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Comment by jamesmccann | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, we out here obsessing about making money on BTC...

There are folks who on purpose do not participate in BTC because they know the energy consumption is wrong. Go tell people about it and they might get it.

I don't participate in BTC because I find the whole thing hilarious.

Between it's inability to work as a payment method at scale (transactions per minute), exchanges running off with client bitcoins, exchanges getting broken into constantly and the shady way it's handled when that happens and on and on.

I'm not saying the idea is fundamentally useless (clearly) but the implementation is terrible.

I might be wrong and in 20 years I'll be getting paid in BTC but I'd bet that isn't the case.

And they make their snide observations from where? That's right, their computers. How much energy is spent consuming and deliving Facebook? Or iOS games?

There is indeed a lot of engery spent elsewhere - your comment is pure whataboutism though.

A single Bitcoin transaction currently use as much engery as energy spent in a single home for days.

Depends where their electricity is coming from, doesn't it?

What a pathetic argument. Do you realize how much energy is used to maintain existing computers systems used by banks for all their fake fiat currency?

Again - pure whataboutism here.

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

There are multiple reports now out detailing and comparing energy use of traditional transactional fiat money vs. the new schemes

Same thoughts on my side. And we're mostly doing nothing to stop the growing catastrophe. And I am no exception to that, ...just to be honest.

Given that bitcoin can be boiled down to essentially a Chinese energy index, these two things are not unrelated.

There will always be terrible things happening in the world. That doesn't mean we should only work on those problems at the expense of everything else.

That’s just an empty sop to a blistered conscience.

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