Bitcoin with proof of waste is not just about flavour.
The benefits have been relatively modest so far.
For another, necessity: we have a preexisting financial system that secures orders of magnitude more value than cryptocurrencies do, with actual legal guarantees and recourses.
For a final, civic harm: whatever limited negative social ills can be explained by video games are dwarfed by the civic poison of fraud and “easy” money.
That financial system uses many more magnitudes of energy.
This is like blaming dollars for the existence of bank robbers.
I don’t think the directly comparable elements of the financial system (i.e., storage and settlement) use anywhere near as much power as Bitcoin does. Unless you’re doing that thing where you’re comparing the entire traditional economy to Bitcoin, which is silly: the traditional economy has actually valuable outflows, and Bitcoin does not replace factories and their workers.
If we had abundant clean energy everywhere with no unclean power plants, then knock yourself dead. But right now, any power consumed has an unclean component.
Even if you use power in a country that is 100% renewable, it takes away power from a grid that is then replaced by non-renewable energy. And that these miners buy old crap power plants make it worse - it reverses grid-wide improvements to green energy.
... heck even with fully renewable energy for the entire globe, wastefully burning energy so that more renewable power sources need to be deployed is still bad - no power plant is neutral to manufacture.
And re: comparison to call of duty, if had the same footprint as Bitcoin, then we could start talking. Bitcoin consumes power like a small country, not like someone forgetting to turn off the lights. All for something that can be done without any of this power draw.
This idea/delusion that energy that is used for mining should and could have been used for something else. It's just not the case.
It’s pretty clear the GP means a demand curve: cryptocurrencies induce demand for energy sources that would otherwise be uneconomical to operate. This doesn’t require fungibility.
Okay, but the 'if' there is true. Bitcoin is currently inducing demand for coal and gas plants, which is very bad. It's unclear when it'll stop doing that, if it'll stop, and a hypothetical future in which Bitcoin starts incentivizing the good thing instead of the bad thing doesn't change the truth value of the current bad thing.
(We've also fixated on coal burning, when there are oodles of other great reasons to not like Bitcoin. A small handful of them have been listed elsewhere in this thread.)
If somebody proposed a law tomorrow that bans coal plants being reopened to mine Bitcoin I wouldn't be against it, and Bitcoin would carry on happily regardless.
BUt you're then getting into the dangerous territory of telling people what and what isn't an acceptable use of compute power. Bitcoin is a valid and useful consumer of energy.
If Bitcoin is neutral as you say, it cannot incentivize renewable production. It can only induce energy demand and, consequently, seek out the cheapest energy on the market. It doesn't get to sit on any laurels for that, any more than car manufacturing or aluminum refinement would. Except, of course, that those actually produce things.
The best thing that happened to Bitcoin was when it got banned in China so that the mining capacity was vastly reduced, taking part of the environmental footprint with it. Can't wait for others to do the same.
Maybe new Blockchain products will pop up that do something interesting without being a significant contributor to global warming and lung cancer by massively increasing unclean power usage - but maybe not.
The massive amount of stranded hydro that Bitcoin was soaking up in China, when mining was banned was that energy magically teleported to NYC to power people's TVs and dry their clothes? No, it's now sitting there unused with no buyers of last resort. In fact, that being sitting unused is now subsidising the fossil fuel mining by lowering the relative mining difficulty.
Mining is responsible for a rounding error in emissions, if it disappeared tomorrow it wouldn't even make a detectable dent.
Fossil fuels are bad. Fossil fuels being used for mining is bad. That doesn't make Bitcoin bad.
Yes there are cases where they buy good power plants, but they also power from grid and buy dirty power plants. Even in case of good power, the investment should instead be made to make this power useful. Heck, folding at home or similar would be a hell of lot better usage.
But that isn't where we are. We're in a huge energy crunch, and having to go back on green policies because of it. During this time, ANY consumption is bad, and no, regardless of opinions on its usefulness, Bitcoin does not yet contribute in a meaningful enough way to sacrifice other utilities.
So yeah - I agree with you that we can waste power when and only when the vast majority of dirty power has been replaced.
1. People mine Bitcoin on the grid.
2. Some miners - mostly China, which is no longer mining - buy decommissioned power plants and mine "off the grid".
... But, surprise surprise, these decommissioned power plants were previously used. People generally do not invest in building power plants that cannot connect to the grid, as the power plant needs to make money. While it never became a thing in the US, energy trade is a big thing in the rest of the world - see e.g. the European Energy Exchange.
The people that tripped over a hydroplant that was built only to power e.g. a remote factory that has shut down and nothing else, account for a very, very, VERY small amount of miners.
Considering that Bitcoin mining consumes TWh in the scale of a small country, those few fairy tale cases just don't matter. It's a cute way to try to justify the environmental disaster Bitcoin mining is, just too bad it doesn't hold.
I personally am a fan of Drew's work and pretty skeptical of crypto, but this announcement makes me feel that Sourcehut is too small and attached to the preferences of one man for me to host anything significant there.