If you think this “scientific” study qualifies as a contributor to intelligent discourse think again.

Pray tell, which part is it that you find fault with?

It assumes the value of Bitcoin is in the mining of new coins. The network also has value as a ledger to record transfers of Bitcoin (billions per day) which contributes to the value of the network

The analysis can be generalized to say anything that uses 0.05 electricity creates these large harms. Perhaps true, but it’s not going to be unique to Bitcoin

This. This bad argument about value of cryptocurrencies being mining, lack of perspective and policy proposals in the paper are the most obvious signs of bias.

I love how most of the criticisms of this study amount to saying putting the word scientific in quotes and calling it a day.

For every dollar spent building a train station there are $50 dollars of health and climate damages.

This ignores the USE of the train station, and just focuses on energy costs to build it.

This study is only focused on mining new coins. Heads up, some of the (wildly inflated) value of bitcoin is tied to (arguable) uses and the ability of the blockchain to operate as a non-repudiation public ledger that allows global transfer of value with strong guarantees totally independent of any other central party.

Some quick math.

1 bitcoin is lets say worth $50,000. Let's assume $10K in electricity to mine this. So for every $1 in bitcoin, you need 20 cents of electricity.

Reduced to it's simplest, the claim here is that for every 20 cents of electricity, there is another 50 cents of health impacts.

Fair enough, but if you believe this, then a lot of other things have huge damages.

Right, other things have huge damages too.

Pointing out other things also have an environmental impact just dilutes the discussion about Bitcoin and doesn't add anything to it.

And neither is highlighting bitcoin, especially by focusing ONLY on the mining aspect of it. The use of the network is also part of the bitcoin story. If instead of using new bitcoins mined they did transaction value per day (ie, $20B+) the math would be totally different.

If you applied this same damage model to something people had fondness for (ie, driving an electric car) you'd realize we should be working as HARD as we can to kill EV cars dead, because there is a MASSIVE unaccounted for cost to charging them (using this model).

Reality though is bitcoin chases low cost power, and that is currently often actually green (hydro, excess solar during day when their is curtailment and negative pricing etc). I can't imagine the economics making sense to mine using coal power.

What good would transaction value per day be? This is like counting your salary twice, once when you earn it, once when you spend it, lol.

Because the transactional ledger of bitcoin is what is driving electricity use, and another statement might be, for every $1 transacted on the bitcoin ledger, 0.0005 dollars in health damage is caused. (it's roughly a factor of 1000 more volume then new mining, and over time new mining is going to get smaller and smaller)

You mean the mining isn't driving electricity use?

Ordinarily I would agree, but in this case there are two potential systems and “which of these two uses the least energy” is a relevant question.

(I’m extremely skeptical about PoW crypto of all types, BTC included; this is just about the reasonableness of this specific argument).

The question is valid - it would be interesting to see the comparison. To get some perspective as to how big of a problem cryptocurrency consumption really is.

Please compare and contrast the status quo with the crypto alternative.

I hate this blanket method of dismissing when someone points out that all available alternatives to something are also bad

What about intelligent discourse about whataboutism?

Actually, more of -that- would be grand ...

(Imagine! Politics! ...)

a "Whataboutism" is just a comparison the reader doesn't like

This isn't whataboutism, it's a valid question considering BTC is touted as a replacement for the financial system and ostensibly performs a similar function with an alternative infrastructure. If the premise is that we should stop BTC mining and processing simply because it costs $X dollars (code pun intended) per transaction, then the price of alternatives is germane to the discussion.