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You're quibbling over details: The point is that bitcoin is deliberately designed to waste as much energy as possible. It's a constant arms race where you have to keep escalating your hash rate, or you risk somebody else being able to execute a 51% attack.

It's an absolutely atrocious example of the Red Queen effect ("running just to stand still") and I can't believe that technologists who in other contexts value elegance and efficiency can defend bitcoin with a straight face. I can only assume they have a lot of money tied up in bitcoin, because otherwise it makes no sense.

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"You're quibbling over details"

CO2 emissions being wrong by a factor of a thousand is a "detail" to you? ;) My point is that the impact of proof-of-work, although real, is grossly exaggerated and appears to be more manageable than what eye-catching press titles suggest.

Another example: journalists like to claim Bitcoin emits as much CO2 as an entire country. But in fact current emissions are comparable to what a single city like Cape Town emits (28 MtCO2/yr.) Thus these sorts of statements are not so much a testament of how much Bitcoin emits, but more a testament of how little CO2 these countries emits.

"designed to waste as much energy as possible"

It is designed to use no more than what the revenues (fees+rewards) allow to purchase.

But instead of debating how big or how small Bitcoin's energy use is, I think a more intellectually interesting debate to have is whether or not Bitcoin is useful to society, and whether or not its utility justifies the costs.

Thanks for taking the time to point this out, especially since you're swimming upstream.

> I think a more intellectually interesting debate to have is whether or not Bitcoin is useful to society

Exactly.

I don't think it's at all useful to society conceived of as the best a society could be, but there's no doubt it's useful to capital. Either way, I'm not sure if merely being useful to society is sufficient to justify that level of energy usage.

Bitcoin is censorship-free, permissionless money. It is sound money (the single soundest money ever conceived) and this allows for an age of monetary freedom where citizens are no longer forced to fight an uphill battle against centrally planned 2% inflation that is gradually transforming the working class into a position reminiscent of indentured servant.

> I think a more intellectually interesting debate to have is whether or not Bitcoin is useful to society, and whether or not its utility justifies the costs.

I honestly don't think it's an interesting debate. It's been done to death, and neither side will ever make any headway in convincing the other.

Not sure anything regarding Bitcoin hasn't been discussed to death.

In this case, perhaps because there's no easy yes/no answer to it. I'm an opponent of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general. I find the environment important. However, I can attest there are valid use cases for cryptocurrency. I don't think there are valid use cases for me (a European utilizing the EUR who's not interested in tax avoidance or buying illegal utilities) though. So for me cryptocurrencies are not only irrelevant, they're harmful.

Not sure if you are aware, but not all crypto is based on proof of work (mining). There are other algorithms that don't waste tons of energy and still provide the benefits of crypto. Also, they can be useful for things other than tax avoidance and illegal utilities.

Excluding the use cases of tax avoidance and illegal utilities how is it more useful than EUR? They're all more volatile / less stable than EUR.

You can’t generally send EUR anywhere in the world for free in seconds. You can’t pay for things in EUR with 0 fees. There are some crypto’s that can do all of those things.

> the Red Queen effect ("running just to stand still")

It would be good if it were actually and deliberately properly designed this way to create an arms race of "who can get more general-purpose computing power for less" because it would accelerate technology development with this Red Queen effect...

Unfortunately they've missed the "general purpose part" - most mining todays is done by special-purpose hardware made for mining only, and improving it is generally useless for CPU / GPU / TPU design.

I'd fully support a similar coin that would be mine-able on GPU / TPU / other-general-matrix-multiplication-hardware because it would lead to a race decreasing the price of hardware that can run large neural networks :)

Yeah, if it were designed in such a way as to incentivize general purpose computing, or to reward producing the results of some useful scientific or mathematical computation, then I would be less appalled by it.

As it stands, brute-forcing SHA256 on ASICs is just a travesty.

there are lots of coins with algorithms designed to resist ASICs. Bitcoin just isn't one of them.

There is a downside to designing a mining algorithm tuned for general purpose CPUs: anyone with access to a lot of general purpose CPUs (such as botnet operators, or government groups) can easily aim their existing resources to try to do 51% attacks against the cryptocurrency.

If the mining algorithm requires specialized hardware, then no group starts out with an existing advantage. If the NSA decided it wanted to 51% attack a cryptocurrency, they'd have to make a massive investment in their own hardware, and then that hardware can't be repurposed after the attack. A 51% attack is likely to devastate the value of a cryptocurrency, which also de-values any mining hardware built for it, which naturally discourages anyone who invested in mining hardware from attacking the cryptocurrency.

Though mining algorithms that require specialized hardware also come with their own downsides: the companies that invest in making the mining hardware early on could decide to keep the most advanced mining hardware for themselves and gain a lot of control over the network.

Well, you need to spend some sort of resource to ensure the integrity of your money supply.

The dollar is backed by a few million troops. Bitcoin is backed by a few million tons of coal.

And armies. Why doesn't some gang just march into a few of the big hydro-powered ASIC mining centres and take over control, thus enabling them to steal all the bitcoins. What prevents that? The armed power of nation-states to enforce a generally-agreed order on societies.

> thus enabling them to steal all the bitcoins

Just FYI, a 51% attack doesn't allow you to "steal all the bitcoins"

All that would accomplish is taking control of the revenue generated while they are in control. If the big mining centre is working with private keys that are unknown to the operators, then they would not be able to spend the coins previously mined. If they gain control of more than 51% of the hash rate in this way, they would be able to censor transactions or reorg the chain. That would still leave most of the blockchain in tact. A deep reorg might even get forked away from by the rest of the network, leaving them alone in a situation analogous to Ethereum Classic.

That's a pretty roundabout way of thinking. Plenty of countries have troops but an unstable currency (e.g. Venezuala). Plenty have a stable currency but no significant troops (e.g. Iceland).

Militarily robust sovereignty is necessary but not sufficient for the integrity of a fiat currency.

Governments such as Iceland borrow military power through international agreements.

Robust against what?

Threats to national sovereignty such as invasion.

I don't really see how protection against invasion helps you maintain a fiat currency. I don't think an army is either necessary or sufficient. These just seem like two different issues.

Do you have an example of a nation failing to repel an invasion yet maintaining the integrity of its currency?

You're shifting the goalposts. Lack of protection against invasion doesn't mean you're going to get invaded. Maintaining a standing army isn't protection against invasion either.

Do you agree that if a nation is successfully invaded its currency will lose its integrity?

Do you agree that defense against invasion requires an adequate military or agreements with nations with adequate militaries?

If we agree on those two claims, it seems we must agree that militarily robust sovereignty is necessary but not sufficient for the integrity of a fiat currency.

No thats actually the right way to think about this. Externalities are often misinterpreted to only include a few layers of abstraction when in reality its a much more complex and multilayered discussion and include both positive and negatives.

i thought one of the features of bitcoin was that mining would eventually become too computationally expensive -- because the total number of bitcoins is fixed. so at some point, mining does not produce coins and you're only mining to process transactions. so isn't there a plateau somewhere, relative to the throughput of the network? nb: non-expert here

Based on limited knowledge, once all the coins are mined, I think the miners then compete for transaction fees only.

>mining would eventually become too computationally expensive

I don't think that's true, the difficulty adjusts every two(?) weeks based on the hashrate.

It's not quibbling over details. Bitcoin miners often place their mining farms near power plants and consume electricity that would've been wasted otherwise. A lot of it comes from renewable sources.

At the present moment network users are collectively paying about $700 000 a day in tx fees, so clearly the network itself creates value.

> consume electricity that would've been wasted otherwise

[citation needed]

But even if that were true, it would be disincentivizing the deployment of grid-scale storage technologies, so still hurting the battle against climate change.

It seems there are no grid-scale storage technologies that wouldn’t already be integrated into the current designs. Hydropower dams are ones for example. Engineers are not stupid.

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