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Comment by knuthsat | Hacker News Reader

Global warming above 2°C will happen just by the nature of n-th order effects. Trees burning, methane stored in tundra getting released can have decades of CO2 equivalent emissions compared to 1 human civilization year.

Bitcoin has a small effect compared to everything else we do and everything else that will happen.

Human civilization isn't exactly living as optimal as possible and I do not see why Bitcoin needs to be the thing we optimize.

There's Las Vegas, having AC 24/7, cooling the streets from open casino doors. There's individuals feasting on steaks every single day, every single meal.

Looking through the eyes of a frugal optimizer, should we ban that too?

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Maybe?

Although, which one do you think is easier to ban?

If cryptocurrencies were to disappear tomorrow, would the everyday life change? And if we ban meat? Which one do you think will encounter the most resistance? So which one is the most feasible? And then, which one do you think has the best return on investment?

Best return on investment is most definitely finding new ways to produce energy and new ways to sequester greenhouse gases.

Anything else is a minor dampener to an exponential process.

Getting rid of Bitcoin is absolutely nothing compared to our exponentially increasing energy needs.

Lowering greenhouse emissions to 0 today would still result in dire consequences when the temperature increase comes, just from the massive n-th order effects.

I have no idea how the opinion of Bitcoin being so detrimental to climate came to fruition and how it's considered plausible at all.

It came to fruition because it’s creating vast new wealth in a fashion that is directly competitive to old wealth. It’s also easy because climate change is a real, pressing existential crisis. Take this with the caveat that most people won’t think past the headline, so lots of people don’t get to the obvious conclusion of “the way we generate power is the root problem”

Lowering to zero doesn’t solve the problem, but it would help give us a longer runway.

Whether we develop new clean energies without reducing our energy consumption, or we reduce our consumption while doing the development, can make the difference between catastrophic failure and hope.

This is why I think it is important.

But should we focus our efforts banning things that won’t change the way people have to live? That seems like an easy way to fail.

Further, Bitcoin is not the main issue. BTC being clean or dirty is based on the underlying issue of dirty power generation. How about we ban dirty power generation instead? Attack the actual, underlying problem.

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