They will probably never stop subsidizing coal mining though. Otherwise they will get even more reliant on foreign coal which gives a hypothetical US blockade much more clout.

Sure, but in most cases people would, at best, be seriously inconvenienced if they were immediately banned. At worst, people would die.

If bitcoin was banned worldwide tomorrow, it would be an interesting story in the news and the internet would be furious for a while; there would be no significant real-life impact. It would probably be the most slam-dunk "obviously we should do this" environmental regulation in history; even things like "we should not put mercury in lakes" had significant downsides compared to banning bitcoin.

So far bitcoin has negative utility even aside from environmental disaster (ransomware).

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

A few years ago people laughed at me for buying bitcoin, it's good to see bitcoin adoption moving along nicely.

If you mean "proof of stake" - I've never heard anyone describe any environmental issues with them, so I assume that they either don't exist or are far smaller in impact than PoW.

If you mean "proof of storage/space" - it seems like that tends to produce very high write volumes, which in turn burns SSDs out very quickly[1] - and you can argue that that's bad for the environment. How bad, and whether it's worse than the energy consumption of PoW, I'm not sure. From one perspective, it's worse, because you could theoretically power PoW mining using exclusively green energy, but you can't pull the raw materials for SSDs out of thin air.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27001848

Bitcoin mining's main cost is energy usage. It already fully optimises for less energy consumption. But because the way bitcoin is designed, any gains in energy consumption will cause mining difficulty to go up, and with it energy consumption.

Bitcoin is designed to be anti-efficient. All improvement in efficiency of mining are immediately cancelled out by difficulty adjustments. That is the economic model of bitcoin: It will always use as much energy as you can buy with the mining rewards.

There is already a market incentive for that (electricity is not free), and there is already a solution to this (proof of stake). Please stop advocating and using proof of work shitcoins.

That's the insidious thing about PoW, though: it will absorb efficiency improvements by design. If a chip came out tomorrow that halved the amount of energy used per hash, instead of halving the CO2 use of PoW, miners would be incentivized just to double the network hash rate.

The question is whether that will happen before serious consequences of climate change. While I agree that market (as well as government) incentive is likely to optimize these systems for less energy, and cleaner energy in general, humans are lazy all the way through the bell-curve. Because we developed for millions of years in a hostile world with scarce nutrition, we are inclined towards conserving nutrition and calories, thus we are still inclined mentally to be reactive more than proactive.

What I'm saying is that you might very well be right, but I am pessimistic in that I think we may react too late. Our efforts to change our ways have been, for all intents and purposes, a joke for the last 40 years.

> It is based on the wrong assumption of a static universe.

I am glad you bring up this point, although there's a flaw in it.

What I think you are saying is that the universe is full of change that the myopic human brain struggles to comprehend in its short lifetime. This is something I frequently have difficulty communicating to people.

For instance, one of my long time interests is in native plants and foraging. The truth about "native plants" is that little of it approaches a definition that can be considered truly "native". What's native to a person depends on their perspective. Native since when? Since humans showed up? Since before European settlers? Since the Pleistocene? What people think of as native plants are often as recent to an area as the 1400's or were carried by birds and critters from other parts of the world at some point in prehistory.

To your point, the world has always been changing long before we showed up, and attempting to keep it in suspended animation may be a losing game.

But many in the native plant community (yes, there are people simply interested in native flora) won't have that perspective, let alone consider it intellectually. I left those communities because my view that not every non-native plant is "invasive" or "noxious" was considered heresy. Because the world has always been in flux, I generally don't believe that living things introduced in our lifetime must be eradicated to maintain the image of the world we are familiar with. There are of course exceptions, but to many zealots every plant they don't like must be an exception. It doesn't even matter if an introduced plant doesn't pose a threat to surrounding plants and animals. They want it gone because reasons.

In some ways, climate change can be viewed in the same way. While I absolutely think that climate change caused by humanity is an alarming concern, I have trouble discussing the issue with people because they have the "static universe" world view. In their minds, our current Earth is the one that was always meant to exist, which is pretty anthropocentric. They believe that, at least until recently, we had just the right amount of glaciers, just the right amount of snow in the winter, and just the right amount of heat in the summer to melt the snow caps for drinking water and give us a nice tan; it's just as God intended!

The tricky thing about climate change is that a certain amount of it was destined to happen whether we were blowing CO2 into the atmosphere or not. This fact (and it is a fact) doesn't change my view that we should be concerned about the warming of the glove, but it's often ignored by people. They read facts about melting glaciers and simply conclude, based on their limited earthly experience, that glaciers shouldn't melt and that glaciers melting are necessarily a sign of doom. Ironically, some of them are still opposed to nuclear energy or seriously investing in solar technology, but that's neither here nor there.

On the other hand, some use the fluctuating-universe theory to rationalize their lack of concern. To them, all change is what God intended, figuratively speaking. It's the mirror image of the supposed counterargument.

There are solutions that should satisfy both sides of the coin. Will they ever agree to use those solutions proactively? It seems we are at a political impasse where one's position on these issues primarily depends on where their personality and temperament naturally drifts them towards rather by highly conscious choice. (arguments around free-will notwithstanding)