> If people were using BTC for its intended purpose (transferring money to and from people they don't trust) it'd be brilliant and it'd have a much more minimal environmental impact.
Making BTC transactions is the very thing that costs electricity in the BTC network. If no one made any BTC transactions today, then no blocks would be added and every miner and node would be idle.
> wasting electricity and making global warming worse
We do plenty of this already with conventional currencies (micro-trading algorithms for stocks and currency speculation, for instance). Doesn't make either okay, just want to maintain perspective.
I'm not going to claim that BTC is good or evil, but it's for damn sure both disruptive and interesting. I think we'll also have gold and petro-dollars for quite some time, though.
> The problem is that intentional carbon emissions (as opposed to incidental ones) have not even been a thing in the past.
What about Bitcoin makes it more intentional than any other industry? The product is proof of work, not energy wasted. That's why miners keep making their machines more efficient at producing proof of work instead of simply building larger power supplies and electric heaters.
There's also nothing in Bitcoin that makes it favor fossil fuels over green energy.
> like power consumption used by bitcoin which is solved with newer tech
To be clear, that is absolutely not solved for Bitcoin, which still wastes energy at a disgusting rate. Some crypto things have shifted to non-proof-of-work approaches, usually proof of stake, but Bitcoin is still pumping out more CO2 than many countries.
> Please trust me when I say that I do not give a damn about the price of bitcoin. What I care about is stopping runaway energy consumption, and from that perspective proof-of-work is the biggest existential threat to humanity since the atom bomb.
Bitcoin energy usage accounted for 0.11% of global energy usage and you think it is the biggest threat to humanity since the A-Bomb? Bitcoin is entirely irrelevant to the grand scheme of things re climate emissions.
So you are wrong on this point:
> bitcoin is a nontrivial component of that and it threatens to grow at an exponential pace
Bitcoin IS a trivial component of overall emissions and even with an insane ramp up would not be close to being the biggest issue re emissions.
>My point is that btc is being targeted as big bad meanwhile same people who demonize it for its environmental damage are perfectly fine with heavy industry causing global warming.
The difference is that with heavy industry, we sacrifice environmental quality in exchange for a product with known utility (gas to make our cars go, energy to light/heat our homes, etc). While industrial products can function as a medium for speculation, and do make a few people very rich, they are still primarily produced for immediate consumption.
Bitcoin does not, per se, provide any utility to anyone other than speculation.
> major problems such as the energy consumption issues
You don’t seem to know much about crypto currencies to name energy usage as a real problem of crypto.
While Bitcoin will keep it’s “proof of work” approach to mining in the foreseeable future, there are now quite a few alternative crypto currencies in circulation employing “proof of stake” that do not suffer from large computer power usage e.g. Cardano, Solana or Algorand just to name a few. Furthermore, Ethereum, the second largest Crypto currency in circulation, plans to migrate to “proof of stake” by 2022. Stakes are already online.
So please inform yourself before stating that Crypto will destroy the planet. No one is forcing you to like Bitcoin but you need to keep in mind this project has been invented over 13 years ago. It would have been impossible for the creator to anticipate its popularity and fix all its technical issues including energy consumption.
> 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?
>They spend huge amounts of energy that are helping destroy the planet
This sounds extremely ignorant, Bitcoin essentially has accomplished a _trustless_ transfer of value, globally and at very low costs (even considering the extraordinary fees right now). This is just the cost of that...
> IMO BTC existence is possibly good as it raises demand for cheap energy (and currently green energy is cheapest it seems), it's also good as forcing function for fiat.
No. It increases demand for energy period. Increasing demand makes energy more expensive, not less.
It's certainly working on destroying the planet with its obscene energy requirements.
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