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Comment by 2muchcoffeeman | Hacker News Reader

A quick google seems to turn up that this claim is from thefactsource.com based on the internet uses 10% of global power. And YouTube is 11% of internet traffic. So 1% of global power.

An estimate of Bitcoin power consumption by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

I know which one I’m more prepared to believe.

Even if this were true. I go on YouTube and can learn things: recipes, FreeCad tutorials, coffee nerdery, harmonica lessons.

Bitcoin literally does nothing.

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That article assumes that if YouTube is 11% of total internet bandwidth then YouTube is 11% of total internet electricity usage. That's a very dubious assumption.

> Bitcoin literally does nothing.

Except make those little pieces of green paper in your wallet look foolish.

Remember the infrastructure is one part of the equation. The billions of devices consuming YouTube are running in electricity as well.

The virtue of energy use argument is just dumb.

But again, read what the person you are responding to wrote. YouTube provides something of value to millions. PoW is not required for cryptocurrency to function. PoW provides no value. It wastes time and energy for the sake of wasting processor cycles.

Come on... PoW provides no value? So the almost $1 trillion in Bitcoin is just, nothing? Not worth anything? I think the people invested would beg to differ.

There is no need for Bitcoin to use PoW. Bitcoin can continue to exist using a different algorithm to establish distributed trust. But since you brought up Bitcoin, yes, I would say that it provides little value to society in it's current state. It operates primarily as a speculative investment rather than a true currency.

What would you propose the Bitcoin core team should switch to? Have you looked into the other algorithms, the feasibility of migrating of the existing network, etc.? It sounds more to me like you've just written off cryptocurrency in general.

As far as I can tell PoW is the most proven consensus mechanism so far. PoS may be promising though. ETH2 successfully switching will be telling.

I haven't written off anything. PoW is inherently flawed. It does not scale and Bitcoin has proven that. Bitcoin averages ~300K transactions a day while using more energy than some countries. That is unacceptable.

Says you.

Electricity is a commodity and a utility. Who are you or I to subjectively decide that a use is valuable or virtuous?

Is YouPorn worthy? Is MLB.tv valuable? What are the criteria that you use to determine worth?

Is YouPorn worthy? Is MLB.tv valuable?

Yes because people like porn and baseball.

Bitcoin is like gold. It’s valuable because other people say it’s valuable. But nothing useful happens when you mine crypto. Was I entertained? Did I learn something? Are they producing a widget? Even gold can be made into jewellery or used in electronics. Crypto literally just uses power.

There is no subjectivity here. We are not discussing the perceived value of cryptocurrency. We are talking about the value of the PoW algorithm. It is objectively wasteful. It is wasteful by definition. It's entire purpose is to force computational resources to spend cycles on computationally expensive problems that provide no value to society. It is an interesting an novel idea but it does not scale and that is a problem since there is a very real cost to society in expending significant amounts of the planet's resources for no gain.

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