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by dsukhin 1955 days ago
It's worth comparing Bitcoin's proof of work to other schemes of maintaining currency value to understand this in a relative sense. The Military Industrial Complex which arguably is the mechanism by which the dollar maintains its position as the global reserve currency puts out 152MtCO2/yr [1].

Without making any judgement on if this ratio is reasonable: this is 3-5x more than BTC POW but arguably also contains other negative externalities like loss of life, etc.

[1] https://earther.gizmodo.com/groundbreaking-report-gives-us-a...
4 comments
snakeboy 1955 days ago
I don't really know much about bitcoin and how mining scales with the number of trades, but there are only a few million Bitcoin users, meanwhile there are billions of USD holders/users each of whom have (I'd guess) significantly more average daily transactions.

That's something like 5 orders of magnitude more activity with USD vs BTC.

So for something that is used upwards of 100,000x more and only takes 5x more energy, that'd be a win for USD, no?

This of course is all disregarding my strong skepticism that the excesses of the US Military is a reasonable proxy for the strength of the US dollar.

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deschutes 1955 days ago
Even if one accepts the theory of military power your argument puts forth, how is bitcoin any different? What part of reality prevents a better armed group from taking over bitcoin mines?

And for that matter, I don't accept the theory; it reeks of motivated reasoning to me.

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qeternity 1955 days ago
What in the eff...

That's quite an unbelievable leap. The USD infrastructure and it's energy needs is in no way dependent on reserve status. That's just grasping at straws.

The same plumbing handles a plethora of other, smaller currencies with many orders of magnitude better efficiency than BTC does (yeah yeah Lightning, off chain, blah blah).

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rspeele 1955 days ago
I can't wait till the whole world is using Bitcoin and we no longer have to spend money on militaries, banks, and investment companies.

At least I assume Bitcoin obviates all of those things since I keep seeing them brought up in comparison to Bitcoin's energy usage.

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