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Comment by celticninja | Hacker News Reader

All this vitriol for Bitcoin and how terrible it is for the environment. Honestly it is just the latest stick people want to beat it with. Its hardly the first and it wont be the last thing that damages our environment. And it is also far from the biggest causes of pollution.

Cargo ships cause more pollution than all the cars on earth, yet we are told to drive less but the cargo ships keep coming, keep getting bigger and keep polluting. Stopping/Reducing them would mean we can't consume cheap goods so a blind eye is turned, to an easier target, Bitcoin.

If everyone who I heard complain about the inefficency of bitcoin were also protesting Mcdonalds, Shell, Texaco, Amazon etc it might actually have some merit but until then I feel free to ignore the green virtue signalling.

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This is a fairly common fallacy, though I'm not sure if it's formalized enough to have a name.

I have enough time and energy to criticize both mega cargo ships and Bitcoin for their unnecessary pollution.

Also, if we banned Bitcoin tomorrow, the only people who would really notice are those who have bet their shirts on a risky investment. If we banned large cargo ships tomorrow, everyone would feel it as delivery times (and possibly prices) for things increased. Personally, I'd be willing to pay those higher prices in exchange for less pollution.

Sure but I think GP’s point is that the amount of criticism & headlines Bitcoin gets for its energy use, fairly or unfairly, appears orders of magnitude more than other areas, like online gaming (or dozens of other industries).

Probably because, as you point out, there’s a lot of money and companies in those other industries. And those industries would rather not make headlines for negative environmental, or other, reasons. (Legal apparatus, lobbyists, etc etc)

Are people that cannot tell CO2 and local air pollution apart the same who cannot see the difference between gambling and investment?

All investment is gambling. Investments have different risk profiles, sure. But unless you can perfectly predict the future then the uncertainty is non-zero and it is a gamble.

But when investing how much an investment makes absolutely isn't very interesting. All that matters is opportunity cost, or how one investment compares to all of the others. You want to make the best investment for the right amount of risk - and this is going to always be a gamble because it is highly uncertain.

So you want to talk about how much energy casinos around the world waste?

I'm a bleeding heart hippie but agree 100%.. and when you dig deeper, you may find that those propagating the fud around crypto are actually speculators trying to drive prices.. which makes the fake outrage even more sick.

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