And unlike other currencies this one doesn't require the energy expenditures of a full standing army or the diplomatic trades to enter into protection with someone who has one. Seen through that lens bitcoin is absolutely green.
I don't think that's a substantiated claim, but even if it were true, the lack of regulation in the *coin sphere made a fertile breeding ground for scammers from wherever they originated.
> but what matters to me is being able to send and receive money myself.
Yourself and billions of computing hours that could be doing stuff like protein folding or climate modelling.
> And unlike other currencies this one doesn't require the energy expenditures of a full standing army or the diplomatic trades to enter into protection with someone who has one. Seen through that lens bitcoin is absolutely green.
Are you suggesting that if not for fiat money then there would be no need for standing armies? Like we'd all just join hands: Russia would hand back Crimea, Pakistan and India would grant Kashmir independence, Iran and Saudi Arabia would realise they practice essentially the same religion, and the former states of Yugoslavia would hold the world's largest pancake breakfast? If not, then you can not attribute the environmental impact of maintaining militaries to fiat.
- a stamp uses a small amount of resources no matter how many stamps you want (more stamps may even be cheaper from economies of scale).
- Bitcoin inherently relies on expensive computation to provide safety
- each Bitcoin is more expensive than the last due to increasingly difficult nonces.
- (dumb edge case) you can’t make old stamps so it’s hard to image using a lot of resources to find/make them. Obv not true for other products
Bitcoin difficulty can change in either direction.
further crypto would be a much more flexible domain at working towards reducing carbon emission than deeply embedded and slow changing fiat systems
If so, what services can't? People already use BTC as collateral for loans/mortgages ...which are two of the riskiest activities traditional banks engage in.
I don't think people really think through the reason there is a 20% tax on financial activity that goes through traditional banking system.