[deadmetheny]

The banking system's energy use is incidental and embracing greener practices is entirely within reach. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has energy waste as a feature that cannot be divorced from how it works. The entire thing works because computers are burning energy to find nonces, and the more people are using Bitcoin, the harder the hashing becomes, which uses even more power. The entire proof of work concept system is irredeemably linked to wasting energy and gets even worse with more adopters for a system that can barely handle 10 transactions a second. At least the banking system accomplishes something for its energy usage and that usage isn't intrinsically part of its functionality.

[erulabs]

> energy waste as a feature that cannot be divorced from how it works

Er, this is entirely false. Proof of Authority, Proof of Stake, and a handful of other schemes which do not require large amounts of compute are possible. Bitcoin itself has not "switched" due to stagnated innovation and politicking, but it's entirely false to say that PoW "cannot be divorced from how [bitcoin] works"

I'm sure we're all victims of our own bias, but yours seems particularly vitriolic. There are nations out there bending over backwards to subsidize coal, build missiles, frack the earth, etc. Some compute being used on BTC instead of JavaScript or Videogames or whatever else would be consuming those CPUs is _hardly_ some vast evil.

[ironcan]

He was specifically talking about proof of work though, which indeed is inherently wasteful. And seeing the whole block size issue, it seems impossible bitcoin would ever move away from proof of work.