Yes. Energy spent on Bitcoin is energy not spent on something else, even in a world where everything is powered by renewable energy. We do not live in a world where everything is renewable, and renewable energy spent on Bitcoin means whatever non-renewable power is being used elsewhere instead of being eliminated. It is also a myth that renewables have no negative environmental impact: metals have to be mined/smelted/etc., chemicals of various kinds are used, and there is waste from the manufacturing processes. Ideally we would be working towards more efficient technologies that use less energy to accomplish whatever task (and for the most part we have been doing that).
All energy generation is bad for the environment, just more or less bad. Solar cells and wind power might be "renewable", but it requires a lot of metals and material to build (and also energy), they disturb natural habitat etc. They are much better than coal, oil and gas, but they are not harmless. It's better to avoid using energy if possible than using renewable energy.
Cavemen used very little energy before the discovery of fire. Are you prescribing a return to that state?
>>>Response to Dan added here due to rate limit.
> waste power
Infinite energy in the universe and everything mankind has achieved has been in large part due to energy consumption. The idea that we should now stop that trend is antihuman/antihuman-progress at its core.
Let the individual/market decide the best uses for energy... not your money = not your choice.
BTW off-planet mining using the sun/stars is a great idea for the future and doesn't require them to be blacked out.
No of course not, that reading isn't any more accurate than it would be to say that you're arguing that we should set up a Dyson sphere around our sun to black out the earth and mine Bitcoin in the vast dead emptiness of space for all eternity[0]. Be careful not to inflate arguments into completely separate positions.
What GP is saying is that switching to renewables doesn't make all of the negative externalities of wasting power go away.
You shouldn't extrapolate out on that to some grand view of the world that says we should never use technology. It just means we shouldn't waste power, and we shouldn't use "solar" as an excuse to waste power.
[0]: After all, Dyson spheres are powered by renewable energy.
What's a better way to losslessly and securely store human labor/time for future use? Almost everything else (fiat, gold, silver, real estate, etc...) that exists is debased/debasable, deteriorates, or loses value.
The above arguments completely hinge on energy being "wasted". Lossless labor/time storage isn't "waste" to market participants seeing a need for it and putting their hard earned money behind it.
Bitcoin basically turns one of the hardest to counterfeit things in the universe, energy, into money.
How else can you achieve lossless storage without a trustless secured environment (the bitcoin network)? Any multi-decade/multi-century solution that market participants should focus on instead?
> Almost everything else (fiat, gold, silver, real estate, etc...) that exists is debased/debasable, deteriorates, or loses value.
Look, yes, Bitcoin is deflationary, but it's still subject to market pressures. It's not technologically guaranteed to be worth anything 200 years from now.
Besides that...
> securely store human labor/time for future use?
It's not secure storage if you can't retrieve it[0]. What do you mean by "lossless"? You permanently lose all of the energy when you convert it into Bitcoin. You can not get that power/energy back, it is gone. What you hope is that the value of Bitcoin will allow you to trade your coins for somebody else's energy. But guaranteed scarcity is not the same thing as lossless storage, otherwise we would store all of our Youtube videos on collectable Beanie Babies.
Bitcoin's value is based on social consensus, not because it can be converted back into electricity. You're not storing anything, you are using a scarce resource to guarantee that it will be difficult to create more Bitcoin in the future, thereby creating a deflationary currency.
> Any multi-decade/multi-century solution that market participants should focus on instead?
All of them? Most currencies have been around for multiple centuries. The US dollar has been around for multiple centuries, and the US dollar is young.
Yes, the value of the US dollar can fluctuate, but, and I can not stress this enough, so can Bitcoin's value. There is no magical technology that makes Bitcoin worth anything, it's worth what people are willing to trade for it.
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Maybe a thought experiment will help here.
If you think that Bitcoin is genuinely storing energy in a lossless format independent of market pressure, then I should be able to create a new Bitcoin using the exact same technology because it's Open Source, and it should also be just as valuable, right? I just need enough people to join in on mining that it's difficult to commit fraud, and now my secondary coin should be just as good as Bitcoin at storing value, because it's using the same technology, the same distributed governance model, and the same electricity to power it.
Heck, I don't even need to create a new coin, I can fork the current chain; that's what Bitcoin Cash did. So let's say I fork Bitcoin's chain, and all of the exchanges that currently take Bitcoin also start taking my new coin so it's similarly decentralized.
Have I just doubled the amount of electricity in the world? No, of course not. Because the value of both coins will be based on social consensus, not because they are a perfect digitized storage medium for electricity.
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Another thought experiment on retrieval.
Let's say tomorrow, the apocalypse hits. The US government collapses, the dollar is worthless, all governments are overthrown. Government-issued currency is only fit to burn. Gold isn't even worth its weight in food. Only Bitcoin remains.
Now, bear in mind that the Internet does not exist anymore, because the US government and a bunch of centralized, US-dollar funded corporations were maintaining it, and they're all gone. But you would like to convert your Bitcoin back into electricity, because it's a lossless store of electricity/effort.
How do you do that? How do you even trade your bitcoin when there is no network for you to connect to? A truly lossless store of electricity should be able to handle that situation, right?
Owning 1000 satoshis/21M BTC is guaranteed to be worth 1000 satoshis/21M BTC 100 years from now, it can not be debased.
Every fiat currency (USD, GBP, CAD, AUD, etc..) has a denominator (aka max supply) that increases. Almost every fiat currency dies a horrible death in less than a century due to this inflation. 1 British pound sterling used to buy 12 ounces of silver but is now worth 0.5% of its original value and dropping. This is not lossless time/labor storage, the denominator is increasing rapidly as central banks respond to the crisis of the day.
How does a beanie baby look after 100 years without maintenance, no deterioration? How easy is it to counterfeit a beanie baby? The problem with your approach to criticizing BTC is you believe you can isolate the properties first. All the properties I mentioned and more work together in a synergistic fashion to create a lossless time/labor energy storage network.
>I should be able to create a new Bitcoin using the exact same technology because it's Open Source, and it should also be just as valuable, right?
This would be true if we ignored one of the primary laws of money, "hardest money wins". There can literally only be one hardest money, and capital will flow into it precisely because it is the hardest and acts as the best store of value. This is where looking at BTC as technology first leads you astray, it is in fact money first. Money will flow into one rather than the other BTC fork and the one with the highest hash rate will secure value better. The network with the highest hash rate will also have a huge incentive to expedite the death of the softer/less-secure money/network through 51% attacks and more... then consume its value.
Silver was the hardest money in the world until people realized gold was more scarce and harder to mine...silver turned into a shitcoin not long after that moment. Anyone that continued to hold silver after that point suffered a tremendous loss of value... hardest money wins in action. Bitcoin is now doing this to gold and every store of value on the planet thanks to better design.
>How do you even trade your bitcoin when there is no network for you to connect to?
This is P2P money first, just because it has now scaled to 10M+ users doesn't mean it can't run like it originally did, with 1 miner and 1 node. It can scale all the way back down to the size of whatever is required in your doomsday scenario. It will still be the hardest money in the universe in that scenario since all networks will be equally affected by the blackswan, so the people that do continue using it will appreciate its lossless storage and retrieval of human labor/time energy. We already have the blockstream satellite for transactions (Puerto Ricans were using BTC while banks were closed due to no electricity after the recent hurricane) and over the next decade nodes and miners will be put in space (probably by SpaceX and other large holders pushing for multi planetary human existence)... the network hasn't gone down in 12 years and after space nodes/miners are in place, the network will never go down unless an extinction level event occurs in our solar system. It is so well designed, it is already a space money solution.
I took another run at this because the longer you take to understand these concepts the poorer you will be. This may be among the most important information you could ever receive at this moment in history but requires knowledge in ~5 disciplines to fully appreciate... ~200 years ago I would've been doing something similar by telling you to convert your silver to gold before the price plummeted into a death spiral.
Yes it's not like solar panels are condensed out of the air with zero waste. They have to be manufactured, in a process which almost certainly isn't carbon neutral yet. The materials used to make them have to be extracted from somewhere. They're transported to the installation site on the back of diesel-burning trucks.
Cleaner energy sources are a necessity, but simply reducing consumption will always have the best impact on sustainability.
Yes, because those renewables could be powering people's homes and productive equipment, or powering conventional payment systems with plenty capacity left over. It's not necessarily a deal-breaker, but plenty of crypto exists that doesn't need this much power.
Energy for the home and nearly every other electricity demanding enterprise easily outbids bitcoin miners. There’s a reason they have to go the there ridiculously remote places to set up operations.
Depends. Could those renewables go to other applications? If so, then using them for BTC means that somebody else must use carbon. If instead the renewables were located in places where it was not possible to move the energy to more useful locations or if the entire world ran on zero-emission power, then it'd be much less of a concern.
I'm happy to let BTC win if it means that global warming is halted. But if worldwide net zero emissions is a prerequisite for BTC being considered non-wasteful then that's a tall order.
PoW doesn't even lead to good distribution as we can see since a few years and more importantly its not needed. We have Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) "blockchians" since like 8 years and it beats PoW by any metric.