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Comment by maxharris | Hacker News Reader

What is the energy cost of the entire USD-based financial system? At a minimum we need to total up what the US Mint, the Federal Reserve, Visa, Mastercard, Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and thousands of other companies and government entities do. It is obvious that amount of energy used to keep the USD going absolutely dwarfs Bitcoin.

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That is a completely useless comparison. If anything, compare energy usage per transaction. If you would hypothetically scale up the transaction volume of the Bitcoin network to the entire USD financial system, you'd quickly find out that it would use more energy than was ever produced on this planet.

Bitcoin's energy usage is not related to the number of transactions in any significant way, it's strictly a defense measure to prevent a nation state from tampering with the ledger.

Maybe you should read up on how Bitcoin actually works before you comment.

I've read the whitepaper and follow technical developments occasionaly, I know how it works on a high-level.

You could make Bitcoin process 1000x more transactions and the energy consumption of mining it wouldn't even change by 1%, all else being equal.

Miners are willing to waste as much energy as they get back in rewards from mining blocks, while competing with each other for their share of the rewards. The rewards are newly minted Bitcoins (and some transaction fees, which are a small part of the reward). So the higher the Bitcoin price the larger the rewards miners get and the more energy they are able to spend competing with each other while still turning a profit.

If the price is 50k, it doesn't really matter if the network is processing 1 transaction a second or 10 million, the energy consumption will be roughly the same.

Smaller than the energy required to run Ireland, unlike bitcoin. An algorithm designed to be wasteful in energy wasting energy is not something we should be shocked at.

The US military certainly consumes more energy than Ireland.

Hmm, a cursory glance on the topic made me think it's certainly possible, but not a guarantee. According to this[0] Wikipedia article, the DoD used less than Denmark, which is smaller than Ireland, but that data is outdated...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_Sta...

And that consumption does not go away with BTC

Nice whataboutism. 10/10.

And yes, the U.S. military should massively downscale.

Isn't this entire discussion the definition of whataboutism?

We're all focusing on Bitcoin as if killing it would stop global warming or something. There are dozens of different things we could be criticizing when it comes to pollution.

And we do! For many years! Just not on this thread.

Global climate change won't be slowed or stopped by a single silver bullet. It will take reduction in many, many areas combined, and many of those are already underway, have been underway for years now.

Meanwhile, all of those savings are being offset by wasteful-by-design crypto mining that benefits extraordinarily few people. So yes, in addition to the many, many, many reports on various other major contributors to ongoing climate change, it's time to talk about crypto mining, too.

And what was the effect of those many years on global yearly CO2 production? Did it decrease?

If we are to waste time talking about polluting classes, let's focus on the big ones first. Naval transport, coal power plants. These should be regulated first.

I agree as long as China and Russia also eliminate their military down to equivalent levels with unlimited auditability between the 3 countries.

I'm not sure you know what that word means. Pointing out a factual inaccuracy in the parent comment isn't "whataboutism". US military isn't a different issue, it's an integral part of the USD-based financial system.

Is it your contention that the sole purpose of the US military is to back the value of a dollar? Because if that is the case, and you are still unable to see why people think you're silly, then there is little hope for you.

Of course not, why would you think that? It's just a necessary part of the USD-based financial system.

So what do you think would happen if the US military disappeared tomorrow leaving China and Russia as the two big guys? World War 3 for years? How much would change if bitcoin disappeared tomorrow? Probably a stock market dip.

You have to include the energy used to power the US military, among other things too. The value of the Dollar is inextricably tied to the threat of force. Bitcoin, on the other hand, offers trust through proof of work, not violence.

So we won't need the US military if the US adopts BTC? Ridiculous.

We don't need the US military even now.

The issue is that the US dollar is actually achieving something. Bitcoin is just causing people to froth at the mouth and burn up huge amounts of energy while polluting the environment heavily. When it pops lots of people are going to be left hurting because they bought into bitcoin fever.

You should look at what plenty of ETFs do with their time. Pollute, pillage, waste, oh and profit. The "wasting" of electricity is a valid concern, but when apples-to-apples, it's nothing out of the ordinary.

To keep the USD (among others) going we need trust, which is in part "created" by armed forces defending the nation/gov minting it. They dissipate a fair amount of energy.

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