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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

If you have even the slightest concern about global warming or the environment overall, you should consider Bitcoin a horrible mistake we should be trying to eradicate.

It's a currency backed by willingness to waste electricity doing useless work. And worse, as it gets more popular, the willingness and price will continue to drive higher.

Hopefully China recognizes that this is in odds with their efforts to clean up their environment, and crushes Bitcoin fast before the damage is too catastrophic.

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I think it's not entirely valid to say it's useless. Perhaps overly energy intensive, but the whole point of mining is to verify the blockchain, it's not a mindless calculation (though it is artificially inefficient). This is supposedly what the Ethereum proof of stake will fix. The problem is that you have two competing goals: you want fast hashes to keep transactions quick, but since you incentivise hashing, you don't want people to be able to exploit it to print money.

Currently, we have around 6M Thash/s. If you pretend that it's all using an Antminer S9 (1.3kW/14Thash) you end up with around half a gigawatt of power running the Bitcoin network. So over a year that's about 4.4TWh per year. In reality, few people have S9's and it's more like 15TWh per year. China alone uses around 4000TWh per year for comparison.

That is a staggering amount of power, but the global power consumption is perhaps 1/1000 of China's (or the US's for that matter) annual energy usage.

What is the equivalent for, say, VISA or Mastercard processing? Somewhere there are a bunch of enormous datacentres which are processing transactions. I would imagine a lot less (my back of the envelope suggests around 1GWh/year).

EDIT: Actually they have VISA's consumption here, so I wasn't far off: http://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption. I estimated each data centre (x2 with a back up each) to use 8MW of power - they have 2x diesel generators quoted at 4MW. That works out to around 0.25GWh of power per datacentre per year. I assumed that there's probably more overhead elsewhere in the system (i.e. POS readers, etc.) and doubled it. I don't know if their analysis accounts for the fact that each centre has a backup running simultaneously.

Also because people seem to be getting the wrong end of the stick here: where did I say that Bitcoin is comparable to VISA? I'm putting the numbers there to show how massively disparate the two networks are. Partly out of curiosity, and partly because you can't just quote one number without a reference point and I think a large finance company is a good place to look. Nor am I saying that bitcoin's inefficiency is somehow justified - it uses more energy than a small country.

First -- that's even worse because VISA powers probably 1/3 of all modern commerce. Bitcoin is a hobby of the .01%.

And even if that wasn't the case, it's not comparable because bitcoin is _fundamentally backed_ by the willingness to waste electricity. This is very important, and I feel like people gloss over this.

If VISA figured out how to run their datacenters without electricity, they would do it in a heartbeat, and it would have no impact on the amount of processing being done -- they'd just do the work cheaper, and it would be great.

If bitcoin mining got more energy efficient, THERE WOULD BE MORE MINERS BECAUSE COSTS DROP. The amount of money miners are willing to waste on hardware and electricity is fundamentally tied to the price, and as the costs go down, it's easier to fight for the fixed-sum payout. This will never change. As bitcoin gets more popular, a proportionally large amount of electricity is WORTH BEING WASTED.

It is a fundamentally broken model, if you are trying not to rape the environment.

This is assuming the value that the VISA system provides is the same as what Bitcoin's does. Bitcoin is being used more as a store of value these days. The ratio of the value it provides to electricity requirements is much, much greater when taking this into account.

What value are you talking about exactly?

Newer designs offer the same service with improvements like scrypt and other algorithms to prevent ASIC attacks which just centralize control to hardware designers/producers, like these warehouses in China.

Exchanges can and have artificially inflated prices:

http://www.coindesk.com/bot-named-willy-did-mt-goxs-automate...

Came here to say this.

A more accurate comparison would include costs related to storing and securing wealth (banks, guards, etc)

You're off your rocker - a "hobby of the .01%". If you can't see the potential of a decentralized cryptographically secure store-of-value/currency then you are incredibly short sighted.

The point is that almost nobody uses bitcoin, and it still uses as much electricity as VISA (or more). If it became the currency of the masses, we'd spend half the world's electricity farming blocks.

> If it became the currency of the masses, we'd spend half the world's electricity farming blocks.

Yeah, some rough math on current market cap suggests not quite half but probably more than a tenth.

But the problem is saying the 0.01%. Bitcoin is certainly used by a small fraction of people, but it's not at all a rich-person thing.

i think the electricity use is a bigger problem.

And traditional currencies have been cutting down trees for hundreds of years to process them into paper. Isn't that incredibly inefficient? Think about all the energy that is wasted to get the heavy metals out of the ground to produce coins?

That's not even including the fact that every retail store I've worked at never turn of their POS terminals or the 24hr ATM's. The gross waste of having to build buildings to store money in?

Is the traditional banking system really any more efficient?

Not to mention its not exactly wasting electricity at all its just inefficient by design for security purposes.

> Bitcoin is a hobby of the .01%.

It's still relatively easily accessible to the middle class. It also allows the middle class in regimes with unstable currencies to more easily transfer and store value.

I think you're reading too much into my post. I was simply curious to see what the actual numbers were. There's no point saying "Bitcoin is bad." without any justification: so I justified it - it's insanely inefficient. And you need that extra data point (VISA) to see just how inefficient it is. My favourite horrifying fact is that if Bitcoin were a country ranked by energy consumption it would come in at around North Korea.

>Bitcoin is a hobby of the .01%

Do you mean of the .01% of the richest people of the population? If so, you have no clue what you're talking about.

You could argue that energy is being wasted in traditional currency systems. Printing currency, ATM machines, cash registers, transporting cash in armored cars. This energy doesn't serve any purpose besides maintaining the currency itself, similar to bitcoin.

There are upcoming optimizations that will allow the bitcoin protocol, via layer 2 solutions, to run at the same capacity as visa.

Yes, it really is possibly that bitcoin will have a higher capacity for less energy costs.

Bitcoin feels like digging a mine with plastic spoons. Technically speaking the energy is not useless, since it does go into digging. But at the same time there are far more efficient ways to do it, so "useless" is a pretty decent way to describe the vast excess.

The comparison with VISA is bonkers once you account for the different sizes involved. Bitcoin uses 26,000 times more energy per transaction. If energy per transaction remained constant while Bitcoin scaled to the size of VISA (a dubious assumption, to be sure) then Bitcoin's total power consumption would be 390,000TWh/year, several times more energy than is consumed by human civilization worldwide at present.

Edit: it sure would be nice if we could just price the externalities into energy costs, then all of this would just work itself out and we wouldn't have to worry about it.

All the electricity spent isn't to do the transactions, it is actually a security cost to prevent 51% attacks on the blockchain. Amassing the amount of miners and electricity to do that attack becomes immense, hence the security. Hopefully in the future Ethereum's proof of stake implementation can solve the problem without wasting electricity.

The purpose of that security is to protect the integrity of the transactions. Without transactions, the network is pointless. The energy used for mining should be charged to the transactions, just like the energy VISA uses to light its offices would be.

> The energy used for mining should be charged to the transactions

I mean, it basically is.

The built-in rewards drop every couple years, so the only reason people will continue to mine is for transaction fees.

What are you suggesting should be different?

I'm suggesting that a different security scheme should be used, one which doesn't depend on wasting a shitload of electricity.

As I mentioned in my edit, an easy way (in terms of coming up with the solution, not implementing it) would be to price the externalities into the cost of energy. Then the electricity would only be used if it was actually worth it.

Not wasting electricity is a good idea.

But I don't understand how transaction fees relate to it. That just means a different person pays to waste electricity.

And pricing in externalities won't actually stop people from wasting power, so you'd better have a good system set up to use that money to counteract the externalities.

I'm not talking about explicit transaction fees, I'm just talking about the energy use of the system on a per-transaction basis. Looking at the absolute energy consumed by Bitcoin isn't enough by itself, because you also need to account for how big Bitcoin is.

Pricing in externalities will absolutely stop people from wasting power pointlessly. People will only use power if the benefit is greater than the cost. This includes "waste" if the effort of stopping that waste is greater than the cost of the waste, but if externalities are priced in appropriately then that means there's actually a net benefit to that. It's only a problem if the cost to the world is higher but the person paying the bill doesn't see that.

In terms of bitcoin, if the electricity to mine one costs X on the miner's power bill, and that bitcoin can be sold for 2X, then the miner will keep on doing it even if the total cost of that electricity including damage to the planet and other such things is 3X. If you price in the externalities so that the power bill actually says 3X, then the miner will stop. You don't actually need to use the extra money to counteract the externalities.

But as some miners stop, the efficiency of mining goes up again.

In a general sense, the amount of money spent on mining will stay constant. If you make electricity 3x as expensive, then maybe 1/3 as much electricity will be wasted, but it's still fundamentally a waste.

If you don't use that extra money to undo the externalities, then the world is still getting more polluted just so bitcoin can spin in place.

This isn't something like a power plant where charging $X per ton of CO2 released will make them cut emissions to 0. You would need a per-bitcoin fee to stop waste. Charging per-kWh has a limited effect, because people will always buy [bitcoin price] * [bitcoins per day] worth of electricity.

If pricing in externalities increases the price goes up by a factor of three and bitcoin mining continues at 1/3rd the energy usage then it's no longer a waste. As long as you've done it correctly so that the price is accurate, then people will only use that energy if the benefit it creates is greater.

Using energy for some benefit is fine, and bitcoin clearly has some benefit. There's only a problem when the benefit is lower than the cost of the energy, and that only happens when the energy's price doesn't reflect its cost.

But bitcoin could be sustained on a fraction of that much energy. There is no benefit to mining beyond the point that prevents 51% attacks. After that it's all tragedy of the commons waste.

That isn't how a blockchain works. The decentralization comes with penalties, such as if 51% of the participants say something is true it is. You have to provide some way to insure that doesn't happen due to a malicious attack. Proof of work systems do that buy making the cost and resources to achieve 51% astronomical.

I don't understand what you think I'm getting wrong here. All of what you say seems completely consistent with the point I'm making.

Yes we know. We are questioning whether the orders of magnitude increase in energy usage is worth the decentralization.

Unless there is a world government that dictates "no" I don't see why arguing with the market that clearly is saying "yes" is worthwhile. Even if externalities like "damage to the planet" were properly priced in by each country and energy source chain that still wouldn't guarantee the energy usage would go down, it just might be slightly less profitable. (From my standpoint there's currently no such thing as energy waste through human activity since the vast, vast majority of local energy in our solar system is not being used for any purpose, "wasteful" purpose or no.)

The whole idea is that if the price of electricity reflects its full cost, including externalities, then you'll no longer waste it. If people keep mining bitcoins in that environment, then it's because bitcoin mining actually provides more value than the cost of the energy it consumes.

If the fact that we're eight light-minutes away from a zero-maintenance 400YW fusion reactor makes it hard for you to consider human energy usage to be waste, just think of it in terms of CO2 pointlessly added to the atmosphere instead.

It doesn't help to think of CO2 pointlessly added either since I don't think mining is pointless. Now if they kept their existing setup but tweaked it so they still do all the computation but never submit any successful blocks, or just kept buying hardware and setting it on fire, then I guess I'd agree that seems pointless and wasteful (even if inconsequential compared to the giant ball of fire that's currently severely underutilized), but only because it's entirely and obviously unprofitable. Since "waste" by other metrics is so subjective I try to only consider the best proxy I can think of, which is cost and benefit figures. I don't put efficient LEDs in my house because I buy into the environmentalist argument of trying to live while using less energy personally, or live while "wasting" as little as I can, but because it saves me a significant amount of money. Similarly I don't stress out about "waste" if I go to sleep but forgot to turn some lights off because although I still have to pay for it, it's not very much. Even when the cost is high, like buying a lemon car, I don't feel bad about waste having to get rid of it and get a different one but about the extra cost.

The only way to affect miners is probably with economic consequences, rather than environmentalist philosophy. Maybe less CO2 would be added if the mining costs were higher, maybe not, and in any case I still have no idea how to price in the rise in CO2 due to a ton of SHA hardware cranking away, independent of whether it's powered by solar panels or water or coal. You'd have to have some sort of sensor on each unit (and the units involved in its manufacture -- put one over my mouth while you're at it) to capture its CO2 output at each moment of time (since it might not always be on due to repairs or whatever), and then you'd have to price the cost of each bit of output somehow, and who should pay it at what times.

To price the CO2 emissions of miners, you don't try to track the miners themselves. You tax CO2 emissions at the source (i.e. the coal-fired power plant the miners are plugged in to), and then the miners pay for it through higher electricity costs. If they use solar or wind instead then their electricity prices wouldn't reflect that tax. If they use a mix, the price will partially reflect that tax.

If you can price in the consequences at their origin then the rest just works itself out, whether it's LEDs or cars or bitcoin mining.

The data center doesn't consume the max output of each diesel, that would be an idiotic design.

Also, Visa handles orders of magnitude more transactions per second so the energy difference is staggering. Bitcoin users are like regular people driving around in coal fired steam locomotives.

Right, but this is a Fermi problem. We have no idea what the true output of each generator is, or that there are only two per centre. All we know is anecdotal evidence from reporters who visited the sites and whatever VISA will publicly admit. As an order of magnitude estimate, it's good enough.

And yes - it does highlight the problem with bitcoin well: 3 orders of magnitude less electricity to process 3 orders of magnitude more transactions.

Bitcoin mining is wasteful compared to other mechanisms (e.g. Stellar SCP) that can secure a blockchain without mining.

I couldn't find anything but I wonder how global energy consumption changes on track with the predicted bitcoin processing growth? are we talking 1% of global power consumption in 10 years or 10%?

It's possible to estimate an upper bound based on the dollar value of the BTC miners receive as revenue from inflation (subsidy) and transaction fees. The inflation rate in Bitcoin drops over time; transaction fees will likely increase, although not in proportion to the total economic value of transactions (and other uses) secured by Bitcoin (bitcoin is not "backed by energy", it is secured by energy expenditure).

Currently miner revenue is less than $7 million/day. It's a bit tricky to convert that into, say, CO2 emitted as miners tend to use the cheapest possible sources of energy, which are stranded renewable resources like hydroelectricity dams built in places distant from consumers (apparently China among others have built a lot of uneconomic dams for various political reasons).

The PoW security model doesn't require the amount of energy destroyed to increase indefinitely as a percentage of total value secured. Rather, the amount of energy destroyed by PoW simply has to be more than the highest funded attacker can afford. That's easy to do, as attackers who would attack via PoW are few and far between - as your attacker gets more powerful (governments) there are much cheaper attacks that can be done than naively attacking PoW directly.

In any case, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the amount of CO2 emitted by Bitcoin mining operations is dwarfed by the amount of CO2 emitted by plane travel associated with people attending Bitcoin conferences...

> Rather, the amount of energy destroyed by PoW simply has to be more than the highest funded attacker can afford.

Miners don't measure or care for how much an attacker can afford. They will simply continue adding mining hardware and increase electricity usage as long as they can turn a profit, which depends mostly on:

* the marginal cost of electricity

* the amortization cost of the hardware

* the price of BTC

* the difficulty

If you calculate power usage for the global hash rate as if it were produced by, on average, 2-generation old mining hardware @0.51 W/Gh, you end up with 0.017% of average global electricity production (3x more than last year).

If you extrapolate an unconstrained tripling of production every year, you will (to my surprise) arrive at your 10% estimate.

However, if we assume the last year's additional capacity was on modern hardware (5x more efficient), miners are presently using 0.0005% of global production, and after 10 years of unconstrained annual tripling would only account for 0.295%

Further advancements in efficiency or a slowing of the growth rate from 300% annually seem like likely diminishing factors.

In the end it doesn't matter how efficient the mining ends up being. All that matters is the price of electricity. Assuming efficiency gains level out and thus the cycle of buying new hardware to keep up approaches infinity length, the only major cost left is electricity use.

So in that case the energy used is dependent on (transaction fees * bitcoin price) / (energy price)

So to get a % of all energy usage, you need to know the future energy usage, the future energy price, the future bitcoin price and the future amount that will be spend on transaction fees.

I'm sure the future energy usage and price have good forecasts available. Then you're left with the bitcoin price and fees (both which are dependent on popularity (which in turn is dependent on price and fees)), but good luck forecasting that.

Ironically the best way to get bitcoin to switch away from proof of work would be to silently acquire 51% share of the mining pool and start voting for proof of stake instead of proof of work.

That's not exactly how it works as there's no voting per se. That would basically lead to a fork.

Mining Bitcoin is completely analogous to mining for gold. Was all of the effort and energy put into gold mining "wasted"? Perhaps, but the economic liquidity it provides has value in and of itself. I'd argue it's quite high, given that money supplies are only going to tighten in the future.

The article said it's largely run on hydroelectric power, which would seem to mean it's not hurting the environment that much.

China isn't trying to clean the environment.

The Paris Climate Agreement lets China get away with polluting more since they're considered a developing country. Not only that, they get paid by the first world countries who signed the agreement in the hopes that they will be developed faster. You have to be an absolute idiot to believe that a country with such an awful track of human rights violations would sign it out of the goodness of their heart.

Do you not think that mining metal, the minting process etc... is not waste?

Who said anything about metal? Physical cash is dying.

It is still used and being produced. Cash will not being dying anytime soon. People are using Bitcoin for many reasons, one of them being privacy, cash provides privacy.

It is a myth that Bitcoin provides privacy. Bitcoin is pseudonymous. With external knowledge, it is possible to detemine the identity of users. And you have to give your real-world information if you want to convert Bitcoins to $$.

There are a few Bitcoin "ATM"'s out there that dispense cash for BTC or let you buy BTC for cash. The latest one I read about took your picture and required an ID, but some out there probably don't, and a motivated individual could steal an ID and just not show the camera their face.

I really think it's amazing that we have this authoritarian China that is hellbent on destroying the environment in the world, destroying manufacturing and jobs and society in other democratic countries, and guess what, we keep buying crap that don't last long from China.

But it's work to prevent armored cars (often diesel) transporting cash. Or potentially large portions of banking and minting systems which as a whole expends plenty of energy. You can't just look at the cost without weighing the benefit.

You could say you don't think that is likely to happen, but spending energy to attempt to save more energy down the road isn't a clear mistake– it would just be a failed ambitious attempt to reduce waste.

It cost money to run a finance system.

What you are arguing, effectively, is that if you care about stopping global warming, then lets cut the electricity to every single bank in the world.

Some finance systems cause global warming because of the air conditioning systems running in their buildings. And others, like bitcoin, cause it via mining.

How does your categorical criticism not also apply to things like barbie-doll manufacturing facilities?

Also, it does not take into account the potential for value being removed from dollars (denominator and subsidizing currency of big oil, big war, big agra, etc.) and being given irrevocably to the proletariat who are actually concerned about climate change.

> irrevocably to the proletariat

Yes, a currency that is so hard to understand that even seasoned technocrats can't figure it out is perfect for the proletariat.

Cryptocurrencies are yet another example of wealth transfer from educated elite to another educated elite. There is nothing "democratic" about it.

It requires a tech expertise which 95% of the planet doesn't have to even accept/make a payment. Forget about "mining" it - 99.5% of the world's population doesn't have the knowledge or the resources for it.

If you can't figure it out, you're not really a seasoned technocrat, are you?

Sure, it requires some tech expertise right now. But so do ALL emerging technologies. Bitcoin will probably not be the dominant cryptocurrency forever. I foresee whichever one is able to be quickly and secured transferred and stored on smartphones changing the global economy. Think about how many people in developing countries have phones and need a way to securely transact and store currency.

Computers at some point was technology that 95% of the planet doesn't understand.

Most people still don't understand computers, but they're easy to use and relatively predictable, although security is still a big problem.

The thing about currency is that if people lose their money they might suffer and die. So it should be easy enough to understand that they can't easily be ripped off, and transparent enough that nobody can accumulate system-changing quantities without that being pretty obvious to everyone else. I've been interested in Bitcoin for years but understanding the Bitcoin ecosystem seems like a full-time job. You can't have an economy entirely based on financialization and trading, and if the people who specialize in handling the currency are sure to end up with the largest amounts of it then it's hardly better than what it's replacing.

I'm not saying there should be no rewards for specializing in currency work, but I'd like to see some sort of self-limiting mechanism. I'm reminded of a humorous Stanislaw Lem story in which a wicked king is tricked into replacing all the currency in the kingdom with uranium coins, so that his insatiable desire to accumulate as much as possible in the royal treasury eventually leads to criticality and his subsequent destruction.

Do you consider accessing Facebook as 'understanding computers'? If not, this number hasn't changed that much...

Do you consider having a wallet as 'understanding bitcoin'? If not, this number hasn't changed that much...

We can do this all day. You don't need to understand anything other than downloading a wallet, storing your coins there, and being able to send them anywhere instantly.

Except bitcoins are not instant, and aren't even guaranteed to go through.

The transactions are also non-refundable and pseudo anonymous, unlike the payment methods in your wallet. This is not a feature.

Making analogies with computers and smart phones and wallets doesn't mean Bitcoin is guaranteed to be successful or mass adopted.

being given irrevocably to the proletariat

Really? Where is this mass distribution taking place? I don't think most of the proletariat has ASICs and my attempts to mine bitcoin on a CPU some years ago were fruitless. I think I have half a BTC somewhere on my hard drive but but I don't have any Bitcoin software installed right now because having an active wallet seems to require handling massive blockchain files, and I really don't enough about security to be sure it isn't some kind of explosive payload.

I guess I could dig up an older computer, put a minimal operating system on it, and dedicate that to being my bitcoin wallet. Or my Dogecoin wallet. Or my Ethereum wallet. There's >100 cryptocurrencies now and I have no way of knowing which ones are subject to Tulip mania and which (if any) are being created in the public interest; they all seem to be their own raison d'etre (rather than having positive externalities that I'd want to invest in), they all seem to be speculative, they all seem to reward hoarding.

At least Ethereum seems aimed at offering utility beyond simply being currency, but so much of the hype is speculative that it's drowning out more proletarian considerations like real-world utility. I'm not trying to be snarky here, I'd love to hear which cryptocurrency you think is best for regular people and why.

By 'regular people' I mean people who don't have lots of capital to invest and don't want to restructure their lives around mining or something. I'd be particularly interested to hear of any currency that was designed to limit concentrations of value and instead prioritized transaction velocity.

the distribution today is evident in redditors being made into millionaires, and in venezuelans buying basic goods and health care.

the traditional government control on value is only starting to erode though, and who knows what the future looks like.

The idea that this will somehow wrest control from governments is a libertarian fever dream, and will be as long as governments have a monopoly on force. At best, governments will allow it to continue to operate in parallel, albeit subject to regulations. At least for citizens of developed nations with heavily regulated financial industries. I don't know if it will be more true for Venezuelans.

Wrong. Bitcoin is a black swan. For example, me and my friends use it to pay each other for various thing because it's just so easy/painless. There is NOTHING out there that is as easy and painless and cheap (pre fucked up BTC fees, we're using LTC for now to transfer between one another).

How is the government going to stop me from using Bitcoin? Buy bitcoins locally, store them in your wallet, memorize your passphrase, and delete your wallet. Now what? How are you going to know I have coins? All you can surmise is I bought 'something' for $X which could have easily been chips I bought with cash.

Used to work for a popular bitcoin wallet. LOTS of Vene users. Even talked to some personally who used ETH/BTC to pay for goods.

Just to speak of the "fiat" alternatives here:

Alipay and WeChat are free and convenient in China, relying on simple QR code scans to pay contacts. They are free. Other countries have similar things (LINE?)

PayPal is so close to being this too but it's just so clunky and relies on input of your friends' email addresses.

If I remember correctly Visa tried doing their own thing in the UK some time ago (Visa V.me) but it didn't really catch for whatever reason.

Apparently you haven't used Venmo, or any of the other tools for paying your friends using government backed money conveniently, for free.

I have. I can't stand that a third party 'owns' my money and the fact that it's not based off anything. It could be gone tomorrow. You can say the same for BTC, but that's only if someone steals my coins. You also failed to address the use case in my OP.

"Really? Where is this mass distribution taking place?"

It happens at the transaction level.

You now don't have to pay 30 dollars for a wire transfer. You can send money anywhere in the world, for 1-30cents, depending on your cryptocurrency of choice.

Plus whatever fee (often % based) you're going to pay if you need to convert from your cryptocurrency to another one or to your local currency, but that still may be less than other methods depending on where you live and what those methods are. Here in the US I can't even pay my landlord online without a $3 fee each time (or more if I want it to go through in less than a few days) because we bank at different banks and neither of us is willing to set up an account at the other's, so a check it is, but even that I have to pay the cost of the stamp.

Barbie doll manufacturers don't want to use electricity, and barbie doll manufacturing isn't zero sum. It's fundamentally different.

If someone learned how to make a barbie doll which used 1% of the current electricity usage, a couple extra dolls would get created, but electricity usage would drop a lot.

If someone learned how to make bitcoins with 1% of the current electricity usage, _miners would just mine 100x what they do now_. Fundamentally, the amount of electricity that will be wasted on bitcoin mining is driven by the price. So as it gets more efficient, it becomes worth it to waste more to match the price in the race for mined blocks.

It's horrible, and it's incredibly dishonest to compare it to any other kind of manufacturing.

I see what you mean, but in reality miners are constrained by mining hardware production speeds, and mining hardware pricing which charges a 10x more for a 10x more efficient machine. It is almost always a margin call whether buying a new machine will pay for itself, so the 100x elastic response you are describing seems unreasonable.

There are also 2 factors to control the growth of miners, reward halving and the end of this weird period of high fee transactions. After transaction fees drop down, a lot of older mining hardware will be unprofitable and come offline.

And how would that in any way refute the point that Bitcoin itself wastes energy?

It's a familiar pattern by now - someone criticizes Bitcoin, and the reply is that some other thing is bad too. You are essentially changing the subject, not addressing the criticism. Are you hoping I'll get distracted, or something? Surely you can't be hoping I'll suddenly start thinking Bitcoin is wonderfully energy-efficient, for example.

Reminding me that Ted Bundy was really bad, is not going to convince me that Jeffrey Dahmer was a great guy. (I almost went "full Godwin" here with you-know-who's next-door neighbor as the example, so, you're welcome.)

Are there any rhetoric experts out there who can properly categorize this "argumentation technique?" The best I can do is some combination of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evasion_(ethics)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

Anyway I call it "A full and glorious admission that you can't argue the point on the merits whatsoever."

How and why would Bitcoin remove value from real money?

Basically, because one is being printed faster over time and and the other is being printed slower over time.

Also boom/bust cycles and the increasing mainstream sentiment of crypto as a safe-haven asset.

I read an argument once that an inflationary currency encourages spending and discourages hoarding, and it follows that the reverse would be true for a deflationary store of value like Bitcoin.

And are you saying boom/bust cycles are a good thing? For pretty much any average user of money, they're not.

This is completely irrelevant to the article, where they use hydroelectric power to mine bitcoins. But even if they used nonrenewable soures, the negative impact on the environment shouldn't be faulted to bitcoin. It's the energy sector's fault for prioritizing harmful energy to renewable energy.

And even so, using energy to mine bitcoins isn't wasting the energy, it's turning the energy to real value. Just because it's not physical currency doesn't mean it isn't real - it has advantages (and disadvantages) to physical money. The electricity/algorithms cost create these features. And when countries ban cryptocurrencies, they would only do so on the guise of global warming, but more accurate and unspoken reasons would be that it gives too much power (anonymity) to the people.

Electricity is fungible. The clean hydropower would be used somewhere else if not wasted on BC.

Electricity is not perfectly fungible because of infrastructure costs and transmission losses.

The nature of mining as a competition for the cheapest electricity means that miners will naturally move towards areas where the electricity is not in demand.

They are using electricity to do computation. Even if, hypothetically, the electricity could not be transported elsewhere (and that's not realistic), if hypothetically manufacturing could not be set up there (and that's exactly what normally happens), the electricity could be used to do computation which is _actually useful_, which is why companies set up datacenters in the middle of nowhere with cheap electricity.

Minus the transportation costs.

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