[keymone]

It’s energy producing companies that worry about sustainability, not energy spending. Energy spending endeavors only worry about profitability. So it’s absolutely misguided to scold bitcoin over it’s use of energy and not do the same for instance to people heating up their apartments or driving cars or insert your energy spending activity.

Increasing efficiency of bitcoins proof of work will simply bump the difficulty so energy use will remain the same.

[superbrama]

There’s a difference between scolding energy usage and pointing out that the design itself, even if efficiency of that design is increased, is what leads to this spiraling energy expenditure that powers massive computational hashing power only to support that currency and nothing else (no other social or technical goals). There are better ways to design such a system to do more than perform endless hashing that is merely self-serving. Furthermore, there could be innovations related to a trustless system that will make bitcoin itself obsolete; the future of bitcoin as leader isn’t guaranteed.

This isn’t related to heating or driving efficiency.

[keymone]

You seem to be convinced there are better ways to implement a distributed consensus mechanism that doesn’t depend on proof of work. Feel free to present it to the world and become the next satoshi. Meanwhile - face the reality. PoW will consume as much energy as is profitable and only market decides that.

[superbrama]

I’m convinced people are searching for it. I’m convinced there’s a huge nouveau academic interest in this area. This just helps to estimate likelihood of bitcoin’s longevity.

Yes, precisely, you always need buyers to push price further. Market decides up or down, miners play along as it makes sense to them. Kind of like the swap over to bcash about a month ago, because it made sense financially.