[ForHackernews]

I think you're being disingenuous. Bitcoin is fundamentally different from all of those other things in that it is deliberately designed to be as inefficient as possible. Proof of Work is a Red Queen's Race[0] where the difficulty keeps escalating and you have to keep pumping in more energy or else risk somebody else executing a 51% attack against you.

Not only do miners and printers work to make their processes more efficient and cheaper, but once the gold coins are minted or paper money is printed, they can be used for N transactions at extremely low cost per-transaction. Contrast this with bitcoin where EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION has to be bundled in a block, so every single transaction involves more energy than an average household uses in a week[1].

Imagine burning a whole tank of gasoline to pay for a cup of coffee and you'll start to see why Bitcoin is an ecological atrocity.

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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race

[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele...

[2] https://www.coindesk.com/carbon-footprint-bitcoin

[nyanloutre]

You forget that it would use the same energy to produce a 1MB block than a 1GB block

[UncleMeat]

And we've seen how controversial block size changes are.

[teh_infallible]

So few people understand this. Doubling blocksize doubles the capacity, and therefore the efficiency of the network.

[zaarn]

At the current efficiency level, the capacity would have to grow thousand-fold before it even approaches the efficiency needed. Not even lightning would provide the amount of capacity required IMO.

[VMG]

Not sure transactions have to be bundled in a block.