Braking force in EV is from magnetic fields in the engine pushing electricity back into the battery. Magnets and copper wires do not degrade when used. Pad brakes in EVs are only used when braking HARD, as in emergency stop. They degrade less because they are not used much.

Really holding user's coins?

The ring signatures have a big scalability problem, and the cryptographoic strenght of the monero anonymity is all but proven. Monero is an interesting experiment but its feasibility as a long term store of value is to be provem.

Also, moving some transactions off-chain transaction will effectively mix the coins and strenght anonymity.

The total is much more than the sum of the parts in this case. You get whole new dynamics that were unpredictable from the single parts.

Like saying that the first calculator was not a new kind of machine because valves existed and people made calculations before.

> You can't just scale the number of transactions in a block forever and still have a stable currency.

If you mean that over time the incentive to centralization become stronger, yes, you are right. There must be competition to enter the blocks, otherwise when mining subsidy ends, there will be no incentive to secure the ledger.

If you mean that ten times the transaction have a computational cost 10 times greater (or 5, or 2), you're wrong.

> The whole point of the system is to verify transactions and it stops working if it doesn't do that.

Plenty of cryptocurrencies are mining tons of empty blocks. on the short term, if there are no transactions, mining continues with the same difficulty.

The effect is long term: if noone is using the currency for transaction, it has no value so less and less people mine it. The difficulty drops, and the security drops, pulling value down even more.

You are almost right, but it is a very indirect effect, and takes years to manifest itself.

No, you're right.

Numbers i said are my guesses, but the order of magnitude should be about that.

I don't remember exactly how many hash ops you have to do to put 1000 txes in a merkle tree, but it should be more than 1000 and less than 10000.

My point was exactly that. Computational cost of the merkle tree is negligible when confronted with the computational cost of the POW

I mean, the main proponents of BCH did not mine it themselves to keep the difficulty down, it does not seem to have reached hashrate-price-difficulty equilibrium yet.

Not a bandaid at all. Unconfirmed transactions in the "lost" chain are bringing fees with them, so it is the exact same incentive of every other transaction.

Besides , how many times in history a continental network partition of the internet has happened?

And it would only take a single node connected to both sides (land and satellite?), to undo all the work of the would be attacker.

> how many times in history a continental network partition of the internet has happened?

Continental? No. Country-wide? Many, many times.

Imagine being in Egypt during the Arab Spring revolution when the government shut off Internet access. Imagine selling product to people for Bitcoin, seeing your client software accept the transaction because "enough time has passed", and then a few days/weeks later, when Internet access is restored, seeing your wallet balance get clobbered by the much-longer global chain.

/shudder

This is no different than, say, watching MongoDB for if it loses your writes, and if it does, replaying them.

This is definitely a band-aid: a good database doesn't lose writes it acknowledged.

Proof of work does not elect the next miner.

Proof of work means that the lucky random miner has invested energy on a previous valid block, and is lucky enough to find another valid block.

If you take that away, you could as well use a database and a trusted timestamp server.

No, that's a false dichotomy. And also the "lucky" is relative to the whole scheme. The value to the miner of finding a hash to make another block has gone down and will continue to go down, that's partly why transaction fees are so high.

In any case, that's like saying someone is "lucky" to win a video game in Dave and Buster's. That's not the only way to incentivize validators to timestamp transactions. All you really need is a consensus protocol.

Ripple for example has a consensus protocol that can be run by an entire LOCAL community and can fund itself and the resources it uses. Without requiring a global blockchain. And Bitcoin validation is effectively centralized in the hands of a few miners.

Who defines the LOCAL community?

People who deal in that local currency.

Hope you're wrong because this is starting to look like a Black Mirror episode.

Fifteen Million Merits (S01E02) to be specific.