The main point against them is that the only use case they have is going around financial regulations. Buy drugs, transfer money to a gambling site, accept a ransom or go around capital flow regulations in your country. There is absolutely zero reason to use it otherwise. Some of those regulations might be unjust or bad but then we should address that. This is even before we enter more imaginative scam attempts based on popular blockchains.
This isn't wrong, but this is also not an argument for bitcoin, it's an argument for Keynes' "bancor".
People still own phones without spellcheck?
As chips commoditize and energy trends towards 100% of all costs, miners will step into these situations exclusively.
As far as your claim that bitcoin is useless that's a personal judgement. My personal judgement is that reintroducing sound fixed supply censorship resistant money to the world is of enormous benefit. But that's beyond the scope here. I don't think it's constructive to make judgements about what people value and chose to expend resources towards. If you have a problem with externalities then have a debate about that. But who are we to judge if someone wants to heat their pool? If they do so through carbon emissions then consider taxing that. The sustainability of the energy production is your issue really, not the energy use.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-miners-are-giving-new-l...
Which energy markets?
It's not like bitcoin mining is legally or geographically constrained to countries with well-functioning energy markets and a reputation for environmental thinking.
Proof of work schemes could provide a positive marginal return when energy would otherwise be curtailed, but that's just a side effect of being a very price-elastic source of demand. These schemes can just as easily operate with polluting energy made cheap through local political corruption.
For that matter, the freest energy is stolen energy, so mining malware will forever have the edge on that front.
Bitcoin is neither clean nor dirty because it has no governance to make it such. At absolute best it is a neutral energy buyer of last resort, replicating all our political flaws on the world stage.
Why you’re paying Bitcoin’s energy bill:
https://review.chicagobooth.edu/finance/2021/article/why-you...
>The vast computing power needed to create new bitcoins has driven up energy bills for residents and businesses
>Millions of people who have neither mined nor traded a bitcoin are nevertheless paying for bitcoins to exist. That’s because the vast computing power needed to create new bitcoins consumes enormous amounts of electricity and has driven up energy bills for residents and businesses, according to University of California at Berkeley’s Matteo Benetton and Adair Morse and Chicago Booth’s Giovanni Compiani.
HN Discussion:
Artificial snow doesn't cause shilling and gambling addiction, and HN isn't plagued by thousands of foaming-at-the-mouth Artificial Snow Shills who leap to its defense with rationalizations and excuses and whataboutisms and diversions like you and awrence just leaped to Bitcoin's defense.
awrence> I was just emphasizing how people point fingers at Proof of Work without considering the immense negative environmental externalities generated by the current fiat system.
No you weren't. Your comment didn't mention anything about Proof of Work or the current fiat system. We can all agree that it was pure unadulterated whataboutism, which proves my point (edit: as does your following reply. You even admitted yourself that what you wrote wasn't an argument for Bitcoin. It's pure whataboutism!). Thank you.
awrence> Whether bitcoin is a net positive environmentally or not is a different debate.
That debate is long over, and you already lost it. But you're trying to divert the conversation away from that debate you can't win, instead of offering any proof of your ridiculous theory that bitcoin is a net positive environmentally, because you and I and everyone else all know that bitcoin has a terribly negative environmental impact, and very few practical applications.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I doubt anything significant. Also I thing btc has the potential to explode (wrt usage) in a way gaming doesn't.
> All the VR and AR nonsense that is being developed and sold
^ also niche
> We have chips, we have electricity
mining is notably power intensive, relative to other chips/electricity usages. That said, so is heating, so maybe if miners replace their radiators?: https://news.bitcoin.com/the-crypto-heater-mines-digital-cur...
It's also notable that in developing nations (which are often the most populous) there maybe little appetite for luxuries such as gaming, but plenty of reason to invest in crypto precisely because of lack of faith in government/banking infrastructure.
A gamer can only run one machine at a time and, as much as they might try, they can’t play 24/7. It wouldn’t even come close to the cost of powering Bitcoin.