[edgefield0]

The fact that bitcoin mining on its own is now consuming as much electricity as the country of Argentina with no end in sight, as we are accelerating toward a climate change cliff, is sickening. Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.

[ssss11]

To give you the other side: It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US. Either Argentina doesnt use as much as you’d think or the US wastes a whole lot of power doing nothing. I’d argue thats way worse than mining bitcoin!

Anyway its a sensationalist statistic designed to arouse your response. I’d expect theres heaps of things more wasteful.. office building services running 24/7 comes to mind

[tomxor]

> It also uses less than all idle devices plugged in, in the US

I'd bet that _all_ idle "devices" in in the US are providing far more utility by being ready and available to do ... anything (you did say all), than bitcoin which is _only_ a vehicle for speculating on intrinsic value being used by a tiny minority.

Sorry but I'm fed up of these stupid comparisons, if bitcoin uses 0.56% of the worlds electricity, there are a maximum of 178 ways to divide up the rest... it's simply not on that scale of usefulness, _and_ it is not comparable to fucking visa because it doesn't serve the worlds transactions, no one buys coffee with bitcoin. It's also not comparable to the USD for the same reason. Everything you compare it to will be of more material value to the world and almost always consume less energy, even if it's icecream. </rant>

[undersuit]

How much energy does encrypting all our video transmissions cost? I don't care how efficient the hardware running HDCP is, it's still wasteful to do so for every application and it's not even to protect the users nor would it be effective in the current form as such.

[tomxor]

Encryption of video specifically is a bit narrow, but lets widen it a bit: we watch a lot of video, video is neat right? I wonder how much energy goes into the transmission of _all_ video on the entire planet? end-to-end, the encoding, the hosting, the network transmission, the decoding on billions of devices and lighting up all those LED backlights, (and the extra overhead added by copyright protection crap)...

It's got to be on a similar playing field right? i wouldn't be surprised if it was a little more than 0.56% globally. But look at how much _billions_ of people get out of it all over the world: entertainment, art, education, something to connect to people with... it has a huge and invaluable impact on society - i dare anyone to try compare that to Bitcoin (not blockchain, not the utopian crypto dream, but Bitcoin).

[bobviolier]

The digiconomist actually compared watching Youtube with a single bitcoin transaction (don't know the specifics and how accurate), but they said 1 btc transaction is the same as 51.000 hours of watching YouTube:

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

[trident5000]

Comparing BTC mining to a small country is just absurd. You could do the same with hundreds of other applications aside from YouTube like all social media servers, gaming, existing banking infrastructure, etc. Also Bitcoin arguably replaces gold which uses more energy and is more destructive to land (while using fossil fuels instead of mostly renewable energy like BTC). Lastly how much energy do we think the dollar which is backed by the US military uses per year? Id wager a lot more.

The pitchforks are out in this thread quite simply because people dont like other people outmaneuvering them in purchasing power but of course is disguised as a virtue signal.

[Natfan]

To clarify, that's fifty one thousand, correct? Some countries use a period (.) as their "digit group separator"[0], and others use a comma (,).

[0]: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/110693

[Wowfunhappy]

HDCP's energy usage is marginal, but yes, it's pointless and I'd very much like to kill it. More critically, I'd also like all mobile phones to receive software support for three times as long as what Apple currently provides, and I'd like to build more wind farms and stop shutting down nuclear plants.

None of this excuses Bitcoin.

[undersuit]

I don't know why Bitcoin needs to be excused.

[Consultant32452]

I know this is just a matter of opinion, but I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies that are manipulated to cyclically transition massive amounts of wealth from the poor to the wealthy.

Of course there's no guarantee that bitcoin or any of the other cryptos will resolve this issue for us, but they are our best chance at the moment.

[tomxor]

> I feel it would be hard to over-estimate the value in getting humanity off centrally planned currencies

That's not what this is about, Bitcoin has utterly failed at that mission, and nothing about cryptocurrencies necessitates computationally wasteful proof of work. The only reason Bitcoin is still popular is because of people using it for speculating, it's not a viable currency.

[IgorPartola]

Bitcoin is deflationary, isn’t it? How could it ever replace fiat if just by merely holding it you are guaranteed in the long run to increase value? You need mild inflation to get people to actually spend and not hoard. Bitcoin’s supply is fix so there is no point in ever spending it unless you want to cash out.

[trident5000]

Yeah because Ill never buy food and housing until I die because my currency is deflationary. That logic is so tired. Also the fact that you can convert US dollars to investments instantly instead of consuming basically extends the same situation, yet we still spend when we need to.

[solosoyokaze]

Bitcoin continues to grow at an enormous rate. It hasn't failed at anything. Soon BTC will surpass the value of gold. We are actually on our way to getting off fiat.

[mockingbirdy]

This. I've realized years ago that the current fiat system can be unsustainable because it's very hard for regulators to avoid the temptation of applying QE and other monstrosities. But I realized way too late that BTC is the vehicle to flee from that (in a simple way compared to moving physical assets across borders).

It already succeeded in helping rich people in China to bring their wealth out of control. This has maximum utility for a lot of people. I'm not sure what will come after the current financial system (and it most probably won't go anywhere and will co-exist for some years before crypto will be banned everywhere), but this new type of wealth transfer mechanism already gets used a lot. Everyone who distrusts the current financial system or is oppressed by their regime is interested in it.

I don't know how the world will look like (it'll probably be very hard to continue the current path because capital has found a new way to move across borders and avoid taxes, again) and I don't know if it's generally good for global society, but Pandora's box is open.

I agree with the energy discussion and that it's wasteful, but the utility of it (transacting without governmental permission) seems to be higher for the participants. And they don't care about its socioeconomic impact, they care about its utility for them (money for miners and speculators who keep BTC's value high and the network functional, permissionless transaction for the actual target audience / users of BTC). BTC was built for permissionless money transactions, the speculation is just a byproduct and everyone is focusing on it instead of looking at its actual value for its users.

edit for the sibling comments: You need BTC only to move your assets from one country/wallet to another. You can then move it to a stable coin like USDC and slowly and safely get it out of the crypto system without having to deal with the volatility. This takes you half an hour and you're done. It's currently an investment vehicle, but its utility comes from being able to get money from A to B regardless of government intervention. Even if BTC drops to $3k, it still has this value. Looking at the price of BTC is missing the point: it's more than $0 and you can do a transaction in 10 minutes and that is all that matters to move assets.

[Hiopl]

But that high value (and the volatile prices) is entirely the problem (coupled with other issues like the extremely low potential number of transactions per second). As it stands, Bitcoin will never be anything other than an investment vehicle. Maybe another cryptocurrency will be a suitable replacement for fiat, but right now and for the foreseeable future, crypto is still too niche, too complex and volatile. At most we're seeing banks extend their offerings with cryptocurrency, but none of it points to widespread replacement of fiat outright. There are too many institutional, technical and social barriers.

[tomxor]

> It hasn't failed at anything.

It has failed at being a usable currency, and not merely for socioeconomic reasons. A currency is more than just intrinsic value.

[rnestler]

> Soon BTC will surpass the value of gold

How would one measure that? The price of one bitcoin compared to the price of a kilogram of gold? That seems arbitrary. Total market value? Transaction volume?

[Consultant32452]

The computationally wasteful bit is a temporary problem for which solutions are already being created. The Lightning Network is one such effort.

Governments are already taking efforts to fight against crypto. The fact that bitcoin is classified as an "asset" is the government adding friction to using it. Every time you transact in bitcoin you have to put that on your taxes because there's some capital gains/loss. Of course, they don't talk about it as if that is an attack, but it is. And they wouldn't be attacking it if they weren't scared. It's surely not guaranteed, maybe not even likely, but it's still possible that we will win.

[dTal]

The computationally wasteful bit is the proof-of-work, which is an inherent part of bitcoin. The Lightning Network is just about scaling transactions.

Your government rant is a non-sequitor - bitcoin doesn't become any more efficient just because The Man doesn't like it.

[undersuit]

The first government to move their money onto a crypto us going to have massive control over their economy. Roll their own crypto, keep the keys that allow more money to be printed, have the ability to lock people out of their wallets on a whim? They could even extract taxation by running all the nodes and taking the transaction fees.

[oraphalous]

Having a reliable store of value - is itself extremely valuable. At least to me... and to quite a few others apparently, with more and more by the day.

[Stevvo]

Bitcoin is about as "reliable" as a store of value as a casino chip placed on black on the blackjack table.

Bitcoin has many virtues, but a "store or value" is demonstrably not one of them. Why do you, and many others, feel that it is in spite of its volatility?

[shawnz]

There are a few counterarguments to this.

> about as "reliable" as a store of value as a casino chip

Casino analogies are misleading because the problem with the casino is that the expected outcome is negative. The problem with the casino isn't the volatility.

There are plenty of stores of value which have extreme volatility but are still prized by investors, like real estate or artwork.

> demonstrably not one of them

We are talking about an asset class that has existed for about 1 decade. Nobody is really sure what it will be able to achieve, but its ability to act as a store of value seems promising. As more people form their opinion about this and other matters related to cryptocurrencies, we should expect the volatility to decrease. So the volatility at the current moment is not really a good indicator for the long-term volatility.

[whateveracct]

i can't believe this "store of value" hype pivot that BTC pulled actually worked

[shawnz]

Alternatively, there was no "hype pivot" and that's simply what the market decided they valued most about Bitcoin (for now).

[rzz3]

> than bitcoin which is _only_ a vehicle for speculating on intrinsic value being used by a tiny minority

That’s a bit simplistic and completely lacking in big picture perspective. You even underline “only” as if you’re very confident in what you’re saying. Please do some research.

[tomxor]

Oh sorry, please replace "only" with 99.9%. Because of $20 transaction fees, because of the trend of companies that once accepted it shunning it due to aforementioned ridiculous transaction fees, and finally due to numerous papers presenting a statistical analysis of bitcoin transaction behaviour and coming to the same conclusion e.g DOI: 10.1016/j.intfin.2017.12

[smeyer]

Yeah, but the rest of us don't have to put up with legions of people excitedly explaining about how idle devices are great and everyone else should idle more devices.

Bitcoin consuming massive amounts of electricity is bad. Idle devices consuming massive amounts of electricity is also bad.

[grifball]

Haha, but actually, you might have to put up with that soon. There's recent research on a blockchain technology called: "proof of space" which would require systems with large storage to idle for long periods of time I believe.

EDIT: proof of storage -> proof of space

[kevingadd]

Hey, at least that way all those empty apartments and houses being held as investments will get filled up with proof of space mining nodes

[bluescrn]

We need a way to prove the work was done using renewable energy

[Natfan]

Sure, you could get large Bitcoin miners to get certified with some authority, so that they can put a stamp on their website that tracks all of the transactions that were made with renewable energy.

However, people can, and will, lie and cheat for profit. In this case it's in the form of PR and playing nice with the Government, possibly for tax reasons.

We've seen this same story play out in the car industry[0], and that has far fewer (albeit far larger) players that need to be properly regulated.

So, from a technical perspective, how would you achieve this goal? Could one mathematically and cryptographically prove that the work was done using renewable energy? I don't know, that's something for someone much smarter than me to figure out.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

[grifball]

It sounds impossible, but I've read the abstract of this article which claims to provide a cryptographic proof of a physical object (nuclear warhead): https://www.pnas.org/content/113/31/8618

I'm not sure if this is possible to extrapolate to prove an energy generation process... But, it's exciting that a physical material can be cryptographically proven over a network (if I'm reading this abstract correctly).

[kfrzcode]

Bitcoin consumes electricity and creates a store of value, fungible, and with easy global transaction methods.

Your dangling iPods and Alarms Clock, however, are just hunks of junk, sitting around, highly illiquid.

[jazzabeanie]

Certainly not on a per gram basis...

[rcstank]

GP claimed that generating dollars using electricity is bad. Isn't that what the majority of companies are doing?

Edit: that's my whole point: mining BTC is generating value by verifying transactions. In turn, the miner gets paid for their work.

[AaronFriel]

Bitcoin consumers more power than entire nations' economies while generating so little value that I suspect my home town in Iowa would exceed the transaction rate on a daily basis. A moderately busy food district in a major city would exceed that every day. (I'm thinking roughly 100,000 people getting lunch or dinner in 1 hour ought to generate 13 to 27 times as many transactions/second as the entire Bitcoin network supports.)

Sure, there's bitcoin cash, lightning network stuff - but uhh, where's the beef? I mean, seriously, where are the users using Bitcoin at volume?

It seems like Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme for people mining (or HODLing) Bitcoin, not a store of value, not a mechanism of currency.

[shawnz]

Transaction rate is not the only possible way to judge the value a monetary system.

Also: Bitcoin's maximum possible transaction rate could be arbitrarily scaled up without impacting the electricity usage at all (but it would have other trade-offs not related to energy usage, which has made it hard to establish a consensus on the issue).

[AaronFriel]

> Bitcoin's maximum possible transaction rate could be arbitrarily scaled up without impacting the electricity usage at all

If it can, why hasn't it?

[vkou]

Transaction rate is the only possible way to judge the value of a monetary system.

A system where you essentially can't transact is economically dead. The health of an economy is measured by how quickly money flows in it, not in how wealthy a dragon sitting on a pile of gold can get.

It can be a speculative system, but that's far less useful than being a monetary system. Bitcoin is a terrible currency in the same way that houses, or diamond rings are a terrible currency. Settling transactions in them is slow and incredibly expensive.

[lallysingh]

They're moving money out of their countries past currency export controls.

[kfrzcode]

The BTC market cap is around $650 billion. I don't understand your logic.

[AaronFriel]

Market cap is not a meaningful measure of a currency. A better measure is the velocity of money within a currency.

For context, just one part of the US economy is the stock market. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) which came up in the news recently processed $2.15 quadrillion in securities in 2019.

The 30 day average for estimated transactions in Bitcoin is around 5-6 billion, or still around 1/1000th just one art of the US economy's transaction volume.

At 5 transactions per second, the average transaction size would have to be around $1,268,2308 to equal the velocity of just one portion of one sector of the US economy. 5 transactions per second is actually higher than the average transaction throughput over the past several years.

[xur17]

No it isn't.

[cortesoft]

No, creating new dollars is just updating a database at the fed, basically.

There are no companies that generate dollars. That would be counterfeiting.

[Matticus_Rex]

> There are no companies that generate dollars

Other than banks. Banks generate new dollars through fractional reserve lending, though they also destroy them.

[jki275]

The fed certainly generates new dollars.

[cortesoft]

Yeah, and they aren’t a ‘company’

[sudosysgen]

Companies generate dollars by first generating things that some people find useful. Just generating dollars by themselves should be done with the smallest possible amount of electricity.

[bluescrn]

Or they generate dollars by trading and speculating but not actually creating anything. How much power is used worldwide by stock trading, HFT, etc?

[sudosysgen]

I agree that this is an issue, but I don't think that's anywhere near what Bitcoin uses.

[shawnz]

Bitcoin's energy usage is proportional to its market value so you might say it always uses the smallest possible amount of energy (given the current valuation).

We have yet to see if alternative systems like proof-of-stake can gain the same trust and replace proof-of-work while actually consuming less energy in practice. I'm hopeful though.

[sudosysgen]

Creating currency by itself does not create any value.

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

It's unclear how much value is being created by Bitcoin vs how much is being captured/transferred from elsewhere.

Plenty of reasonable people likely think that Bitcoin doesn't create any value.

[airstrike]

Companies are generating value, not dollars.

[Closi]

No, companies do not create new money. They create goods and services in order to generate value/profit.

[jld]

Banks are companies and their service is to create new money.

[Closi]

Banks that are for-profit companies add to the money supply (via loans) but don't 'create new money' in the same sense as mining Bitcoin.

Mining bitcoin is most similar to a central bank printing/issuing money (except it's issued to the person that can waste the most electricity or show proof of stake rather than being issued selectively by the central government).

Banks can add to the money supply by lending out money which has been saved in them by others, but there is nothing unique to fiat currencies about this, and the same can be done with Bitcoin or other crypto. I suspect you wouldn't say that 'banks can create new bitcoins without mining', but that's the same thing as saying 'banks can create new money without printing it'.

[cosmodisk]

It's not sensationalist at all. Just because idle devices in the US consume the same amount, it doesn't become less important. It's still absurd amount of energy that could be used for much much better purposes. Another good example, albeit on much greater scale is Youtube, which already uses 1% of the world's electricity output.

[hulahoof]

A good idea in theory that hasn't seem to have taken off in any major way is designing a PoW that is mobile device optimised so that the consensus can be driven by idle phones that are charging etc., Major problem being how can you ensure that the miners are indeed an idle device instead of a dedicated server farm. I have a feeling PoS such as in ADA or ETH 2.0 will likely emerge as the front runner in the next decade (by usage, BTC will likely hold top spot in total market cap for a while to come)

[sailingparrot]

Ah yes the good old "but something worse already exists therefore it is ok" argument. Always very effective.

[cortic]

more like; "but the amount of electricity is so insignificant to us that we use more doing absolutely nothing"

[read_if_gay_]

GP didn’t conclude “therefore it is ok”.

[trident5000]

More like theres hundreds of things in the world that use more energy than BTC like gaming, gold mining, existing banking infrastructure, social media servers, etc - and the comparison is stupid in the first place. People just want to virtue signal because they dont like other people getting ahead of them and they didnt invest. Thats the crux of the outrage just like people get into stock investment wars.

[fendy3002]

Rate of growth. For bitcoin to be useful as currency, it needs to be used by many more people, while idle devices may not grow much more.

However idle devices power consumption also needs to be addressed.

[christophilus]

Streetlights/ night time lights which (besides often consuming fossil fuels) have the additional feature of ruining the night sky for stargazers, insects, nocturnal animals, etc.

[playingchanges]

How about empty cruise ships running off generators. Or all the oven lights left on accidentally across the world every night lol.

I wonder how much electricity California will be consuming when we stop selling gas cars and go all electric...

[Griffinsauce]

This kind of whataboutist counterargument is so tired and asinine. Multiple things can be bad. Bad things do not cancel each other out.

If someone is murdered in one city, that doesn't suddenly become less bad when someone else is murdered in another.

[thamer]

It really is terrible, and many enthusiasts don't seem to understand enough about Bitcoin to even realize it. For so many it's just a way to make a quick buck when Elon tweets about it.

To put in in numbers, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index[1] (they link to other research that arrive at similar conclusions, if not worse): the total footprint is almost 37 million tons of CO2, a single transaction accounting for over 300 kg. A single transaction requires the same amount of energy as an average household over 22 days, or emits the same amount of CO2 as a 2020 Civic driving 1,000 miles.

The comparison with the visa network is just as wild: a single bitcoin transaction takes more energy than 432,000 visa transactions.

At this point it's highly irresponsible to continue using and supporting Bitcoin.

[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[varajelle]

Take the cost of your house, divide by the amount of time you enter your house through the door. You get the price each time you get into your house. For a 300k$ house and entering the house twice a day for 20 years that's about 20$ each time you enter your house.

Does not make sense? Of course not because dividing the amount of electricity used to mine a block by the amount of transactions also doesn't make sense.

[vkou]

No, what you're saying makes no sense for a different reason. When you buy a house, you don't take $300,000 and set it on fire.

If you, after 20 years, sell that house for $600,000, does that mean that you were paid $20, each time you entered your house?

A bitcoin transaction, on the other hand, is quite literally a colossal waste of electricity, to enable an incredibly small amount of value (Settling one transaction.)

You may be able to argue that it also enables another kind of value (A bunch of bitcoin hoarders getting rich), but that's not value that's of relevance to literally anyone else in the world.

Look, you can make an argument that traditional billionaires help the world by much handwaving of invisible hands efficiently allocating resources in open markets.

What second order forms of value for the world does the existence of bitcoin speculators create?

[oraphalous]

"and many enthusiasts don't seem to understand enough about Bitcoin to even realize it."

Yeah because - smart people in the bitcoin space NEVER spent any time thinking about energy consumption.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T0OUIW89II

[bookmarkable]

Sickening? Really? Don't you find it interesting that currency free of nation-state regulators would be attacked as anti-environmental?

These same regulators would love to steer policy and public opinion by calling something that reduces their influence bad for the climate, even if such a thing is run on clean energy, solar, etc. That seems suspicious.

Beware of what -isms you are repeating and supporting - they are very likely aligned with other -isms you would not support, or are a root cause of the issue you care about in the first place. Environmentalism is no exception.

Overall, blockchain currency has the ability to help humanity. If that requires more power, well, so does everything. I'd focus on how to generate that power renewably, not to argue against a technology that millions in the unbanked world could use to better their situation. I'd suggest you learn more about the problems that present cryptocurrency as a potential solution before just listing new problems.

[jboog]

I've been hearing for almost a decade how Bitcoin was going to change the world and help humanity and yet...nothing. Other than some speculators and early adopters getting rich.

I've yet to hear of anything "world-changing" BTC could do that isn't already done better by traditional systems.

[SuoDuanDao]

BTC shouldn't be conceptualised as a killer app but a proof-of-concept. The world-changing thing the technology can do is eliminate graft, and I'm fine with it taking a while to get there.

Meantime, it's useful to keep track of who is most vocally against a technology that could eliminate graft.

[solosoyokaze]

For the past 10 years you could have kept your money in a savings account or Bitcoin. One of those has been decimated by a fiat printing press, the other has been a great investment.

Bitcoin has already changed humanity for the better and it's only getting started.

[qeternity]

> For the past 10 years you could have kept your money in a savings account or Bitcoin.

The classic false dichotomy by people peddling crypto. Nobody is keeping their money in a savings account. There are productive investments that aren't crypto.

[solosoyokaze]

What asset class has returned value like crypto for the past 10 years? None.

[qeternity]

Ok, is Bitcoin a super speculative investment, or a savings account? Now you're just moving goal posts.

Ironically, crypto's returns are all due to Tether...which is purely inflationary printing. USDT is what you'd get with the USD if the Fed were run by actual criminals.

Let's chat in a year.

[jboog]

This is an asinine argument.

The risk profile of Crypto vs an index fund is exponentially worse.

What you should care about is what asset provides you the best return with the lowest risk.

At any time in history you can look back at the past ten years and say "Clearly X stock was the best choice for investors and you're foolish to claim otherwise!"

[throwaway829]

I’m pro crypto but this statement could of been made during the tulip mania. I think the better argument is being free from central bank devaluation of hard earned savings.

[adriancr]

Stock market... derivatives...

[jlmorton]

> One of those has been decimated by a fiat printing press, the other has been a great investment

How has the US dollar been destroyed? It has enjoyed remarkable price stability, very close to the target rate, which is what everyone expects and can plan for.

The other has seen astronomical, wild price swings, which no one could plan for, and while it's currently enjoying a high value (just as tulips once did), it was worth 95% less just 10 months ago - and probably will be again soon.

[solosoyokaze]

The dollar has absolutely been destroyed. Housing, health care... true inflation is rampant.

> The other has seen astronomical, wild price swings, which no one could plan for, and which is currently enjoying a high price (just as tulips once did), but which was worth 95% less just 10 months ago - and probably will be again soon.

People have been saying this at their own expense for a decade.

[jlmorton]

Housing costs are not high because the dollar has been debased. They're high because of high demand and lack of supply in many urban locations, primarily because of local zoning and permitting processes.

If housing were expensive because the dollar had lost value, then you would expect it to be cheap to buy a house in SF in some other form of currency. But it's not, no matter what medium of exchange you want to use, it's still expensive.

And there are of course lots of locations with significant supply where housing in the US is dirt cheap, like Detroit.

Health care is more complex, but the same general idea applies. Whether you pay in USD, or anything else, it's still expensive.

[ben-schaaf]

You can make the same claim for putting all your money in TSLA. Just because it has had good return in hinesight doesn't mean it wasn't an extremely high-risk investment.

[fchu]

Having great returns and improving humanity are very different things. I'm pretty sure a lot of scams are benefiting their creators very well, and yet...

[solosoyokaze]

Having great returns when the alternative is to let the government wipe out your savings, is actually a benefit to humanity.

[wtfrmyinitials]

If people can print money, they will.

[DeRock]

While not world changing, it did allow for the paying for of illicit drugs over the internet. Silkroad was the peak of bitcoin usability IMO (regardless of my moral perspective on the matter). Ever since, its slowly transitioned into a Ponzi scheme built on the back of future "decentralized finance" promises.

[tomc1985]

How is this a rebuttal to being accused of using more power than a substantially-sized country and offering little in return for it?

Like, at least the current fiat model actually works for most people.

[qeternity]

> Beware of what -isms you are repeating and supporting

> Overall, blockchain currency has the ability to help humanity. If that requires more power, well, so does everything.

You jump immediately into whataboutism: what about all the other things that require power.

Bitcoin is not beyond criticism. It is currently 99.99% used for speculation. Does it have potential? Absolutely. Do a number of competing non-PoW/non-blockchain based solutions also have potential? Yes. Do those competitors potentially use far less energy? Also yes.

In the best case, Bitcoin is using a metric shit-ton of energy before actually hitting critical mass for its social use-cases. In its worst case, its a Tether-backed ponzi that is siphoning a tremendous amount of energy from more productive uses.

[thatfrenchguy]

> These same regulators would love to steer policy and public opinion by calling something that reduces their influence bad for the climate, even if such a thing is run on clean energy, solar, etc. That seems suspicious.

This is textbook conspiracy theory here. Don't forget that even if bitcoin was running 100% on renewable energy (which it definitely is not), the added load on the grid definitely causes coal/gas plants to fire up and make the grid CO2 emissions of the country where people mine bitcoin to get worse.

I don't buy the decentralised argument either, more than 51% of the hashrate is in China and the government can decide to shut all of this down the day they want to reduce their unproductive CO2 emissions.

[simias]

Bitcoin is barely a currency. Its deflationary nature is the main reason it's been somewhat successful so far (because it rewards early adopters) but it's also be its demise (because nobody wants to spend a "currency" today that's by design going to be more valuable tomorrow).

Cryptocurrencies is what happens when libertarian techbros try do "disrupt" basic financial systems without taking the time to figure out how it's really working.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Peaple saying that embracing bitcoin is going to create a fairest world for all are either deluded or trying to sell you something.

In 2017 hundreds of projects (be it premined coins or "ICOs") got literally billions of dollars for all sorts of revolutionary projects. What are the results? Where's the revolution? Why am I know posting on HN through the blockchain?

11 years on and still no use case besides pyramid schemes and buying drugs online. Great job folks.

[seibelj]

MakerDAO, Synthetix, Cosmos, Polkadot... all of these are working and did ICOs. Ethereum itself was an ICO. Crypto is wildly successful by any metric.

[willbudd]

Proof-of-work =/= cryptocurrency. There are cryptocurrencies that work without proof-of-work, and those that quantitatively rely on it to a far lesser degree.

Honestly, it continues to surprise me how clueless most of HN commenters are on this topic.

[kevingadd]

Point to a real production cryptocurrency using proof-of-stake right now. All the big ones are still using PoW and we're what, over a decade in to the history of cryptocurrency?

Once even one of the major chains is on Proof of Stake or Proof of Space or something we can talk about how associating cryptocurrency with PoW is unfair. AFAIK the closest we've come is that Ethereum people started experimenting with proof of stake in December? Things like that are progress but don't do anything to put a dent into the massive electricity and resource squeezes being created by cryptocurrencies.

[djamrozik]

Eth 2.0 will be fully PoS (released fully in the next year or two, but staking is possible now).

Cardano, Cosmos, Polkadot are a few protocols that are PoS but are still very early in their development.

> "we're what, over a decade in to the history of cryptocurrency"

I would argue that's not long at all. The internet was technically invented in the 1960s (ARPANET) and TCP/IP went global in the early 1980s. Took a while for things to get to where we are now.

[willbudd]

Ripple, Nxt, etc have been around since 2012-ish or earlier. Ancient technology, basically.

[kevingadd]

Wasn't aware of those ones, thanks. It's a shame they're not even in the top 100 by volume.

[saltyfamiliar]

Ripple (XRP) has the 5th highest market cap and volume of any cryptocurrency, but it's very unpopular on a cultural level because it's basically centralized.

[kevingadd]

That's fascinating, I ctrl-f'd for Ripple on a couple charts since I hadn't heard of it and it wasn't on them. Do crypto sites omit it because it's unpopular or viewed as not a blockchain due to being centralized?

[cardanome]

Ripple has still the fifth biggest market cap.

If you look at the five biggest coins by market cap (excluding USDT which is just digital Dollar) then three of them use proof of stake, Cardano, Polkadato and Ripple. Ethereum is actively transitioning to proof of stake.

Bitcoin is the ONLY outlier. Though also the biggest market.

[galangalalgol]

I'm old and clueless. Is proof of stake related to anonymity in any way? I read something about dealers in contraband switching from btc to monero among others for that reason.

[Geee]

Ripple is not proof-of-stake. It uses traditional consensus with trusted validators. It's basically a fiat currency that is run by a corporation to benefit them.

[ROARosen]

Ripple (aka XRP) is number 5

[wmf]

Avalanche isn't that big yet but it's in production and running DeFi.

[intotheabyss]

They also recently had network issues for three days

[xur17]

Tezos uses proof-of-stake and launched a little over 2 years ago.

[coolestguy]

It really is pretty bewildering how many top comments here show almost 0 understanding of the technology.

How many other topics that get posted here have the same thing happening??

[notjtrig]

That's a very good point. It is sort of demonised in the media but tech people understand encryption and cracking, phreaking, p2p networks, finge topics are our speciality. An intrested mind does not sit in front of a powerful research platform to claim ignorance year after year. People in tech disporportantly ignore crypto and it's a shame.

Why would we want to create another currency system when we feel enslaved to the first one but at the same time aware we are the minority of people, and hold an incredible privilege.

It's easier to pretend you don't understand, or just don't think about it, look the other way and suck on those corporate titties to the tune of 250k USD/year because that's the attitude that got us to the top.

[SuoDuanDao]

I have a theory that Hacker News is sufficiently influenced by the investor class that anything disrupting their business model gets special treatment quite outside the site's usual techno-optimist repertoire.

[hddu]

Wow it's almost like the media is all propaganda and lies, people on the internet claim to be smart while they don't really understand what they are talking about, wow who knew. (Yes I include myself in the pulling shit out my ass on the internet group)

[Nition]

That fact just makes the enormous use of power on Bitcoin look even worse though. The main rebuttal to the Bitcoin power complaint is "but it's useful as a decentralised currency." If there are other cryptocurrencies out there doing the same thing using orders of magnitude less power, where does that put Bitcoin?

We have a technology that takes thousands - by some measures hundreds of thousands - of times as much power as existing networks for one transaction, that isn't used in a practical day-to-day sense anywhere, and many people are still defending Bitcoin specifically as a successful currency. How much power does it have to consume, how few real-world uses does it have to have, before everyone agrees it could really do with some improvements?

[hulahoof]

Bitcoins usefulness is not just in its utility, but also it's creation and governance. When you highly value a decentralized, trust-less environment it's hard to look past the decade long success that the Bitcoin experiment has been.

Convincing users to migrate to 'alt coins' requires longevity of these chains, amongst other qualities, to prove they can be successors.

[Nition]

I guess what I'm trying to say is, the arguments in these threads mostly go like:

* User A: Bitcoin is bad, it uses tons of electricity.

* User B: Bitcoin is great, and [other thing] uses just as much electricity.

And I'm just confused why User B never says something like "Bitcoin is great, but I agree it really needs to use less power and allow for more transactions."

[intotheabyss]

Because to change Bitcoin means to fork Bitcoin, and 2017 has shown that the community does not want to hard fork to update the consensus of the chain. A bigger question is how will Bitcoin deal with securing the chain once miners rely primarily on transaction fees; especially considering Bitcoin can't scale. Another factor is that spent addresses release public address information which is susceptible to quantum attack exploits. I'm bullish on cryptocurrency (like Ethereum) but bearish long-term on Bitcoin. However, one thing Bitcoin is used for currently is as a decentralized collateral. You can wrap Bitcoin and deposit it on Ethereum and lend it out for interest. This is a fairly good use case in the short term, but Bitcoin the blockchain is not sustainable longterm.

[Nition]

Yeah, good answer. I hope Ethereum can make a full transition to Proof Of Stake. I remember they were already talking about it being close when I was looking into it in 2017.

[akra]

As one of the clueless novices on this topic what I fail to understand is that proof-of-stake and other consensus mechanisms have been available for alt-coins now for a little while - yet BTC is still dominant. Is it just because of popularity of BTC? If so I struggle to understand how the market is rational here (not saying it has to be). And do other coins/forks issued with similar rules/characteristics cause a price decrease in BTC due to fungibility? The confusion you speak of may come because people see BTC as the successful coin and see other alternatives may have weaknesses that "are priced in". As a novice, because I assume there's no free lunch, other currencies not using PoW could have weaknesses that BTC does not have hence the price. For better or worse the most successful coin determines what people see as the successful approach to crypto at the time.

To your point I've also seen that some coins may still prefer PoW, and may have mitigated many of the disadvantages of it (e.g. made it harder to centralise mining).

[willbudd]

Imagine you have created a new social media webapp with a few innovative new features not seen elsewhere. Would that spell doom for a now suddenly inferior Facebook/Twitter/etc. Possibly, but the network effect in terms of inertia and critical mass makes that an unlikely proposition.

Moreover, the driving force behind Bitcoin keeping it ahead of the pack so far is the promise of short/medium term profit as an investment vehicle due to the artificial scarcity of its deflationary algorithm. Other cryptocurrencies are better positioned toward forming a long-term solution as a low overhead global decentralized payment platform, but what they offer is more of a collective benefit rather than a strong monetary incentive to any individual backer/investor on an individual level. (Which arguably is just an emergent property of human greed within the regime of unchecked capitalism.)

[akra]

The thing is for me, and maybe that's an opinion, is that the investment vehicle due to scarcity is the more important utility right now. Given all the QE and low interest rates across the board worldwide that is the real value prop. There is a need for an asset such as this to preserve wealth, and other assets such as gold have market mechanisms to stop them running away too far I think (e.g. gold certificates, reserve banks willing to liquidate, etc).

In first world countries for most people I would argue for all its faults the banking system is "good enough". In my local country can send money to people almost real time and pay by card quickly and easily without fees. Sure there is still room for improvement, but for most average people the need to change is low. Especially when I still need the banking system as "primary" to pay my taxes, settle my bills, etc - you know all the "real stuff".

[philjohn]

That's all well and good, but Bitcoin is the de facto cryptocurrency - the one everyone has heard of, and still the most popular.

[blurbleblurble]

It shouldn't be though, and it's gonna take influential cryptocurrency people wising up fast to divest from btc into those other projects before righteous public sentiment gets used by central banks against all cryptocurrency projects. All of their effort and hype will be entirely in vain if they don't think hard and fast about the real human impacts of what they're investing in.

[kevingadd]

The cause and effect you describe hasn't applied to significant investors in oil or coal up to this point that I'm aware of, despite the disastrous effect those two revenue sources have had on the environment. I'm not sure why Bitcoin would be significantly different when its negative externalities are effectively invisible and a bunch of the mining occurs in mystery data-centers overseas, outside of the reach of central banks.

[davidmurdoch]

Ethereum is used more than bitcoin (measured in transactions per day), so that'd make it more likely to be considered the de facto cryptocurrency, no? It'd also make it more "popular" with cryptocurrency users, though definitely not as well known by the layman.

[philjohn]

I'd argue the one that sees the largest "value" of transactions per day.

[davidmurdoch]

Ethereum is used as a computer, but it can also be a way to transfer value. So I don't agree on using that as a that metric.

It would seem that Bitcoin is more popular amongst those who don't use cryptocurrencies, and Ethereum is more popular amongst those who are. Just a thought.

[tromp]

> There are cryptocurrencies that work without proof-of-work

And they don't have a fair distribution mechanism. They exist primarily to make their creators rich.

[willbudd]

Those two statements capture perfectly what I think of Bitcoin too with its ridiculously deflationary block reward-halving algorithm.

Anyway, yes, I agree that 99% percent of existing cryptocurrency implementations are at least partially affected by short-sighted greed.

However, I think it's important to note that there is no technological constraint preventing the potential success of more egalitarian implementations. In that sense, it's at least disappointing to see technological potential for societal benefit being so categorically dismissed due to the flaws of early prototypes such as Bitcoin.

[tromp]

I agree reward halving help to concentrate the wealth on early adopters. The simplest and arguably fairest emission would just fix the block subsidy. I'm aware of only one coin that has adopted such an emission.

[ajmurmann]

The real solution here is not complaining about individual use cases of energy, but effective carbon pricing. Wit cap & trade on a global level, this wouldn't be an issue. Of course there seems no political will nor ability to make this happen any time soon.

[vinger]

The big miners in China and Iceland are using hydro and geothermal. Pricing the other miners out might have some interesting side effects.

[exyi]

China is relying heavily on coal power (AFAIK, can't find reliable source quickly). Iceland has clean energy, but in contrary to the popular wisdom "only" ~30% is geothermal, most is hydro. See https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/IS for more detail.

[hulahoof]

They are taking about the miners, not the grid as a whole. There are some massive operation utilising hydro setups in the middle of nowhere that were otherwise unused

[kevingadd]

In some cases miners literally steal electricity or other resources to mine, so carbon pricing won't affect scenarios like that [1]. Maybe we can treat those as a rounding error... At the point where miners are willing to do things like build a transformer station you're in wild territory way beyond a neighbor tapping into your cable line for free TV. If the money's good, what's stopping a connected miner from bribing the right people to get a discount on electricity and skip the carbon tax?

[1] https://modernconsensus.com/cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/russian...

[wmf]

what's stopping a connected miner from bribing the right people to get a discount on electricity and skip the carbon tax?

International sanctions. Civilize or die.

[young_unixer]

Maybe we should blame the defenders of constant inflation and government overreach. You mentioned Argentina, which is a prime example of these problems.

If we didn't have those problems in the first place, Bitcoin wouldn't be as attractive.

[Moodles]

What % of bitcoin owners own it for political reasons along your lines, compared to people just using it as an investment?

[saltyfamiliar]

I'd argue it doesn't actually matter. People only buying it as an investment vehicle is still enough to push into mainstream awareness and increase it's level of adoption and usefulness, and at its core, the reason it's an attractive investment in the first place is because it's deflationary, digital and decentralized.

[iamricks]

Well, since you can own bitcoin anonymously, any answer to this question other than “i don’t know” will have a huge margin of error

[jki275]

Bitcoin isn't anonymous at all. It's at best pseudonymous, but even that is pretty easy to break. There are companies who do nothing but provide analysis services that link real people to bitcoin addresses.

[vinger]

They haven't uncovered who created bitcoin yet. While working with exchanges accounts can be linked to a person. The ability to do this at scale or find any person from any account isn't real.

[jki275]

Sure it is.

Chainalysis does it all the time.

Satoshi left the scene without ever cashing anything out, and before blockchain analysis really became a thing. He's not relevant to modern bitcoin at all outside of having been a founder of it a long time ago.

If he were spending bitcoin today, he could be found and identified easily, which is likely why he (actually the conglomerate that posed as him, Satoshi isn't likely a person) left once he achieved his goals.

[willbudd]

Whether or not you can pay/receive currency anonymously has nothing to do with whether or not you can contribute source code and/or whitepapers anonymously.

[Antipode]

How would a completely unregulated currency be better in that regard? Aren't the wild swings in bitcoin price essentially hyperinflation/deflation?

[gruez]

It depends entirely on your time horizon. USD might be more stable day-to-day, but has lost 32.3% of its value in the past 20 years. This is just with CPI, if you're comparing to asset prices this is probably much worse.

[Antipode]

I was talking more about hyperinflation specifically, rather than the normal ~2% annual inflation targets. I don't understand how lack of monetary policy would prevent hyperinflation.

[blurbleblurble]

It's hard to see it as anything but that because cryptocurrency people don't collectively realize the gravity of the PR disaster they have on their hands. Central banks are looking for reasons to shut down the whole cryptocurrency space and in an ignorant public's eye, bitcoin's absurd energy waste is a perfect reason to do just that.

Where is the coinmarketcap-like tool that indexes cryptocurrency projects' energy (in)efficiencies and e-waste footprints? Where is the tool that's easy to use and shows how efficient cryptocurrency projects are in real time? Without that, the whole space is in serious jeopardy, including those few projects that actually have the potential to benefit people and the planet.

[solosoyokaze]

Bitcoin is probably the most important social/technological innovation since the internet (which uses how much energy?). Most people realize that moving humanity forward requires energy. There's loud neo-luddite contingent that missed the boat on crypto (it's actually not too late), but I wouldn't take angry anti-crypto HN comments as public sentiment. The public is in desperate need of a finance system not tied to the existing oppressive establishment.

[SantalBlush]

This is such a vague explanation of bitcoin's usefulness that I'm even more glad to use US dollars after reading it. "Most important social/technological innovation since the internet." "Moving humanity forward." "Not tied to the existing oppressive establishment." These are not real, concrete reasons for anyone to switch to bitcoin. These are statements I would expect to hear from someone who is trying to recruit me into a pyramid scheme.

[throwaway829]

People who save in FedBucks are no closer to owning a home in California. If you’re saving in FedBucks you’re treading water as the printer goes burrrr. Mostly likely you know saving in FedBucks is a fool’s errand and convert your money to Wall Street assets. Crypto is an alternative store of purchasing power that’s not currently run by New York bankers.

[nietzsch3]

Bitcoin uses 7% of the energy the global banking system uses and its energy use doesn't scale with adoption

[K0nserv]

Does that follow? Surely as Bitcoin becomes more and more valuable there's more and more incentive to mine and the more entranched it becomes more important to defend against 51% attacks become.

It seems to me that what has happened historically i.e. ever more people starting to mine will continue as long as Bitcoin remains valuable.

[nietzsch3]

Yeah and I simply don't see 51% attacks working or going on for long periods of time due to adoption and game theory. Nation states simply can't afford gain 51% because it would mean they're already losing legitimacy of their currency IMO.

[mrb]

Please realize that Argentina uses slightly more energy than a single hydroelectric power station like the Itaipu Dam (103 TWh/year).

A single dam.

So, really the comparison is more a testament of how little electricity Argentina uses.

[fifilura]

That is not just any "single" dam, but the world's second largest.

The largest dam in Sweden, which is my reference, a country where hydro is the biggest source of electricity, produces 2TWh/y.

(And sadly much of that energy now goes to heavily subsidized Facebook and Google servers because it is cool to have those companies in your town, and collect income tax from the 10-ish people that work there)

[Symbiote]

That is the second largest hydroelectric dam is the world.

Pick the Netherlands instead for the comparison, which has similar consumption to Argentina.

[mrb]

That is still a single dam.

A whole country could be powered by a single dam.

[fifilura]

The number of places where you can build a dam is limited, and when you find one it is not unlikely that you have to relocate > 1 million people to build it (Three Gorges Dam). That is on the other side of the scale you are talking about.

[mrb]

The point is about making a comparison. When Bitcoin's energy consumption is equaled to that of a single dam, it just doesn't seem that impressive.

[notjtrig]

The USD is backed by military might and risk of invasion, this is known as the petrodollar it currently requires a US military that uses the equivalent resources as 140 countries.

If you consider 98 million barrels per year used by the military to protect 1.5 trillion USD, every million in the bank uses 65.5 gallons of oil per year.

[colinmorelli]

You're really attributing the entirety of the US military's oil consumption strictly to the preservation of US currency? That's quite disingenuous. Did I miss the part where moving to cryptocurrency will eliminate the need for a military?

[analog31]

The entire economic and technology infrastructure of the world is backed up by military power. I believe we should talk about all three things: Military expenditure, energy usage, and money systems. All can be improved or made more efficient independent of the others to a substantial degree.

The things that are worth buying with bitcoins are still largely produced by the conventional economy.

[rcstank]

How much energy is consumed by online banking? Big Tech in general? These are sincere questions.

[kevingadd]

If you google search "how much power is used by online banking" there are multiple analyses answering this question for you along with consumption estimates for Bitcoin. One pro-bitcoin one from my first 4 results attempts to estimate all the power consumption for every bank server, branch office, and ATM 24/7 around the entire globe and produces an estimate of 140TWh/yr vs bitcoin's (at the time) 32.56 TWh/yr estimate. You can compare their average transaction values for yourself to decide how favorable this comparison actually is for bitcoin.

An article I read today provides a comparison point for realtime transaction processing, Fedwire, along with its transaction volumes and server count. It's interesting to compare that with Bitcoin's volumes. The article also makes claims about the energy consumption (suggesting FAANG's energy consumption is already dwarfed by Bitcoin) but I can't manually verify those myself: https://www.ofnumbers.com/2021/02/14/bitcoin-and-other-pow-c...

The above article estimates a best case total of 55.1 TWh/year for the major Proof of Work chains, and also provides estimates for various types of mining equipment, etc.

[philjohn]

A single bitcoin transaction uses ~ 600,000x as much energy as a single transaction on the Visa network.

[shawnz]

Bitcoin's energy usage isn't determined by the transaction count but by its valuation. Raising the limit of transactions on the Bitcoin network wouldn't affect the energy consumption (but it would have other trade-offs).

[kevingadd]

Aren't there significant technological obstacles to raising the transaction limit, not to mention the fact that large miners have actively obstructed attempts to raise it in the past? My understanding is that we only finally got a block size increase with segwit in 2017 and that only happened after people worked around miner sabotage.

[shawnz]

There are no technological obstacles per se, but it will increase the rate which the size of the blockchain grows.

It's true miners have obstructed attempts to make these kind of changes but they don't control the price of Bitcoin. If market demand for a higher transaction rate becomes great enough and they don't adapt, then another coin with bigger blocks will simply outcompete Bitcoin.

[kfrzcode]

Do you have a source to cite here?

[hggh]

The goal of cryptocurrency is not to substitute online banking but the entire banking system. How much energy does that consume?

[xtian]

> Given this fact alone it's hard to see cryptocurrency as anything but a selfish crackpot scheme to generate a few dollars at the expense of humanity and our planet.

You could say the same thing about the US military, which is the world's single largest producer of CO2 emissions.

[opinologo]

You know what else consumes heaps of electricty? Your computer, your data centre, your AWS account the bank services you consume, your appliances and a large etcetera.

Bitcoin is the first financial break-through in a long, long time. Is designed to move control away from the few back into the hands of the people. In Argentina people love investing in Bitcoin because their currency is awful. It loses value because the government can print more. Just like in the US. No government can print more Bitcoin so the value keeps growing.

Bitcoin alternatives like Bitcoin cash (or regular Bitcoin but with a bigger block size) can be used across the border without censorship. Remember MasterCard banning donations to Wikileaks? Bitcoin cannot be banned.

Back to your comment. Now we have solar, we have wind power. All clean sources of energy. They are cheaper than coal and can power everything. Including Bitcoin.

[IntFee588]

This is precisely why Ethereum and its new proof-of-stake mechanism will take over as the dominant currency in the next few years.

I wouldn't expect crypto to disappear. The market is currently worth $1.5 trillion, people will fight for its adoption to keep their investment.

[cableshaft]

It very well might. Bitcoin has first mover, an easier and better name, and more awareness behind it, but ETH might eventually take over. I'm rooting for both (and for bitcoin to eventually find a better solution to its power issues).

[AngryData]

Is that any worse than our culture of disposable items that have no business being disposable? Washing machines, dishwashers, and dryers have no reason to not last 25 years, they haven't changed how they function in over 50 years. And all the smaller consumer crap that works maybe a dozen times before an irreparable part or piece fails. Or how many working cars were destroyed in cash for clunkers only to be replaced by trash that is harder to repair and maintain?

Using energy on "worthless" cryptocoins isn't great but we produce tons of other worthless shit using tons of energy and materials that will be worth nothing in just a few years without blinking an eye.

[hjek]

Agreed with your point of disposable items. Regardless of whataboutisms, the point about Bitcoin using more power than Argentina still stands.

(If person A says that traffic accidents are horrible, and person B says "Is that any worse than war?"; while B is correct, that doesn't make traffic accidents any less horrible.)

[hulahoof]

Of course not, but taken to extremes we would have nothing to compare actions to. At a certain level of abstraction we need to be able to compare at the fruit level and not apples or oranges.

[mareko]

Not all cryptocurrencies are the same. Many newer ones run PoS which doesn't 'waste' energy. The Celo network goes even further and is carbon negative. It sends a portion of block rewards to Project Wren, which uses them to buy carbon credits to offset more carbon than the network emits to run.

https://medium.com/celoorg/celo-to-go-carbon-neutral-with-pr...

[louloulou]

Then there should be a global tax on carbon emissions. This is not a Bitcoin issue it's an issue with atmospheric carbon emissions not being priced correctly.

[DennisP]

Some cryptocurrencies are trying to fix that by moving to proof-of-stake, which does away with the mining effort entirely.

[pcthrowaway]

Some cryptocurrencies also use PoS natively, and have been for years

[base698]

Yeah it's definitely more sickening than fiat that allows endless wars and death all over the globe.

[antonzabirko]

Lol, it is probably one of the least unethical uses of electricity that i can think of while not being net positive. If you care about this, realign onto cloud computing or industrial equipment for deforestation. It's disingenuous to care more about btc mining.

[throwaway3699]

Power consumption is irrelevant if we're using green technologies for mining. The fact that the green lobby is staunchly anti-nuclear makes it very hard for me to care, though.

[cableshaft]

Yep, nuclear really should be part of the discussion for clean energy.

[jki275]

Tezos and Cardano are the top two cryptocurrencies that don't use this model at all. They use proof of stake, which doesn't consume any significant amount of electricity.

Also, the vast majority of the electricity being consumed for bitcoin mining is hydro in China and has nothing to do with climate change.

Also, equating bitcoin to cryptocurrency isn't accurate at all. There are hundreds of others.

[samsonradu]

> the vast majority of the electricity being consumed for bitcoin mining is hydro in China

Side concern but isn’t this concentration a red flag? Likely many miners are in China or Russia due to the electricity prices. Can’t they collude to execute a 51% attack?

[akra]

They could and can. The problem with both PoW and PoS is concentration of consensus/trust over time I think. There are models I've seen that break that up somewhat in PoW and potentially other forms by relying on something that is hard to concentrate (e.g. the market for consumer grade CPU's, social networks, etc). I would like something that anyone can run, but has some natural barrier that prevents it from being centralised.

[jki275]

That's proof of stake. Look at Cardano and Tezos.

[jki275]

They possibly can. Nearly all of them are in China, and nearly all of them are owned by a single company that manufactures the ASIC processors that do the mining.

This is why I'm not a bitcoin maximalist and I'm not a huge fan of it. I have a suspicion that eventually it will fail.

[o_p]

How much energy consumes the industrial military complex that sustains the fiat value of your US dollar?

[doggosphere]

73% of mining is renewable energy

https://pd.coinshares.com/EN-Mining-Whitepaper-December-2019

[ptd]

Why is the idea of people using electricity to make money so sickening?

[pushrax]

Implicitly they are arguing the value to people is low compared to energy consumption. They are sickened by the allocation of our limited sustainable energy production to this inefficient endeavour.

Presumably a proof of stake system with energy consumption within a few orders of magnitude of centralized ledgers would not be sickening.

[dTal]

Because money is a collective fiction we can easily "make" using only ideas, while electricity is a real and finite resource, the safe and sustainable generation of which is a primary concern for our future. It feels like a bad trade.

[saltyfamiliar]

Sure, but if you want it to be _sound_ money, it has to backed by some kind of inherent scarcity or guarantee which implies work and energy expenditure. If you want to be able to store it on a flash drive and transfer it to a different continent with no intermediaries, that too will cost something. If it were 'fictional' enough to be free, it wouldn't be useful.

[dTal]

I don't think that's inherently true. What's required is trust that one hasn't fiddled the numbers, and scarcity of some token is just one way of accomplishing that. Here's a monetary system, not unlike bitcoin:

All transactions occur in the market square, at the Town Ledger. Everyone's balance is public, and every transaction is witnessed by everyone else lining up for their turn at the Ledger. Everyone keeps an eye on their balance and the balance of a few friends. The mayor locks up the Ledger at night of course, but discrepancies tend to get the mayor lynched so she keeps a very close eye on it.

The system started by tracking barters, but it got too confusing to track all the different things, so it was agreed to simply write down a number equivalent to the trade's value in chickens as determined by average exchange rate over all previous transactions - nothing special about chickens, they were just a very commonly traded good which made for well-defined exchange rates.

After a few chicken runs, the villagers agreed to abandon the chicken standard in favor of shiny meteorites that fell from the sky once every ten years. They were technically slightly inflationary, but people lost them from time to time as well so it kind of evened out. Anyway, there weren't many of them around; most transactions were in fractions of a shiny meteor-pebble. It was just a convenient reference.

And nobody had to mine anything.

[lottin]

Thank you. This is exactly it.

[tshaddox]

That’s the question that I never see answered. Presumably if someone is using electricity to mine bitcoins, it’s because they couldn’t use that electricity for something more valuable (including things this commenter would probably consider more wholesome? or “valuable to society”?) like producing food.

[simonw]

Because if there's a direct connection between the amount of electricity used and the amount of money generated, the only logical conclusion is for human society to burn up every possible available ounce of energy as quickly as possible.

[o_p]

Its the cost of a decentralized currency, people find it worthwhile and priced it accordingly. Who are you to say that is wrong?

[hddu]

Every time I hear someone talk about the electricity consumption of argentinia I laugh and think of the soy wojak gif.

[justblaze23]

https://nano.org/ - That's the reply

[kasparkallas]

There are many alternative cryptocurrency projects to solve the environmental, speed and cost issues of Bitcoin. Nano looks like a genuine project but ultimately it’s an experiement with a non-inflatonary currency with high-volatility. This model is bound to fail barring a miracle.

[ericflo]

Electricity consumption doesn't equal climate change per se - not all electricity is created equally. I see PoW cryptocurrencies as one of the most promising incentives to move to a sustainable energy future. Given the lack of political will for policy-based incentives for this goal, a market-based incentive is welcomed.

[jonplackett]

Kind of a weird buy-in from Tesla on that basis isn’t it.

[Solvitieg]

To everyone complaining about energy: We will almost certainly use more energy in the future than we use today.

The proper response to climate change is not necessarily to consume less energy.

[hahahahe]

Wait till Satoshi is revealed to be Jensen Huang.

[blurbleblurble]

It's hard to see it as anything but that because cryptocurrency people don't collectively realize the gravity of the PR disaster they have on their hands. Central banks are looking for reasons to shut down the whole cryptocurrency space and in an ignorant public's eye, bitcoin's absurd energy waste is a perfect reason to do just that.

Where is the coinmarketcap-like tool that indexes cryptocurrency projects' energy (in)efficiencies and e-waste footprints? Where is the tool that's easy to use and shows how efficient cryptocurrency projects are in real time? Without that, the whole space is in serious jeopardy, including those few projects that actually have the potential to benefit people and the planet?