Bitcoin consuming massive amounts of electricity is bad. Idle devices consuming massive amounts of electricity is also bad.
EDIT: proof of storage -> proof of space
However, people can, and will, lie and cheat for profit. In this case it's in the form of PR and playing nice with the Government, possibly for tax reasons.
We've seen this same story play out in the car industry[0], and that has far fewer (albeit far larger) players that need to be properly regulated.
So, from a technical perspective, how would you achieve this goal? Could one mathematically and cryptographically prove that the work was done using renewable energy? I don't know, that's something for someone much smarter than me to figure out.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
I'm not sure if this is possible to extrapolate to prove an energy generation process... But, it's exciting that a physical material can be cryptographically proven over a network (if I'm reading this abstract correctly).
Your dangling iPods and Alarms Clock, however, are just hunks of junk, sitting around, highly illiquid.
Edit: that's my whole point: mining BTC is generating value by verifying transactions. In turn, the miner gets paid for their work.
Mining bitcoin is most similar to a central bank printing/issuing money (except it's issued to the person that can waste the most electricity or show proof of stake rather than being issued selectively by the central government).
Banks can add to the money supply by lending out money which has been saved in them by others, but there is nothing unique to fiat currencies about this, and the same can be done with Bitcoin or other crypto. I suspect you wouldn't say that 'banks can create new bitcoins without mining', but that's the same thing as saying 'banks can create new money without printing it'.
We have yet to see if alternative systems like proof-of-stake can gain the same trust and replace proof-of-work while actually consuming less energy in practice. I'm hopeful though.
There are no companies that generate dollars. That would be counterfeiting.
Other than banks. Banks generate new dollars through fractional reserve lending, though they also destroy them.
Sure, there's bitcoin cash, lightning network stuff - but uhh, where's the beef? I mean, seriously, where are the users using Bitcoin at volume?
It seems like Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme for people mining (or HODLing) Bitcoin, not a store of value, not a mechanism of currency.
Also: Bitcoin's maximum possible transaction rate could be arbitrarily scaled up without impacting the electricity usage at all (but it would have other trade-offs not related to energy usage, which has made it hard to establish a consensus on the issue).
A system where you essentially can't transact is economically dead. The health of an economy is measured by how quickly money flows in it, not in how wealthy a dragon sitting on a pile of gold can get.
It can be a speculative system, but that's far less useful than being a monetary system. Bitcoin is a terrible currency in the same way that houses, or diamond rings are a terrible currency. Settling transactions in them is slow and incredibly expensive.
> The health of an economy is measured by how quickly money flows in it
Bitcoin isn't an economy. It is just a small part of the overall economy
That's because you don't need a 50% attack to destroy bitcoin. You just need the stroke of a pen, and it's price, and utility would collapse.
Those things should ought to have a much higher cost to attack since they hold significantly more value than Bitcoin currently.
> You just need the stroke of a pen, and it's price, and utility would collapse.
Then simply valuate it on what it will be worth in a post-regulation future rather than its current value. If you really believe that will happen, then it presents a great shorting opportunity for you and you would be helping to price in risks such as that.
Depending on the kind of regulation, its value would either be roughly the same (if the regulation is of the KYC form), or would go into free-fall (if the regulation is of the 'this is illegal, starting 30 days from now').
But that's not my point. My point is that the much touted BTC resilience to a 49% attack is a solution to a problem that nobody has.
> My point is that the much touted BTC resilience to a 49% attack is a solution to a problem that nobody has.
If nobody has the problem, then nobody will buy it.
If it can, why hasn't it?
It's also not clear the market has a strong demand for an increased transaction rate yet. Eventually it will be almost unavoidable, but we might not be there yet. If that's the case then it might be harmful to increase the number of frivolous/unnecessary transactions for no reason.
For context, just one part of the US economy is the stock market. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) which came up in the news recently processed $2.15 quadrillion in securities in 2019.
The 30 day average for estimated transactions in Bitcoin is around 5-6 billion, or still around 1/1000th just one art of the US economy's transaction volume.
At 5 transactions per second, the average transaction size would have to be around $1,268,2308 to equal the velocity of just one portion of one sector of the US economy. 5 transactions per second is actually higher than the average transaction throughput over the past several years.
Plenty of reasonable people likely think that Bitcoin doesn't create any value.