MS: Bitcoin mining uses as much electricity as 1M US homes

On some stuff you cannot put a price tag - like mastercard ads say, some stuff is priceless.

I think that in reality, PoW systems become more centralized over time. You can already see that with Bitcoin. Eventually the gatekeepers become those with the largest energy resources available to them, and "we the people" will be in the noise when it comes to hashing power.

I'd rather take energy efficient centralization than faux decentralization that also happens to destroy the environment.

It's not healthy for a society when people start self-censoring their actions like that. If nothing else, it places banks in a privileged position where they can get away with more predatory behavior, because people are more likely to see them as a necessity.

It's for this reason that anonymous transactions are valuable. You really should be able to buy legal marijuana or books about firearm construction without worrying that people might judge you. Neither is illegal, if you want one (or both) you should have the freedom to purchase them. However, many people would choose not to buy them, simply because they know the bank might see it on their balance sheet if they ever have to call the support line, and they're worried about follow-on consequences to their insurance premiums or their job if knowledge about that purchase ever circulates. That's a chilling effect in action.

Electricity is very fungible, and hydro locations are limited. This means that when the (very limited) hydro energy is converted into heat to mine bits because it is easier to colocate some ASICs next to the dam than an aluminium smelter - then the smelter will run on slightly-pricier coal instead. The marginal carbon emissions can still be blamed on the coin mining.

Under what definition?

Is this definition a standard that couldn't be applied to other currency systems or asset classes that you respect?

There's a reason I ask so specifically

For an individual investor making a decision about which currency to hold, all else being equal, deflation is always better than inflation. Not sure what you're trying to say exactly.

The point is that transaction fees will never be as high as current block rewards. The cost of bitcoin mining is currently subsidized by inflation of the Bitcoin money supply. That inflation will end, and it will not be fully replaced by transaction fees.

If you're asking why the inflation schedule had to be fixed in advance, that's because otherwise there is no trustless way to ensure it stays in check. The genius of Bitcoin is the way it uses incentives to enforce rules in a distributed system made up of selfish and even malicious participants. As you say, miners would have to self-regulate against their own self interest, and that would not be stable.

PoW has proven itself in the field for years, while PoS is still untested at scale. Being able to piggyback scientific/medical/environmental computation over a PoW scheme would provide significant value as opposed to a fairly useless compute problem such as the double-SHA256.

The key here is to be able to re-interpret/re-state a problem in terms of the PoW algorithm with the following characteristics: - Expensive to calculate, cheap to validate - Dynamically-adjustable difficulty

An ideal implementation of this would be similar to an OS running an idle process (double SHA256), and switching to running user-processes (medical/scientific computation) when needed/instructed.

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

I did some research, and it doesn't seem that the mining farm in Iceland is even comparable to Chinese ones in terms of hashrate. Do you have any source?

I mean, as a matter of principle, the transaction fees of a bitcoin transaction are always cheaper than any credit card swipe, ATM withdrawal, or wire transfer.