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Comment by psychlops | Hacker News Reader

No effort was spent calculating "damages" from competing currencies or stores of wealth.

The US Bureau of Engraving and Printing had greenhouse emissions of roughly 40,000 tons in 2021 to make roughly $900m worth of dollar bills. The US Mint I don't have up-to-date numbers for, but reasonable extrapolation is something like 20,000,000 tons for $5b worth of coinage.

In other words, Bitcoin uses more energy, and emits more carbon, than the largest currency in circulation. If you scale it by transaction volume, it's not even close.

And of course physical currency - i.e. M0 - is only a small portion of the total money supply measured by M2.

Bitcoiners argue that you need to count the cost of the US military in that calculation, as the force which ultimately secures the value of the US dollar. You can't carve out "printing money" as the only impact.

And people who make that argument are idiots--it necessarily implies that if everyone were to magically switch to Bitcoin overnight, then every military in the world would be abolished at the same time as unnecessary. It makes no sense to allocate anything larger than exactly 0% of the military's emissions to the "cost" of currency, because that is how much effort the military spends on enforcing its value.

(You'd actually have a stronger argument trying to allocate a portion of the police budget to it, as it's the police forces who would enforce payment of debts in government specie, not military, and in the US at least, the military is prohibited from acting in a police capacity.)

> And people who make that argument are idiots

Name calling people isn't a great way to "win" your discussion. And that isn't the implication at all, military exist for many other reasons one of which is to secure the wealth and economy of its citizens.

"Printing" bitcoin would take almost no energy at all, the ongoing electrical use is to ensure the network is working and secure.

Why should they? Other people have already done that, and it's not good for Bitcoin.

This is where you get accused of whataboutism for asking why we're not comparing and contrasting one morally dubious choice with the alternative choice that happens to be the default.

Well, that's literally the definition of "opportunity cost". So it's expected in any reasonable economic analysis.

I'm not defending proof-of-work cryptocurrencies at all. I'm bringing it up because the culture within the field of economics generally seems to have forgotten to compare alternatives, rather than doing analysis based on some idealized vacuum scenario. Once you're aware of this you will see it everywhere.

Does that make it a bad argument? Say we accept that Bitcoin causes damage to the environment, do we then ignore the energy expenses of the default because...I'm not sure where you are going with this.

While I don't know the incentives of the author's, I suspect a reason they target Bitcoin energy expenditure because it's easy.

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