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Comment by mattnewton | Hacker News Reader

> Does that mean everyone who plays video games after work is literally satan for consuming energy for mere entertainment?

If that replaces them and the three friends they are playing with from each driving in their own car to the bowling alley 25 minutes away then it's a net carbon savings. It's all about the alternatives, and in the case of cryptocurrencies, a lot of people think there are comparable, much more energy efficient alternatives for everything you use crypto for legally. There really is no ridiculous conclusion here, it's about the alternatives.

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> there are comparable, much more energy efficient alternatives for everything you use crypto for legally

No. The only alternative that is even remotely similar to Bitcoin is gold, and gold mining is horrendous to the environment. Proof of stake coins are not Bitcoin, they don’t provide the same value proposition, and if you don’t understand why then I’d encourage you to do some more reading (including the entirety of the article linked in this post).

Taking your analogy: that doesn't make going to bowling alley as an evil alternative to video games? We should all acknowledge that's a straw-man argument. But this is the kind of argument you hear against PoW. For all we know they are driving electric cars to the bowling alley. Does that make the scenario different? How's that different from PoW powered by solar?

It's a difference of degree. Going to the bowling alley in a gas car is certainly worse for the environment and if they were perfectly substitutable you probably shouldn't choose the bowling alley. They certainly aren't perfect substitutes.

Neither is PoW and PoS, but it's still a question whether those differences are meaningful and worth the tradeoff. The argument is not absurd, there are real costs to the PoW approach worth considering.

The PoW powered by solar is different but it's also a mythical beast. By design there would be no way to legislate the kind of energy the mining part uses because it's opaque to the users of the network. The only thing reasonably open to legislation by a country are the interfaces of the network with the countries financial system and by then it is impossible to determine the providence of the energy it used. It's also impractical to make enough energy where coal or other fossil fuels aren't economical to mine blocks in a popular PoW scheme.

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