Energy transports costs are non-negligible. In fact, in Europe I pay more for the grid transfer (~0.25/kwh) than generation (0.06/kwh).

Yes, that's one of the factors influencing planning. It will be very hard to get financing for a hydroelectric plant without existing infrastructure or some guarantee that transmission will be built. You can't just pick a river and hope the customers come to you.

The grids are large, but the transport is very inefficient. That's why Bitcoin mining is becoming an alternative to previous ways to avoid wasting energy surplus, like melting aluminum ore.

I understand the theory, but that just isn't what happens in reality, at least right now. Please at least glance at the links I listed.

I did glace at those, actually read most of it. It all depends also on how much energy consumption you'd deem adequate. And further, how you even tell or know what would be adequate.

The reason is I don't think the costs for our broken monetary system are fully appreciated, or even appreciated at all, at this point.

I can't back it up adequately right now, but I do believe most of the environmental damage today, most of inequality, most war, and most political corruption is caused by fiat money and its skewed incentives. Crypto at least has a real shot at fixing those.

Interesting question would be, how much of _all_ energy does bitcoin cost? Now I've looked up the numbers. Total consumption of the bitcoin process seem to be 78-87 TWh depending on which source you look at (I found one higher than what one of your source said and will use that, for 2019).

Total annual energy consumption is 584 EJ, or 162,222 TWh (statista numbers, 2019).

That would put bitcoin at 0.05% of total global annual. I feel that is not too high.

Given your premise, I agree that is an acceptable cost. I also agree that your premise sounds difficult to back up in the space of a comment. I've found that most people, myself included, have some kind of pet political issue that they believe to be the real cause of all the problems in the world. I'm not dismissing it out of hand, but I think you'll agree that it's an eyebrow-raising claim if you've never heard it before.

Bitcoin's share of carbon emissions is about 0.1% by my rough calculations (based on https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption and https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions). My position is that stopping the worst effects of climate change is going to require lots of relatively small changes across all sectors of life. Bitcoin is nothing compared to, say, heating and cooling homes, but we can't just get rid of heating and cooling. We can distribute more efficient appliances, build more insulated homes, influence behavior to lower usage somewhat. Each of these might give us a .1% improvement. Find a hundred things like this, and we've cut 10% of global emissions, that's pretty good.

I know bitcoin is here to stay, and I'm not suggesting government should try to ban it or something because it's bad for the planet. But until I'm convinced that it's the savior you say it is, it's not something I personally want to be involved in, and not something I can celebrate. Even ignoring mining, the cost per transaction is an enormous hurdle for me that I will need a lot of incentive to get over.

I can see where you're coming from and it's consistent reasoning. I also agree my scenario isn't substantiated (at all) yet, even though I believe it to be not uncommon in the crypto community.

I will put my thoughts on this together, and if you're interested ever hearing about it put some contact in your profile. In that case I'll ping you.

This exchange turned out productive. Thanks for that.