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by nmjohn
4313 days ago
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You are completely ignoring the issue. Just because a majority of money exists electronically doesn't mean a lot of money isn't spent on paper and metal versions. The United States alone spends tens of millions of dollars a year on producing pennies - beyond the face value of the pennies. So the entirety spent on mining bitcoin is not too far off from what one country spends just on minting pennies. |
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It's true, pennies are a horrible waste. It costs almost $0.02 to make one, and nobody even likes them very much, but the mint still churns out billions of the things ever year. That should probably stop.
But overall, coinage is a tiny fraction of the overall dollar economy. And Bitcoin isn't really comparable to coinage, anyway, since BTC is not a fast, convenient, anonymous, peer-to-peer mechanism for exchange that's appropriate for use in small transactions. Compared on that level, BTC seems sub-optimal long before we start worrying about details like energy efficiency of production.
What BTC really compares to is a currency in general, such as the dollar. There BTC at least has a chance of comparing on a vaguely level playing field. And at that scale, pennies are insignificant.