per month.. You can set up your own Bitcoin full node on a Raspberry Pi with a 1 TB drive for a few hundred bucks. Since there are 15,500 full nodes in operation at the moment, Bitcoin's total digital storage in use is about 7000 TB. Which is really pretty tiny for a worldwide distributed network.

You don't need to do heavy research to find this out. Likewise for how miners get paid. All of this is extremely well known.

So in other words, you’ve already decided you don’t like it and haven’t invested any time in examining your beliefs.

Well, I have invested the time an I can tell you the energy consumption is both necessary to the economic value of Bitcoin and the overall “uses too much energy” criticism is farcically misinformed.

But for now, start here:

Not only can money now flee into cryptocurrency, it can flee cryptocurrency networks themselves as well, and this is a trend that will continue to escalate until all networks can carry all other tokens and the security of the … effectively a second level of abstraction above infrastructure – the security of the protocol itself, and its resistance to partitioning, most especially, will be critical to its being the chosen basis, and thus, to whom the fees for transactions will go.

It's my opinion that the seeming kerfuffle going on in europe is going to be a transient thing. USA and NATO is now way in the minority not just in terms of population but also access to hard commodities. While the pipes for gas to the west of Russia are being closed, the pipes to the east are opening up wider. India and China are going to have to start getting along with each other better on their borders.

Because there is a convergence going on amongst the continental nations, as the west is increasingly alienating themselves from the majority of the world (both people and resources), this has to be factored in as well. Energy rich nations now have a huge incentive to welcome proof of work mining.

Proof of work mining is not going to go away, no matter what the staking maximalists say. Proof of Work is a proven and unbreakable limit on currency issuance, and will grow and shrink in accordance with the economics of energy and the security is vouchsafed by this – if it's not possible for one group to get cheaper energy than any other, the amount of hashpower required for a given level of security is going to directly correspond to the amount of energy available in general, and PoW will always be at the margins, where the power is the cheapest, picking up the slack in off peak periods, and being used by refiners to offset their waste flaring, and many other marginal energy sources.

Because the energy comes from the continent, mainly, Eurasia is going to be the new stronghold for this hyperbitcoinization as you are calling it. Because it's essentially tied to the energy supply, and the miners will go where the energy is produced. China and Russia will have to change their attitudes towards cryptocurrency mining, because it benefits both of them to protect the network, and no matter what they try to do with their idiot central banks, when the monetary policy of these organisations fails, as it inevitably will, they will always have that backstop and that's eventually going to become the back*bone* of their economies.

Oh my God I didn't think about that. I don't think the Ukrainian government is going to come to terms, which means they will lose and get a Russian backed government. And that means the U.S. will freeze their gold.

And then…whose gold is it? The new Ukrainian government will demand the gold, of course. And of course the U.S. will tell them they can have it when Hell freezes over. But the Ukrainian people are still the very same people who put that gold there in the first place. And Russia will never let go of Ukraine.