It’s too bad we didn’t go the scifi route of having money be energy credits and instead went the route of proof of energy wasted.
However the real point about bitcoin is it’s efficiency decreases as adoption or speculation increases, whereas another use of computation such as say Google search this is not the case and they are actively trying to make it more efficient.
In contrast to energy credits in scifi which is something like a promise to deliver a fixed amount of energy, like how a dollar used to have an equivalence in gold.
Like, do you imagine some future spacefaring civilization going around and blowing up stars in order to calculate hashes for their currency? I can, but really only as something that an evil civilization or runaway automation would do.
Why not build a dyson sphere and sell contracts on the energy instead, to people who will use it to be productive? Why is it better to burn all stored energy you can find off as quickly as possible to generate numbers you don’t otherwise need?
People use this argument a lot, and I don't get it. You're trusting that miners don't perform a 51% attack; you're trusting that the underlying crypto doesn't have shortcuts; you're trusting the wallet software. Some of these things are unverifiable, leaving you only with trust.
Because bitcoin miners would buy it and "waste" it
The original factory was built to take advantage of the power from the dam. The dam needs a constant draw of power in order to maintain it and smelting potlines were perfect for this.
Today, transmitting the electricity further would be too cost prohibitive due to the remote location. In this case, bitcoin is less polluting energy arbitrage than aluminum smelting.
Only if 100% of global aluminum smelting occurred from green sources. As that’s not the case the world would be better off if they had kept smelting aluminum as long as the reductions occurred in less green locations.
I really like this term.
It is wasted in terms of burning fossil fuels though, since that is stored energy that took millions of years to charge up.