"If it keeps increasing at this rate, Bitcoin mining will consume all the world’s electricity by February 2020"
PoW/Bitcoin has the same dynamics as gold mining under a gold standard. There is a return to spending a marginal resource in bitcoin mining, vs something else. As you add more resources to bitcoin mining, the return becomes low compared to the "something else" options, and no more is invested. You reach some equilibrium.
There's no reason that equilibrium would be the entire economy; most likely, some small fraction of it. But note, network costs scaling with the size of the global economy is not a point in Bitcoin's favor!
Proof of work does, in a way, rely on the entire world spending enough computational work on the blockchain that it becomes infeasible for any one person to spend more. So it does have much of the dynamics of an arms race.
Edit: The same logic explains why the problem will affect most attempts to have an "eco-friendly" PoW Blockchain, like Bram Cohen's proposal:
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/08/chia-network-cryptocurrenc...
That just shifts the arms race to something else: in that case, on spending economic resources on faster ways of doing a lookup. Still should reach equilibrium at a stable fraction of the economy and produce the same waste, although perhaps in the form of hyper-optimized DB lookups and the related hardware and labor for it, not energy.
Conversely, if it weren't worth so much, less people would be competing to mine bitcoin, the difficulty would be much lower and the energy used would be less. Not a very useful observation to make though as it doesn't help the problem off high energy usage. Using hard drive space instead should use less energy at the expense of using more chip fabs and more silicon.
If you think about it, if one can transform energy into money, humans will end up capturing all the energy they can to do so.
The only reason anyone would bring up BTC regarding climate change would be to distract from the harm caused by oil, gas, mining, and oceanic shipping companies.
Just because it's not significant doesn't mean we have to forget about it. We can always tackle BTC's problem later.
Yes, and for many other reasons, rooted in the fact that especially since BTC is not really used as a currency, the effort is de-facto wasted and that we should likely be putting the energy to better use.
You know the about the Pacific Island, similar to Easter Island, that depleted all of their resources building massive stone heads?
How much sugar a BTC buys you on the long term is anybody's guess.
You've very well illustrated the fundamental problem with Bitcoin: it's thought of as a technology, when really it's a financial instrument.
The 'storage' you've described is mechanical, technological - and has nothing to do with the concept of a financial store of value.
A good financial 'store of value' is somewhere you can park some money, and know that you can go back in 50 years (or some time frame) and it will still have value. Hopefully a little more.
BTC is extremely volatile, and because it's not backed by anything - it could go to 0 tomorrow. Probably not - but it could.
Think: will BTC be around in 100 years? Heck, in 10 years?
Maybe.
Will real-estate in London be worth at least something in 100 years? Almost assuredly.
Real-estate is generally a very good store of value though obviously it depends upon which regime that real-estate sits.
BTC is a very interesting thing, but it's not really a currency, and not really a store of value ... so then what is it?
And you will have big costs maintaining that particular store of value (taxes, maintenance, ...)
Bitcoin storage will cost you zero. And yes, it could be worthless in two years.
Ahh - but we can 'guess' - and given how we know the world works, there is a very high likelihood that London property will have value, and probably more than it does today.
BTC - there's a decent chance it could be worthless.
Though BTC does own the 'upper end of value spectrum' - i.e. investing in BTC could make you 1000x richer in 100 years - and London property will never do that - BTC also owns the lower end of the spectrum, i.e. with a range of probabilities at zero, or near zero. Meaning - not a very good store of value.
In fact - as a 'store of value' BTC can't even be remotely considered when there are so many better options.
Speculation? Sure. BTC is might be a good bet actually. Store of value? Bad bet.
With one small caveat: the world is in turmoil at the moment (as usual, more than usual, not sure?), with big events hitting the economy worldwide: climate change, AI, self-driving cars, automation, ... you name it.
What is the chance of any one of those events to nuke your "London Real State in 100 years" strategy? Low. The combined chance of all those forces? Not so low.
What is the chance that real state in London will be wiped out (as a store of value) and bitcoin will not, in 100 years? The balance is tipped on the side of London, but not so much as you would think.
Interesting times ...
BTC can be stolen (have been stolen) and depend of the existence of a complex network of computers and the faith of thousands of people.
The value of everything depends on complex interactions, and a dose of faith.
This is most likely a myth...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/new-evidence-easter-...
https://www.archaeology.org/news/1649-131216-easter-island-n...
Hell, the state department spent taxpayer money to promote fracking to the rest of the world.
This is only possible because we allow so much concentration of money and power (and thus they can buy their way around the law and avoid paying for externalities). Concentration of capital is the root of all evil. Modern banking system is built to concentrate capital, and has been dangerously successful in the past century.
Antibiotics lead to resistant bacteria, not viruses.
Bitcoin, with its proof-of-work/Merkle tree, exists solely because this problem cannot be currently solved. Perhaps blame that state of affairs a bit more than those who seek an exit from it?
Various QEs around propelled the fiat to the moon. Add to that various other money making legal and semi legal moves with, and having extra money, as a number, not a value, had to flow somewhere. So it did, one of the speculations being housing, another one Bitcoin, etc.
You don't hope for a "massive crash", but some form of taming the markets and removing liquidity should (we'll see how this will be played out) occur in the next 2-5 years.
At that point of time, Bitcoin, sadly, may be the first in the line of high beta toys to go out of the window as the rest scrape for the exit (BTC network is limited to around 7 TPS or therefore).
Meanwhile, buy the dip, to the moon, etc.
LPT: If you can't disengage that much on emotional level from it, at least hold your btc on an exchange that converts striaght to USD, and make sure you can put your order in asap when things go south.
If Bitcoin continues growing at the rate is has for the past 60 days, each coin will be worth over $1M by 2019-01-07.
(Obviously extremely unlikely, but interesting to think about)
Possible, but use at your own risk.
In which world do journalists live?