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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

One BTC transaction consumes more energy than million visa transactions. BTC is the most energy inefficient financial transaction system ever developed.

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Maybe that is the price of censorship resistance. Maybe that is the price of sound money. Maybe if you don’t have a system like this imperial hegemonic nations like the US will print money to stay ahead with impunity. Maybe, for all those things, that’s a price worth paying.

I’m sorry but this is just appeal to emotion that does not match the current reality of Bitcoin. In what way is Bitcoin “sound”? It’s volatile, opaque, and at the peak of the frenzy (i.e. when usage was high) transactions were both expensive, and slow.

I don’t see how the existence of BTC prevents the US Treasury from printing money. In some theoretical scenario maybe, but not in actuality. And I don’t buy that BTC is going to empower “the little guy”. Coinbase, the most accessible way to trade cryptocurrencies is now beholden to Wall Street and there are concerns about the amount of control China has over BTC [0]. The same people in control now will try to retain if the rules of the game change.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/news/bitcoin-wont-win-worldwide...

It’s a feedback mechanism. The fed will always worry that if they get too loose the rich will dump all their money into gold and land and art and whatever pristine investments they can buy to avoid inflation. Guess what is the perfect digital equivalent to these things?

Conspiracy theories, money mystism and emotional rants.

"Surrender to the US monetary global hegemony for the enviroment"

Or build another one where trust doesn’t require burning down a planet.

Good idea, I'll make the logo

We’d better involve a government with access to a large military. Or they’ll eventually invite themselves.

bitcoin is burning down down the planet? Why do you equate energy use to environmental destruction?

Exactly, it is taxing our environment and will so ever more. Sooner or later it will become unbearable and will need to be regulated, simply due to its contribution to climate change. Let's hope that it can be regulated, even. It is by design not sustainable and we have just one planet.

> It is by design not sustainable

I've only read the Bitcoin whitepaper a few times, so I might not have a 100% understanding but I've missed this point in every single reading. Could you point out the section where this "Bitcoin should not be sustainable" is outlined in the original paper?

It’s in the Proof of Work. The „..difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour.“ The more nodes, the faster the hash rate the higher the difficulty. Here is a nice (exponential) graph showing difficulty over time since 2010 http://bitcoin.sipa.be

And „The average work required is exponential in the number of zero bits required and can be verified by executing a single hash.“

The difficulty of a unit of work can be practically limitless, the difficulty to verify a unit of work is practically nil. As long as work needs to be performed and as long as the network keeps growing, both the total amount of work and the amount of work per unit of work increase. The required energy of the network increases with them as long as the machines do not get efficient faster, which is highly unlikely.

Currently, the energy footprint of one BTC transaction is estimated to be 612 kWh and the estimated electricity demand increased over 10.000 % between 2015 and 2021. Digital currencies reportedly account for 112 TWh energy consumption per year in the top 10 countries. That is in the ballpark of the total electrical energy consumption of all 41,500,000 German households. (https://www.institutionalassetmanager.co.uk/2021/01/20/29466..., https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ and https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... and https://www.statista.com/statistics/464187/households-by-siz... ).

Blockchain currencies with alternative consensus algorithms are better in this regard.

No, I don't think GP is referring to Proof of Work here. Proof of Work is designed to be difficult and to enable securing of a network. Nowhere in the design of Proof of Work is it said that it has to not be sustainable, which was the main argument. So GP must have meant something else.

You are right, I also do not think that it is intentional, but just incidental insustainable. It is still an inherent and central part of its design.

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