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Comment by FranckLeroy | Hacker News Reader

This is how insanely bad Bitcoin is for the environment : If you buy a Tesla car (around 40 000 $) in Bitcoins, the impact of the mining of those bitcoins is around 80 tons of CO2. This is 4 times more than the savings of CO2 you can expect from this car (compared to a gasoline one) on its entire lifetime (around -20 tons).

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It's not a problem of Bitcoin but the reality in which there is no cap on externalities.

Every sane person will try to limit consumption/waste of critical resources if she knows the resource is limited. It's an easy choice to make.

Do I take bath if I have just a bottle to drink while being lost on a desert? Do I keep car engine on in a garage?

For our convenience, any side effects of our consumption are hidden from us. We don't have to kill our bacon, keep waste at home, or enslave children to drink our cocoa. Occasionally we will shed a tear while watching a documentary about lovely, furry animals with sad eyes.

It's true that if we just put a tax on CO2, then either the price of BTC would go up, or the work factor would go down.

However, that seems to be less politically feasible than banning BTC.

This seems flawed. A single Bitcoin can be split into 100,000,000 pieces and spent infinitely. It may cost some X amount to mine it, but that is not an ongoing cost.

Yes, a more precise value would arguably be the CO2 impact of mining associated with the transaction fees, together with some fraction of the "mining cost" of the coins spent.

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