Why Bitcoin will be bigger than you think | Hacker News Reader

Why Bitcoin will be bigger than you think

andyjagoe.com

10 pointsventuregrit9 comments

The carbon cost of mining is a big weak point especially since its a constantly escalating carbon cost. People talk about bitcoin as if its carbon neutral when its quite the opposite.

How does it compare to traditional banking's carbon cost? Don't forget to factor in the carbon cost of the calories used by all the people that work there and their commutes. Without a comparison point, you really don't know whether or not carbon is a weak point for btc.

You do realize that 99% of the traders/investors could care less about the carbon footprint. They are focused on the volatility and profit.

this is a straw man. The point is not its absolute energy consumption, but its energy consumption relative to other alternatives.

How much energy does it take to operate the current global financial infrastructure? The current global financial structure employs millions of people (who fly on planes, create waste, etc.), hundreds of millions of office square footage, data centers, etc.

Furthermore, there are cases in which consuming energy actually reduces GHG emissions, as is the case for consuming otherwise flared methane gas. See https://www.upstreamdata.ca .

The current global financial infrastructure serves roughly six billion people. The current cryptocurrency infrastructure provides much more limited services to far fewer people, and still uses an incredible amount of energy to do it (e.g. possibly as much as 0.25% of world energy for Bitcoin alone). In terms of energy consumption relative to utility, that's not a net win.

But what does it matter? Putting aside any moral arguments it's not like it can be fully regulated or stopped even if there was the will to do so.

lol...The global financial system HARDLY serves 6 billion. Why are so many concerned with "banking the unbanked"? And arguably, the end product for those that do get access is pretty bad (slow, high fees, inflation-ridden).

It's also quite patronizing of you to say who and how crypto serves others.

More data on the world's unbanked/underbanked. https://globalfindex.worldbank.org/sites/globalfindex/files/...

One way to look at it is this: Mining provides the security that makes Bitcoin valuable. The equivalent thing that provides the security that makes fiat currencies valuable are the militaries of the associated countries.

Good article for 10 years ago

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