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by toenail 978 days ago
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.
1 comments
plastic3169 978 days ago
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.

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toenail 978 days ago
> 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/

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derangedHorse 978 days ago
> 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.

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