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Comment by caterama | Hacker News Reader

Who cares? Everyone is fixated on Bitcoin... there are tons of energy inefficient processes out there. The solution has nothing to do with Bitcoin... environmental impact needs to be priced into energy itself, whatever the application. This is a failure of the markets (and therefore ourselves). Bitcoin is a scapegoat.

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Here's the problem with this sentiment. Bitcoin isn't replacing anything. Not pre-existing fiat currency, not banks, nothing. Bitcoin only adds to the problem at an alarming rate.

Bitcoin is certainly not a scapegoat. It's a massive problem and, largely, a symptom of human greed that must be put in check.

I think that’s highly unlikely. Surely the people mining Bitcoin would be doing something else if Bitcoin didn’t exist. Or to think of it the other way, if there was some better way of making money with electricity then the Bitcoin miners would be doing that instead.

Have you considered that they wouldn’t be trying to turn electricity into money and might be making money some other way?

And to your point, likely a way that doesn't have global implications? Even other bubbles of the past didn't have quite the reach that the likes of Bitcoin has (maybe with the exception of the entire stock market in the Roaring 20s leading right up to the crash of 1929). That's why this time, this is much more dangerous in the long run.

What about the hypotesis that a global shared ledger under no-one's control with thermodynamical guarantee of immutability actually has some value?

There is no thermodynamic guarantee in Bitcoin.

Last I checked too, Bitcoin is not quantum safe either.

Making money without using electricity? I suppose that’s not impossible, but it sounds unlikely at any appreciable scale.

Turning electricity into money is different from using some electricity while you make money.

I fail to see the distinction. Bitcoin mining, just like farming, traditional mining, etc. doesn’t literally have electricity as its only input.

> I fail to see the distinction. Bitcoin mining, just like farming, traditional mining, etc. doesn’t literally have electricity as its only input.

If your are referring to the wasted hardware, then sure, but once the equipment is in place, Bitcoin mining itself does in fact have electricity as the only input.

So, are you saying that new technologies must be considered wasteful if they don't wholly replace existing technologies and instead create new usages of their own?

For example would you say that smartphones are wasteful because they allow us to communicate more frequently than we could before, thus they don't strictly replace an existing consumption of energy?

That seems like a silly interpretation to me. Of course our energy demands rise as we develop and use new technologies. It's because we are doing more things with them!

Also, as I mentioned in another part of the thread, I don't think it's obvious that cryptocurrencies won't replace any existing usages of energy.

The argument is not so much that cryptocurrencies don't replace anything as that they don't have a use case (this is something that we can observe, unlike "value" which is subjective), and therefore it could be argued they are objectively useless regardless of their actual value in the market.

Bitcoin certainly has a use case, just observe how it is being used today, every day. Not just to buy drugs online, but also for example to escape oppressive currency controls, defend against questionably ethical practices like civil forfeiture, etc.

If you are saying that it doesn't have intrinsic value, then yes of course that is true, but I don't see how that makes it useless (unless you think cash is also useless)

Couldn't this be met with a proof of stake coin? I could at least tolerate a PoS cryptocurrency because it at minimum consumes orders of magnitude less energy than Bitcoin would.

Hopefully. I think proof-of-stake is a promising technology but I'm not certain yet whether it can fully replace the security guarantees provided by proof-of-work. But if it can, then of course that would be excellent. Not only would it reduce the consumption of cryptocurrencies but it might even offset some of the energy usage of traditional financial instruments.

Some possible issues with proof-of-stake though are: Does the ability to borrow money to stake (since you get it back after exiting) make it too easy to conduct an attack? And, since you can't stake if you have no coins, will it be too easy for entrenched stakers to control the supply later on?

It could. But so far, no PoS coin has ever survived a bear market. Look at Peercoin and Novacoin as examples.

And that right there is probably why Bitcoin is going to persist. They can't afford to become poor themselves easily. So it was never about the technology and all about keeping an entrenched position at all costs.

Things could be different this time around. Polkadot and Cardano are leading the way in PoS and Ethereum might conservatively copy the parts that work. But they could turn out to be just like NavCoin and PIVX after a few years — much lower on the marketcap chart. I don’t know what the winner will be in the future but I do know quite a lot of the past.

It's true that a small minority of people actually have a use (legitimate or not) for bitcoin, but as far as the general public is concerned this is not the case.

And appropriately it represents a small minority of energy use (~0.6%)

Exactly, hoarding bitcoin —not using it— is the problem. It leads to high prices and consequent high environmental impact.

You mean saving, which is actually a use contrary to what years of keynesian propaganda have made you think

0.6% is orders of magnitude larger than the percentage of people who have a legitimate use case. In my opinion it's not that coin does not have legitimate uses, it's that the cost of providing those uses far outweighs the benefit by design.

The current increase in value and ramping up of energy use is not due to an increase in the usefulness of the coin, but instead on a renewed interest in the game of hot potato that is speculation.

Many things are symptoms of human greed, isn't that what capitalist societies are built on, after all? If carbon was taxed, you'd see a huge investment in green energy and nuclear from both BTC and everyone else then it wouldn't matter. Why should one industry pay for externalities and another not?

What a weird metric.

The international space station isn't replacing anything, i still think its valuable.

It has replaced things. You are just ignorant to it.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/15_...

? That's a list of cool new things related to the ISS, not a list of pre-existing things that the ISS has replaced.

I can't tell you how many people I've seen defending the energy use of cryptocurrencies by saying in essence "yes, but it's nothing in comparison to the energy we waste on the banking sector so it'll actually become more efficient as it replaces that".

> Bitcoin isn't replacing anything. Not pre-existing fiat currency, not banks

How in the world do you say this? It's made significant progress in replacing both of these things. Just because it hasn't 100% eliminated all extant currencies and banks doesn't mean it's not making meaningful progress in that direction.

You should have said that Bitcoin is a bad solution to a problem. The mining algorithm is wasteful because it uses cpu/gpu cycles as much as it can to calculate useless math instead of doing something a lot less energy-intensive like proof of stake. I’m not gonna pretend to be up to date on crypto mining but useless math is useless.

> This is a failure of the markets...

The failure is governments subsidize so much energy production they effectively take the market out of the equation. Remove government incentives for cheap power at all costs and then you'll see the action of the market.

That's not going to help nuclear power very much.

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