You could say this about mining any other commodity. Modern mining is literally converting fuel into some metal or mineral.

For instance: There's only a finite amount of gold, and until recently (electronics), it had no real applications aside from looking nice. Yet gold has been mined for millennia, historically with slaves (sadly this is still the case in parts of the world) and now with machines. The economic use stems from this, and as gold has always been sort-after, it's desire (value) probably won't change anytime soon. While you can't wear bitcoin, I don't see it disappearing either.

If you could summon gold from the ground in a more efficient way, would you?

Bitcoin mining is meant to be inefficient - why not try for a better way with similar guarantees?

Of course you would, this is the same reason ASICs have come onto the market.

I'd say the inefficiency is one of the smartest moves in the design of Bitcoin. Not only does it counter Moores law, it also provides a scarcity; the more bitcoins that are mined (so there must be a demand for them), the harder mining becomes (limiting supply) - Adding inflation into the mix.

Had they just dumped 21 million Bitcoins into the market, it would have never taken off, and it would have probably been written off as a Ponzi scheme.

While you may not like the social or environmental impact of Bitcoin, it is hard to deny there is some brilliance in its design (like how the coins become the product of their own transaction logs).

wouldnt making gold mining more efficient just mean that you would mine more of it eventually taking the same amount of overall energy use?

Not really, because most of your costs aren’t energy.

Agreed. And I see the same counterpoint being trotted out for a case against EV vehicles. "Cobolt mining bad!" but I suppose oil drilling and fracking isn't?

The difference is that Bitcoin is far more energy intensive than real mining.

Source?

Here’s one: https://coincentral.com/bitcoin-mining-trumps-gold-mining-en...

Amusingly, when I search for the energy consumption of gold mining, the results are all about comparing it to Bitcoin.

Following the methods of the paper I already see a huge flaw.

They calculated energy per coin using hashpower from 2016-2018, ignoring all mining and coins from 2009-2016. Basically cherry picking their data and ignoring all the coins that were minted with lower hash power.

Surely the current cost of mining is what’s relevant when comparing the two today. Are we also supposed to go back and calculate the energy use for all the gold that was mined centuries or millennia ago?

It's different because the block reward is very biased at the beginning. By 2016-07-09, 75% of ALL bitcoin that will ever exist has already been mined. I doubt that's the same for gold reserves on earth. Furthermore, mining serves a dual purpose of also securing transactions, so for a fair comparison, you'd also need to factor in the costs of securing gold for storage/transport.

But look! https://twitter.com/khannib/status/1116352595537403905?s=19

I agree with your sentiment. Unfortunately, exhortations to "do the right thing" never, ever seem to work.

And efforts to ban or control the trading of a liquid, globally used asset also never seem work. (It would be like trying to ban the buying and selling of, say, US dollars.)

Perhaps the best way to address the very real environmental issues you raise will be with the development and adoption of more cost-efficient, less polluting, more environmentally-sustainable energy production technologies?

> Let a non-POW cryptocurrency please replace it.

I hope this will happen naturally because all the electricity that is expended with PoW needs to be paid for somehow, either through fees or inflation.

You think fiat currencies carry zero cost and zero energy footprint?

I don't think anyone was suggesting it was 0. It is a many orders of magnitude less per transaction though.

They have substantially less, especially on a per-transaction or total value basis.

Bitcoin layer 2 solutions (i.e. lightning network) don't have this "per transaction" issue, though

Comparisons to Bitcoin's per-transaction energy use is not valid. It could use 100x or 1/100th of the energy and process the same amount of transactions. Transaction throughput is a separate problem.

Petrodollar powers the war machine, so it’s not even close.

How do you compare a traditional transaction to one that is uncensorable by anyone?

Cash is the same.

And how much does it cost to transport cash to some company across the country?