CO2 emissions being wrong by a factor of a thousand is a "detail" to you? ;) My point is that the impact of proof-of-work, although real, is grossly exaggerated and appears to be more manageable than what eye-catching press titles suggest.
Another example: journalists like to claim Bitcoin emits as much CO2 as an entire country. But in fact current emissions are comparable to what a single city like Cape Town emits (28 MtCO2/yr.) Thus these sorts of statements are not so much a testament of how much Bitcoin emits, but more a testament of how little CO2 these countries emits.
"designed to waste as much energy as possible"
It is designed to use no more than what the revenues (fees+rewards) allow to purchase.
But instead of debating how big or how small Bitcoin's energy use is, I think a more intellectually interesting debate to have is whether or not Bitcoin is useful to society, and whether or not its utility justifies the costs.
> I think a more intellectually interesting debate to have is whether or not Bitcoin is useful to society
Exactly.
I honestly don't think it's an interesting debate. It's been done to death, and neither side will ever make any headway in convincing the other.
In this case, perhaps because there's no easy yes/no answer to it. I'm an opponent of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general. I find the environment important. However, I can attest there are valid use cases for cryptocurrency. I don't think there are valid use cases for me (a European utilizing the EUR who's not interested in tax avoidance or buying illegal utilities) though. So for me cryptocurrencies are not only irrelevant, they're harmful.
It would be good if it were actually and deliberately properly designed this way to create an arms race of "who can get more general-purpose computing power for less" because it would accelerate technology development with this Red Queen effect...
Unfortunately they've missed the "general purpose part" - most mining todays is done by special-purpose hardware made for mining only, and improving it is generally useless for CPU / GPU / TPU design.
I'd fully support a similar coin that would be mine-able on GPU / TPU / other-general-matrix-multiplication-hardware because it would lead to a race decreasing the price of hardware that can run large neural networks :)
As it stands, brute-forcing SHA256 on ASICs is just a travesty.
If the mining algorithm requires specialized hardware, then no group starts out with an existing advantage. If the NSA decided it wanted to 51% attack a cryptocurrency, they'd have to make a massive investment in their own hardware, and then that hardware can't be repurposed after the attack. A 51% attack is likely to devastate the value of a cryptocurrency, which also de-values any mining hardware built for it, which naturally discourages anyone who invested in mining hardware from attacking the cryptocurrency.
Though mining algorithms that require specialized hardware also come with their own downsides: the companies that invest in making the mining hardware early on could decide to keep the most advanced mining hardware for themselves and gain a lot of control over the network.
The dollar is backed by a few million troops. Bitcoin is backed by a few million tons of coal.
Just FYI, a 51% attack doesn't allow you to "steal all the bitcoins"
Governments such as Iceland borrow military power through international agreements.
Do you agree that defense against invasion requires an adequate military or agreements with nations with adequate militaries?
If we agree on those two claims, it seems we must agree that militarily robust sovereignty is necessary but not sufficient for the integrity of a fiat currency.
>mining would eventually become too computationally expensive
I don't think that's true, the difficulty adjusts every two(?) weeks based on the hashrate.
At the present moment network users are collectively paying about $700 000 a day in tx fees, so clearly the network itself creates value.
[citation needed]
But even if that were true, it would be disincentivizing the deployment of grid-scale storage technologies, so still hurting the battle against climate change.
It's an absolutely atrocious example of the Red Queen effect ("running just to stand still") and I can't believe that technologists who in other contexts value elegance and efficiency can defend bitcoin with a straight face. I can only assume they have a lot of money tied up in bitcoin, because otherwise it makes no sense.