> bitcoin uses a 1/3rd of the energy used in gold mining - bitcoin uses 7% of the energy used in the global banking system

Those are both gigantic energy expenditures, and to say that BitCoin uses only a third of the energy that another despicable planet-destroying industry does doesn't speak much in the favor of BitCoin.

Nor does saying that something ~50 million people own (0.5% of the Earth's population) is "only" 15% of the entire global financial system used by 7.3 billion people.

Would you rather have us use the bad system that uses more energy or the better system that uses less energy?

...which is which? Since the global financial system clearly uses much, much less energy per person, I'm guessing that you're also calling it the "better system?"

Or are you pretending that if BitCoin were used by every person on Earth that it would still be using the exact same energy?

Bitcoin's energy usage is not correlated with volume of use. The energy usage is correlated with the expected value of newly minted coins. When you think you can get $2 of "mined" currency for every $1 of power, you wont think twice about wasting lots of power on it. When you only expect $1.01 for every $1 spent mining, you'll give up. It self regulates. The current wild case of so much energy being spent on it is due to the value rising quickly over time and expected to rise further. When the overall expectation for the future of bitcoin is that it will plateau or only very slowly climb further, lots of miners will drop out and the energy usage will plummet to an easily justifiable level.

Did you read my initial comment? Bitcoin uses 7% of the energy the global financial system uses and its energy usage does not scale with adoption. Transactions are meant to be run on the Lightning Network which consumes next to nothing compared to Visa, and long term savings are meant to be stored on the blockchain. This argument that Bitcoin uses too much energy has been around since its whitepaper and has been countered multiple times.

*edit, not debunked but countered with practical solutions

> its energy usage does not scale with adoption

And yet it has scaled, drastically, hundreds-fold over the past few years.

You could say that it scales with the price, which is true, but tell me with a straight face that if seven billion people started buying BitCoin that wouldn't affect its price to an extraordinary degree.

> Lightning Network

The magic words that have said every time energy is mentioned for the past six year, supposedly making us ignore the energy BitCoin is actually using.

> This comment is incredibly ignorant and I'm going to have an aneurysm if it gets brought up again

Hi, welcome to HN. Please read the guidelines. Talking like that is nowhere near acceptable here. Thanks. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html