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Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

People don’t vote with their time and energy, they often vote with their wallet regardless of the impact on energy and the environment which is the issue. See: Negative Externalities.

The problem with Bitcoin is that energy waste is inherent in its design. As Bitcoin value goes up, the value of a Bitcoin relative to energy changes, which encourages more mining, which results in higher energy spend and emissions as the algorithm difficulty adjusts to the new hash rate.

Generating 10,000,000 bitcoins could be done at low energy with a few miners - but the more valuable they become the more energy they use.

My issue with Bitcoin is that while other industries try to save power, Bitcoin tries to waste it and waste is built into the algorithm.

And the more popular Bitcoin gets, the more our planet gets polluted trying to make magic numbers on a ledger.

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What you call energy waste others would call effort. Money should be hard to produce otherwise you end up with central banks putting magic numbers on balance sheets

You can use energy that would otherwise be wasted https://cointelegraph.com/news/oil-companies-will-dominate-b... or clean energy like Nuclear

You can’t choose the kind of energy Bitcoin gets made with. It’s produced worldwide and mining moves to wherever energy is cheapest, which ends in a race to the bottom.

> What you call energy waste others would call effort

This is my whole issue with it - effort doesn’t have to be tied to wasting energy, but it is in Bitcoin. Why would people call wasting energy ‘effort’ in a system where wasting energy wasn’t intrinsic to the system itself.

Nobody has been able to come up with an equivalent alternative. The closest seems to be proof-of-stake instead of bitcoin's proof-of-work, but the security becomes weaker (which is basically the whole purpose of bitcoin), see https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/70807/how-does-p...

Is PoS strong enough to still be 99% as useful?, I don't know, these are all experiments

Well it depends on what you are looking to achieve.

If you are looking for it to be a currency, traditional currency seems to perform better.

If you are looking to invest in some speculative instrument on the basis that the value is going up then Bitcoin and poppies seem to be good ideas.

It's not wasting energy, it's consuming previously wasted energy. In fact it puts a floor under energy prices so that it rather than wasting energy that you can't get to consumers you can instead use it to mine bitcoin.

Nic Carter has a good piece on this: https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co...

How common is it for the central banks of currency sovereigns to indulge in massive quantitative easing? If anything, they're far too reluctant to do so (even during recessions) precisely because of the kind of superstition on display here that money shouldn't consist of just a "magic number" - as if Bitcoin were any less of a token.

Apparently when a government when a government adds money based on economic analysis it’s BAD, but when an algorithm generates new magic bitcoins at an arbitrary rate set by satoshi every 10 minutes that halves every so often it’s REVOLUTIONARY.

What guarantees to you that governments add money based on economic analysis?, but most important, what makes you think that decisions made are aligned with your values?

Venezuela is the living proof of a government that makes decisions with the only objective of keeping power, WHATEVER IT TAKES, even if it means to the reduce quality of live to a 10% in less than a decade.

So bitcoin, and many cryptocurrencies, are at least neutral in monetary emission. Yes, it's not based on economic analysis, therefore is sub-optimal, but equally predictable by every actor, full transparent, no possibility of inside information or conflicts of interest.

Venezuela is an excellent example of a government unable to issue money arbitrarily, because they pegged their currency to the US dollar and accumulated debt in a currency over which they had no control.

AFAIK Venezuela has never pegged the bolivar to the US dollar. But the government did issue bonds in US dollars, I suppose those are the debts that you are talking about

I wish people who complained about governments adding money at least understood why they should be angry. Instead, they are just angry because they want to be angry at something.

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