[dvh1990]

Bitcoin is a good thing. It's a simple financial system with very few rules that can serve as an anti-fragile backbone for much bigger systems on top of it.

Instead of looking for ways to curtail it (because that ALWAYS works, right?) we should be looking for cleaner ways to power it like renewables and nuclear.

[asinoastuto]

blockchain is a good thing. bitcoin is just a early adopter that refuses to go away because people keep pumping it up for one reason or another. there are many better alternatives to bitcoin that solve all the issues people here on HN complain about, but all you will read is people calling others "non-coiners", as if thats the reason anyone is against bitcoin.

[dvh1990]

Maybe, but being a free system everybody is more than welcome to build something better. I'll be the first in line to hop on.

[MBCook]

Let’s just pretend that all bitcoin mining was done in data centers.

That means that whatever practical good bitcoin provides, we’ve DOUBLED the energy usage of data centers.

Is that good worth having to build that much additional capacity?

What about the problem that bitcoin keeps increasing it’s energy usage?

And finally, is there no more efficient (in energy usage) way of doing the same thing?

[dvh1990]

You can probably tell that I'm a Taleb fan, but it seems that whatever we have in place for doing the same thing is rotten to the core. What happens when we get hit 2x or 4x as hard as 2008? The way financial systems are structured today is the problem, and decentralization seems to be the only answer. Bitcoin is exactly that.

Bitcoin's future value may end up being no more and no less than helping us preserve a functioning world economy given an unprecedented financial crisis. Is that worth double the energy of data centers? Yes, because without it you will have 0 data centers.

Solutions will have to be implemented to curtail that energy use. Could be better power sources, could be more efficient consensus mechanisms.

[em3rgent0rdr]

and focus on internalizing carbon cost into energy prices, and that will help focus on lightning network for micro-transactions.