Interview with Plamen Andonov
“Bitcoin is the best thing that could happen to green energy”
Plamen Andonov is a professional software developer and cryptocurrency expert. He is the founder of the Crypto Revolution conference and maintains a popular YouTube channel with over 23,000 subscribers. Its main goal is to encourage wider and better-understood adoption of Bitcoin. He is the author of two books on Bitcoin and two courses on the Udemy platform.
How does the halving affect the profitability of bitcoin miners and what is your prediction of its potential impact on the entire market?
The halving has been unchanged since 2009, and every time there is one, the same concerns arise: What if mining is cut in half, won’t miners go bankrupt? We already had a halving in 2012, then 2016 and 2020, and now the next one is coming in 2024. So far, Bitcoin has managed after each halving to raise its price enough to compensate the miners. I don’t expect it to be any different from previous times. Non-optimized miners will go bankrupt and only the market will decide whether the price of Bitcoin will rise or not – as it has for the past 14 years.
Bitcoin is often accused of being very energy intensive and leaving an environmental footprint. What is your position on this matter?
Bitcoin is the best thing that could have happened to green energy. Thanks to it, we have at our disposal a mobile energy consumer that has the ability to instantly stop and restore its consumption. It’s a bit counter-intuitive: Why do we need a power consumer? Sometimes in order to build a mega project, we need a middle ground to step on – someone to buy our energy before we have fully completed the project. Bitcoin helps a number of projects start getting returns much earlier, and the power lines are not overloaded with energy that cannot be selectively turned on and off. Being able to have an energy consumer that we can stop instantly is a big advantage.
Are you worried about the future of Bitcoin?
No. We need a limited amount of money. If this was a problem and we needed more money – we would simply print the missing dollar, euro, lev, but that is not the problem. We need a place where we can record information that we can be sure is not tampered with. This overlaps with the need for highly accessible online banking. Bitcoin has not yet shown its full capabilities and new applications are yet to be built on top of it. It will open up a whole new world for microtransactions, which is where the future awaits us.
And how does Bitcoin fare against the growing competition from other cryptocurrencies and technologies?
Bitcoin has no competition. There is no other cryptocurrency that is as decentralized and has built such trust as Bitcoin. Artificial intelligence is in no way a threat to Bitcoin, but rather something that will unlock Bitcoin’s potential.
New technologies like ChatGPT, MidJourney and more can generate new text or graphic content very quickly and cheaply. But they cannot generate new bitcoin. I see a future where AI-based applications use the Internet money, Bitcoin, as their currency, bypassing political fiat currencies.
Do you expect cryptocurrency regulation to change in the near future and how might this affect Bitcoin?
There are many scams in the crypto world. Many cryptocurrencies are unregistered securities. Their regulation will only cut through the noise and send a clear message: Bitcoin, not crypto. Only Satoshi Nakamoto has made a protocol, over which even he has no privileges, that is truly decentralized and has completely removed the human factor. It is not by chance that he chose to remain anonymous. Every other cryptocurrency since then has started with the idea: Many people made a lot of money with Bitcoin, let’s launch our cryptocurrency and we make money too.
What are the challenges the Bitcoin sector is currently facing and how can they be overcome?
Personally, I don’t see any challenges. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is already qualified as a commodity by the SEC. It is decentralized enough to be useful, and without its great decentralization, uncensorability is lost. It needs to do only one thing – new blocks. As long as this happens, the protocol works and the industry survives.
2023-06-09 09:25:00
#Bitcoin #currents #blow
