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Comment by ephbit | Hacker News Reader

> 0.11% or even 0.08% of total worldwide energy consumption is a fucking shit ton of energy.

Completely irrelevant. Because other uses of energy (that me and lots of other people consider wasted or even harmful) are orders of magnitude larger and thus harmful than Bitcoin's.

Either you accept that not every person on the planet agrees upon which uses of energy are useful to them individually. Or you're basically saying "my opinion on which energy uses are legit and which aren't is the only one that matters", at which point we can stop discussing altogether because I don't really care about "discussing" with people who have this standpoint.

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> Either you accept that not every person on the planet agrees upon which uses of energy are useful to them individually. Or you're basically saying "my opinion on which energy uses are legit and which aren't is the only one that matter"

Those are the only two options? How about the one where I agree with you that there are other massively wasteful energy activities out there but that fact is not an argument for tolerating them or allowing for more. Bitcoin is crazy wasteful compared with other financial tools which can do the same thing. You seem to be saying that because some people can drive giant trucks when really all they need is a small car or better yet take public transport, that you should be able (and without any criticism) be able to burn a mountain of energy to get a transfer added to a public ledger. You are both being wasteful and its not ok!

> How about the one where I agree with you that there are other massively wasteful energy activities out there but that fact is not an argument for tolerating them or allowing for more.

If you care so much about having less harm done to the ecosphere then why are you currently debating about "tiny slice of greenhouse gases" (Bitcoin) that other people arguably find very useful, instead of focusing on the "bigger portion of the emissions pie" (perpetual consumption of unnecessary new stuff in the post-modern consumerist society)?

I have a hard time believing you care more about the environment than about trying to blow the supposed evilness of Bitcoin out of proportion.

> Bitcoin is crazy wasteful compared with other financial tools which can do the same thing.

Good, which are these?

The one financial tool that somewhat comes close is gold, and because the latter implies orders of magnitude slower transfers than Bitcoin and because it's harder to secure and comes with a few more downsides on top it's still far from "same thing".

> If you care so much about having less harm done to the ecosphere then why are you currently debating about "tiny slice of greenhouse gases" (Bitcoin) that other people arguably find very useful, instead of focusing on the "bigger portion of the emissions pie" (perpetual consumption of unnecessary new stuff in the post-modern consumerist society)?

It's not either/or, it is possible to care about both (calling on the previous analogy, you can be against both child abuse AND war). Also, sometimes the way to solve a big problem is too deal with all the little ones that make it up; for example, trillions of watt-hours so people can be conveniently paid when they put ransomware a hospital's computer system.

Would you agree that it somewhat makes sense (and is usually efficient) to correlate one's effort in solving some specific problem in some way to the severity of this problem relative to other problems (assuming all these problems are solvable)?

If this were the case, it would have been fitting for you to have written quite a few (maybe a few hundred) texts, discussing the problem "carbon/ecological footprint of exaggerated consumerism" if for the sake of simplicity we take length of text as a measure of effort invested in solving a problem.

Yes, it is possible to solve several problems in parallel. But putting a (hugely) disproportionate amount of effort into different problems when we're dealing with a set of problems of which some are arguably existential due to their order of magnitude, while others are absolutely not existential due to their order of magnitude .. well, doing that doesn't appear to make much sense (to me) and it makes me question whether the goal of solving the existential problems is really a shared goal.

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