[arcticbull]

Just one country, to achieve the computational and storage power of a raspberry pi. The mental gymnastics continue to beggar belief.

I wish people would just be honest and say yes, it's absurd and wasteful, but I think it'll make me rich so I don't care.

[derangedHorse]

> I wish people would just be honest and say yes, it's absurd and wasteful, but I think it'll make me rich so I don't care.

That's just your opinion. Most hardcore bitcoiners aren't in it to be rich, it's because it has a lot of potential to be a more sustainable monetary system over what we have now. I don't see the energy consumed by Bitcoin to be wasted and I'm doubtful that most who say it is understand why it's used in the first place.

[toenail]

Every industry on this planet that is worth doing uses "more energy than one country". Anybody who parrots this "argument" is either stupid or malicious.

[plastic3169]

I find it interesting to travel in such country. Take a train and when it approaches a city look at all the buildings passing by. All the lights in the windows that show that people live there. The eletric heating of many of those homes. All the electricity any of the people living there ever spends. All the factories, farms you see on the way. Massive greenhouses. Server farms. All those electric cars stuck in traffic. The train goes for hours and hours. Everything you see combined uses less electricity than bitcoin. Millions of people can run their lives and build all their businesses using less energy.

The scale is mind boggling.

[toenail]

Like I said, the same can be said about any industry on this planet. That this fact is mind-boggling for you shows that you haven't really ever thought about energy consumption. That you see this as a weakness of bitcoin shows that you approach bitcoin with the preconception that it is useless, and that you try to find facts that suit your view.

[plastic3169]

That’s a fair point I don’t have good grasp on what energy usage really is.

I don’t perceive bitcoin as useless. I think the energy usage is way out of scale. POW is elegant solution to building the system, but the logical conclusion is that it ends up taking massive industry scale resources only catering to small to midsize industry. It’s economically viable only in the narrow sense that we don’t anticipate the true longterm costs of energy spent.

[toenail]

> but the logical conclusion is that it ends up taking massive industry scale resources only catering to small to midsize industry.

That's a fair assumption, but personally I find it absurd to think that a global open permissionless trustless non-censorable payment system will not keep growing. I think that's an expression of the financial privilege rich people in secure, wealthy countries without any financial problems have.

> That’s true, but then so does Google, Youtube, Facebook, Amazon, the cruise industry, Christmas lights, household drying machines, private jets, the zinc industry, and basically any other sizable platform or industry. From that list, Bitcoin’s energy usage is the closest to that of the cruise industry’s energy usage, but bitcoins are used by more people, and the network scales far better. If people were 10% more efficient at shutting off their electronic devices when not using them, then that alone would save more energy than the global Bitcoin network uses.

> https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

[derangedHorse]

> It’s economically viable only in the narrow sense that we don’t anticipate the true longterm costs of energy spent.

Why would it be less economically viable with scale? As Bitcoin increases in value, the hashrate and energy usage will increase. If it doesn't, the hashrate and energy usage will stagnate or decrease.

If you think the energy usage is "way out of scale" for the problem it solves, I think you may be underestimating the challenges of developing a decentralized monetary system and the impact of money on society itself.