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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

The link between Bitcoin and carbon emissions is absolutely crystal clear. The USD and American hegemony has a massive tangle of indirect dependencies through governments and bureaucracies, spy agencies, militaries, etc, none of which you can disavow yourself from.

Yet you can divest from Bitcoin by simply not buying it.

It's the absolute perfect expression of our greed as a species. Ruining the planet for ephemeral bits. Bitcoin might as well be rebranded the "anti carbon offset". You're literally doing nothing but buying into a speculation market that is backed by only bits, and those bits are obtained at the cost of a supremely inefficient cryptographic process which has attracted massive electricity investment simply to make money. It has zero indirect benefit to society.

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The value of bitcoin is that it is a money with a fixed supply. A gold-backed government currency is approximately the same and would render bitcoin unnecessary. Yet no government is willing to issue currency that is convertible to gold on demand. Why? Because of greed. People with control over currencies want to be able to make money at will, unconstrained by the necessity to produce value or even to persuade citizens to pay higher taxes.

The electricity costs of bitcoin is the cost of countering government officials who insist on maintaining the power to inflate their currencies. The cost is analogous to the cost of freedom-seeking citizens of a despotic government. Enormous resources are used up in North Korea as the government seeks to control and restrain its population and some individuals seek to resist and escape. One could blame this cost on the Dear Leader who seeks to impose his will on the population or on the selfish individuals who resist him. It depends on your point of view.

> The value of bitcoin is that it is a money with a fixed supply.

There are any number of things with a fixed supply, and most of them are not valuable. Scarcity is not what makes something valuable, it is some intrinsic value plus scarcity.

As a money, BTC is bad and will get worse if it deflates and people want to hold, rather than spend it. If, conversely, the value collapses, it is also bad money.

Note one thing, btw, which I haven't really seen mentioned:

Currently, BTC mining produces 900 BTC a day in coinbase rewards, or about USD 40m, or about USD 100 per transaction. Once mining rewards halve a few times, and/or BTC drops, and assuming people are willing to pay only around 1 USD per transaction, it'll generate around USD 500k a day, and difficulty will adjust to support that amount of mining.

However, that amount doesn't strike me as being absolutely immune to a 51% attack, if big sums are at stake.

"..that is convertible to gold on demand. Why? Because of greed"

Because pegging your currency to gold only makes sense if you have a static economy. I'd advise you to read a bit about how well the gold standard functioned before 1934 (the 2008 financial crisis or the current recession are fairly insignificant compared to the "Great" and the "Long" Depressions). And bitcoin is several magnitudes worse than gold because it's inherently (hyper)deflationary.

Save the children, don't buy Bitcoin.

Having a trustless global currency directly benefits society imo.

The link between BTC and carbon emissions is absolutely not crystal clear. A significant amount of BTC is mined with renewables.

The problem is a dirty grid, not Bitcoin. Green up the grid and how exactly will BTC contribute to CO2 emissions?

> A significant amount of BTC is mined with renewables.

Which could be used to replace non-renewable energy usage elsewhere.

This anti-growth mindset is poison.

The solution is to add more and more renewables (and nuclear), not to ration electricity.

> This anti-growth mindset is poison.

And endless growth is suicide. We could trade absurdist oversimplifications, but the reality is that we live on a finite planet and we are currently in vast ecological overshoot. We need to live within the carrying capacity of the actual world instead of an economics textbook and the stock market that's programmed us to think in quarters and single-year increments. It sounds a lot like we don't share the same urgency about climate change. I won't accuse you of being a denialist but I would encourage you to look at just how deep and fast we need to cut carbon emissions before we just splurge energy on speculation markets like Bitcoin.

> finite planet

Guess you haven't heard of outer-space then.

This is some Thanos nonsense you're championing.

In many cases this is incorrect. Bitcoin's mining network is the first global energy market that unlocks stranded energy (energy produced too remotely to be profitably inserted into any grid) and brings its value to society.

Natural gas producers are TODAY starting up miners to burn excess gas that would otherwise be flared. The concept has been productized - https://www.upstreamdata.ca/ - and is live.

Yeah, and entire coal-fired power plants spring up just to feed datacenters to mine bitcoins.

We could as well put spare energy into manufacturing hydrogen fuel cells or running datacenters instead of blowing it on specially-shaped bits.

Let's discuss the total energy requirements of the entire financial system, which could arguably be replaced by cryptocurrencies and apps. I suspect crypto is a huge net win if we fully embrace it.

Bitcoin is the most eco-friendly currency because it can be mined by otherwise-wasted energy sources like gas flares.

https://www.whatisbitcoin.com/news/bitcoin-is-an-energy-solu...

> Ruining the planet for ephemeral bits.

I mean, this has been happening since waaay before BitCoin was a gleam in anyone's eye. You want to take that tack, you start to sound like a Marxist (not that there's anything wrong with that).

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