[gcatellani2k]

Does anyone by chance have an article on hand comparing the carbon footprint of BitCoins (or any other crypto currency) vs. physical money. Physical money needs to be producef, distributed, collected, transferred, stored etc. I would just like to know the delta between both forms of currency. In my mind at least, without such facts, I have the feeling that cryptocurrencies are much worde for the environment and wouldn‘t want to support them, hence why I want something factual to support/disprove this. Thank you very much and please forgive my mediocre English.

[mckirk]

That would indeed be an interesting comparison. It's worth noting though that cryptocurrencies aren't automatically energy-hungry on the scale of Bitcoin. There are alternatives, such as the upcoming Ethereum 2.0 chain, that try to be more mindful of energy consumption through Proof of Stake instead of Proof of Work.

[jerrymiller]

Here you go: https://www.danheld.com/blog/2019/1/5/pow-is-efficent

[crtasm]

The way that's worded sounds like Bitcoin was designed with ASICs in mind - that isn't the case, is it?

[jerrymiller]

Satoshi has not envisioned ASICs, no. But it doesn't matter what Satoshi thinks/thought of. Bitcoin is not controlled by anyone; anyone can introduce a better way to mine/use it.

[gcatellani2k]

Thank you very much.

[africanboy]

there are estimates, but almost all of them are flawed and biased because the bitcoin crowd is making them. For example many consider the energy consumed by banks branches to light up the offices or by the air conditioning systems, as if bitcoins were mined in dark caverns self refrigerated.

Or they compare the total amount of energy consumed, but when making their calculations they "forget" to take into account that the total amount of money in circulation is around 80 trillion dollars (some sources say more, some less, I settled on the CIA estimates that are usually very precise ) directly employing million of workers (5 million only in Europe+USA), while bitcoin market cap is only 600 billion (rounded up by me) and employees zero workers.

Money is used everyday by billions in countless transactions (~1 billion transactions a day only counting CC), bitcoins owners are only 5 million and make only 300k transactions per day.

Also consider that bitcoins are designed to burn energy to exist, money works even if suddenly communications shut down or on a desert island in the middle of the ocean with no internet connection, you don't need to keep a copy of a public ledger of all the transactions and can be reused many times and recycled.