One of the main reasons why I dropped BTC.
"Getting rich" at cost of the environment (extremely high resource consumption)? No thanks, I'd rather leave that world for future generations.
"Getting rich" at cost of the environment (extremely high resource consumption)? No thanks, I'd rather leave that world for future generations.
Greed creates waste in all venues.
Further, fiduciary duty of corporations to maximize shareholder profit has led to almost every environmentally harmful exploit of externalities. I'd argue that the stock market is fundamentally responsible for 99% of all pollution.
Bitcoin does not eliminate the idea of fiduciary duty. Bitcoin holders still expect bitcoin loanees to trade and operate in their financial interest.
What is the emission cost of the system which enables this functionality?
bitcoin numbers don't include the off-chain stuff either, lol.
Bitcoin energy is literally expended on a massive, inefficient mainframe that processes a couple hundred transactions a second. That's all - everything else is additional to that.
Tens to hundreds of thousands of highly paid bureaucrats, accountants, risk managers, regulators, legislators, clerks, lawyers, law enforcement, judges, etc.
Obviously the purely digital systems consumes more compute, but I think you're discounting many of the true costs of the existing system.
If you think that tens to hundreds of thousands of highly paid bureaucrats, accountants, risk managers, regulators, legislators, clerks, lawyers, law enforcement, judges are there just to prevent erroneous trades...
It seems that you are discounting a vast amount of things that the system does besides preventing the execution of erroneous trade.
We're talking about just keeping track of who owns what amounts of a commodity. That part is using terawatt hours per year! I am very doubtful that the "keeping track of who owns what amounts" part of the stock market is anywhere near that.
Determining who has the rights to make changes to what data, auditing changes, auditing ever-changing access control rights, systematically changing these rules to adapt to technological advancements, etc. is the function which Bitcoin accomplishes that you are discounting from your perceived cost of the traditional stock market.
At least with bitcoin you could theoretically throw up a pile of solar panels and directly convert that clean electricity into money.
example: if you aren't getting X Mh/s @ $Y kw/h, it isn't profitable?
I'm more worried about humanity having a future.
In other words, you should mine if you're in China where you can get those rates
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/12/chinese-police...
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2143758/chine...
https://www.ccn.com/chinese-police-seize-600-bitcoin-mining-...
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2108486/four-...
https://kyc360.com/article/bitcoin-causes-electricity-crisis...
you'll never find a systematic article on it, but these aren't the first or the last incidents.
they also pay much lower hardware costs than the US does, because it all happens off the books. Chinese mining farms with internal hardware/super cheap power are nothing new.
china doesn't and never has played fairly in terms of hardware or power costs. crypto as a whole has been embraced because it's a good system to move value past chinese capital controls, you just are getting your beak wet as that money moves.
just like those 2 million dollar houses in vancouver or whatever. Sure, it's great to be trading in that current, or providing property management services, or to be holding the asset as it's pumped up by that money moving under the chinese capital controls!