| A little late to the party, but here are my two cents. First of all I also want to mention "Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index" (https://www.cbeci.org). In my opinion it makes better comparisons (https://www.cbeci.org/comparisons/). The strongest hypothetical argument against the consumption is that Bitcoin incentivizes green energy. The mining operation is mostly interested in one thing: access to the cheapest electricity possible. Currently China is still subsidizing electricity, which has attracted a lot of Chinese miners and apparently is tolerated by the state. But in the longer run I believe that Bitcoin will be the thing that will allow investments into green energy on a big scale. This is currently only happening by e.g. governments guaranteeing a minimum electricity price with other horrible consequences (see Germany: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...). Bitcoin however provides the incentive by itself to invest into green energy. This also is regardless of the fact that where there are optimal conditions for green energy often no infrastructure is available to add it to the grid. Bitcoin only needs an internet connection and consumes energy on-site. Regarding arguments that compare transactions with energy spent (comparing apples-to-banana...), I will make a counter-comparison: "The amount of electricity consumed every year by always-on but inactive home devices in the USA alone" spends three times the energy of the Bitcoin network (see "Fun Facts" at https://www.cbeci.org/comparison). Comparing the energy consumption of a transaction is meaningless, because this transaction may enable thousands of off-chain transactions (see Lightning network) and vary in actually block-spent-size depending on if it aggregates many actual transactions or not. It also shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of energy went into it in the first place, since otherwise the whole point of Bitcoin, namely being open, borderless, censorship-resistant and neutral, wouldn't be possible. It's like saying that all the many maintenance checks of airplanes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_maintenance_checks) wastes so and so many hours and energy of engineers' work-time, just because you don't see that they make air travel safer. |