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Comment by eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 | Hacker News Reader

How much energy do the following consume in total:

- mining metal for coins of fiat currency

- mining gold because people don't trust fiat (digging otherwise useless-in-that-quantity rocks out of the earth, a Proof of... hmm... WORK?)

- running stock exchanges because people don't trust gold either (tungsten has almost the same density)

- smelting the plain metal and gold

- the US military which backs the dollar, and the other armies which compete with it

- manufacturing paper for fiat (lots of water consumption?)

- printing fiat

- transporting fiat

- transporting bank employees

- building shiny glass palaces for banks to signal their status (PoW)

- flying bank managers across the planet to signal status (PoW)

- the office equipment, servers, and employees of banks

- existing fiat currency becoming garbage due to wear, better fakes, and inflation

- the network of hundreds of thousands of ATMs and the COBOL mainframes which back them

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Just to provide some balance, you can add to the bitcoin side:

- Mining metals for GPUs and other devices that run proof of work

- Manufacturing those devices

- Transporting those devices

- Building shiny glass bitcoin cafes.

I'm aware that several of your list items dwarf my items, but it's useful to still remember that producing (and as the article states, using) electronics _also_ has a cost.

The US Mint appears to use about 250 billion BTUs of energy a year, or about 73 GWh. I can't quickly find numbers for the Bureau of Engraving & Printing, but I suspect it's in the same ballpark.

That puts it at about 0.1% the energy usage of Bitcoin. Now compare how much transaction volume Bitcoin supports versus that of USD cash currency.

And don't forget:

- space exploration

- streaming videos

- grocery stores

- cars

- shipping containers full of fidget spinners

- building and maintaining zoos

- giant casinos in Las Vegas

- hospitals

And all the other things associated with the so-called "green" USD ecosystem.

Are you saying grocery stores, cars, and hospitals only exist because of the "USD ecosystem", and would not exist if Bitcoin were dominant?

Of course not!

I thought we were just listing things paid for in dollars. Like "the US military which backs the dollar, and the other armies which compete with it". The armies of the world ain't going away either. Nor banks. Nor status signaling.

No, it seems to be a serious belief that some enthusiasts have that the USD doesn't have value except for military spending, and therefore there's no need to spend on a military if you have an alternative trust basis for currency.

More likely, I think it's the cognitive dissonance of Bitcoin's insane energy usage causing them to find anything remotely plausible to tot up in fiat's column, especially now that Bitcoin pretty clearly consumes more energy than not merely "all the computers backing VISA" but "all the computers backing all financial transactions for all currencies in the world."

Does it matter? Bitcoin will never be a currency based on the implementation (a satoshi is not small enough) and just because something else is bad or worse doesn't make what you do acceptable.

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