[dale_glass]

> Citation needed.

A BTC transaction is currently estimated to take 821 kWh. That's ridiculous.

> BCH is a scam. Not because they assume that the removal of the block size limit comes without any costs, but because it regularly splits after influential but narcissistic 'leaders' attempt to grab more power and because its community continues to justify deceitful tactics to promote BCH and trick people into buying BCH when they expected Bitcoin.

I don't care about any of that, actually. I'm mercilessly meritocratic in this regard, and in my case, merit == processing transactions at a low cost.

Whatever nonsense goes on in the community, the drama regarding branding or whatnot isn't of my concern. My interest in crypto is extremely minor and focused straight on the "cash" type of usage. Whoever can provide that earns my interest, and I hold no loyalty whatsoever. BTC had my interest back before it bumped into the block limit, and at that exact instant, lost it.

[frankenst1]

> A BTC transaction is currently estimated to take 821 kWh. That's ridiculous.

It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what? How much energy/CO2 does the traditional financial system consume/produce (incl. buildings, production, transport, security)?

>> BCH is a scam.

> I don't care about any of that, actually. I'm mercilessly meritocratic in this regard, and in my case, merit == processing transactions at a low cost. My interest in crypto is extremely minor.

If you don't care about the details and your interest in crypto is extremely minor it is super risky to put any money in an altcoin like BCH or to advertise it without a disclaimer.

You are more likely to lose value because

    - a) it has low security (a collusion of only 0.5% of Bitcoin miners can perform a 51% attack on BCH)
    - b) the community and their 'leaders' continuously lie and mislead the public about BCHs performance, adoption and scalability (e.g. unlimited transactions without degraded decentralization)
    - c) the coin and the community splits regularly because of power grabs
    - d) the market's expected value of BCH drops continuously (because of the points mentioned before)

The merit you are looking for, "processing many transactions at low cost" is currently not achievable without sacrifices. If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

[dale_glass]

> It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what?

The current system, which is far more efficient.

> a) it has low security (a collusion of only 0.5% of Bitcoin miners can perform a 51% attack on BCH)

Not a critical issue, since evidently it's not happening. I'm not putting in more than I can afford to lose.

> - b) the community and their 'leaders' continuously lie and mislead the public about BCHs performance, adoption and scalability (e.g. unlimited transactions without degraded decentralization) > - c) the coin and the community splits regularly because of power grabs

Completely unimportant to me. I'm not loyal to BCH or anyone else. I use whatever works at any given point in time. BCH currently seems to be the most usable for my ends, given how it performs transactions cheaply and has decent enough adoption. But if it dies, no big deal, I'll use something else. Heck, even DOGE seems to be doing okay.

Plus, this is crypto. There is no such a thing as an altcoin. It's all software. Permissionless money, remember? Lies, deceit, cheating, are all fair game since there's nobody to give anybody official blessings or permission on anything. So I couldn't care less who said what or what internal drama is brewing. Does it work or does it not for my use is the only metric, and the second it stops working I'll find something else.

> - d) the market's expected value of BCH drops continuously (because of the points mentioned before)

No, currently it isn't. See the graphs. Plus I'm not interested in the virtual gold kind of usage. So long it more or less holds up, that works for me.

[frankenst1]

>> It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what?

> The current system, which is far more efficient.

You keep repeating that. Do you have any sources to back that claim?

[jcranmer]

> It is huge, I agree. But ridiculous in comparison to what? How much energy/CO2 does the traditional financial system consume/produce (incl. buildings, production, transport, security)?

I've done the math before, but I've forgotten the precise results I came up with. The results are in the realm of "Bitcoin uses more energy than that which is used to produce all the US [maybe all the world's] currency." Like, it's not even close--I think shipping gold bars on an airplane may be more energy-efficient than Bitcoin now.

[frankenst1]

Impressive, I wouldn't know where to begin. Could you expand on which items you included and how you decided on how they were weighted?

[jcranmer]

The hardest part is finding the raw data. I only considered the energy costs of actually producing the currency itself (mostly imputed by operations cost, since I couldn't find any reports on the actual energy consumption of the mints or engraving presses). I realize purists will object to not including the amortized cost of the facility, etc., but the number that's being compared against for Bitcoin focuses only on the cost of the proof-of-work and not the similar facility costs.