It'd be nice if some of the money were used to make it easier for charities to convert to cash as quickly as possible. Bitcoin pointlessly consumes so much dirty energy, I imagine many environmental charities see bitcoin akin to blood money.
While some coal in landlocked and inaccessible locations is fired up in an environmentally unfriendly process to mine Bitcoins, most miners are powered by hydrogen dams, geysers and other geothermal energy sources that cannot be transported or stored.
Um what? Certainly we have made great progress as a civilization switching to cleaner forms of energy production but calling greenhouse pollution a "non issue" at this point is pretty nuts!
Worse, Bitcoin's energy consumption scales based on the price of bitcoin, not on transaction volume. The more USD each bitcoin is worth, the more miners will spend on energy to get that sweet, sweet block reward.
So it isn't a "meme" and Bitcoin's proponents would do well to concede that "yeah, bitcoin pisses away a lot of electricity--sorry about that...".
Do you also suppose that we should reduce vehicle emissions by increasing the cost of gasoline? Why isn't it fair to blame vehicles that run on gasoline and vehicles which are particularly inefficient at running on gasoline?
No it's not. I'm saying you can fix the problem by modifying one constraint. Fix the cost of energy, and you fix your problem with energy wastage. It will make absolutely zero difference to bitcoin what the price of energy is. If energy is more expensive, mining will reduce, and bitcoin difficulty resets to the lower mining hashrate.
> Do you also suppose that we should reduce vehicle emissions by increasing the cost of gasoline?
Of course. It's ludicrous to think otherwise.
Again. Give me a break...
By the way there is no such thing as a waste of energy. This isn’t soviet Russia, neither you nor the government dictate how one is allowed to use energy. As long as you have the funds to pay for it, you are free to use the electricity how you see fit.
If you’re reasonably concerned about the environmental concerns of how energy is produced, take it up with the producers. Stop technology-shaming.
Until Bitcoin is done bootstrapping and the block reward is zero.