I don't think it matters who you ask to investigate it, everyone except bitcoin users themselves will realise that it's an absurd waste of electricity, for very little added value.

Again, reading the original comment, you can apply your very same line of reasoning to " Playing video games?" or the rest of the examples. Should all the people who don't play videogames also get together and ban gaming because they themselves don't benefit from it and it consumes "too much"?

Why do you stop taking into account scale? Gaming as a whole does provides entertainment to a large number of people and thus consumes large amount of energy. While bitcoin is providing benefits (real or imagined) to a very small fraction of people and consuming more electricity than a _whole country_. If red dead redemption was played by 10 people but consumed electricity equivalent to 100 people's daily life then we would be talking about regulation there too.

BTW, afaik bitcoin has 5million users and Argentina's population is 44 million. Also, this energy consumption by 44million people includes all the activities you can think of to add to this argument.

Scale does not inherently excuse. Energy for gaming could be routed to feeding/warming the poor; should 100 die of starvation/hypothermia so that 1,000,000 can play Fortnite? do you really want to continue such reasoning?

Yes I do. This is why my country had a space program before we solved all our social issues. You need to look at how much good an activity actually does vs how much resources it will consume. Entertainment is a good thing so is space exploration. But ISRO did not consume more resources than all other social improvement plans combined. Bitcoin is consuming more energy than the daily lives of a whole country. _Combined_

Gaming is also consuming more energy than the daily lives of a whole country __Combined__. Entertainment is a good thing, but watching a movie consumes a lot less resources than playing games so why are games acceptable? What about VR? VR uses a lot of GPU computations for something a small fraction of people use. Surely people playing VR could use some other form of entertainment that is less resource consuming.

Or then we let people use their own resources the way they see fit.

I would like to redirect you to @africanboy's analysis[1] of how much energy gaming uses. He did it well.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26091220

Gaming uses vastly less energy per person.

in your example 100 bitcoin users would let a million of people die of starvation/hypothermia so that they can play blockchain.

scale in general does not excuse, but consumption per capita should.

A Ps4 consume around 100 watt/hour

If you keep it on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is 876 KW/year.

Which is not very much.

At 120Tw/year with 5 million users BC consumption per capita is an astonishing 24,000kw/year (or 24Mw)

Every bitcoin user consumes 27 times the energy consumed by a (quite powerful) gaming console turned on non stop (which is never the case)

That's why there have been campaigns around the World to replace incandescent bulbs with the energy efficient ones.

Compared to the traditional ones the new light bulbs can save up to the 80% of the energy, compared to a bitcoiner, a non bitcoiner can save ~97% of the energy by simply playing videogames.

> A Ps4 consume around 100 watt/hour

You need to take in the manufacturing costs, costs to develop software, costs to run servers too, otherwise you're only measuring marginal energy consumption for a new user.

Marginal energy consumption for a new Bitcoin user is probably small too.

The website linked is actually measuring the amount of energy that BC is using right now to operate.

It's not the total amount of energy used to create the BC network, the software, the HW and everything else.

https://cbeci.org/

> The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) provides a real-time estimate of the total electricity load and consumption of the Bitcoin network. The model is based on a bottom-up approach initially developed by Marc Bevand in 2017 that takes different types of available mining hardware as the starting point.

> The first number refers to the total electrical power consumed by the Bitcoin network and is expressed in gigawatts (GW). This figure is updated every 30 seconds and corresponds to the rate at which Bitcoin uses electricity. The second number refers to the total yearly electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network and is expressed in terawatt-hours (TWh). We annualise Bitcoin’s electricity consumption assuming continuous power usage at the aforementioned rate over the period of one year. We apply a 7-day moving average to the resulting data point in order to make the output value less dependent of short-term hashrate movements, and thus more suitable for comparisons with alternative uses of electricity.

The parts of PS4 and Bitcoin that are expensive are different. It makes zero sense to compare the expensive part of Bitcoin to the cheap part of PS4

Do you think the bitcoin mining rigs materialize themselves out of thin air? Those things get constantly replaced because they get inefficient due to the rising hashrate and advancements in chip efficiency.

The ratio of energy spent running to energy spent producing is orders of magnitude higher for bitcoin rigs than for PS4s.

I disagree the comparison is useful.

that's simply because a PS4 is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than BC and was designed to be like that

BC on the other hand are very expensive in terms of energy consumed, by design

BTC don't make any sense energy wise and in the end don't make any sense to invest in something designed to burn energy in the long run, especially now that we are trying to fix the mistakes of the past

No you really can't. Gaming employs large amounts of people, sustaining economic growth as well as innovation (GPU development was originally sustained by demand related to gaming) . Bitcoin has little economic impact relative to its energy use.

The money spent by interested parties indicates otherwise.

Feel free to present a case where the economic impact of gaming is less than Bitcoin (feel free to include every crypto-currency ever made in that comparison).

Market caps in speculative, unregulated markets aren't indicators of economic relevance. Gaming facilitates billions in production on a yearly basis. Crypto related activity produces very little in comparison. And no, someone buying billions worth of Bitcoin doesn't count (just like people buying GameStop stock doesn't reflect the economic impact of the gaming industry).

Don’t move the goalposts. Bitcoin has little economic impact relative to its energy use you wrote. Oh, but it does. Miners created something of value, others bought with real money substantially greater than the cost of creation - and durable enough to resell indefinitely (with mundane care & handling). The only ones fit to establish “economic relevance” here are those who actually bought Bitcoin, with an estimated total resale value of $650B. Picasso's Les femmes d'Alger was sold for $179.4 million in May 2015; the economic impact of Pablo painting for a few days was indeed enormous. Those vs gaming, where while making/marketing games is profitable the tremendous energy going into playing them produces no lingering resale value of any form.

So no actual arguments then (just more pumper nonsense around prices). If you have no interest in economics, why attempt to pretend you do (see your Pablo reference as an example of why you might've not paid attention in Econ 101). Why not just say: "buy bitcoin because moon money" and move on.

Your point is true until it's not true, or Bitcoin fails.

You could make the same argument about any nascent technology that hasn't succeeded or failed yet.

Rather than a case, how about a framework to evaluate going forward: the market. Given enough time, I'm pretty sure the market will root out the "real value" of bitcoin and keep assessing the "real value" of gaming.

Let's watch for 5-10 years. If you're right about bitcoin, I bet its price will be much lower and you can gloat. If you're wrong, I bet its price will be much higher (because I agree with the basic assessment that gaming "feels" much bigger today). Luckily, we can both place our bets based on our best assessments of the future.

How confident are you that you can present a substantive case against bitcoin that matches the diligence that Ross Stevens has done for years? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lczPTYf_tvA

Asset values don't reflect economic impact/relevance (as in a $100MM Picasso doesn't indicate $100MM of economic activity). That's why GDP is used as an indicator for economic growth, not market caps.

Market cap is an estimated resale value under current/predictable conditions. GDP is a total of cumulative annual transactions. We can measure Bitcoin both ways, and each is remarkable.

Hopefully anyone reading this will take a minute to look up GDP.

The comment above, in a nutshell, is what's enveloping the current crypto environment. Maybe one day we'll get past it (or maybe this is just it).

As it happens I just listened to a long talk by him, perhaps this one. He kept arguing that "bitcoin isn't volatile, because the price of various things measured in bitcoins keep falling".

Either he doesn't know what volatility means or he is trying to scam people.

Money spent by interested parties only indicates that there is money to be made. It doesn't mean anything about the usefulness of bitcoin.

I think video games are a silly waste of time but I don't necessarily want to outlaw it. If playing one round of Mario Kart consumed several megawatt hours of energy though, I don't think anyone would want it to be allowed.

This is the slippery slope logical fallacy.

We already do apply such laws. Car manufacturers are required to sell a certain number of EVs. Emissions must meet standards. Appliances have energy ratings. etc. etc.

If Bitcoin were regulated so that those using the excess output of hydroelectric or other fixed output systems could do so for free, but everyone else was taxed appropriately, then that would actually probably do very little because that is largely the situation already: far from being an anonymous decentralized anarcho capitalist future, it is just large organized crime syndicates in China and Russia generating the transactions. And for all these reasons, the US should make it illegal.

So things that the majority don't like / understand should be illegal because they use resources? You can't see the issue with that?

And that still doesn't really answer whose job it is to ban all these things, and what mechanism would be used to enforce it.

> So things that the majority don't like / understand should be illegal because they use resources? You can't see the issue with that?

There is a difference between majority not liking and only like 0.2% of the world consuming more energy than _a whole country_. There are 5million bitcoin users, they are consuming more electricity than 44 million people's daily lives. Think about the scale of imbalance here.

While the phrase "a whole country" sounds dramatic, that doesn't really put the usage into perspective compared to those other examples.

For example MGM claims their properties in Nevada consume 171 MW. That's more than 65 of the countries from this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

Let me rephrase that. 5 million people are using more energy for small parts of their daily transactions than 44 million people in their entire daily lives. Sounds pretty dramatic to me. Even if we say that the argentinian electricity consumption is 10x lower than anywhere else, it will still be 5million people's partial amounts of transaction and 4.4 million people's daily lives (which includes all the transactions they make daily).

It is good practice to question if a technology is worth the social cost of wasting so much electricity. This is literally how Bitcoin is built, as it keeps growing, it keeps consuming an insane amount of electricity, for a very little amount of transactions per day. This is call ethics, doesn't mean it should be illegal, but there is value in questioning it and investigate if perhaps there are better solutions than wasting energy.

If the majority is 99% and that other fraction of 1% use an ENORMOUS amount of resources on their hobby, then yes it is reasonably to consider making it illegal.

You conveniently omit the social cost.

Enforcing could be done via banning any payment with bitcoin.

Well not really. Most people buy coins because they believe the price will climb and never use them for buying. For the retailers who accept bitcoin many are in smaller countries where the law wouldn't apply and many semi-legimate uses (ordering weed by mail) would continue to accept payment this way because their activity is more illegal (carrys a bigger punishment) than the new bitcoin law would.

What is the point of BTC price climbing if you wouldn't be able to convert it to cash or pay for goods?

> So things that the majority don't like / understand should be illegal because they use resources?

If they produce a net negative for the majority and only benefit a small number of people, then yes.

We don't go around driving tanks, do we?

I love tanks, but there's a reason why we can't drive them to go to the mall.

"for very little added value"

That's an awfully subjective claim and one I find to be contentious. I think even today Bitcoin's impact on global politics has already provided massively more value to global society than all of the resources it has spent on electricity.

What positive impact on global politics is it that Bitcoin has had that motivates all the energy spent?

Money laundering

> Who investigates and what is the outcome?

The public? Something that benefits a few at the expense of the many is the canonical case for regulation.

(I don’t think we should ban or even really regulate Bitcoin. Not at this point.)

> at the expense of the many

I think you've misunderstood something. Those people are buying their own electricity...at their own expense. So, you want to bring arbitrary restrictions to electricity - as if we didn't have enough issues with net neutrality already.

The market could solve this problem properly if there were a global carbon tax, but unfortunately, there isn't.

Assuming bitcoin is using carbon poluting sources. Some of the bigger miners in China use hydro/dam energy. The miners in Iceland are using geothermal.

from @umanwizard:

>The market could solve this problem properly if there were a global carbon tax, but unfortunately, there isn't.

"Solve it"? How so? Crypto mining is largely powered by renewables (40% according to one source in Sep 2020). It is a race to find the most energy efficient way create power to make it worthwhile to mine, which has some positive effect on society by driving innovation. No idea if that is a net positive, but this is not black and white issue at all the way many here are framing it.

> Crypto mining is largely powered by renewables (40% according to one source in Sep 2020).

That’s one source and less than half does not mean “largely” in standard English usage. More importantly, almost nobody uses Bitcoin so a key question would be how that’d change if usage could be scaled up to, say, even 0.1% of daily transactions.

For bitcoin to use an equivalent amount of carbon as visa per transaction, it'd need to be 99.9999% powered by renewables and visa would need to be 100% powered by fossil fuels.

Except that most of the energy is subsidized by China or other countries.

Ah, so they are paying for the adverse effect on the climate. That's alright then. /s

We have solar power, hydroelectricity, nuclear power, wind turbines...if the mere fact of electricity existing has an adverse effect on the climate, I can tell you one thing:

It's not bitcoin's fault.

Cool. 63% if electricity still comes from fossil fuels: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix

So, ca. 76 of those TWh/year are still carbon heavy.

Yes - nowadays I think pretty much everything that uses a lot of energy comes under scrutiny, and, in particular people look to see if the same outcome can't be achieved with less energy