I agree that we're quick to look at other people's small wastes with condescension, but bitcoin is not a small waste.

If an evil overlord wanted to exacerbate our climate and energy problems, pushing Bitcoin to mainstream use is probably the ideal way to do it.

Here's my reasoning. Miners spend electricity. They're getting block rewards and fee rewards, they'll exchange earned bitcoins to dollars and pay their bills. So ultimately energy spent per block = (block reward + fee reward) x bitcoin price.

Right now block reward is 6.25 BTC. Last block fee reward was 2.13 BTC. Block reward will go down as time goes on.

I don't really understand economics of fee rewards and whether they'll grow over time linearly or exponentially. I checked historical data and it does not seem to grow at all. So I'll suppose that reward fee will not grow.

So in the end you'll have block reward of 10-20 BTC. That's all you have to pay your electricity bills after you mined block. So basically energy spent per block is directly correlated to bitcoin price, and that's about it.

Obviously bitcoin price won't grow to the moon and its price is limited by some economical factors.

So while bitcoin network might draw non-negligible amount of electricity, it still is limited by design.

Now if miners will decide to change bitcoin design, for example to increase block size, that's another matter. But it's not clear if that would happen.

Mining bitcoin is essentially printing money, so miners with profitable setups have an incentive to expand these setups. As mining capacity grows, a parameter called "difficulty" - which represents how much power you need to waste to mine a block - is adjusted so that the mining rate remains constant. Since mining is necessary to maintain network security, difficulty will grow to compensate for expanding mining capacity, but not high enough to kill it off.

If you look at the history of the adjustments to difficulty, you'll find a pretty much clean exponential.

(In other words, Bitcoin is as close as we've ever come to expressing greed in units of kilowatt hours.)

Since supply will become more and more constrained over time, while demand has no realizable upper limit (that we know of), this assumption is wrong:

> Obviously bitcoin price won't grow to the moon and its price is limited by some economical factors.

If bitcoin were to be fully adopted by the mainstream, BTCs would be easily in the M$ range.

So that's a rough estimate upper bound if Bitcoin would become our civilization currency of choice: 1.2% of total energy spent.

Not the end of the world, if you ask me.

Incorrect, growth curve is driven by mining power and forces innovation in lower cost of electricity. The worldwide cost of Bitcoin usage in KW has been compared to the headquarters of Bank of America's usage.

You seem to be missing a couple units there...

I see this take quite regularly and it seems a normal response to clickbaity headlines like "BTC has same power usage as Switzerland", but I think it misses some important nuance to the debate.

* Most studies locate miners and then assume their CO2 output based on energy use assuming a general energy mix of the country, this is not useful because energy usage != CO2 output, it depends very much what energy source is used * Miners are strongly incentivized to find the cheapest possible electricity, often means finding pockets of excess wasted energy, which is also often renewable or hydro and using it rather than letting it go to waste * BTC can be thought of as converting frequently excess wasted units of energy into a commodity which can be sold * The above might change and if for some reason coal became the most competitively priced energy source then this would be very bad for the environment indeed.

Whether or not BTC is useful, it undeniably holds value, in the literal sense that if I gave you 1 now you could sell it at a market rate

All the above notwithstanding, a lot of research is going into finding an alternative to Proof-of-Work that is less energy intensive and I would hope that in the future a secure alternative will be found.

Love the bitcoin submarine. lol.

To add something informative to the conversation ...

The reason that the big bitcoin farmers are located in China is that the power generation model is different in China than the West.

China is controlled by about 8 Dragon Families in concert with the CCP (you'll notice that in news stories the prominent actors all descended from Maoist leaders, etc.)

So if you're a bitcoin miner, you just talk to the Dragon Family in charge of power generation (for example, one family owns the Three Gorges Dam profit stream, plus most other dams), and hook up to a hydroelectric dam. No published electricity rates for you.

The above also explains why the arrest of the Huawei CFO in Canada is such a big deal in China - she is royalty, and the West is treating her like a common peasant.

She only thinks she's somebody.

No one knows who the fuck she is outside of China.

Sweating just not good enough for me, even when it's dry. I can cope with it, it's not like being hot would kill me (within reason and if I stay hydrated), but it has a serious impact on my performance. When it's hot my brain gets foggy and my thoughts slow. Maybe I could still operate at a caveman level of performance in that sort of weather, but I couldn't do my job.

See also: https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...

Your assumption falls flat because a lot of people don't need to generate extra heat from electricity, they already have too much of it.

Secondly, municipal heat is pretty rare in the US; few cities have it and the number keeps getting smaller each year. What few municipal heat systems that do exist are largely for business districts too, unless if you live in NYC as an American you most likely will be using either AC or forced air natural gas heat. Given the choice between the two[0], AC would be the best possible one from an efficiency perspective.

0: Heat pumps can be used to heat too, which is even better. Its my hope that heat pumps will become more common in the coming decades to assist in electrification.

I'm assuming by "municipal heat" you mean district heating. Can you explain why those systems keep getting rarer in the US? Over here in Europe, we are investing a significant amount of money in expanding those systems and connecting more houses.

And district heating basically doesn’t exist in the US outside of NYC.