Though youtube is mostly doing 'useful' work in the process, bitcoins consume energy by existing.
The electricity angle on BTC is, let's admit it, pretty dumb. If people were worried about CO2, like, for reals, we would be talking about concrete, and trying to find something less CO2y for our roads. People want to talk about culture, and approve or disapprove of what they like or dislike. So yeah, if you don't like Bitcoin and want to sniff at it, go ahead and stuff a plastic straw in its nose and call it a seaturtle. You can tweet about it on a platform that uses a comparable amount of electricity, and cause a few servers to get spun up to get your trending hashtag to the concerned masses.
If you actually givea crap about CO2 (unlikely, but possible), become a materials scientist, or advocate for the funding thereof, or fight for more nuclear powerplants. Stop making your ethical decisions based on aesthetics.
They only want Bitcoin useful for two things: Buying and holding. These actions drive the price up. As long as no one is using or selling Bitcoin, the price stays high.
Between the high transaction fees ($8 right now), the deflationary nature, and the “HODL” narrative, everything about Bitcoin was designed to disincentivize actually using it. It’s designed for hoarding and speculating.
The more interesting question is what value Bitcoin has created for society besides acting as a speculative good.
The point is that Bitcoin is designed to be inherently power-inefficient. Proof of work systems rely on the work being both difficult to calculate and useless.
Even if Bitcoin transactions went to 0 tomorrow, the system would still consume more energy than Argentina just to keep everyone’s balance.
Worse yet, it the power consumption goes up every year because the system incentivized it.
Do you have to do proof of work when there are no transactions?
My understanding was that the PoW was done to place transactions on the block chain. If nothing has changed, nothing has to be done. The entire system can be offline and archived if we have 0 transactions.