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Comment by polkovnikov-ph | Hacker News Reader

Dollars require infrastructure too. Thousands of banks and other institutions are required to operate it. They have offices (that take energy) and employees (that take energy and also have households that take energy). Most of that energy comes from fossil fuel. I'm pretty sure operation of dollar costs much more than operation of Bitcoin. Let's ban dollar.

High price of bitcoin resulted in surge of "bitcoin is a fraud" kind of articles to HN. Who wants to play bears on Bitcoin market that much?

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> They have offices (that take energy) and employees (that take energy and also have households that take energy).

This is also true for any company handling Bitcoin.

> I'm pretty sure operation of dollar costs much more than operation of Bitcoin.

And if you compare the utility of the two?

It's very worrying that few in the community seems to take this issue seriously.

Genocide is a very effective way to reduce carbon emissions, but that doesn't mean it is a good or ethical idea.

That's a strawman I'm afraid, the real question is the relative energy per-transaction costs between Bitcoin and traditional currencies. Bitcoin just doesn't scale.

I actually think this is a really interesting argument. Here's some quick napkin math that shows a large enough difference that, I think, you can't just shut this down as a strawman:

17.7M barrels of oil annually by bitcoin mining operations

8.16B barrels of oil by US banking sector employees

These numbers don't count the physical infrastructure, servers, and other plant that these businesses own, operate, heat, keep the lights on in.

Here are my sources:

One stat I just read says that the top 20 North American banks employ 1.2 million people. That's 1.2M people eating and commuting 5 days a week for the purpose of supporting fiat.

With a quick investigation:

-US per capita annual barrels of oil: 6800 (1)

-Bitcoin annual Terrawatt hours: 30.1 (2)

-6800 * 1.2M = 8.16B barrels of oil by US banking sector employees (3)

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/250220/ranking-of-united...

2: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-...

3: http://www.kylesconverter.com/energy,-work,-and-heat/terawat...

> That's 1.2M people eating and commuting 5 days a week for the purpose of supporting fiat.

They aren't really "supporting fiat" as you say, they do things that (presumably) have value like storing money, making loans and...whatever else it is that banks do.

If all the world's central banks decided tomorrow to stop the printing presses banks would still have a function in society independent of "supporting fiat" as they have had for a long time.

Mmm, those people would continue to exist even if they didn't need to work to support fiat. And I don't buy the fact that not having banking jobs would affect the overall population all that much. If you really want an apples to apples comparison you'd need to find numbers for:

- Energy required to harvest and process hard currency - Energy required to run the servers that support electronic transactions for fiat

Then divide that by the overall value of fiat vs bitcoin to see how costly they are per unit of value

The costs in mining Bitcoin are not really per transaction. They are per block, and a block can include many transactions. The technology is also changing. It is wrong to assume more transactions imply more energy usage.

> High price of bitcoin resulted in surge of "bitcoin is a fraud" kind of articles to HN.

The higher the price, the more energy miners can profitably use. The environmental aspect of bitcoin is getting attention because the carbon footprint is no longer hypothetical.

Let's look at previous May. So you're sure the reason of the "bitcoin is a fraud" surge is x5 increase in hash rate, and not x10 increase in exchange rate? Look, it got twice as efficient in half a year, and yet they go with their hypocrisy on bad environmental impact!

Bitcoin is not going to be replacing dollars in any foreseeable future, so any (environmental) costs of bitcoins are purely additive to the existing infrastructure costs.

That's the second good reason to ban dollar, isn't it?

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