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by sadfinger 1935 days ago
This is right. It is useful to know how much electricity production costs in health and environmental output. It is useful to know how much of bitcoins value is the electricity cost. We can put a value on environmental harm caused by total electricity usage. But, using these and suggesting that we can accurately measure the cost of cryptocurrency now and in the future compared to how the money/value would otherwise be spent is a distortion. The same reasoning can be used to make anything that stores value or does not have an obvious output look disproportionately harmful. It could be useful to compare cryptocurrencies with themselves. I am a little interested to see how they factored cryptocurrency's optimization to use the cheapest electricity possible. It disproportionately favors storing value from electricity that would otherwise be wasted.