> It very much does. The more efficient your miners the more you have a temporary advantage over your peers, so there’s incentive to replace your equipment. Then everyone upgrades theirs too. Once you do the difficulty adjusts to match the new hash power. Thus bitcoin becomes less efficient. There’s a straight line up and to the right over time in terms of hash rate, and power consumption but the max tx rate remains a pitiable 7tx/sec. Therefore by definition it’s become less efficient.

So, yes, it becomes less efficient in terms of hash rate, that's true. But we don't really care about hash rate efficiency. What we do care about is power efficiency, but that scales with price not mining technology. And yes, the price has gone up, but power consumption will only continue to rise if the price does. This is basically an economic fact - miners are compensated in Bitcoin, so they should only be willing to consume as much dollar-weighted power as they receive in dollar-weighted bitcoin.

> People very much pay attention to bitfinex, since they own the funbux people use to avoid AML/KYC.

Bitfinex's volume is legitimate, though. Tether is an open question, but tether is also tradable at a market rate. The market believes tether is worth $1. If you disagree, you can short it, and if you actually believed tether was illegitimate, you'd do that. The fact that you haven't indicates to me that you don't really believe it.

> I can’t believe you’d sit there and say it’s okay if 95% of volume is fake and manipulative because you’ve found the good 5%. If only 5% of all USD transactions were fake, or all stock transactions were fake we’d burn the system to the ground.

I think the crux of the issue is that nobody cares about these exchanges. Their volume isn't real and everyone knows it, so they don't matter. If I claim to own a stock exchange that trades 100 trillion usd of volume every day, does that mean that now 95% of traded stocks are "fake"? No. It just means some random guy on the internet claimed something silly. That's what these fake exchanges more or less are.

> So until 2050. And then you think miners will continue to secure the system for their health? Of course not. Transaction fees will skyrocket and if anyone is left using the system the process will repeat itself.

> “Protecting their wealth” haha, good one. They lost 33% last week. 70% since all time high. 99.8% if they invested in alt coins. That’s not protection, that’s insanity. There’s so many better ways to protect wealth. It protects wealth like warm milk on a windowsill.

Better than Venezuelan Bolivars by a long shot.

> Trust me I’m not buying haha, I made a bunch of money in the initial bubble run, sold at 17K and got out. Today, there’s plenty of better investments in the stock market. I mean outperforming an asset class down 70% in 2 years is pretty pretty easy. Even SoftBank has a better track record. Actually it may be outperformed by the Turkish Lira at this point. (Edit) since 2017 the Turkish lira has done much better than bitcoin.

Measuring something's performance from it's all time high is a strange way to consider things. Nobody does that in any other market. There are plenty of assets down that much from their ATH. You're cherrypicking a particularly bad time period for Bitcoin. If you started in 2016, the returns outstrip any national currency on earth - which for the record, is also not a meaningful way to look at things.