The Bitcoin Energy Argument That Nobody Makes

> Should the costs be borne by the same people who derive the benefit? Absolutely.

Apologies in advance, but for the sake of argument I'm going to create a straw man for a moment. I'll do my best to bring my straw man argument back around to fit the context of this conversation.

Sometimes the real cost of an activity isn't fully apparent until a crisis emerges from those activities, such as the Flint, Michigan water crisis. And sometimes by the time we figure out how much damage has really been done, the people who "should have paid" are long gone (soil contamination is still a good example here).

Sadly, humanity has proven time and again that we are entirely willing to dump our problems onto others in order to further enrich ourselves. At the most visible level there is inflation, where producers happily pass the burden of increased operational costs on to the consumer. When land tax increases, profit doesn't go down, rent simply goes up.

My point is that the true cost of an activity isn't always readily apparent, and sometimes humanity will be left to foot the bill. Case in point, in the distant future our planet will be a very unsafe place to just run around digging holes in - because you might run into a nuclear waste deposit. All of the measures that we take to try to scare people away from these sites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin...), may in fact end up piquing their curiosity and attracting them.

So when you talk about "the costs being borne by the same people who derive benefit", to my ears that sounds very tone deaf when you consider that those costs involve burying nuclear waste and marking those locations on maps that will very likely become lost long before the waste site is safe. If you don't care about the humans of the far future, then I don't think we even have enough common ground to constructively argue upon.

> Should we treat as implicitly accepted that a particular use of energy is frivolous and should be stopped? Not if you care about your own ability to use energy to do things you think are valuable.

Implicitly accept? No, I think we should explicitly reject frivolous energy use on the grounds that we endanger the future inhabitants of this planet with the byproducts of that energy use.

Author here. I agree, me not liking it is not a great point. I think a stronger point would have been:

If you take the energy usage of anything you need to ask: "Does the positives of the thing justify this energy usage?". Let's say the current energy consumption of the Bitcoin network is X. You will find people saying "X is totally justified for the upsides the network brings" and you will find people that say no to that. But if you ask the yes people then: "What about 2X, 4X, 100X?" More and more yeses will switch to no. Of course you will find some people that will say "A power consumption of infinity is justified for the Bitcoin network and I rather have that than a car a house $other_thing_energy_consumption_thing" but I doubt this will the majority.

And this is the fundamental point tried to make. With rising Bitcoin prices the power consumption will cross every threshold without changing the positives that the network brings. I don't see a way to convert the people who say "it's NOT worth it" to "yes it is worth it" without affecting the Bitcoin price.

If you compare that to Christmas light there is a big difference. If you have people that say: "I don't like that Christmas lights use so much power" we can think of multiple solution to decrease the power usage without affecting the upsides proportionally: Can you compromise on using Christmas lights a week later in the year? Can you commit to slowly changing your existing lights to more power efficient ones? Can you use them for an hour less per day? And you can build incentives and legislation around that. I know that even in this space there are hard liners on both sides but I believe it is completely feasible to reduce the power consumption without affecting the upsides in the same way.

Energy prices are rising: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-60227306

What he seems to be saying is that by design proof of work incentivizes fully saturating available energy, and that the only world in which it won’t compete with other uses of energy is one in which we have more than enough capacity for all other uses, plus excess, and that until we’re there being in favor of devoting energy to proof of work is functionally equivalent to being against preventing emissions. I’m unaware of the debate, so as a lay man I admit I don’t know if the argument is old or not (and I think how old it is is irrelevant to whether or not it is right), but I find this line of argument compelling.

The author does point out your Christmas light comparison but identifies a key distinction: for Christmas lights, the point is the colorful lighting for human enjoyment. That's the upside and the energy cost is the downside. Coming up with a lower-energy way to generate the same colorful lighting will save energy.

For Bitcoin, the destruction of value is the point. The nature of proof-of-work is that you continuously expend more resources than a hypothetical attacker possibly could. If resources get cheaper or more abundant, you must burn more of them to compensate, because your attacker can too and you always have to outpace them. So Bitcoin incentivizes using an "expensive" amount of energy no matter how "cheap" energy gets.

Guess everybody knows what’s going on in your 10’s of forum pages lol. What are you referring to and what’s the substantive argument against the idea that “proof of work is uniquely incentivized to always maximize energy consumption by design?” As someone who lives under a rock and has not read a single one of these aforementioned forum pages, would love some clarity.