[imtringued]

It doesn't really work this way...

If a bitcoin costs $6000 people will spend physical resources worth $6000 (in theory) to obtain it through mining.

Let's assume you are a miner in siberia and have a heating bill of $100 every month and spend $1000 of electricity to get $1100 worth of bitcoin. You now only pay $900 to get $1100 bitcoin. You will spend the excess savings of $100 on more electricity for mining. Now suddenly everyone starts heating their houses with bitcoin mining to save $100 until difficulty rises to account for the saved money.

Every dollar you spend on the most efficient mining setup will only give you one dollar worth of bitcoin plus a small profit.

[Squithrilve]

Well it's obvious you can't heat your house and earn money at the same time continuously. Bitcoin is no magic perpetuum mobile zero-point energy bending-physics solution but it's true that you can minimize the waste.

> Every dollar you spend on the most efficient mining setup will only give you one dollar worth of bitcoin plus a small profit.

That sounds just like any other investment, or am I missing something?

[joe_the_user]

Bitcoin basically is money (a store of value and medium of exchange, with some speculation on increasing future value thrown in that won't change the logic here).

Increasing the amount of money in the world does not increase the amount of goods and services in the world. Thus turning energy into bitcoins will increase any other goods and services but instead results in more money chasing the same amount of goods and services.

Just as one gets apparent economic benefits from paying people to dig holes and fill them, one can get some appearance of benefit from resources being diverted to bitcoin mining. This is OK as long as we imagine an unlimited external resource world we exploit however we want but once you get to a world we have finite atmosphere, finite biosphere etc and pumping enough C02 into these can kill all of us, this sort of approach is becoming untenable.