Just a nuance.
Mining does reduce pollution for oil companies. Its low infrastructure demands and longer than you expect shelf life does utilize power that was being unused or wasted. This is the crux of your argument and it is not accurate. You got here because you decided you dont like how that power is now being used after misunderstanding that it wasn't being used, and I dont care.
It is 100% additive. It doesn't reduce pollution for oil companies, at all, in any way. Certainly not when you take into account all the oil consumed to build and deliver all the mining hardware that's turned over to the tune of 12.31kT per year.
Fine say you're right. Show me a single study, a single article, a single write-up from a reputable source that shows bitcoin reduces pollution for oil companies.
> Its low infrastructure demands...
12.3kT of waste per year means a lot of infrastructure relative to what it provides which is basically nothing.
> ...and longer than you expect shelf life
Shelf life?
> ...does utilize power that was being unused or wasted.
No. If that power wasn't being squandered on a multiplayer excel game, it would be used for productive things. The same power cannot be used twice.
> This is the crux of your argument and it is not accurate. You got here because you decided you dont like how that power is now being used after misunderstanding that it wasn't being used, and I dont care.
It is massively, overwhelmingly less efficient than traditional banking and the generated waste and wasted power is purely incremental. If that entire transaction volume moved to traditional rails, the incremental power required to support it would probably be ~one guy on a stationary bike's worth.
VisaNet alone can handle 65,000 transactions per second. 7 is 0.01% of that.
For perspective, bitcoin would require, if scaled linearly, 123 Megatons of e-waste (triple the entire world today put together). It would require 700,000TWh or 23X the entire world's output of electricity. It would also emit 333,000 megatons of CO2. More than 10X the entire world's current output. Just to replace VisaNet. Of course it's physically incapable since even wasting that quantity of resources, the total transaction count would still be 7.
There's no world in which you can rationalize away that it's drastically, overwhelmingly, mind-blowingly less efficient.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/why-bitco...
In case you can’t access bloomberg here it is over amp
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...
One of your other points that I choose to respond to: The energy use doesn’t scale linearly to transaction activity and is not a prerequisite to the function of a proof of work network
I think there is enough information here to alter your lecture so I’ll wait and see. The rebuttal that I predict will be based on the size is the mining operation in the article, so just assume there are bigger ones doing the same thing.
> The energy use doesn’t scale linearly to transaction activity and is not a prerequisite to the function of a proof of work network
That's just a nice way of saying the bitcoin network cannot scale, intentionally so. Scaling is antithetical to proof-of-waste. At some point you run out of resources to waste.
It is being converted to power for the onsite computers instead of being flared away. How is that not better than the immediate flaring
The mining incentive structure and automatic deoptimization of the algorithm mean that there’s a constant arms race to build faster hashing hardware that lasts a few months and then gets thrown out without improving the performance characteristics of the underlying system. 7 transactions per second costs 620kWh and yields 107g of garbage. Each pair of transactions is like chucking your phone out the window and powering a home for 45 days. Do you see how shameful that is?
A Tesla gets 4 miles per kWh, so each pair of transactions - where you scribbled down an IOU into a big multiplayer excel sheet - consumes as much resources as driving round-trip across the United States and throwing your iPhone out when you get back.
The crazy thing is there's frequently a big overlap between the crypto enthusiasts and people who you know, believe in global warming and recycling.
> And again, nobody is looking for other things just for the sake of proving that something else can use less energy because there isn't a problem.
And I bet global warming isn't real either huh? I mean those oil companies aren't looking for alternative sources of energy because there isn't a problem.
The reality is economic incentives beat rationality pretty much every time hands down.