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Comment by deadmetheny | Hacker News Reader

Where the money came from is irrelevant. And wasting energy and computer equipment to create play money for idiots who want to ignore why decades of banking regulation have been implemented is way more "rude and tasteless" than mean words on the Internet. The fact that a small amount of money being shuffled around went to a good cause is nice but doesn't offset the truly exquisite amount of waste the entire crypto ecosystem generates.

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What about the waste generated by the banking system? Banks have to use electricity in order to operate, right? I haven't seen anybody complain about them as if they are eco-friendly or something. Or is it that since we are depending on our banks, they can do whatever they like but bitcoin being a ponzi scheme (or that's what I read on reddit) is an easy target to comment about on the Internets? As if Chinese miners have hooked their ASICs in your neighborhood's power supply. It is fascinating how people turn eco-friendly just to bash something but are part of a totally anti-ecological society.

The banking system's energy use is incidental and embracing greener practices is entirely within reach. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has energy waste as a feature that cannot be divorced from how it works. The entire thing works because computers are burning energy to find nonces, and the more people are using Bitcoin, the harder the hashing becomes, which uses even more power. The entire proof of work concept system is irredeemably linked to wasting energy and gets even worse with more adopters for a system that can barely handle 10 transactions a second. At least the banking system accomplishes something for its energy usage and that usage isn't intrinsically part of its functionality.

> energy waste as a feature that cannot be divorced from how it works

Er, this is entirely false. Proof of Authority, Proof of Stake, and a handful of other schemes which do not require large amounts of compute are possible. Bitcoin itself has not "switched" due to stagnated innovation and politicking, but it's entirely false to say that PoW "cannot be divorced from how [bitcoin] works"

I'm sure we're all victims of our own bias, but yours seems particularly vitriolic. There are nations out there bending over backwards to subsidize coal, build missiles, frack the earth, etc. Some compute being used on BTC instead of JavaScript or Videogames or whatever else would be consuming those CPUs is _hardly_ some vast evil.

He was specifically talking about proof of work though, which indeed is inherently wasteful. And seeing the whole block size issue, it seems impossible bitcoin would ever move away from proof of work.

I'm not sure you realize the scale: Bitcoin uses more electricity than entire countries. It uses as much electricity as 6 million US households. It's magnitudes more than VISA, despite the latter handling many more transactions.

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

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