I agree, I trust in the technology as well, I’m mainly here learning about blockchain, not so much about cryptocurrency (from an investor point of view, I do like to follow it from a tech point of view).
The bitcoin transaction cost is honestly insane, but most people don’t dive that deep. Here’s some background data I compiled over time:
in July 2017 bitcoin was consuming about 14TWh / year; by January 2018 this had increased to 44TWh / year or triple the energy consumption. Right now it sits at 47.65TWh / year so almost up another 10% in the last month.
To put this in understandable terms, a US household consumes an average of 29.5890 KWh; so bitcoin could power 4,049,860 households. A single bitcoin transaction consumes about 385 KWh, in other words one bitcoin transaction can power 13 households for a single day … one bitcoin transaction!
This means that to-date, Bitcoin consumes more power than the Republic of Ireland or New Zealand or Hungary and is just trailing behind Peru.
Add to that the environmental impact, I.e. the carbon footprint, bitcoin has a footprint of 21,432 kiloton (kt) of CO2, which is equal to 188.45 kilogram (kg) of CO2 per transaction. This total footprint is equal to 1 million transatlantic flights…
Now knowing that every miners mines every block, but the block reward goes only to one miner that means that most of the mining effort is literally wasted effort. Hence 80% of mining gains being spend on mining cost.
This implies that in the long term this isn’t an economically viable nor environmentally sustainable currency. Having said that I still think the concept and the blockchain are absolutely awesome; and I love the revolution this has started in the technology field. Hence my belief in the likes of Raiblocks, Tangle, Hashgraph; which don’t have this economical and environmental waste.