Re: Energy use - A single Bitcoin transaction is around $8 today. If you assume an efficient market, where the cost to compute Bitcoin is roughly equivalent to the energy cost, that's a crazy 80kWh in US energy cost for a single transaction (and probably more, since Bitcoin mining is done where energy cost is lower). The claim that a fraction of that comes from renewable is silly, this renewable energy could go to other means.

Don't put words in my mouth that I didn't say (or rather, typed). I never said it's better. Government&banks-robbing-all is a worthy cause to fight anytime, even if it doesn't directly help the criminals-robbing-a-few problem, because actually, the latter already happens today, and will always happen (sadly). So we must fix one thing at a time.

One of the biggest misconceptions around Bitcoin is somehow that it was supposed to sort all this out before it bootstrapped to a large enough network, but we all know that´s impossible.

Depends on how quickly you need that transaction to hit the blockchain.

Anything over 30 minutes is currently 1 sat/vByte and 1 sat = $0.00019230 dollars. The average bitcoin transaction is about 250 bytes. That's $0.048075 or almost 5 cents.

If, on the other hand, you accept contemporary definitions of inflation and consider normal modern monetary systems as being the least bad - then it’s a pretty different picture.

These articles invariably attract the gold heads.

Are you sure? Gold is a massive problem: https://theconversation.com/gold-mining-leaves-deforested-am... (bitcoin fixes this)