[albertgoeswoof]

Bitcoin's electricity consumption is unfortunate, it's difficult to assess whether it is a waste or not. The current position blockchain tech can be compared to the state of networked computers in the 70s and early 80s. Not a huge amount of value delivered at the time, yet very few could have foreseen the impact of the internet and personal computing on the world.

If blockchains and distributed computing does present a new leap forward in how we communicate, this electricity will not be wasted.

[QAPereo]

Is it a waste to burn CPU cycles, to have a chunk of entropy to wave around so that you can possibly buy shit?

Yes.

[nathan_f77]

I think you're right that it's not an ideal situation, but humans are not an ideal species. We don't yet live in some Star Trek (or The Orville) world where currency has been abolished and everyone acts altruistically all the time.

Cryptocurrencies might be able to serve as a stop-gap before we figure out how to get there. It keeps everyone honest. In the future, it might even replace the entire tax code. There would be no more fines or punishments, and companies would no longer be able to hide their profits offshore. Taxes could just be automatically collected from each transaction, and managed by some global organization (maybe the UN). The world could even agree on a "basic income" contract that solves inequality.

These are all hypothetical examples, but I think this would be a worthwhile use of electricity. Especially if it's all cheap and renewable energy.

[scrumper]

It's not so different to burning diesel to dig up rocks so you have a chunk of metal to wave around.

Which isn't, you'll notice, necessarily a counter argument to yours.

[DSMan195276]

I would actually argue it is very fundamentally different. Once you've dug up your chucks of metal, trading them with others requires very little extra energy to be expended (Especially if we're going to go all the way to talking about actual cash, which is easy to split-up into smaller denominations).

Vs. Bitcoin, which will still require miners to expend the same amount of CPU cycles to keep the network working so you can transfer your Bitcoins to others, even after all of the Bitcoins are mined and the blocks provide no new Bitcoins into the market.

[scrumper]

It'd be interesting to see a table of 5 year energy cost from inception of a bar of gold vs. equivalent value of Bitcoin, at various #s of transactions.

[mazlix]

How are you able to definitively say that's more of a waste than to gather cotton and linen and then print money?

[QAPereo]

False dichotomy... electronic transactions and bitcoin are hardly synonymous.

[saalweachter]

Eh, I'd call it more of a "tu quoque" (appeal to hypocrisy).

[gambiting]

"is it a waste of resources, to chop down trees, to then use thousands of gallons of water to turn them into paper, followed by using paint made out of oil extracted from the ground to draw pictures on them, followed by cutting said paper and then using vehicles which again burn oil to deliver said paper, just to have a chunk of it so that you can possibly buy shit?"

Also yes.

[dmihal]

Is it a waste to have a webserver running all day, sitting idle for most of the day?

[rspeer]

Idle CPUs use very little power.