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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

I must admit it looks like I will be proven wrong; I was assuming when the crisis hit cryptocurrencies would collapse immediately. Relative to the more traditional markets though they seem fine. If the ecosystem keeps doing what it does, in a few years people will have settled on a fair price for hash power and then it'll be quite competitive against these unreliable financial institutions.

Someone is going to be subsidising all the largess the regulators are going to have to distribute. That might make the cost of sustaining Bitcoin's energy burn look like the cheap option.

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Cryptocurrencies operate as their own universe, which is only loosely tied to the real world's "good news" and "bad news". In either direction. Which makes it risky to bet against. At least Balaji paid out on his ridiculous hyperinflation bet.

> the cost of sustaining Bitcoin's energy burn look like the cheap option

No, this needs to have the plug pulled on it if we're to keep global warming to 2C.

I wonder if all the banks in the world consume more energy vs Bitcoin network? What if we didn't have these big institutions that employ hundreds of thousands of people to basically increment and decrement a counter in a computer. Imagine all costs that we wouldn't have to incur (e.g transport to work, operating buildings, etc). Today's banks seem very archaic.

This misses the point of a bank, which is not to increment a value in a database, but to provide risk management.

Purpose of any modern bank is to make money for its shareholders. It does so by taking money on one side and lending it on the other. Lending is inherently a risky business and that risk must be managed. It's unfortunate that in this process people who deposit money can lose it. Essentially, those people take risk of losing money for <1%.

There is also another aspect to banks which is to provide ability to exchange money. That part of banking doesn't generate a lot of revenue compared to loans so it receives a lot less attention.

The banks are also serving several orders of magnitude more people than the bitcoin network. The energy usage per transation isn't even close to being comparable.

Even with all of the inefficiencies of modern banking, by comparison cryptocurrency is like lighting oil wells on fire.

> No, this needs to have the plug pulled on it if we're to keep global warming to 2C.

Bitcoin accounts for <0.1% of global CO2e and has one of the highest shares of renewables in any industry (since it competes globally for the cheapest energy).

It incentivises renewables (by being a location agnostic buyer of first and last resort which buys all excess energy 24/7), reduces CO2e (by making it profitable to combust CH4 instead of venting it), stabilises energy grids (by providing flexible demand response, i.e. can be turned on and off at moment's notice), provides banking services for the global unbanked and financially discriminated, shields from gambling bankers and inflation of the money supply, ...

In comparison to all these use cases and benefits, mere "luxury" energy uses such as air-conditioning, tumble drying, video games, porn, ... all consume more energy and produce more CO2e (e.g. A/C ~100x more). Yet nobody calls to have the plug pulled on them.

Regulate the production of energy, not the consumption.

Can I get a source on video games and porn using more energy than Bitcoin?

I would like the source too. I would be very surprised if Bitcoin energy consumption passed even half of what is consumed for porn and video games. I expect the amount of energy being used to maintain Bitcoin to be a rounding error in comparison.

BTC used 123 TWh annually. [0]

Computers, data centers and networks consume about 10% of all the world energy. [1] 4 percent of websites are estimated to be porn [2] a single gaming computer costs about up to 1400 kWh annually. [3]

So the porn websites are about 3X bitcoin and BTC represents around 8.7m gaming computers.

[0]https://www.moneysupermarket.com/gas-and-electricity/feature...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_energy_management#:~:text=S....

[2]https://www.statista.com/chart/16959/share-of-the-internet-t...

[3]https://computerinfobits.com/how-much-energy-do-gaming-compu....

>No, this needs to have the plug pulled on it if we're to keep global warming to 2C.

Sure thing buddy. One of the ways the "little guy" can push back against big banks and big government needs to have its plug pulled because of some imaginary 2 degrees panic. What the hell happened to "Hacker" in "Hacker News", this place is a cesspool of the mainstream rhetoric. Note: I have $0 invested in crypto, but I don't deny its usefulness in "keeping the bastards honest".

>Note: I have $0 invested in crypto, but I don't deny its usefulness in "keeping the bastards honest".

What bastards has crypto ever kept honest?

>Relative to the more traditional markets though they seem fine.

This is your brain on constant high volatility.

I mean, past 12 months crypto hasn't been very volatile. That is part of why it looks like it is outperforming all these banking institutions who are rather volatile in that the regulators are forced to invent new regulations on the fly otherwise the whole system might collapse. Nobody has any confidence that their money will be safe except, ironically, people like the Silicon Valley Bank depositors.

In crypto, they lost FTX. That seems to have been about it. No rule changes required. I can self-custody if I don't trust the exchanges.

Cryptocurrencies did collapse. All confidence in niche coins evaporated overnight and any money that didn't flee the sector entirely was rerouted into the major coins, making them the beneficiaries of the collapse.

> I was assuming when the crisis hit cryptocurrencies would collapse immediately.

It depends on faith in the system... if the green line stays green, why pull? same argument for any other market like the stock market or housing market.

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