Bitcoin is an energy currency.
If anything, bitcoin mining is a disincentive in making a more energy efficient green economy: instead of reducing waste and reducing power production as needed, we now have a way to turn excess power production into money directly. While a carbon tax could have shut down a coal plant, now the coal plant could instead get a bitcoin mining rig and power that, as long as the carbon tax is lower than the (extremely volatile) value of bitcoin.
To avoid the most apocalyptic effects of global warming, we have to close down most fossil-fuel based energy generation today, literally. Bitcoin is actively working against that by driving up the price of electricity to fuel a speculative bubble.
Not a currency, but a digital asset that wastes enormous amounts of energy.
It's in the top 20 or so of world currencies, and it's still in its infancy (thus volatility etc).
My question, then, is how do we go about drowning Baby Bitcoin in the metaphorical bathtub?
What do I do with my profits from mining bitcoin? Send my kids to college, buy groceries, remodel my bathroom, etc. It's an entire ecosystem, speculatively mining bitcoin by consuming electricity is just as evil as driving 1.5hrs to work because you're too lazy to find something near your house for example. People expend trillions of dollars in energy "mining" fiat.
Sure, the monetary value of that energy may be getting stored, but we can't buy lower temperatures with money, unfortunately.
When you store energy by pumping water for example, you can later let that water flow to get back the energy itself (with some inevitable waste, of course). When you're converting energy to bitcoin and later require energy again, you have to use the bitcoin to buy more energy (either from the market or by building a new power plant or something), you can't just physically convert the bitcoin back to energy.
I now see some holes in my Apollo analogy (also government vs individual spending). I am lucky there is always someone on HN who will make a better point :)
Bitcoin gives users a trustworthy decentralized store of value today that they could easily move to another cryptocurrency in future using some kind of decentralized exchange based on smart contracts. It provides liquidity for all future cryptocurrencies.
The Apollo argument was more compelling because it didn't require any value-judgement of the end-goal (but it was less appealing to me for the reasons I outlined). It is an argument about the process, regardless of the results (in the end, the lunar landings in themselves were a symbolic victory more than any great advancement of science - the science happened on the way).
We can go into arguments on why I think the end-goal of crypto-currency believers a la Satoshi would be a net negative, but others have covered it pretty well (deflation, fraud, money laundering, having your life savings destroyed by a hack etc).
https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1348094702550216707
Proof-of-stake coins are one obvious counterexample. Would proof-of-stake technologies have been developed if proof-of-work didn't come along first to incentivise development and build trust in cryptocurrencies?
Furthermore it's possible that a purely proof-of-stake currency would have never gained the widespread trust that proof-of-work did at a time when cryptocurrencies were a new idea. Or maybe not... but people did have ideas about proof-of-stake quite early on and it took much longer for those ideas to gain the same level of acceptance that proof-of-work did.
For example, I happen to believe that decentralized coins are a horrible idea in and of themselves, even without proof-of-work also helping to increase global warming. So, from my point of view, any adoption of a crypto-currency is a net-negative, and I would be happy to know that the technology exists, but is staying abandoned as long as we have no use for it other than non-centralized money.
Sure, but that is a much different argument than proof-of-stake vs proof-of-work.
With the assumption that having a successful proof-of-stake cryptocurrency is a net good, then what I am saying is maybe our usages of proof-of-work up until the future widespread adoption of proof-of-stake actually will contribute more positively to that end than negatively.
So I stand by my original point - the resources going into bitcoin are not fueling technology research.
They may be fueling PoS Ethereum adoption, but that is another argument entirely.
Simple logic.. Billions of dollars in miners are bought by speculators, Bitmain orders new 5nm chips from TSMC... TSMC uses money for R&D.
Either you're being willfully ignorant or you're trolling us.
I'm not sure that's true. Proof-of-stake is established as a concept but there is still lots of room for technological improvements in the implementation and user experience. New proof-of-stake coins can compete more effectively because of the trust which Bitcoin established.
1. With the Apollo missions, the money being put into the project was going into research and development, so there was at least some expectation of getting new science and technology out of it. With Bitcoin,nthe money put in is going into speculation or mining, which only fuels the network. There is no reason to expect new technologies to come out of this, and certainly not any new science.
2. The Apollo project was a big consumer of money, of which there exist plenty in the world and we can create more. Bitcoin is a huge consumer of electricity, the production of which is generally accelerating global warming, the single biggest threat to our survival as a civilized society that has ever existed in history.
We already know that Bitcoin itself is not even remotely close to being a solution to the problem you're thinking about (decentralized money), even IF I agreed that this is a real problem (I don't, I believe Bitcoin is going in the wrong direction compared to fiat money). You could make a decent argument for investing in developing scalable crypto coins, maybe Ethereum or maybe something else, but proof-of-work crypocoins and Bitcoin in particular are an obvious dead end, and can be decommissioned entirely without much loss (especially if the bitcoin holders were compensated somehow).