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Comment by Erlich_Bachman | Hacker News Reader

How much energy does watching porn consume? Playing video games? Watching a movie? Browsing Facebook? Using a ski chair? Visiting an amusement park? Going in vacation? Cooking your favorite type of food? Making ice cream? Driving to your friends? Listening to music? Concerts? Having a party? Banking? Casinos? As a species we use energy to meet our goals. Those goals may be situated anywhere in our hierarchy of needs. Some are essential, some could be considered trivial. But they are all important for their consumers.

Bitcoin is now considered by some important for our future finance system. While not everybody agrees, this may be more important than countless other ways we use energy, for much more trivial reasons.

Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.

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Bitcoin is considered by nearly zero of anyone of any actual note to be important to our future finance system.

1. It has not succeeded in becoming a valid currency as it is a technology attempting to solve a social problem.

2. It is held as digital gold with rapidly changing value

3. It is literally nonsensical as a future currency system due to the limits of mining as it couldnt possibly keep up with daily money use unless you had way more mining activity that would cause it to cost far more than existing systems to do transactions

Here is the thing: All of the things you mentioned have a path to efficiency, Bitcoin itself does not. Eth, maybe! BTC, no. Here is the other thing: At a global scale, m Bitcoin would use more energy than everything you just described combined globaly. It's a climate-bankrupt technology solution looking for a problem it is not equipped to solve. Crypto in some form may work, but this will never work.

> use more energy than everything you just described combined globaly

Pretty sure you're orders of magnitude wrong about that.

Also there are very specific, actionable and already growing things on the roadmap to sustainability:

- Green energy/proper carbon taxing of energy production

- Lowering of block reward to stabilize the transaction fee and find the proper price, with relation to how many miners we really need vs how much people are willing to pay for transactions.

- L2 solutions making bitcoin a payment network and not only a store of value. Like Lightning network which works today, as we speak, is stable, and is still only going to get better and better because it's very early in the lifecycle of that technology.

> Bitcoin is considered by nearly zero of anyone of any actual note to be important to our future finance system.

How can you even be honest with yourself with that line, when it nowadays rarely goes 3 weeks between each consecutive All-Time-High? What is your theory behind that?

This is the worst counter argument I've read on HN yet. Bar none.

You seriously want to equate all these numerous example of entertainment, joy and satisfaction with some useless crypto "currency" that literally doesn't do anything and could be replaced by hundreds of other crypto currencies? Seriously?

> useless crypto "currency" that literally doesn't do anything

You are very disconnected from reality of millions of people. Can you not try to see that? Can you not respect their opinion and their values? Do you just consider your opinion of Bitcoin the valid and truthful one?

How exactly is that different from someone who hates porn and calls it "useless time waster that doesn't do anything"?

The difference is that all those thing have incentives to use less energy, PoW is incentivized to use as much energy as possible.

No, PoW also is incentivized to use less energy, the goal is to produce more work, not simply waste energy.

That's why miners use very efficient ASICS instead of whatever computer they can find that draws the most power regardless of output.

Yes, this is such a disingenuous argument when people say PoW incentivises to use more electricity. It doesn't care about electricity, at best. Also the specific Bitcoin model even incentivises to use less electricity, because for each additional miner that is connected simulateneously, you actually get less paid per GH/(and thus kW), so at a certain point you would just not get paid anything for your electricity.

What about alternative chains ? actually I never read the energy use of eth and others.

I think the point that the energy needed for mining is artificialy by design hihg/inefficient. As I understand some other coins are much more efficient.

This is backwards. The energy needed for mining is the only reason the product (Bitcoin) can exist and make any sense.

And that's one of the reasons why bitcoin is an utter failure.

> Being judgmental about how others use energy they pay for reeks of hypocrisy, virtue signaling and holier-than-thou attitude.

No it's just a value judgement. We all have to be able to make them.

- Premise: Bitcoin is not important or useful

- Conclusion: It's a massive waste of energy

To give another example:

- Premise: Most activity on the internet is just people making themselves feel better about the nightmare of consciousness

- Conclusion: It's a massive waste of energy

Not useful to who?

Sounds like, not useful to all the people in the world minus the people to whome it's useful.

Description is not advocacy

The servers hosting porn consume Certainly less energy than Bitcoin itself. And people actually make use of the content!

Hey I'm not sure the post-fap gasm is higher than some bitcoin hodlers.

Which is an entirely subjective position. You could argue that porn is not only useless, but also harmful. This is the same logical question for any use of anything.

I don't know if you have noticed, but people actually make use of Bitcoin as well. Just because there are some speculators doesn't mean that there aren't millions of people using BTC and sending transactions every day. Also the fact that USD/Visa is much bigger right now, doesn't either mean that there aren't millions of people who use crypto.

> but people actually make use of Bitcoin as well

Absolutely.

It's very useful for facilitating money laundering (e.g. Tesla cars), drug dealing, child exploitation material etc.

I think you'll find both USD and the internet are much better vehicles for that.

The tragedy in this conversation is that Bitcoin’s use case is more ambiguous than a ice cream spoon.

There are much faster, more reliable ways to store value or send / receive money.

Bitcoin’s two main use cases are investment and also making payments to drug traffickers or hitmans.

Do they pay an appropriate price for the energy the use? Do they pay a price that takes into consideration CO2 and environmental costs?

This is a very important question. But shouldn't we be asking this of every company and every consumer of all electricity everywhere? What does it have to do with mining. This has to do with electricity production, its regulation and proper taxing.

I have a hard time believing that they pay an appropriate price on any scale. Mining is highly portable and miners will locate their stuff to wherever they get the lowest rate. I would not be surprised if the electricity that miners are running on is government subsidized.

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