As opposed to: gold/silver/diamonds mining (greater energy and human cost), arms manufacturing (orders of magnitude larger industry), etc. Why single out bitcoin (which is actually offering a useful service that critically needs PoW to work)?
I think it's fair to say "Bitcoin is wasting energy" does not necessarily imply other useless things don't also waste energy given that this whole conversation and article are about Bitcoin.
The fact that huge sums of money, energy, and human time is also wasted on arms manufacturing doesn't make Bitcoin mining somehow a good thing.
Your kind of argument is called "Whataboutism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
(Note: I don't think the grandparent's argument is of this form as there don't seem to be any obvious shared constrained resources which could be applied to reduce precious metal mining that are instead directed at reducing bitcoin mining ... I'm curious though if you have any suggestions for how to shift one's thinking when _trying_ to make an argument about priorities so as to help prevent oneself from making arguments that amount to whataboutism ...)
Rather than shutting a conversation down with cries of "off topic" or "fallacy" (I'm addressing the crowd moreso than you in particular) maybe we should all be looking towards the question of why all of us have a propensity for wastefulness? Surely, some waste is necessary when figuring out new processes or keeping old ones up to date but is there a way we can reduce waste without reducing or putting limits on innovation?
It is not specious to confront the argument head-on. If someone says "I am the strongest person in the world" and you say "what about that guy over there", you are not engaging in a useless rhetorical device, you are making a valid counterpoint to the original point.
Bitcoin mining is wasting energy.
Other potential uses of such wasted energy include not generating it in the first place.
Using British Columbia as an example, which until recently had very cheap electricity relative to North America as a whole, for many years a huge number of apartments, condos and houses were built with resistive electrical heating as the default option.
Laws of thermodynamics say that if a hashing ASIC isn't doing physical work, it's producing a huge amount of waste heat. The problem is that waste heat is being vented into the atmosphere rather than being used to heat offices, homes and warehouses. I know there's a few startups that have tried to produce cryptocurrency-mining waste heat appliances that can be installed in decentralized locations. Not sure how successful they have been.
If the waste heat can be used from October to April to heat offices, homes and other things that consume vast amounts of electricity via resistive heating (swimming pools, etc), it would accomplish both the function of hashing and heating.
I don't doubt theoretical applications, I'm just saying everything thus far has been hype and cluster"%#&s.
There are a plenty of regulatory reasons why this is simply not true. Cryptocurrencies may sound stupid from a technical point of view, but clearly they have a bunch of very real advantages over e.g. liberty reserve.
Edit: I guess I'll be waiting for Show HN: MongoDB based money laundering platform. :)
People need gold but better. Bitcoin is just that assuming bitcoin network survives.
So can your bitcoin wallet, or you could forget your key or lose your hard copy.
> People need gold but better.
Debatable.
> Bitcoin is just that assuming bitcoin network survives.
No, you can fork bitcoin, or create a thousand slightly different blockchains, and you can replace it in the blink of an eye. However weird gold is, it is a finite resource with real world applications (albeit not unique for most of them).
And I'm sure you can buy a number of funds or stocks backed by gold, if that's your thing. But you also have thousands of other stocks and funds, and real estate, and micro financing, etc where your money can both work for you while also potentially benefiting the world. Bitcoin without any application is a pyramid scheme, by definition. You put money in, to take money out later when more people have entered the system.
You can also encrypt your wallet, put it in few public places on internet and not forget a key. And be completely safe. Gold is much harder to secure.
>> People need gold but better. > Debatable.
People always need better versions of things they already have.
> No, you can fork bitcoin, or create a thousand slightly different blockchains, and you can replace it in the blink of an eye.
It has already happened, didn't replace bitcoin.
> However weird gold is, it is a finite resource with real world applications (albeit not unique for most of them).
Real world applications of gold don't justify any significant fraction of its price. Most of the value comes from scarcity and durability, properties that bitcoin has. Again assuming bitcoin network doesn't die.
> But you also have thousands of other stocks and funds, and real estate, and micro financing, etc where your money can both work for you while also potentially benefiting the world.
When you buy bitcoin you also pass money around to people that need it more than you at the moment.
Still cheaper than Newegg/Amazon/etc.
This is not a technical challenge I’m making. This is a political demand.
You would also still have to prove it’s more efficient and has a smaller carbon and energy footprint than traditional currency.
I agree with you that cryptocurrency is not currently particularly intrinsically useful, but I don't believe that "let everyone use it in a decentralized tamper-proof manner" fundamentally requires "and simultaneously restrict it from the following uses, which a subset of the global population deems undesirable".
(In that regard, it's similar to "regular" crypto. I don't mind that people I don't particularly like are also able to use crypto to secure their communications. It's essential to my use case that they not be able to intercept my comms, and I accept in return that I can't intercept their comms either.)
I didn't really think about distributed cryptographic "proof" and the chaining so you can't delete B from A - B - C and chain up A - C, indeed the authority would just have to be trusted and be somehow tamper proof.
Blockchain would be interesting to record the sequence of events you want to make sure people can't change retroactively, making it distributed means it's ecologically disastrous though.
Yes, there's also the proof-of-work part. We had that in 1999 with Hashcash.
The only thing bitcoin brought to the table was moving proof-of-work from a trusted hardware module to a P2P network.
That's hugely debatable.