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Comment by throwaway857384 | Hacker News Reader

How much pollution does gold mining produce? How much pollution does printing money produce? How much electricity (pollution) does visa use? How much pollution does any service we take for granted produce?

I'm not saying bitcoins CO2 product is good or bad, just that there are so many things that create so much CO2 that we never question or consider.

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I think you're being disingenuous. Bitcoin is fundamentally different from all of those other things in that it is deliberately designed to be as inefficient as possible. Proof of Work is a Red Queen's Race[0] where the difficulty keeps escalating and you have to keep pumping in more energy or else risk somebody else executing a 51% attack against you.

Not only do miners and printers work to make their processes more efficient and cheaper, but once the gold coins are minted or paper money is printed, they can be used for N transactions at extremely low cost per-transaction. Contrast this with bitcoin where EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION has to be bundled in a block, so every single transaction involves more energy than an average household uses in a week[1].

Imagine burning a whole tank of gasoline to pay for a cup of coffee and you'll start to see why Bitcoin is an ecological atrocity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race

[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele...

[2] https://www.coindesk.com/carbon-footprint-bitcoin

You forget that it would use the same energy to produce a 1MB block than a 1GB block

So few people understand this. Doubling blocksize doubles the capacity, and therefore the efficiency of the network.

At the current efficiency level, the capacity would have to grow thousand-fold before it even approaches the efficiency needed. Not even lightning would provide the amount of capacity required IMO.

And we've seen how controversial block size changes are.

Not sure transactions have to be bundled in a block.

Tell me more about the exponentially increasing pollution/costs of printing money, please.

Tell me more about strawman arguments.

I specifically alleged that "proof of work" is a bad idea.

A more economical solution that keeps all of Bitcoin's benefits would be nice, but it is not clear at all, whether that is possible.

By forbidding Bitcoin large countries might make a dent in its adoption curve and push the problem back a couple of years, but that won't be a long term solution.

Sooner or later we will probably have a globally accepted uninflatable reserve currency that uses a lot of energy, until another genius finds a more economical way to keep our savings safe.

Some bitcoiners would also argue that saving will lead to more informed and contemplated spending, thus reducing waste. Some are already saving a lot because they are expecting benefits in the future, a feeling which might have gotten lost in the recent past.

Again this tired strawman argument?

Gold mining produces several orders of magnitude less CO2 pollution than Bitcoin. Besides that, gold mining processes are ever increasingly more efficient, while Bitcoin, by design, is every increasingly less efficient to mine.

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