[forgotmyoldname]

So Bitcoin uses more energy than an entire country of 110 million people (the Philippines).

That's absolutely nuts. If you said you could reduce an entire country's CO2 emissions to zero overnight, and you had a valid plan to do so, you'd be on the cover of every newspaper for your revolutionary plan to help save the earth.

But say you want to flip a switch and turn off a single cryptocurrency in order to do it, and you'll have floods of people trivializing it, saying "well, let me tell you why 110 million people's CO2 emissions aren't that big of a deal..."

[glenvdb]

Scroll down to the bar chart showing the country rankings.

Look at the top 3 countries (China, US, India).

Compare those to Bitcoin... can you honestly tell me that Bitcoin constitutes a significant amount of energy consumption in that context?

And it's also worth noting that energy consumption isn't necessarily bad for climate change. You're conflating "energy consumption" with "CO2 emissions". It's CO2 emissions that are the problem, and Bitcoin energy consumption is far more green than most other industries.

So we have a monetary network that consumes a globally insignificant amount of energy and is more green than many other industries... is it really a significant problem?

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-energy-use-comp...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-7dMVcVWgc

[forgotmyoldname]

America, India, and China? Those are fully functioning, massive economies that power the entire world and have people commuting, working, eating, farming, manufacturing, and doing all the normal processes that life entails.

Are you saying we should compare a digital coin with very niche usage to the collective impact of all of those actions taking place in the most massively populated and economically significant nations to ever exist?

And you're saying it's an insignificant amount of power, yet it consumes more power than an entire nation of 110,000,000 people? There are 110,000,000 people in the Philippines using cash every single day to drive their economy and live. Are there even 100 million people using bitcoin for daily business and consumer transactions involving physical goods? Or even 10 million? Or 1 million?

Is there a reason you're pretty serious about downplaying the impact of electricity equivalent to 110 million people and saying it's not globally significant? Because it's pretty significant. If that many people stopped using all electricity overnight, the impact would be pretty significant. Wiping out the entire Philippine economy would absolutely send shockwaves around the world. That'd be a huge hit to manufacturing and food industries on every corner of earth.

Would Bitcoin suddenly vanishing be more impactful than the Philippines vanishing overnight? Or, to choose a different country from that previous site, The Netherlands?

[glenvdb]

Before addressing this comment I want to pick up a point from your previous post.

>But say you want to flip a switch and turn off a single cryptocurrency in order to do it, and you'll have floods of people trivializing it, saying "well, let me tell you why 110 million people's CO2 emissions aren't that big of a deal..."

Well, with Bitcoin, you can't "flip a switch" to turn it off. There's literally no one on the planet with that power, which is kind of the point. As long as people see value in the asset and the network, it will always be there.

Moving onto your latest post, everything you said depends entirely on whether you believe the value proposition of Bitcoin separating money and state.

As said by Satoshi Nakamoto, "The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible."

It's worth a lot to me and many other people not to see their wealth melted away by inflation, which is basically a hidden tax that disproportionally effects the people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale. And that's just one use case for it (i.e. store of value). There are other important features of Bitcoin that people value.

A sound money with decreasing inflation, absolute scarcity, that is difficult (if not impossible) to manipulate is very valuable to ~8 billion people on this planet. At the moment only a small percent of people understand that (maybe hundreds of millions?), but that may change over the coming decades.

Looked at it in that way, it's current energy expenditure is incredibly small and for the amount of wealth it secures and transfer globally... also incredibly efficient.

[forgotmyoldname]

Nobody has a switch to just turn off all power in the Philippines either. That wasn't the point. The point is that it's a massive energy waste that grew the same exact way a cancer does--out of virtually nowhere and uncontrollably. If it never would've existed, that's a huge amount of waste that simply wouldn't exist either.

Bitcoin is anything but efficient. It takes massive amounts of energy to make a simple transaction. Far more than any current currency transfer network. If it continues to grow, and if it would horrifically become mainstream, energy usage would be several magnitudes higher than it is now.

Right now its primary uses are for bringing more people into the scheme to eventually dump for cash, and to exchange for illicit materials online. It's a very niche case used by a tiny, tiny fraction of the total population, and it already consumes more energy than many entire countries. Extrapolate that energy usage to 1000x the current population and 1000x the current usage to assume everyone is in on it and using it regularly for normal transactions--at a minimum, we're hitting 1000x energy usage rates.

That's energy usage exceeding China and America's total energy usage combined. Just to send bits on a network. You'd be more efficient carting blocks of gold manually across the world for every transaction.