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Comment by Capt-RogerOver | Hacker News Reader

If you knew the technical details of blockchains, you would not think that. And yes, the process IS much more than wasing massive amounts of energy.

> 1) Surely we can come up with a less wasteful solution to this

You are welcome to try. If you do come up with a less waisful solution you will be able to create your own altcoin and will make billions worth of dollars on it. Some very smart people have tried in the past and are still trying.

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There's already a less wasteful solution, it's called fiat money.

That's because you are not actually considering the electricity usage of fiat money at all.

Banks aren't setting themselves on fire in the course of operation:

http://gizmodo.com/a-huge-fire-took-out-a-bitcoin-mining-ope...

Because banks aren't setting themselves up in places based on the electricty cost. And shoving rackmount servers in close proximity and underventilating them. Even huge fintech operations aren't chasing cheap power at the exclusion of other concerns. Banks do not use the kind of electricity that cryptocurrency uses, when you control for the volume of usage of each.

So from a sample size of 1 you think all miners are setting g themselves on fire?

You're right

Excel consumes a lot of energy

Fiat money doesn't serve the same purpose as Bitcoin and in some ways is the opposite. Why are there so many trite unthoughtful comments being made about cryotocurrencies? I'm guessing people are turned off by all the scam coins and are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I'm turned off by watching a bunch of people who haven't learned basic lessons about banking trying to reinvent it, badly. Anyone who spent a few days learning about how banks do security could have understood that what these exchanges like Mt. Gox were doing was frightfully vulnerable, and anyone unwilling to spend at least a few days learning about banking security has no business running a currency exchange. But it's all handwaved away because fiat money is evil and cryptocurrency makes you feel like the hero in a Neal Stephenson novel so screw the man. So now we have a bunch of programmers and enthusiasts learning how the financial system works from first principles and making boneheaded mistakes as a result. And they have enough money swirling around thanks to Chinese capital flight that they can screw with the pricing for an entire market like GPUs. And then when you point out how much electricity this whole scheme wastes they say "well banks use electricity" as if that's the same thing. It's heedless, irresponsible and discouraging.

Do you realize that exchanges and cryptocurrencies are not even close to the same thing? In fact most exchanges deal in fiat as well, so you should also be shitting on fiat at the same time based on your logic.

Bank Of America Tower requires around 8 megawatt. And it's only one skyscraper.

So what? Bank of America is a company that provides banking services as a business model, they are not a necessary aspect of fiat currency any more than coinbase is a necessity of bitcoin.

Right. People are still going to have mortgages in a world where cryptocurrency replaces fiat money, assuming that we don't have much bigger concerns than electricity use. People are still going to need banking services. It's not like you can replace the whole banking sector with Bitcoin.

> If you knew the technical details of blockchains, you would not think that. And yes, the process IS much more than wasing massive amounts of energy.

Feel free to elaborate...

proof of stake

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