| «I don't understand why so many are still blind to these very serious problems...» Because something that consumes a fraction of a fraction of one percent of the energy consumed by the world is not a "serious" energy problem, no matter what silly comparisons people make, like saying Bitcoin miners consume more than Ireland when it turns out that Ireland consumes so little electricity that it could be supplied by a single hydroelectric plant. Something that's actually a serious problem would be, for example, the fact the world wastes more energy than it uses every year: https://www.businessinsider.com/worlds-dirty-energy-comes-fr... There is also a lot of misinformation being published. For example uninformed journalists claiming that miners in China use coal power, when in fact most are located in the Sichuan province because there is plenty of cheap hydroelectricity over there. I have studied mining for many years, and IMHO it is so ruthlessly competitive that I see the mining industry moving toward building or buying & retrofitting their own hydro/solar/wind power plants optimized for mining for two reasons. (1) Renewables have now become the cheapest source of energy. And (2) many costs of traditional power plants can be avoided when you design a power source specifically for mining (eg. a solar plant can avoid having to convert and transport AC currents on long distance and instead produce DC for immediate consumption by nearby equipment.) If mining ever gets to that point of large scale renewables power plants optimized for mining, we will probably see many net beneficial side-effects, such as the increased production of solar panels for miners causing the cost of solar to decrease for the rest of the world. Finally, if mining ever gets so profitable that it warrants consuming much more than one percent of the world's production of electricity, then it means something would have pushed the value of cryptocurrencies very high. This something can only be a major event, such as the world realizing cryptocurrencies have enormous social and economic benefits. (I can't see speculation alone pushing and maintaining high prices long enough to matter.) If, on the other hand, cryptocurrencies turn out to be mostly useless, then their value will remain low, and miners will never consume excessive amounts of energy. You are basically worried about a non-problem. Miners will only use very large amounts of energy if cryptocurrencies are actually very useful for society, ie. if pros exceeds cons. |