this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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I mean, yeah, it's bad. We shouldn't be ignoring how bad bitcoin is for the environment.
But are you really gonna tell me that all the computers and CPU time that Wall Street uses for trading somehow takes less?
It doesn't matter what financial system you use, you're still burning energy to make it work.
As far as transactions, yes, something like Visa takes way less than Bitcoin. For HFT compared to crypto, who knows, but one thing they’re not doing is something intentionally wasteful like proof of work.
You think having thousands of bankers use their car twice a day is better? It's so much worse
Okay, the bankers could work remotely. What then? Anyway, yeah, it’s still set up in a dramatically inefficient way because proof of work is inherently wasteful. It may have been state of the art 15 years ago but it sure isn’t now.
They could but they won't. Bitcoin pays 0.05$ per kWh, that's close to 0, the only energy that goes into mining is energy that wouldn't have gone anywhere else. Energy is hard to store and sometimes there just isn't enough demand. That's what goes into Bitcoin, and there is no ecological problem with that
I like how someone downvoted you yet had no real retort, because you're right.
You're disingenuously ignoring the opportunity cost of having to build additional power plants - resources required not being usable elsewhere; environmental impact of those resources or, especially in the case of hydroelectric power, of building the power plants themselves, since cement has significant carbon dioxide emissions, along with the fact that proof-of-work algorithms have a tendency to expand in a grey-goo style and suck up as many resources as possible.
The former is a reason why energy conservation efforts and regulations have been put in place. The fewer power plants you require to run everything, even if they're renewable energy, the better. Proof-of-work mining threatens that, because when your incentive to mine is more money, that encourages people taking more than their fair share of energy. It also encourages power theft.
Proof-of-work mining doesn't do a thing to solve the issue of green energy, since there's no sort of quality-of-service system in place which bumps cryptocurrency miners down to the bottom of the pile when it comes to prioritising power usage and even if there was, it'd create an arms race between power plant operators and people trying to subvert those controls so that they can use more power for mining, cf. Nvidia's graphics card limiters versus Ethereum miners. You're either naïve or disingenuous if you're expecting cryptocurrency miners to just cede power when there's money on the line if they keep their operations going at top priority.
Furthermore, even if every single watt that Bitcoin requires to mine was generated by 100% clean energy, the network would still be creating nation-state levels of e-waste.
This is just another one of those techno-libertarian pipe dreams about an efficient free market which don't bear fruit in the real world, just like the "why do we need emissions regulations anyway? Surely, the free market will sort that out, brah" bullshit. It's the fallacy of the broken window writ large.
Long text full of errors. Yes there is a mechanism to prioritize other uses of energy than mining. It's the market. Energy is usually sold between 0.1$ and 0.25$ per kWh while Bitcoin only buys for 0.05$ per kWh. Energy producers WILL sell to the highest offer, which is never Bitcoin unless it's the only option. It is almost always more profitable to just buy Bitcoin than mine it, which is why it's rarely done. Taking that into account, we can discard the rest of your comment
The computer power behind the financial system is literally insane. But if everything changed to Bitcoin, we would use more energy.
What COULD be beneficial would be one of the other coins out there. Doesn't have to be Bitcoin.
I guess my point had less to do with cryptocurrency and more to do with currency in general. It's not a defense of bitcoin as much as it's a critique of how much energy the system in general uses, either way.
However, it's also one that's not easily solved. Even with paper/coin money, you're still using finite resources to produce the bank-notes.
It was a bad point then, because bitcoin uses more.
Citation needed.
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