That is only true for burning fossil fules. Considering that the Hover Dam can generate 2 GW peak, the bitcoin network could feasibly run on renewable energy.
Waiting for the inevitable: "What if we could guarantee that these coins were made only with renewable / sustainable energy sources, giving you the benefit of digital currency w/o the pollution", and the coming "It's like CO2 / renewable energy credits, but with blockchain!" startups.
using something that is practically infinitely abundant (renewable energy) to create an artificially scarce medium of exchange is illogical to say the least... why not use renewable energy itself as the self-valued currency?
Energy price's are highly volatile because you cannot control the supply in a timely fashion nor store energy for later usage (in amounts that matters anyway), i.e it would be a worse currency.
Scarcity is a good attribute for a currency. Plus having a currency that mirror an asset (gold, energy) is actually a bad idea economically speaking because then the currency cannot be used in time of crisis to soften economic downturns. Which is what was used during the 2007 crisis. People do not realize how much worse the 2007 crisis would have been without the measures taken by the Federal Reserve.
IMO, the attractiveness of bitcoin is about being a secure decentralized payment system everything else is fluff. Such a system takes some energy to work what a surprise...
Do you guys think that all the financial institutions combined use less energy than bitcoin ?
Bitcoin is probably using a lot less energy...
> Plus having a currency that mirror an asset (gold, energy) is actually a bad idea economically speaking because then the currency cannot be used in time of crisis to soften economic downturns.
I shared your concern until recently. But then I learned more about fractional reserve banking: with suitable (lack of) regulations banks can and will create just the right amount of extra bank money to satisfy extra demands from the general population for holding extra money.
Historically, just conditions have held in eg the free banking episodes in Scotland, Canada, France, Australia. (I think in the Song dynasty in China, too.)
Australia's free banking period ended up with a property bubble and banks going bust, causing the country's worst ever financial crisis. Instead of "creating just the right amount of extra money", other banks suspended trading.
But free banking is much closer to the way major currencies actually operate today (which also involves money supply determined primarily by banks' willingness to extend credit and fluctuating from day to day) than the concept behind Bitcoin or indeed the gold standard (supplies of a particular currency should be limited by [proof of] specific type of work and only able to grow, and very slowly)
> Australia. Operating with few restrictions, Australian banks were large, widely branched, and competitive, and they practiced mutual par acceptance, making the system resemble Scotland’s. The Australian episode is of special interest for suffering the worst financial crisis known under a free-banking system. After a decade-long real estate boom came to an end in 1891, some building societies and land banks failed, after which 13 of 26 trading banks suspended payments in early 1893. George Selgin (1992a) finds that the banks’ reserve ratios do not indicate any overexpansion of bank liabilities during the boom, though some banks clearly made bad loans. The boom was rather financed by British capital inflows, which suddenly stopped after the Baring crisis of 1890. Kevin Dowd (1992) adds that the banks were not undercapitalized. He argues that “misguided government intervention” in the first failed institutions “needlessly undermined public confidence” in other banks, while other interventions boosted the number of suspensions (all but one of the suspended banks soon reopened) by providing favorable reorganization terms for banks in suspension. (For a different view, see Turner and Hickson (2002).
I don't understand your second paragraph. You can have free banking in a gold standard or in a fiat regime. The historic free banking episodes regularly cited were in a gold standard setting. (But perhaps the confusion comes from 'Internet-Austrians' common insistence on 100% reserve banking as a mandatory feature of what they'd call a gold standard?)
(Bitcoin in its current parameters is more or less trying to imitate a gold standard.)
You seemed to understand my second paragraph pretty well tbh.
Internet Austrians and Bitcoiners believe that what is used as money should be a commodity with highly constrained supply, hence full reserve requirements for the former and a unified ledger and no credit-creation mechanism for the latter. Free bankers (and some altcoiners, and the economic mainstream) believe that what is used as money should be a promise from a financial institution with a flexible supply based on credit creation (disagreeing with each other on whether it's best backstopped by convertibility to a [quasi]commodity or central bank reserves under stricter regulations)
Free banking fanatics' arguments that Australian free banking practices were fundamentally sound and systematic collapse happened only because the government saved some of the worst ones should be taken with the same pinch of salt as anarchists' claims that people are fundamentally non-violent with crime occuring mainly as a reaction to police brutality.
Renewable energy is not an asset. It's energy. It's the basis of all life. It is infinitely abundant (until our Sun dies and the winds stop blowing) Unlike currency, energy has an intrinsic value as a unit of work (the 'joule' being that unit) Energy as a currency would get its value not from artificial scarcity but from its rate of flow in a surplus energy p2p exchange network. Satoshi himself mentioned this line of thinking back in 2009 [1] when I wrote about a hypothetical p2p energy economy, but he thought the Blockchain could power such an energy-as-currency-based economy, and he's actually right. You need to think of the Blockchain as the low level API and write high level currency schemes on top of it. I haven't given it much thought since then.
Haven't tou heard of civilization types? I think type 3 (or 5?) is one where they have harness the energy of their sun(s) in an optimal wag. They gather solar energy in space and beam it to their planet, moon(s$ and their space colonies.
Users would still need to be able to transfer control over such energy to other users in order to pay them. For bitcoin, you can just use the internet. What is your practical proposal for making the "energy transfer" possible?
No, a lot of it happens in Sichuan province specifically, because of the availability of hydroelectric power. Also Washington state for the same reason.
Using that list, Cuba and North Korea immediately follow Bitcoin in energy consumption. Cuba or North Korea alone could never hope to gain control of the network: they could not supply enough power even if they redirected everything to malicious Bitcoin mining rigs. More realistically, even a country like Saudi Arabia (with a reported 272TWh) could not control the Bitcoin network in the long term--"wasting" 5.5% of your national energy consumption is not sustainable.
This "waste" is actually a kind of security all its own.
To be truly accurate, you would need to look at the marginal impact.
Ie even if bitcoin was purely running on renewable energy, it would still crowd out other users of renewable energy, and those might fall back to coal.