People don’t vote with their time and energy, they often vote with their wallet regardless of the impact on energy and the environment which is the issue. See: Negative Externalities.

The problem with Bitcoin is that energy waste is inherent in its design. As Bitcoin value goes up, the value of a Bitcoin relative to energy changes, which encourages more mining, which results in higher energy spend and emissions as the algorithm difficulty adjusts to the new hash rate.

Generating 10,000,000 bitcoins could be done at low energy with a few miners - but the more valuable they become the more energy they use.

My issue with Bitcoin is that while other industries try to save power, Bitcoin tries to waste it and waste is built into the algorithm.

And the more popular Bitcoin gets, the more our planet gets polluted trying to make magic numbers on a ledger.

What you call energy waste others would call effort. Money should be hard to produce otherwise you end up with central banks putting magic numbers on balance sheets

You can use energy that would otherwise be wasted https://cointelegraph.com/news/oil-companies-will-dominate-b... or clean energy like Nuclear

You can’t choose the kind of energy Bitcoin gets made with. It’s produced worldwide and mining moves to wherever energy is cheapest, which ends in a race to the bottom.

> What you call energy waste others would call effort

This is my whole issue with it - effort doesn’t have to be tied to wasting energy, but it is in Bitcoin. Why would people call wasting energy ‘effort’ in a system where wasting energy wasn’t intrinsic to the system itself.

Nobody has been able to come up with an equivalent alternative. The closest seems to be proof-of-stake instead of bitcoin's proof-of-work, but the security becomes weaker (which is basically the whole purpose of bitcoin), see https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/70807/how-does-p...

Is PoS strong enough to still be 99% as useful?, I don't know, these are all experiments

Well it depends on what you are looking to achieve.

If you are looking for it to be a currency, traditional currency seems to perform better.

If you are looking to invest in some speculative instrument on the basis that the value is going up then Bitcoin and poppies seem to be good ideas.

It's not wasting energy, it's consuming previously wasted energy. In fact it puts a floor under energy prices so that it rather than wasting energy that you can't get to consumers you can instead use it to mine bitcoin.

Nic Carter has a good piece on this: https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-co...

How common is it for the central banks of currency sovereigns to indulge in massive quantitative easing? If anything, they're far too reluctant to do so (even during recessions) precisely because of the kind of superstition on display here that money shouldn't consist of just a "magic number" - as if Bitcoin were any less of a token.

Apparently when a government when a government adds money based on economic analysis it’s BAD, but when an algorithm generates new magic bitcoins at an arbitrary rate set by satoshi every 10 minutes that halves every so often it’s REVOLUTIONARY.

What guarantees to you that governments add money based on economic analysis?, but most important, what makes you think that decisions made are aligned with your values?

Venezuela is the living proof of a government that makes decisions with the only objective of keeping power, WHATEVER IT TAKES, even if it means to the reduce quality of live to a 10% in less than a decade.

So bitcoin, and many cryptocurrencies, are at least neutral in monetary emission. Yes, it's not based on economic analysis, therefore is sub-optimal, but equally predictable by every actor, full transparent, no possibility of inside information or conflicts of interest.

Venezuela is an excellent example of a government unable to issue money arbitrarily, because they pegged their currency to the US dollar and accumulated debt in a currency over which they had no control.

AFAIK Venezuela has never pegged the bolivar to the US dollar. But the government did issue bonds in US dollars, I suppose those are the debts that you are talking about

I wish people who complained about governments adding money at least understood why they should be angry. Instead, they are just angry because they want to be angry at something.

I’d argue that “valuable for humans” is brushing over something: is Bitcoin valuable for humans as a collective or is it valuable for a small minority who stand to gain from it?

From my view, and despite the initial promises of Bitcoin, it’s being used by people of means to get even more money than they already have.

If you're in Venezuela, Argentina, Lebanon, Turkey, Nigeria, etc. where your government is stealing your savings via massive inflation it's pretty useful.

It would definitely be better if the learning curve was shallower and the UI's easier, so that more people could be saved.

Couldn't the same be achieved without a currency that encourages mining?

If someone figures out a way to do it, then sure. Mining ensures that no one in the system is able to get a new monetary unit below the market price as well as making tampering with past transactions uneconomical. Ultimately it's a very elegant solution to what was a long-standing problem.

The system pays for itself via transaction fees, which are used to "lock" the transaction history in a completely decentralised way.

But do people in Venezuela etc. really need all the requirements of Bitcoin? E.g. having to deal with a central authority other than their own government could still be an option.

The most popular method in Venezuela right now is cash-dollars and then zelle transfers, and zelle is only available to those who have overseas bank accounts, everybody else is mostly screwed.

Bitcoin is very useful to those who understand it, but if it weren't so hard to understand to common people it would be an even greater success, it would be a practical option to those who have internet and smartphones, that's still a minority in the country, but not as much as zelle.

Despite that almost everyone have heard of bitcoin in venezuela, another big reason for the undeveloped potential of it is the black-mailing from local authorities to anyone they knew had bitcoins, mostly when price went up fast. There's fear in letting know authorities you have cryptocurrencies.

I'm not in Venezuela anymore, but I still use bitcoin on a monthly basis to send money across borders to my family.

And the security of it gives me a guarantee not offered by anything else, by far!!!. I won't get my money blocked, like it happened to me with a US bank account, for trying to spend all of my money at once (~2k$).

So theoretically a central authority should be able to offer all of that, but in practice, they're all made of human being's decisions, which rules change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and susceptible to whims. In other words, unstable and not trustworthy. We have also lived what those central authorities can become

Once you've understand how truly secure money can be, it's hard to go back.

Maybe they do maybe they don't, it's impossible to tell other people what they need. The best you can do is educate them on the options you think could help, people will ultimately make their own decisions.

Short answer: in theory. But in the world we live in, nothing else comes close to bitcoin’s $675 billion market capitalization.

It’s the only cryptocurrency that has institutional financial support.

Sure value is subjective - I find it valuable because it's gold I can transmit through space quickly

Which county are you in? I’ve never had a lack of convenience from normal banking.

I'm a dual citizen - my family lost their savings in Lebanon because of banking capital controls. That story is not unique to our generation or history more generally.

> That story is not unique to our generation or history more generally.

Indeed, though I don’t see how BTC could help — it’ll just be one more currency you’re not able to convert local money into, surely?

For transactions yes you need local money for long term savings would rather hold Bitcoin or Lebanese Lira?

Depends on what you count as long term, but based on the 10-year graphs on WolframAlpha? I’d prefer Lira.

It’s not that I don’t regret not putting £10,000 into BTC when it was worth $250/coin (I absolutely do!) it’s just that I expect that degree of variability to work in both directions.

Everything’s fine until you want to pay an entity your bank or government has decided you can’t pay.

In the US, people who wanted to donate to Wikileaks were forbidden to do so.

Even if I wished to pay an entity that I was banned from paying by my government or my bank, the very fact that it was banned would make me worry about being defrauded.

It's no gold :D Just bits.

So your argument is that if people want to do something, they should be allowed to?

The alternative of stack-ranking what constitutes a good or bad use of energy doesn't seem particularly feasible to me. If energy is cheap, abundant and clean you don't need to create such good/bad energy list.

If it was all abundant wind-power, sure.

Denmark, famous for its wind farms and for having too much renewable energy at times, only has 6.1GW of wind capacity, which is is a few gigawatt short for the Bitcoin network.

So no, there isn't an abundance of energy when you decide to throw it all away as fast as you can.

That's not the situation we're in though. It may be fairly abundant, but neither cheap nor clean on average. And we're still decades away from closing the most polluting sources.

But energy isn’t cheap, abundant or clean?

Also because of how the Bitcoin algorithm and economics work, if energy is cheap then the market will scale up mining thus the Bitcoin algorithm will scale up difficulty. Cheap energy results in more energy waste from Bitcoin.

How much energy is moral to use in pursuit of “sound” money? Maybe Bitcoin hasn’t crossed the threshold yet. But I disagree that we should completely sidestep that conversation.

Yes, but this information is useful in evaluating alternatives and trade-offs.