Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

It's not nearly that bad, because it makes more sense to compare these numbers to gold. Gold is economically similar, since most of its value comes from speculation on the notion that it is deflationary.

If we assume that 85% of total global gold production comes from primary gold mining only, then the 88 million oz (Moz) produced in 2016 consumed the energy value of an estimated 123.2 million barrels of oil equivalent versus 6.6 million barrels of oil equivalent for all Bitcoin production.

https://srsroccoreport.com/bitcoin-vs-gold-which-ones-a-bubb...

The speculative power of gold comes from a kind of "Proof of Work" very much like Bitcoin, by a different mechanism (with different economic properties, of course).

If Bitcoin partially replaces gold (in market cap), and we don't find alternatives for Proof-Of-Work, it seems reasonable to assume that it will also partially replace gold's energy consumption as well.

I really don't understand how people can relate gold to bitcoin - other than the fact they both seem to trade at prices unrelated to fundamental underpinnings.

In my opinion, bitcoin is not digital gold, and quite the opposite. Both require a large amount of energy to be mined, however, once gold is produced (i.e. found), there is no more energy required to keep that nugget of gold in existence. Bitcoin, on the contrary, requires a constantly increasing amount of energy to maintain it's utility.

If today we stopped mining gold, all the mined gold in the world will still be there and will probaly increase in value due to scarcity.

If today we stopped mining bitcoin, all the bitcoin in the world will be worthless.

That sounds pretty bad to me.

Also, let's compare it to cash. Bitcoin is currently worth more than $15000. How much energy is spent to create this in bank notes ?

Or compare to banks. How many people do you need to provide an office for with all the associated cost so that the structure can create $15000 ?

Banks safeguard your deposit and offer significantly more services than Bitcoin.

A better comparison to energy usage would be other distributed computing systems.

Bitcoin is insanely wasteful by design because it's requiring clients brute force guess the hashes in increasingly rising difficulty.

Computational work in cryptosystems of the future would ideally provide useful work that provides value other than brute force hash resistance.

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