> Energy use will always meet demand for coins. This is true even in USD. Bitcoin is actually more efficient than existing financial systems. Bitcoin removes all the labor and expense that goes into running ATMs, Bank buildings, tellers, and so forth. Eth also does this.
How can you say this in good faith when BTC doesn't do the same things existing financial systems do?
> Bitcoin is fairly unique in its energy use. Almost every other use of resources will try to be more efficient if it can be.
It's not like energy use in the world has gone down. If it's cheaper or more efficient it will go up or at best stay the same. Bitcoin has made the transition to more efficient ASICs because that increases profits, it just didn't result in less energy use because now you make more profit.
> I believe that most of money consumed by the financial system actually goes back into the economy. Some bankers buy sushis, then sushi chefs buy gasoline, then oil drillers... and so on. BitCoin tends to waste energy irrecoverably.
Bitcoin is best technical solution we have for an existing societal problem. As soon as better technical solution will be created (e.g. proof-of-stake which can be relied upon), Bitcoin will be modified to use it. And Bitcoin will continue to operate with lower costs - burning less energy.
> Detractors cite electricity usage, but overall it uses much less electricity than the traditional banking system
The traditional banking handles thousands of transfer per seconds, and many many many more assets and assets types than bitcoin. All things that bitcoin is not able - nor designed to - handle.
It's like saying that F1 engine are consuming less gas than trucks. It's only valid if you only look at it from a very specific angle. Sure, in total trucks are consuming more than F1, but both in consumption per km and in versatility, trucks win. F1 engines are not ready - nor designed to - be a suitable replacement for trucks engines.
Bitcoin and cryptos consume order of magnitude more electricity than the traditional banking system if you put them in equal terms. It's only logical since one is supposed to work in zero-trust environments while the other doesn't.
> banking system is idiotically expensive using much more raw energy
It uses much more raw energy because it services the financial needs of most of the planet. Bitcoin dubiously services the needs of a handful. This is so obvious that I suspect you're not arguing in good faith.
>Have you factored in the energy costs of running the thousands of financial institutions and associated infrastructure required to maintain them?
I don't like this argument. It's garbage. Bitcoin does not replace the functions of the entire financial system. I can't take out a loan using the blockchain. Banks do far more then act as a ledger. Bitcoin's utility today is a little more than P2P value transfer. A centralized solution - something like Transferwise - does not use as much energy as Bitcoin.
> The traditional finance system is no more energy efficient overall.
The traditional finance system easily does tens of thousands of times more transactions than cryptocurrencies. Visa alone does a thousand times more transactions than Bitcoin.
Cryptocurrency uses over 0.5% of the world's electricity to do less than 0.01% of the world's transactions.
So, no, your statement is wildly wrong. I have zero problem calling it a lie, because you made it up out of your head and made no attempt to justify it with facts.
> The thing that increases the energy usage is the price of bitcoin.
This simply tells us that bitcoin has a dumb cost structure. Apparently its inventors didn't think about that either. But that's not our problem. Our problem is measuring efficiency, and for that we need a measure of efficiency. And a measure of efficiency needs to be chosen in terms of how good it is at measuring efficiency, not in terms of how good it is at hiding that a certain payment system has a dumb cost structure.
> 1. There is no comparison made to the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry, which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry.
I ran the numbers a few days ago (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234766). Bitcoin miners plausibly use more energy than the entire traditional banking sector. Not just on a per-transaction basis (which is blindingly obvious if you think about it), but on a gross energy consumption basis.
>Escrow accounts and merchant layers are in development
Right, so that means that Bitcoin is not providing many of the services the financial system provides now, so comparing its energy footprint to the existing financial system is pointless.
That's the point I was making. You can't say "Bitcoin uses X electricity and Finance uses Y, which is bigger, and so is worse" when Bitcoin doesn't provide the same services or service the same size of audience as existing financial systems do.
> what matters is how much do all the banking and credit card systems in the world consume by comparison. I would bet it's less than that.
Thing is, with bitcoin the energy consumption is easily quantifiable and it's a single number. The banking system also uses a lot of energy to heat/cool the employees, builds lots of office buildings, and does many things which could be considered wasteful. It really is a little tricky to compare.
The banking system employs a lot of people. Depending on your point of view, this can be a bad thing (they could be doing something more productive instead!) or a good thing (the people are getting jobs, employment is good!).
> Bitcoin already uses a very high percentage of the total energy that the global financial services industry does, and it moves a very small amount of money around to show for it.
> If the bitcoin network were to move quadrillions of dollars per year, it would probably have to use more energy than we are capable of producing
Sigh, this gets spouted like it's the truth by people who don't understand the simple fact that the energy usage in bitcoin is NOT used on transactions! and it DOES NOT scale with the number of transactions!. [1]
> And bitcoin cannot offer insurance, or retirement and estate planning, it cannot take my company public or help me raise money on the bond market. It cannot facilitate a repo transaction on my real estate portfolio, and it cannot offer me a mortgage to purchase a home.
These are the usecases for subsequent layers, and there are services popping up for these already! bitcoin is a relatively young system that is purely community driven.
>>"Why does Bitcoin have to justify its energy usage when the legacy financial system does not?"
These questions always strike me as disingenuous / intentionally obtuse. But charitably assuming an honest question for purpose of frank discourse, my simplest answer / understanding is that in general, in the daily transactional system, participants work to reduce energy cost per transaction and over most periods of time this energy cost per transaction has been reducing, or if it increases, it is to support some additional identifiable functionality. This strikes me as a rational system.
With bitcoin, my understanding is that effective energy usage per transaction / for the system as a whole has been increasing. This strikes me as iterational.
I am eager to be corrected if my high level perception of bitcoin is incorrect and energy costs have been rationally decreasing / becoming more efficient over time.
If NOT.. Then how does anybody persuade themselves to believe this is a rational currency system, or at the very least, that it's energy usage in particular is in any way whatsoever defensible??
> Don't like Bitcoin's Proof of work properties, check out Ethereum.
Ethereum's move to a Proof-of-Stake system was the best thing to happen to the cryptocurrency world, from an ecological point of view; however, that does not change anything about Bitcoin's energy consumption.
Someone who objects to Bitcoin due to its excessive energy use will not stop disliking Bitcoin just because an unrelated cryptocurrency became better.
> Based on national averages in the U.S., the bitcoin network consumes as much power as approximately 6 million homes. Yeah, it is definitely a lot of power, but it is also what secures and backs the bitcoin network.
> Bitcoin Does Not Waste Energy
Please come up with an algorithm for Bitcoin that does not use so much energy because if one exists, then Bitcoin wastes energy. I am certain that Bitcoin is not the crypto that will win in the long term if it sticks to PoW, so I probably don't need to waste my energy opposing it.
How can you say this in good faith when BTC doesn't do the same things existing financial systems do?
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