[Devasta]

No competent government should be allowing the continued use of Bitcoin. Proof of Work is climate Arson, its burning tremendous amounts of energy for the shittiest database you could imagine at a time when we desperately need to reduce Carbon emissions.

[Lerc]

How much warmer do you think the world would be from running Bitcoin for 100 years?

[Devasta]

Assuming that Bitcoin is still 100k per coin in 100 years time, a ludicrous suggestion considering its history, we'd have roughly 0.0125 degrees warming, its generating around 98 megatons of CO2 emissions at the moment.

Are you going to reply pretending that isn't a big deal?

[Lerc]

How did you come to that figure? I'm honestly curious on some of the required factors, I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to find a good electricity generation to temperature rise formula. I think there are currently better estimates on CO2 equivalent emissions on temperature rise than there are on future electricity generation producing CO2 equivalents.

The mining reward currently dictates how much one can spend on electricity and still turn a profit. The mining reward halves every 4 years. The total usage over time woul be the area under the curve. If the price were 100k in 100 years time, the bulk of the electricy used mining would probably already have been spent.

To maintain its generation rate it would have to double in value every 4 years, forever, that comes to about a 20% rise on average per year.

0.0125 is hard to imagine as a big warming, however it becomes part of an overall contribution to global warming. Everything we do contributes in some fashion to warming (or occasionally cooling). Everyone has their own opinion on the value of things as well.

Some people believe that Bitcoin will be transformational to the world economy, some people feel like it is worthless. Who are we to decide if 0.0125 degrees is an acceptable cost to pay or not? Feeling that you are right and others are wrong cannot be a basis for dictating the behaviour of others.

The best we can do is provide the most accurate data we can so that the costs are clear for people to make their own value judgements.

If you believe bitcoin is, as they say, going to the moon, the answer to the energy cost is obvious. Buy bitcoin and sell at the top and use the money to build solar plants, carbon credits, environmental repair etc. Proponents of bitcoin believe that this will happen anyway as a product of the global economic benefit of bitcoin.

I am more skeptical of the future price, and of the future economical benefit. Nevertheless I still don't think it is my place to say they can't try and make the world a better place even if I don't think it will work. Many massively beneficial things came from endeavours that others thought were futile before those things occurred. If we had nomalised cancelling things that others didn't believe in, we would be much worse off now. We certainly wouldn't have most of the infrastructure that supports this platform to communicate on