| About half is used for jewelry because gold is shiny pebbles. About 10% is used for electronics. Mining Bitcoin consumes 5X as much energy as gold, btw, per unit value extracted. It also requires mining gold to produce the circuit boards used for mining Bitcoin - given the popularity of the ENIG immersion gold plating process for PCB contacts. The secondary issue is that of course each Bitcoin transaction generates 100g of e-waste which cannot be recycled and just gets buried. E-waste has a few grams of metals, but is mostly plastic and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Plastic and FR4 cannot be recycled. What little of the e-waste can be recycled is shipped to third-world countries where poor people dig through piles of scrap and dunk it in toxic chemicals. The only meaningful way to move forward is to reduce consumption, especially consumption which achieves nothing, like literally wiring up a power plant to compute hashes of random data instead of attaching it to the grid to do useful things. What a disaster. |
Except that isn't going to work, because governments are untrustworthy and as history shows will sooner rather than later debase their currency.
All people are looking for here is a safe way to store value over time. If governments would let people keep reliable records without bringing in the inflation tax or changing the rules, things like gold and bitcoin wouldn't be anywhere near as interesting. But they are interesting, because it is normally policy to block anyone who tries to store (small-time) wealth for more than a couple of years.