The dollar is literally backed by the extraction and sale of oil (for dollars), which itself is enforced by the largest consumer of oil in the world, the U.S. military, and they secure the trade routes with their aircraft carriers and subs. It's called the petrodollar for a reason.
I'm not dismissing criticism, I'm just questioning your line of criticism. Everyone will accept a fair regulatory regime, many of you are calling for an outright banishment, that's unacceptable.
The energy consumption in clothes dryers, transportation, christmas lights etc. all will fall under "more than most countries" category. You are just constructing a narrative based attack.
* Most renewable/stranded energy mining operations have their own energy source that is not going to be shared by someone else.
* Bitcoin's energy consumption doesn't scale with the number of transactions on each block.
* Most of the bitcoin has already been mined, the incentive to "mine aggressively" is decreasing over time.
* "What if bitcoin uses all the energy", like the top poster on this thread was talking about, they were mocking it to say that all of the energy generated by the sun will be used for mining eventually, is this a fair argument? If such extremist thinking took hold, we could use it to subdue pretty much all progress. Did we think that there will be gold miners digging up land everywhere and we won't have a place to live?
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435464
2. "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
look at this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26440168
They straight up want destruction, without even considering merits of the new technology.
People are gonna tell us (bitcoiners) that the USD is secured by the powerful military of US behind it and we're supposed to accept it as a positive, but if we say that we're going to use electricity to secure the network with nothing but math and computation, we're instantly hated by the same people. What gives?
How can you be ok with wars and threats of violence to enforce the value of a currency, but not computation and electricity? I just don't understand it.