[luka-birsa]

Fully support this, as PoW protocols - from an efficient market perspective - consume as much as they are currently worth to mine, which would mean that if we believe that the value of BTC will go up (in line with past increases, for orders of magnitude) then also the consumption of power will go up just as much.

When BTC hits 250K per coin next year, expect 5x as much energy consumption to what it does use today. At 1M per coin we can expect 20x as much power consumption.

Highly unlikely that taxation can resolve this as global economy simply forces the miners to places where energy is cheap and abundant. And countries will view this as a competitive advantage as now there is a simple way to convert power directly into money. Many cases have shown that poor countries will use their environment to gain an upper hand and pull their country out of poverty. Sadly the impact to the environment is global.

[fredfoobar]

Consider not rabbitholing into a narrative and understanding reality:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-uses-less-than-...

[aloer]

Bit of a weird argument they make there. Banking keeps the world spinning.

What does bitcoin do, right now, to make this even remotely comparable?

[fredfoobar]

Why is there such a strong status-quo bias among people I thought were technologists, and what do you guys defend? the banking system?? really?

Do you all remember the energy FUD that the internet got back in the late 90s [1]?

Please! lets not sleepwalk into another PoS system on the internet to replace the previous one.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=3e2...

[aloer]

It wasn’t my intention to defend the banking system. But since you posted an article where Bitcoin is compared to this banking system I’d say it’s just fair to question whether they can actually be compared.

So, can they?

What’s the current transactions per day? How low can bitcoin energy consumption realistically go compared to where it is now?

[fredfoobar]

No, that wasn't my gripe. Bitcoin is a decentralized technological solution that almost completely replaces the banking system, I'd prefer that over the current Banking system, and bitcoin is global to boot.

Transaction per day -> it can do as many as you want. I run a lightning node and I've shown a lot of people how quick and cheap the transactions can be, and also how EASY it is to get setup to transact in bitcoin over lightning.

[xur17]

This. Every single article and discussion about this "problem" always uses base chain transactions as the divisor for the energy cost per transaction. The average Bitcoin transaction [0] is ~$500k right now. The protocol made a conscious decision to make layer 1 a settlement layer, and secondary layers as transaction layers. I personally make an order of magnitude more transactions on layer 2 than I do on layer 1. The company I work for fits into the same boat, and the vast vast majority of funds we receive are on a layer 2.

[0] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/average-transaction-am...

[whiskyant]

Don't forget the halvening every 4 years reduces the block reward for mining by half.

[exo762]

PoW also implies large inflation, which pays for the security of the network. With PoS you can reduce issuance greatly, while staying safe.