Again, it will crash, so this won't happen. But the community expectation (even if the community doesn't realize it) of bitcoin absolutely is that it will eat all the world's electricity.
We've been waiting for a long time for that catalyst, and if anything I think it's been receding further off into the distance as bitcoin becomes more, not less, established as a mainstream technology.
The people who keep buying into BTC because they think it's fundamentally more useful than fiat currency are in a very small minority. Most of the people buying BTC are viewing it as a speculative investment, but the only reason they're buying it as an investment is because it keeps going up, and the only reason it keeps going up is because people keep investing in it. If it starts going down for some reason, even a little bit, the positive feedback loop could easily switch to a negative one and the bubble will pop. All the investors will start selling at once to try and reap their profits before it falls further.
Also, part of the reason the bubble has gone on for so long is that historically it's been difficult to short BTC. This may change with the advent of Bitcoin futures markets....
Look, I can't tell you the future. I don't know when or how any better than people knew when the dot com crash or real estate crisis would hit. But people in the late 90's and mid 00's absolutely could see that the relevant markets were inflating in unsustainable ways, and absolutely did predict a "crash".
This is no different. Bitcoin is growing in an unsustainable way (c.f. literally eating all the world's electricity if it continues). That never ends well.
The amount of energy used for heating and cooling is extremely huge. Bitcoin is probably 0.0x% of that amount.
Internet is 2% of the whole CO2 emissions, heating and cooling is more than 30%. The industry pollution of China is so big you can't see their impact on CO2 emissions from their cars or their agriculture.
The estimates for Bitcoin, as much as they sound big, they really are not.
Cost in energy per transaction can only fall down with TPS increase (which is something lightning network, or bigger blocksize can do).
With the additional benefit that it keeps people warm/cool?
Can you please tell me why you are not interested in solving this problem? My guess is that it is impossible to do with Bitcoin, and people dismissing the energy problems want to protect their investment rather than develop better technologies.
Most of that energy is wasted because of the architecture and irrational desire of 24/7 comfort AC blasting at the coolest setting.
> Can you please tell me why you are not interested in solving this problem? My guess is that it is impossible to do with Bitcoin, and people dismissing the energy problems want to protect their investment rather than develop better technologies.
Problem is solved easily by clean energy sources.
There are bigger problems to solve, like heating and cooling, like CO2 footprint of animal agriculture, like deforestation of Amazon forest for Argentinian and Brazilian steak etc.
We are here mostly programmers, we don't profile the code and then optimize the fastest function, but the biggest bottleneck. Bitcoin is no where near the bottleneck and all scaling solutions will require less energy per transaction.
Problem is also automagically solved by the market. If mining gets to expensive to do, miners will figure out how to use less energy.
For example, market is not solving all of the above environmental problems because, for example, there is not fair market in animal agriculture.
"Bitcoin is a tool for freeing humanity from oligarchs and tyrants, dressed up as a get-rich-quick scheme."
I consider myself a member of the bitcoin community, and I absolutely do not believe it will increase 100x within 2 years. I think this bubble is going to crash.