> We should stop using the word "waste" to describe the energy consumption of the Bitcoin miners.

All you bitcoin shysters can keep telling yourself that to sleep at night, but you are lying to yourself and you know it.

Bitcoin consumes massive amounts of energy for a pathetically small amount of transactions per second. ON a per transaction basis, Bitcoin uses several orders of magnitude more energy than anything used by modern day financial systems.

Like, embarrassingly, shamefully large amounts of electricity. Y'all should bow your heads in shame for the harm you are doing to the world.

> The service it provides is to guarantee the integrity of the blockchain without the requirement of a central authority.

The blockchain, whose only use case is to enable rampant speculation and amazingly large quantities of fraud.

The whole "space" needs to go away.

Your biggest mistake is comparing energy use. You need to compare the total overhead of bitcoin to the total overhead of the competitive financial system. The second mistake is comparing a per-transaction basis; this is of interest when we are comparing suitability for particular applications, but if you want to talk more generally about whether bitcoin is efficient for payments you need to look at things on a value basis (use usd, eur, cny, or gold ounces).

Why? Why does a new system need to be just as bad as the old one?

It doesn't.

But if the new system is better than the old one, why would comparing it to the old one imply that anyone using the new one should be ashamed of doing so?

It wouldn't.

But it turns out that the new system is significantly worse than the old one, for little to no practical benefit. That's why people are comparing and complaining.

it is a waste. Bitcoin is an unqualified environmental catastrophe that is literally erasing any progress we've made to combat climate change. Burning away the future, turning useful energy purely and directly into waste and profit by shouting numbers into the void, not even leaving any artifact of value in its wake.

There's not anything wrong with having a central monetary authority. There's not anything wrong with having institutional trust.

It could be argued that the trust could still be misplaced, but the idea that we can't trust governments for currency is barking up the wrong tree.

The fundamental problems of inequality don't stem from Treasury, but rather from the game theory concept of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin making barriers to entry for new players always higher than the incumbents. You can take this all the way down to the bottom, in the example of having no car to be a delivery driver, and to get a loan for a car is a tremendous risk.

Sort of. It does create an opportunity cost, in diverting electricity away from other, arguably more useful causes. The whole matter there is complicated by economies of scale and baseload demand etc though. It could also be seen in terms of finiteness of the source of energy.

The measure of usefulness is determined by how much money people are willing to allocate towards it. Given that the money is allocated there, it indicates that for those actors, they see some utility regardless of what other people think. Hence, the only way to modify the unwanted behaviour is to correctly account for those producing the externalities, such that this market signal reverberates all the way through the economic chain.

I agree with all of that except the definition of usefulness. As you eluded to with your use of regardless, rationality is not assured. It is expected (or more likely, hope) usefulness, aka speculation. Even funding the status quo is still speculation, because something could suddenly become not useful in the future. I suppose only time will tell what was actually useful, and I'm betting bitcoin is not among them. Maybe if proof of stake comes along, I'll consider that as more potentially useful.

Obviously capital allocation of individuals is not a perfect measure of utility, but it is the best/ fairest metric we have. Conveniently it provides a clear mechanism to sort out this mess. Price carbon pollution at the source and see the rest of the actors seeking profit fall in line. Miners will chose green energy, green energy will get more demand, their economies of scale will increase, pollution will decrease. Bitcoin energy use is no longer a problem and can provide whatever utility it is valued at without externalities.

If you had a mechanism to price externalities, and it wasn't government, then sure ok. But while we have no effective externality accounting and enforcement, this notion of wastage still exists fairly. If we could price in externalities with a government, then perhaps they would be more worthy of trust for currency too?

In terms of my original statement, I was effectively stating that the problem of decentralising currency doesn't really give back power to the people, because of the nature of wealth accumulation and propagation. Sure, it reduces the capacity for regulatory capture, but people with capital in whatever form still exercise a capacity to better maintain their capital base.

With regards to waste again, it becomes a moral issue. If we know that our externalities will cause problems, then by letting people continue to capitalise on them, we knowingly undermine the wider system we operate in. We have ethics committees for science and medical experiments, but when it comes to finance, experimentation occurs unimpeded. This leads to socio-economic outcomes which, while not fully understood, are also not complete unknowns.

It does not follow that if we can trust a Government to price carbon emissions then we should be able to trust them to not print money. We are basically guaranteed that they will, despite being able to effective disincentive things like smoking with an excise tax.

It is trivial for Governments to implement a carbon tax which would improve environmental conditions for all energy intensive production.

With regards to giving power to people, this is not done through wealth redistribution (although you get a little bit of that). The mechanism is tgrough the constraint that the currency can not be debased. A rising tide lifts all boats, especially when there are not holes in them.

Built in deflation you say? That once again, favours the incumbents. Those starting out will be at a disadvantage even more than they are now, for not having held any tokens of value. It also means that anyone who does attempt to do anything which requires money up front, whether that be starting a business, or starting a family, are at an even greater disadvantage. A rising tide lifts all boats, unless the boats haven't been built yet. Then it just becomes very difficult as more and more of the land is covered by the ever increasing tide.

You seem to be ignoring the status quo. I only need to prove it better than the current system, you need to prove that the current system is better. Those families and businesses that start from nothing still need money. Just that currently the money they do get is going to be worth less in the future.

Right, which means it is worth being spent. If spending is not worth it, then spending by and large dries up, resulting in a reduction of income to others, reducing the multiplier effect, and reducing the amount of actual trade that occurs. People continue to save as income opportunities dry up, and those with no income get royally screwed. With no risk taking occurring, things go back to bare essentials, which we are already very efficient at. Maintenance places are the only places which will maintain any expertise.

To be fair, I think there is already a risk of this, in any situation where capital becomes severely unequal. However, by making the monetary token itself an item of (appreciating) value, rather than only as means by which trade is mediated independently and in arbitrary small parts between multiple parties, is a sure way to speed that process up.

THIs is a wonderful story that doesn’t make any sense. You are suggesting that there are two sets of people, those with BTC that is increasing in value and those without. Those with are spending nothing and getting fabulously wealthy not spending their appreciating asset. Meanwhile, on the outside the no-coiners suffer from the lack of trade and become destitute and the economy drives to a halt.

This makes no sense for several reasons. The no-coiners could just buy a tiny fraction of a BTC with whatever fiat they have and become fabulously wealthy. When they do this they would be setting the market price even higher for all the rich Bitcoiners. All the of these fabulously wealthy holders think against deploying any capital to either enrich their life or increase their rate of return over asset appreciation.

It is absurd to think that as an entire population becomes wealthier that was risk taking occurs, when it it people that are mired in debt that often take less risk.

Before you respond remember these facts, the market price is set by buyers and sellers (trading). Bitcoin is infinitely divisible despite a capped supply. Gresham’s Law dictates that people will spend bad money first. Your no-coiner set has at least the ability to provide a service to begin wealth accumulation.

Should Read “less” risk taking.

By that flawed reasoning, BitConnect must have been extremely useful...

I imagine it was for a few. Now not so much, and not taking any energy.

It's wasting if it's using more than the alternatives and it is using more than the alternatives.

"It's not waste if it serves a purpose. "

It's an open question as if it actually does serve a purpose, though.