[egypturnash]

This analogy neglects to ask what the environmental impact of ice cream is.

Let's say I bought a gallon of ice cream with bitcoin. What is the energy cost of the transaction? How much waste heat did it generate? And on the other side: what is the energy cost of making that ice cream, shipping it to the store I bought it from, and keeping it refrigerated? How much waste heat did that generate?

If the bitcoin transaction cost as much energy and generated as much waste heat as the production, storage, and shipping of the gallon of ice cream, then yeah, that's a good start for saying one is legitimate as the other. But if one of them cost a couple of orders of magnitude more energy, and generated three orders of magnitude more waste heat, for something that is theoretically the same monetary value (because they are, given that we paid for that whole supply chain with the bitcoin transaction), then there is a pretty clear imbalance.

And for a bit more clarity - what is the energy/heat cost of buying that gallon of ice cream with a debit/credit card? How does that compare to both the production/shipping/storage of that gallon of ice cream, and to the cost of buying it with bitcoin?

I am not going to do the research and estimation for this. Some quick lazy searching suggests that one BTC transaction consumes about 3x the energy of 100k transactions via Visa's network, though. And that is the issue: Bitcoin is, by design, incredibly wasteful of resources. Ludicrously so.

[incrudible]

The incremental cost of a Bitcoin transaction is effectively zero. The rationale is that transactions are a side-effect of mining. Mining may or may not consume a lot of energy, but the amount of transactions remains the same.

The mining of Bitcoin only happens once in human history, so all things considered, this should be compared with the mining of all the gold or other precious metals, again, throughout human history.

If there must be a comparison to VISA, we must look at the energy expended by every person working not just for VISA, but the entire infrastructure that makes running VISA possible, that is, the banking system as a whole.

> Bitcoin is, by design, incredibly wasteful of resources

Consider this door:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/87/Wi...

Proof of work is "a waste" in the same sense as this elaborate door is a waste.

[MereInterest]

> The mining of Bitcoin only happens once in human history, so all things considered, this should be compared with the mining of all the gold or other precious metals, again, throughout human history.

"Mining" is an inaccurate term that draws a false analogy between cryptocurrencies and physical resources. At all times, the energy expended by proof of work must be proportional to the value represented on the shared ledger, or else there would be an incentive to perform a 51% attack. The energy expenditure is the goal, and the block rewards are the incentive that drives that goal. As the block rewards decrease, either Bitcoin becomes vulnerable to attack, or the transaction fees increase to drive the energy expenditure instead.

"Mining" implies that a resource is gained by the energy expenditure, which is fundamentally incorrect. The transactions are validated by virtue of energy expenditure, in order to gain the right to apply an update to the ledger.

> Mining may or may not consume a lot of energy, but the amount of transactions remains the same.

This is a true statement. The amount of transactions remains the same, capped at 10 per second. A pitifully small number that cannot provide any use at scale. If every person on the planet used Bitcoin, each person could be involved in a transaction once every dozen years or so. Get your paycheck today, and you can buy groceries next decade. Sounds great for a "currency".

[incrudible]

> At all times, the energy expended by proof of work must be proportional to the value represented on the shared ledger, or else there would be an incentive to perform a 51% attack. The energy expenditure is the goal, and the block rewards are the incentive that drives that goal. As the block rewards decrease, either Bitcoin becomes vulnerable to attack, or the transaction fees increase to drive the energy expenditure instead.

This ignores the ability to require more blocks before considering a transaction as "confirmed". These days, due to the enormous cost of a 51% attack, 2 blocks are usually considered "enough" for Bitcoin, but it was 6 blocks in the earlier days.

Bitcoin doesn't intend to maximize energy expenditure for proof-of-work, that's just a side-effect of its (currently) high price.

> If every person on the planet used Bitcoin, each person could be involved in a transaction once every dozen years or so. Get your paycheck today, and you can buy groceries next decade. Sounds great for a "currency".

Nobody is arguing that a Bitcoin transaction is useful for everyday currency. The same can be said about gold coins or treasury notes.

If you want to use cryptocurrency like cash, there's Lightning, but there's also other cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin Cash) which you can easily convert to and from Bitcoin.

[salawat]

Mining should not cost a damn thing. This is where the entire thing falls apart, and why fiat is the most efficie t basis of currency.

Literal scraps of cloth are distributed as physical stores of value. Most of the value in the economy doesn't even have a physical manifestation.

Most importantly, it's much more practical securing those pieces of cloth in the physical world in the long run than "securing the Bitcoin network" which consumes more and more energy over time when the cash and fiat handling infrastructure is already relatively mature against everything but nation states, which is arguably working as designed.

None of this warrants bringing ice cream into this fight, and to hell with the person so obsessed with cryptoccurrency as to imply that if we don't accept cryptocurrencies, we shouldn't accept ice cream.

It also conflates twodifferent industries that synergize well. Part of what makes modern logistics work is that we even have refrigeration capabilities. Those aren't going to disappear just because your cryptocurrency might have a similar energy function. Which arguably it doesn't, seeing as the BitcoinNetworks energy consumption per transaction is high enough to run household energy requirements over extended timesans, and part of those operating is stprage of and consumption of, refrigerated goods.

Now we at least know what side of things cryptocurrency people are really on.

Nobody looking out for anybody but themselves would get behind getting rid of ice cream.

[kodah]

I doubt as many people keep track of the negative effects of ice cream as much as the recent moral interest of Bitcoin. I don't blame people though, for whatever reason, American moralism is on the rise again. It's going to be a dark decade.

Just a couple negative effects of ice cream that I could think of, put in similar morally leaning terms as people talk about Bitcoin on:

- ice cream is violence against animals because it is part of the dairy ecosystem which forever keeps cows in a lactating state even to their own detriment [1]

- ice cream contains high fat, calories, sodium, sugar and dairy components which contribute to obesity and a higher death toll [2]

- ice cream impacts the environment because it requires large dairy farms, in order to be cost effective, packed with lots of cows which produce their own green house gases [0]

I very much dislike the abundance of moral arguments. In debate a moral argument requires you to offer no alternative to solve the problem, just dictate what something should or should not be and some supporting evidence for why. In my view, a moral argument should be one that occurs in your head and is the catalyst for developing a paradigm that is better, not one you bring to the debate floor or at very least less often than we see them in debate today.

Some links:

0: https://foodprint.org/reports/the-foodprint-of-dairy/

1: https://freefromharm.org/dairyfacts/

2: https://www.foodbehind.com/risks-of-eating-ice-cream/

[egypturnash]

> Mining ~~may or may not consume~~ consumes a lot of energy

ftfy sweetheart

[cosmotic]

Not to mention the transaction time. Visa is seconds, bitcoin is at least 30 min and typically an hour and sometimes almost a day. https://www.blockchain.com/charts/avg-confirmation-time

And then theres the transaction cost to consider. Visa is a few cents, bitcoin is tens of dollars. https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

Then watch out for the purported anonymity where the transactions are recorded forever.

[incrudible]

Bitcoin is slower than VISA, but faster than an international bank wire - and comparable in cost. If VISA is so much faster, then why do bank wires exist?

There are Layer 2 solutions (Lightning Network) for cheap and instant transfers that do not warrant the security of a full Bitcoin transaction.

Anonymity has never been a purported feature of Bitcoin. This is not a downside, it keeps regulatory scrutiny somewhat at bay.

[cosmotic]

I don't know a lot about bank wires except for when I put a down payment on a house. There was a flat rate if I recall, close to $90. Few if any have a credit limit approaching a housing down payment and those rates are percent based I believe. I was told it could take days to complete but it took hours. I did not feel safe doing the transfer but had no other option. I believe that's what title insurance is for (at least in part?). I've completed thousands of visa transactions in the same time, so transaction cost and speed are probably why people use visa instead of wire transfer. There are additional perks like warranty extension, fraud prevention, fraud insurance, etc.

Anonymity has certainly been a purported feature of bitcoin. Obviously erroneously. It's mentioned in the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#:~:text=anonymity%20en...

[janekm]

If you're using bitcoin for international money transfers you're using exchanges on either end of the transaction to convert to bitcoin and back.

You may as well use an International money transfer service like Transferwise (which essentially is similar to a bitcoin exchange but currency to currency), that performs the same function without the bitcoin in the middle... Transaction costs will be lower and it will be faster.

[incrudible]

> If you're using bitcoin for international money transfers you're using exchanges on either end of the transaction to convert to bitcoin and back.

That is not a given.

> You may as well use an International money transfer service like Transferwise (which essentially is similar to a bitcoin exchange but currency to currency), that performs the same function without the bitcoin in the middle... Transaction costs will be lower and it will be faster.

I could ask the same question: If Transferwise exists, why do we still have international bank wires? It's a different financial instrument with different properties. Transferwise is some company from Finland that you need to register with to send a limited amount of money to a limited amount of countries. Maybe that's better than Bitcoin under some circumstances, but it's a different thing.