-
Sheesh. Sorry, I must have forgotten to include the necessary disclaimer that, a) any article(s) posted don't wholly represent my views and/or understanding or those of the entire bitcoin community, and b) I just found some of the points interesting and pertinent to the (what I thought was a casual...) discussion about Bitcoin value and energy. I'll think twice next time before I speak up in the ABSOLUTE TRUTH OR NOTHING forum.
georgert-
I find the 'Bitcoin-energy-usage-equals-X-country' argument pretty tiring.
If you can't be bothered to put any effort into actually thinking about the issue, better to just stay out of the debate. People do care about the issue and it's offensive if you can muster just enough energy to tell them they're wrong but not bother to do any of the thinking to explain why.
itsbruce
So, you kicked this off by wondering how much it costs to get gold out of the ground and counting the cost of the lights being left on in offices as part of the cost of fiat currency. But you followed it up with an article in which the second of the two arguments is titled
and claims that the energy cost of Bitcoin is almost all used to create coins and has nothing do with transactions.
Because that's a hugely hypocritical argument for you to be endorsing. It's also bullshit.
The other argument in the article is also crap but not such blatantly, delusionally wrong crap. Bitcoin mining could form symbiotic partnerships with green energy or carbon neutral plans but right now it isn't because there's no incentive. Even if they did, most of the energy would be going on mining an not to the rest of the world. BTC would be massively increasing the energy requirements of the world economy and the whole of the rest of the economy using the smallest portion. It's not a good thing to pair BTC mining with carbon capture/offset schemes either - it creates an ongoing incentive for the damaging energy creation technologies (e.g. coal mining) to continue, when the existing climate change conventions are based on phasing them out.
Not to say that there might not be a way to make BTC a useful rather than a damaging energy client, but all that article does is repeat the same vague, hand-wavy hopes that Bitcoin bros spout every day to try and evade the argument.