If you think the ends justifies the means, I suppose you could do anything.
How much energy do central and commercial banks, auditors, accountants, corporate currency hedge trading desks, and the armies that back fiat currencies use? Way, way more than bitcoin... and they don't provide a way to pay electric grids to build out renewables the way bitcoin mining does.
Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 if that's what you're trying to say.
This sounds a lot like you're not contesting the assertion that Bitcoin uses lots of energy, but deflecting the issue by saying it is irrelevant that it uses lots of energy and it's more the responsibility of policymakers to make the energy it uses clean instead of dirty. Am I understanding you correctly?
I don't think I've ever heard anyone argue that mining literally emits CO2; the concern is about where the energy itself comes from.
What, we will be the first spacefaring, Kardashev Type 2 civilization that is powered solely by windmills?
Why is energy demonized so much?
There will be 100x, 1000x more energy use in the future in the entire economy.
You are worried some tiny fraction of a percent is an issue?
YES.
Adding a whole new country to the map right now, when we don't have enough clean energy to go around, and we are killing our environment with emissions from energy generation, is a BAD idea.
Far from helping to increase demand for clean energy, as is the meme, cryptocurrency mining is incentivising the return of fossil fuel power plants to service (as has happened in the US and other places) and using vast amounts of coal power in places like Kazakhstan. It's the opposite of what we should be doing, which is reducing our power footprint until we have a handle on things.
> There will be 100x, 1000x more energy use in the future in the entire economy.
Maybe, but if that was using our current mix of tech, we'd cook ourselves in the process.
so you are telling me renewables can't even handle 0.5% increase in demand?
What a dead end technology. Can't wait until we upgrade to nuclear instead.
We can debate whether it's good or bad on net, but the fact that crypto provides monetary incentives for mining it (and thus spending electricity and computer equipment) is not up for debate.
But I would suspect probably not a lot right now. There is some mining that's efficiently burning off nat gas that otherwise would have been inefficiently flared or vented, which is net positive from a GHG emissions perspective, but that's an outlier. Realistically, I suspect there's such a high profit margin that hunting for stranded energy isn't the primary goal right now. Getting cheap ASICs is.
This is why I'm a big proponent of increasing mining regulation. I want to see miners heavily taxed for using carbon sourced electricity and pushed out to the fringes of electricity production. We'll probably need to use regulation to force the industry to actually be the consumer of last resort. Right now, there's just too much low hanging fruit for miners to put in that work voluntarily.