[TylerE]

Cryptocurrency is astoundingly bad at converting non-renewable natural resources into nothing of absolute value at all.

Even (real) strip mining at least produces industrially useful ore.

Blockchain technology as implemented in bitcoin is incredibly wasteful. The power used alone is in the tera-watt hours per year.

All of those massive farms of custom miners...all to process an astounding ~90k transactions a day.

The relative energy cost is astounding, considering that volume could easily be handled by a single server in a traditional architecture.

[kens]

A Raspberry Pi running a Postgres database can handle about 10 times the transaction rate of the Bitcoin network. (Obviously this isn't exactly apples-to-apples, but it gives a rough idea of how totally out of balance the resources consumed vs the transaction rate is.)

(10 TPS for TPC-B: http://raspberrypg.org/2013/11/raspberry-pg-server-some-benc...)

[netrunner]

https://www.academia.edu/7666373/An_Order-of-Magnitude_Estim... claims that the environmental cost of paper currency & minting alone is 10x greater than that of bitcoin mining and concludes that given the trend of Moore's law, bitcoin's relative environmental impact will continue to stay negligible.

[sharpneli]

The reason for the 10x difference is that paper currency is used at least thousands of times more than bitcoin. Thus it's several orders of magnitude more efficient. Heck quite likely it's something like million times more efficient.

Moore's law doesn't help bitcoin. Because if we produce a miner that has 10x the power efficiency of a current mining hardware it just results into everyone using that miner. Total hashrate would be 10x but the electricity consumption would remain the same. The difficulty adjustment in bitcoin guarantees that regardless of the HW the profit from mining goes close to the electricity cost of it. Thus we can simply ignore Moore's law and focus on the fundamental point of bitcoin mining: Producing waste heat.

Having to continuously produce waste heat to secure the network is a fundamental flaw in bitcoin. An attack against the network (51% attack, using waste heat) must be sufficiently expensive compared to the gains of such an attack. The benefits of an attack scale with the amount of value transferred in bitcoin network. Thus the amount of waste heat constantly produced by honest people also must scale in order to keep it secure.

All of this because one person got the bright idea to solve Byzantine generals problem via unforgeable votes. What kind of vote is that? Waste heat. The guy just figured out how to verify that some other person has produced waste heat. And the whole network rests on the assumption that honest people buy more votes than the dishonest ones.

[baddox]

The trouble I have is with your claim that cryptocurrency produces "nothing of absolute value at all." I don't know your definition of "value," but it's clearly not one I share.

[TeMPOraL]

I prefer to use the word "upkeep". Money is not something that has intrinsic value in itself. It's what we need because as a species we're too dumb to handle planetary-scale resource allocation. It's a waste we need to get what we want. But since it's a waste, it would be good to reduce it as much as possible.

[vertex-four]

On the other hand... the existing financial industry - even just the bits around creating and storing currency, and handling transactions - is rather a massive waste too. If it's possible to replace that with something that (a) gives more power to the people and (b) requires fewer people to run, that's probably a good thing - no comment on whether Bitcoin is that something.

[TeMPOraL]

I totally agree. Existing financial industry is a huge waste too (sadly, not many seem to see it that way). But Bitcoin, from what I read about it, seems to have an exponential hunger for power which doesn't lead me to believe that if it replaces current system, we'll be better off.

[baddox]

I think the problem is that you are predicting the viability not of Bitcoin itself, but of your specific assumption about how Bitcoin might be used. I presume you are implying that Bitcoin could not possibly replace the current system, in the sense that it could not efficiently handle all global monetary transactions. Of course this is true by design, and will always be true barring some significant changes to the software. But that is not the only conceivable sense in which Bitcoin could be considered successful and widely used.

[vertex-four]

> Bitcoin, from what I read about it, seems to have an exponential hunger for power which doesn't lead me to believe that if it replaces current system, we'll be better off.

Actually, it's capitalism in general that has an exponential hunger for resource consumption, Bitcoin is simply the first decentralised capitalist system, and it's so simple it's clear.

[TeMPOraL]

Again, I agree.

But well, in the end capitalism will have to go too - lest we want eventually to be strip-mining the whole universe at close to light speed.

[baddox]

I have no problem with saying that traditional money and cryptocurrency has no intrinsic value, but mostly because I think the concept of "intrinsic value" is rather useless.