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Comment by zeptonaut22 | Hacker News Reader

That's totally fair.

I do think that any discussion of Bitcoin has to be evaluated through the lens of "did Bitcoin meet Satoshi's original vision of a digital replacement for cash", and I just don't think that Bitcoin has the transaction throughput to justify its cost to society. I feel like if you were to ask Satoshi if he thought 7tx/s was high enough to achieve his vision, his answer would have been an immediate "no".

Even if it uses no energy to do the actual mining, it still has used huge amounts of computing resources (CPUs, GPUs) which have a very real carbon cost to produce.

Call me a skeptic though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Yes, there are carbon costs.

I think your observation and sentiment would be best used in being vigilant about where Proof of Work is done and the emissions improvement it is having in those places, and rallying against certain kinds of sites.

Its almost not really about what the network does, its about how it is an economically viable emission reduction for fossil fuel sites - in the absence of anything else - as they produce this digital commodity sellable on the open market.

Just a different perspective that relies on acknowledging that it isn't going away. I can see that being a hard pivot, but I think the sentiment is very useful in making sure Proof of Work isn't used in things like more re-commissioned coal plants, or co-opted by governments in the future to gain control of the network at a financial and environmental loss.

As I mentioned in the article

> If there’s a way to reduce Bitcoin’s environmental impact, it’s certainly above my paygrade.

I think it's a really hard problem. I guess I'm not sure what "rallying against certain kinds of sites" means in practice - encouraging regulation? Social media campaigns against those sites? It seems like bitcoin mining has proven resilient to regulation because as soon as one place regulates the miners slip away to somewhere else. Getting ~200 countries to collectively agree on a set of regulations in such a quickly shifting landscape seems near impossible.

As for social media campaigns, it might shame some people but not others.

I don't have much of an answer for what to do here besides "hey, if I want to do a crypto project, I'm going to choose a chain that I feel like is being ethical".

> I don't have much of an answer for what to do here besides "hey, if I want to do a crypto project, I'm going to choose a chain that I feel like is being ethical".

My problem with that is blockchains are akin to lightbulbs in this regard. They use the same amount of energy whether you are meeting with your colleagues under the light or not. Aka, they use the same energy whether you use them or not. It is a very miniscule difference.

This bolsters the anti-blockchain/proof-of-work stance, I find it ironic that if skeptics and critics understood it to this level of detail they would wind up contributing to its improvement instead of the wishful thinking towards prohibitions

It would be more productive use of sentiment

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