Mining Bitcoin consumes 5X as much energy as gold, btw, per unit value extracted. It also requires mining gold to produce the circuit boards used for mining Bitcoin - given the popularity of the ENIG immersion gold plating process for PCB contacts.
The secondary issue is that of course each Bitcoin transaction generates 100g of e-waste which cannot be recycled and just gets buried. E-waste has a few grams of metals, but is mostly plastic and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Plastic and FR4 cannot be recycled. What little of the e-waste can be recycled is shipped to third-world countries where poor people dig through piles of scrap and dunk it in toxic chemicals.
The only meaningful way to move forward is to reduce consumption, especially consumption which achieves nothing, like literally wiring up a power plant to compute hashes of random data instead of attaching it to the grid to do useful things.
What a disaster.
Except that isn't going to work, because governments are untrustworthy and as history shows will sooner rather than later debase their currency.
All people are looking for here is a safe way to store value over time. If governments would let people keep reliable records without bringing in the inflation tax or changing the rules, things like gold and bitcoin wouldn't be anywhere near as interesting. But they are interesting, because it is normally policy to block anyone who tries to store (small-time) wealth for more than a couple of years.
Bitcoin is very very volatile and just because it went up the last x years, doesn't make it stable or trustworthy.
My money in my bank is very safe and it doesn't cost me anything.
The inflation itself is a systematic thing and should affect bitcoin equaly.
When corona came, i was looking at the stock market and was surprised how many people left it. It doesn't make much sense to distrist the stock market that much. After all alot of pension funds are existing, lots of companies or people who are self employed also have to keep their money safe. There is a lot of dependency on the share market and we are all bound to a certain degree of not being able to move it out asap.
Bitcoin can provide a way for e.g. Argentinians to get their money into other currencies when the government is actively preventing that through "standard" mechanisms. It's safe (er, safer) from that perspective.
As someone from a country which has had its currency's value slashed to half 5 years ago, I genuinely don't see how Bitcoin is safe at all. If anything, gold or real estate are safer.
Sure, if it is somehow guaranteed that I won't wake up tomorrow seeing 1 BTC = $30 000, I could see your argument. But is that guaranteed?
I would also like to add that the swings that BTC takes are unpredictable (at least for the common people who would benefit from it being a safe storage for their wealth).
Yeah, if things are that bad, it could be viable.
Civil war is another viable scenario. However, one should also assess the situation properly if his/her country is in civil war. If things go bad and you have to escape, "safe passage for x amount of gold I have on hand" is more guaranteed than "safe passage for x BTC I promise to pay".
If a government is preventing people from transferring money through standard mechanisms, it's only a matter of time until they prevent them from using crypto to do that. If the best use is circumventing the law, it isn't much of a currency at all
Not to mention, a $20 transaction fee in Argentina is devastating.
Your money is safe, your wealth is not. Taking the US as a reference, it is official government policy that if you store your wealth as money then it has a half life of 35 years.
> Bitcoin is very very volatile and just because it went up the last x years, doesn't make it stable or trustworthy.
I was sneaky in my wording - I'm a gold bug and think Bitcoin is worthless. Nevertheless, a rational person who was interested in bitcoin would probably note that whatever its bad points it is simply not subject to the sort of technical intervention that makes fiat untrustworthy.
Also, using gold as a reference, the unofficial policy half life looks more like 12 years. Using the M2, maybe 14 years.
[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2014/september/wha...
The inflation rate is basically a proxy measure of wage growth [0]. The money printing hasn't going in to wages. It isn't appropriate to use the CPI to adjust wealth, because then you'd be mistaking asset price inflation for productive growth and putting money into things that don't earn real returns (ie, are grossly mismanaged).
[0] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2015/november/rela...
People aren't owed a risk-free return on thier capital and inflation is an incentive to invest. You're looking for a merged risk-free long-term store of value and medium of exchange. There's no reason to couple those two. It's actually counter-producive as they have different objectives. Money's job is to remain stable enough for as long as you hold it and cheap to transact. A long-term store of value's job is to go up.
Money is your short-term medium of exchange and lossy store of value. Which you use to buy long-term store of value. This is how capital is productively allocated while also creating a stable financial system.
The ability to adjust the money supply is crucial to reacting to shocks, to a changing population, and a changing economy. Taking away the knobs from the Fed removes their ability to create a stable monetary system in which business and individuals can operate.
If you actually look back in time you'll see under the gold standard, an attempt at this, boom/bust cycles were worse and more exaggerated. And much harder to control. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
This whole trope about the fed "stealing" 99% of money's value over the last 100 years is voodoo fringe economics. These are the people who used to hang out with megaphones at the corder of 5th and Market. Of course it went down, they told you it would, and they told you to buy something else with it.
They are pawns, if you will, to point to as jumping off points to your average Joe and say "Look! Your favorite X,Y,Z institutional guy is into Bitcoin now!" That is all.
But I do agree that it is too hard for the average person to save in the sense of "I will need to withdraw some wealth in the future". The best option out there seems to be ETFs. The dirty secret about the stock market though is that companies don't issue new stock nearly as much as one might think, and therefore the stock market is basically counter-parties playing off each other.
There are plenty of people out there with good, useful ideas and skill sets that really ought to be funded. And no, not all will generate VC like returns.
Figuring out how to link your minor excess now to your needs in the future in a way that isn't a net negative could very well be the defining problem of a generation.
On May 6, 2016, the operator of Liberty Reserve was sentenced to 20 years in US federal prison
It’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) is trusted well enough to be in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by marketcap. It has years of history to look back at. It doesn’t have a inflation rate (0% inflation rate now + occasional coin-burns).
It uses orders of magnitude less electricity than bitcoin because it uses distributed databases instead of ASICS, transactions are sent and received in a few seconds (near-instant), and transaction fees are less than 1 cent (just high enough to disincentivized spamming the network). Compared to Bitcoin’s $250 tx fee and Ethereum’s $30 tx fee, XLM’s tx fees are very cheap.
Finally you can buy XLM on most exchanges since it’s been around so long.
Everything else in my comment still stands though and it certainly is a cryptocurrency.
[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
market cap =/= trust, especially when you consider that in the past there were outright scams that were in the top 15 (eg. IOTA).
lol, Dogecoin is #6 and XLM is #14. Are you saying your currency is less trusted than one with a dog on it?
[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
There are ways to do so that don't involve scenarios literally as absurd as _buying power plants_ to do random equations.
Perhaps some of that desire for a safe value store should be invested in that direction.
Some governments are more trustworthy than others, and lots of people trust some governments. For example many people hold USD because they consider it a better store of value than their own country's currency.
> a trusted party could run a big relational database that was basically a non-inflating currency and really cheap to run
Somewhere like Switzerland would probably be quite trusted to run this.
It's most useful for transactions or transfers that are illegal somewhere. A government can deprive a criminal of a house more easily than a password.
I suspect it was embraced by western governments because it facilitates capital flight from the developing world to the developed world - especially from China.
Looks like they, in turn used this reference [2].
[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
[2] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30087-X
The e-waste generated this way is not an intrinsic cost of handling a transaction, since the hardware could hypothetically be reused or recycled. It seems unwise to think of it as an irreducible cost per txn, rather than a dynamic figure that would likely improve over time (especially if the carbon externality were appropriately taxed)
If you don’t think that a technology that allows you to store value in a tamper free digital ledger is useful it’s hard to argue the usefulness of PoW crypto currencies to begin with.
Comments like the above are a sad demonstration of the fact that, while Bitcoin was originally an interesting technical project... Discussion of it has now been completely taken over by shills that try to dismiss/refute/hide all of the problems with Bitcoin (or the cryptoasset du jour) to safeguard their bet
"Your argument is as invalid as..." ROTFL
Wake me up when Bitcoin moves to a PoS consensus
(Btw, I recommend whoever is reading to also steer clear of PoS coins... If you want to invest, look elsewhere)
The is made worse by the fact that there are alternatives to produce trustworthy ledgers that don't involve destroying the planet.
One of the issues with crypto currency is that we're replacing one elite with another.
As John Oliver says Cryptocurrency is everything you don't understand about finance combined with everything you don't understand about computers. That new, even eliter, elite is probably no more moral or ethical than the old.
It's not like cryptocurrency is more accessible. Maybe it will become so but I still have to fork out a lot of money to buy Bitcoin. It's just the fees get paid to different people.
Not entirely sure how it's better. It is different though, I'll give you that.
Many of whom are expressing great concern over the very thing PoW hastens.
So no, it isn't either or. It's stop jeopardizing the planet in the long term so you can do whatever you're doing now. I don't care that you're doing it, and we can talk civily about the warts of the financial system so it can be tuned to meet your use case better and cone to a compromise; but PoW has the worst set of dysfunctional societal incentives I've seen in my life.
A few guys with guns can be beaten by several other guys with guns.
>plus auditors
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wirecard-scandal-puts-spotlight...
[1] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen...
Meanwhile Bitcoin is just a means to an end, getting rich quick. The fun doesn't happen because we have Bitcoin, but rather because we get rid of them for an unreasonable price.
I don’t know where you live in the world but where I live wages haven’t risen in line with the cost of food and shelter.
Leaving money in the bank is like working to buy a block of ice only to watch it melt away. To argue that any store of value isn’t speculative to some degree is naive.
Isn't there a difference between currency in general being speculative to some degree and cryptocurrencies specifically, whose main value proposition is speculation?
What I was referring to was stocks since they have outperformed government bonds and gold the last few years. Take Amazon for instance. I don’t think the share price is equal to total assets minus total liabilities divided by number of shares. Amazon doesn’t issue dividends so why did the shareholders pay so much for the shares?
The ETs come back once all the minerals are refined and purified and neatly stacked.
It's basically becoming a unregulated comodity that big money institutions get to gamble with because there is just nowhere to put the money on the market right now. If bitcoin and crypto (ETH, etc.) was just a money dumping speculation comodities I wouldn't even bother thinking about it - but it's causing realworld problems (eg. hardware disruptions) and it's going to get worse and worse.
So I'm in favor of preventing institutional investors in crypto in some form, but unfortunately it's not going to happen - too many individual interests behind it at this point and nobody gives a fuck about the overall stability.
For civilisation to survive we need renewables, electric cars/trucks/busses, nuckear power olants, grid scale storage and fusion power or hydrogen.
There are only two scenarion -there things are built and our society rewards them - or in the alternative money in your bank ceases to exist, along with moth of economy
FOMO, mining lotteries, and the guise of financial innovation are typical cover stories here. But all stocks and other publicly traded investments are basically making a bet that others will buy in after you do, raising the price higher. Most stock owners hope this very thing, though some stocks actually pay dividends on profits. The same is true with BTC with the added benefit of that novel mining lottery thing going for it.
> These are some of the questions among others which I think probably provide a better understanding of what is happening than the overly simplistic 'ponzi scam' explanation that has been repeated ad nauseam since its inception.
So what if the rich have too much money? That would explain a lot. It would explain why GME stock was shorted %140 of float.
It would also explain why politicians are so ineffective at regulation. If you were rich, would you want effective politicians? No. You would put your money behind the least effective politicians.
It would also explain why most institutions have become less trustworthy in the eye of the public, as big money has corrupted the system.
And finally it would explain the gold rush on BTC. Because they need new investment vehicles.
How would it explain that?
> It would also explain why politicians are so ineffective at regulation. If you were rich, would you want effective politicians? No. You would put your money behind the least effective politicians.
Just because you'd want it that way doesn't mean you did it. Motive, but where's means and method? https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-c...
> It would also explain why most institutions have become less trustworthy in the eye of the public, as big money has corrupted the system.
As opposed to in the past, where big money hadn't corrupted the system?
Pinky swear with me that you've seriously never heard of dark money. Koch brothers, Russian oligarchs. You've never ever heard of this? Really?
Stocks imply ownership of assets.
Sure, in terms of 'hoping that someone willy buy' is similar to BTC, but the valuation is completely different.
A stock is valued based on the performance of it's actual profit generation.
BTC is just a made up number. It's what people think the crowd will buy it for. Granted, this mechanism itself can be useful in some scenarios, but BTC itself isn't useful, at least not right now.
Unlike stocks which imply ownership of assets of a company, BTC is a pure hype machine, with the most hype given out by people who are already bought in.
If any product or service has ONLY people who use it hyping it up (e.g. BTC, and especially NFTs!) or only people who are NOT using it hyping it up (e.g. the myriad get-rich-quick schemes about some drop-shipping Amazon thing, real estate, or "hOw To BE aN eNTrePreNeUR" in a vague sense of the term (whatever the Gary V & friends stuff is); all those guys make money not by doing what they're telling you to do but by telling you what to do...), it's usually a bad sign.
I'm not sure that's the case any more. I mean we've seen billion dollar companies that just can't reach profitability.
Bitcoin is the opposite: what value it had (international transfers for Americans who live with one of the first world's worst banking systems) has been completely wiped out by the cost of transactions.
At the end of the day the hashes are valueless, no one has a product, or designs, or even any useful code.
The obvious difficulty there is determining the future earnings (and discount rate).
But that doesn't mean they don't exist - it's a rational premise of valuation.
Amazon is worth a lot because it's a giant machine with $350B in revenues - so investors can quibble over their earnings and 'how much that is worth' in future earnings - but it's based on those numbers.
BTC valuation is just whatever the crowd wants to pay.
A BTC is a magic number, and that's it.
Some times they do and some times they don't. That means it's not a fundamental property for stock valuation.
What was the rational premise of valuation behind Gamestop? There was one, but it had little or nothing to do with Gamestop's future earinings.
Sorry this is not true let me illustrate:
If there is a 9/10 chance that the profits will be $1, and a 1/10 chance that it will be $0, then we can value those profits in present terms at $0.9 (Edit: assuming no issues with cost of capital, time value of money etc. i.e. constant real dollars)
If we can reasonably calculate the profits and risk, then we can make a valuation.
GameStop was not a valuation, it was a stampede.
Also note that everything is subject to whims of speculation, fads etc. etc..
Yes, you can do that. You can argue that that's the smart way of doing it. But you don't have to and that's the point.
Elon musk tweets can manipulate the stock market almost at will. There is no profit analysis there, just the mob following Musk.
So again, future profits have nothing to do with a stock valuation. So times it does, but sometimes it doesn't. And if some times it doesn't, then it's not a fundamental property of it.
Nobody has to use anything to value a stock - including current profits. Therefore even current profits would not be 'a fundamental property'.
And of course, nobody has to use any data or logic when valuing absolutely any financial asset anywhere, ergo - the statement is completely pointless.
Again: we value stock based on it's estimated book value, future earnings and other assessments. We can argue a little bit about all of that, fine, that's why we let the market decide.
BTC is just a fantasy speculation.
Correct, so:
> A stock is valued based on the performance of it's actual profit generation.
Is incorrect. The correct sentence should be "Some times stock is valued based on the performance of it's actual profit generation."
> BTC is just a fantasy speculation.
Absolutely, jut like the stock of some companies.
It's just some weird rhetoric you're using to somehow show a parallel between BTC and Stocks.
The material issue here is that stocks can be rationally valued by determining the underlying value of the implied asset ownership - and mostly are - whereas BTC cannot.
That someone can pay $1 Trillion for a pair of shoes, a BTC, or an Amazon shares is not relevant.
It's not just a zero-sum game, making money off fellow investors who bet the stock will go one way when it goes the other.
1. It's a practical way to store value without the government destroying it by monetary emission.
2. People are free to speculate.
The solution to the first point is that governments should stop pulling the rug from under people's feet. Monetary emission should be predictable in the short, medium, and long term, or be tied to some real world indicator, like the cost of consumer goods. Just stop with this inflationary nonsense.
Problem 2 will be partially solved by time. Relative price changes in Bitcoin are reduced each cycle, so by the year 2030 the incentive to speculate in the short term will be much smaller. We will see it more as a long term investment. Another solution is to deregulate other markets so that we can freely speculate in them and stop putting as much attention to Bitcoin, but I don't think politicians are very eager to do that, and it could also have some negative consequences.
And price inflation, which is the relevant metric (as opposed to monetary inflation) in the context of a claim that the government destroys value, has been extremely predictable for 20 years.
This comes up again and again in bitcoin discussions. Money supply has to grow for price stability and to avoid deflation. This also applied even when there was gold convertibility.
What exactly is your issue with a growing money supply?
The primary issue is that simply sitting on a dragon's hoard of money should entitle me to a bigger share of the world's wealth, as time goes on, rather than a smaller share.
Why bigger, exactly? What is the justification?
That's literally exactly how it works right now lol.
> Freedom to speculate.
Have you seen the options market.
> 2. People are free to speculate.
So it's a store of value that's destroyable by speculation. That's, if anything, worse than the US Dollar.
You can based the entire world monetary economy on a single point of failure like this.
But the core point bb88 was making is that it can serve at most one of those two goals: “store of value” and “good for speculation” are mutually exclusive. Something can be neither, nothing can be both.
> we can freely speculate
Right, because that worked oh so well for Long Term Capital Management, or the 2008 Housing Crisis, or the Great Depression, or Dutch Tulips, or...
This libertarian, nay, Austrian, fantasy that if only we would deregulate everything, these incredible damaging boom/bust cycles and disappear and everything would be smoothed out are a discredited zombie theory that never dies.
It hasn't been attempted and I think deregulation / decentralization of the economy has good chances of getting rid of boom/bust cycles.
Without a central bank playing with credit you wouldn't have boom / bust cycles: what's more likely is that you'll find smaller players doing boom / bust cycles in different industries with far less damaging effects.
I sympathise with the libertarian ideas behind BTC, but it's also the most inefficient and power hungry way of reaching the goal. This is a political problem and we need to solve it politically, not technically.
As long as we are having this kind of "discussion" I can see why fantasies about leaving earth and colonizing space are popular.
> People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?"
Since the global saving glut (1), the best question to ask of crazy asset valuations is not "does it reflect the fundamental value?", but "does the money have anywhere else to go?"
Bitcoin, in part, is a marker for loss of trust in governments. Trust in their motives and/or ability to responsibly steward currencies.
Where do I invest that cash? Equities are obviously overvalued as an asset class, and treasuries return basically zero, so people are buying up real estate and crypto instead, and using some cash on the side to gamble in the options market. But this really only exacerbates the wealth inequality problem.
It sounds like you're saying that bitcoin is like a hedge against trust in government. A sort of financial measurement of conspiracy theorism. This is a fascinating perspective, but I'm not sure who is financially exposed to that form of risk. It seems like a great vehicle for speculation ("do I think people will trust institutions more or less in the near future?") but not much else. I'm sure there's someone who stands to lose money if public faith in government erodes. but its difficult to imagine that investor
Most university loans are federally backed. All home loans are understood to be federally backed since '08 and most low income home loans are officially federally insured as well.
US Treasury bonds which make up a significant portion of pensions and corporate debt are essentially federally insured as well since it is know that the Fed will simply print the dollars needed to cover those debts.
So far higher education, home ownership, pensions, and corporate debt; and those are just the financial exposure. There is not a single financial instrument that doesn't in some way depend on these financial bases working properly other than crypto and perhaps some commodities.
"People get too caught up on bitcoin because it is new and nobody understands it"
We understand it quite well thank you (and it's not new!) - far far more often than not, it's the BTC proponents who don't really grasp what it is, and it's not the 'technical aspects' that are the most salient factors.
Bitcoin creates no value.
It's 'profitable' to an individual, but not the system as a whole - and because it has negative externalizations in the form of CO2 emissions etc. - it's actually a net negative.
Making magic digital baseball cards and trading them does not help us make roads, bridges, iPhones, software, drugs, vaccines, clothing, homes - it just makes all of that a little bit harder actually.
Much like residents of Easter Island using all their resources competing to make Giant Heads. Those heads may have mad some people very powerful, they did not help them grow food, make boats.
If all BTC mining stopped right now, not a single thing would change, other than the price of electricity would be a little cheaper in some places.
BTC isn't going to 'end the world' but the energy consumption is a really negative artifact of this purely speculative activity.
There's not so much wrong with people wanting to exchange digital baseball cards if they want to do that - fine - but with the externalizes it's a problem.
Bitcoin creates a "source of truth" which has lots of value for people. For example, working at an organization where everyone wants to cooperate to deliver a product, figuring out who should own, update, and report on sources of truth takes lots of effort. But those sources of truth within organizations help people coordinate their collective efforts.
Out here in the regular world where we cannot trust each other, having a ready-made source of truth has lots of value because it lets people all over the cooperate who otherwise could not.
And of course, there are a ton of ways of having a 'source of truth'.
So BTC is not a good currency, and it's not a very good store of value either. But we knew that going into it, because it's obvious from the start. It's just a speculative instrument.
If you get paid in a regular currency, then you're good. If you don't want to hold it, than buy an ETF or real estate or whatever and you good.
Central banks have monopolized money and obliterated the concept of sound money when they began manipulating the interest rate. They allowed fractional reserve banking, where you can give out money you don't have. They created and spent trillion of dollars they didn't have to prop up markets through quantitative easing.
And now you have housing markets and stock markets in bubbles. Inflation that is inevitably coming.
Mortgage rates only ever go down to support the housing market.
http://www.fedprimerate.com/mortgage_rates_chart-graph.htm
Treasury yields only ever go down to support the stocks market.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2016/10-year-treasury-bond-rate-...
Debt to GDP ratio only ever goes up:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
Ask yourself why this is happening, and how we return to sound money.
That is not value.
You can do that with Gold.
We could do that with an arbitrary fixed currency that someone invents.
BTC 'has not value' because it can't be used for anything - as a currency it's useless, and as a store of value it's next to useless (there are better stores of value).
Your comments about 'money' don't necessarily relate:
1) Currency is not supposed to be a hard store of value. It's there to grease the economy, not for you to hold large quantities. If you want to store value there are plenty of ways to do that.
2) Inflexible currency i.e. 'hard money' makes no sense, and that's why nobody uses it.
3) You say 'inflation is coming' - well if we have such bad currency, why hasn't inflation already taken root in the last 20 years? It really has not.
Again - BTC creates zero value, there's no point to it - it can't be used as currency and it's not a better a store of value than rare comic books.
Yes, we had gold as a monetary standard for quite some time.
1) Currency is not supposed to be a hard store of value. It's there to grease the economy, not for you to hold large quantities. If you want to store value there are plenty of ways to do that.
Money is supposed to be sound. Your notion that currency should not be a hard store of value is a new one, an idea created to support fiat. From first principles, money is a store of energy (creative work, physical work), which is then utilized for efficient exchange of goods and services. Money is not a tool for "greasing the economy", this was only possible when governments confiscated gold and declared all money to be paper that they controlled. Furthermore, buying stocks/houses/gold etc. is indeed a way of escaping USD into assets. However, someone else has to be willing to take that USD. It will still exist, and whoever holds it will be losing value over time. It is a problem when your base asset becomes toxic and no one wants it.
2) Inflexible currency i.e. 'hard money' makes no sense, and that's why nobody uses it.
We used gold and other rare metals for thousands of years. It was literally the global standard for trade.
3) You say 'inflation is coming' - well if we have such bad currency, why hasn't inflation already taken root in the last 20 years? It really has not.
The USD's buying power has fallen dramatically over time. Inflation has been very visible in home prices and stock prices.
'Sources of Truth' are a commodity.
There are any number of ways to do that.
There's no reason to have a $50B source of truth.
And FYI there is no value merely in a 'source of truth' it has to be put to use in some way, and BTC has zero uses.
BTC a number who's ownership can be legitimized by some degree of public scrutiny.
It has utterly no value, no benefit, it's not a currency or store of value.
It's like a pair of Nike shoes, baseball card or comic book, except that it ownership can be transmitted digitally, hence the 'baseball cards'. It has utterly no value other than novelty and speculation.
It's not worth dealing with the BTC crowd, they're the same kind of people who think the Earth is Flat, that Trump won the election or that COVID is not real, following Elon Musk Pied Piper 'to the moon' because of a Tweet.
Carbon offset tokens, or some token that will increase in value when cryptos global electricity usage goes up, and offsets with renewable projects. If it were funded by governments in billions of dollars it would make an impact, and everyone could participate in funding the token.
The problem must be addressed in altering the fossil/non-fossil energy mix. You are not going to control the financial incentive to mine, or kindly ask ppl to use less electricity please. Carbon taxes have been proposed but you would have to get that done globally, they are certainly working on that from a political perspective but you never know there are always resistance to a new tax.
People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?" and I think it is probably related to other questions like why have the greater financial markets become so wonky, why has the behavior of investors changed so radically (GME et al), why have politicians been unable to be effective policymakers for decades, and why many institutions, both social and political in nature, appear to have become less trustworthy in the eye of the greater public? These are some of the questions among others which I think probably provide a better understanding of what is happening than the overly simplistic 'ponzi scam' explanation that has been repeated ad nauseam since its inception.
Bitcoin is just one of many things (pretty much everything) that have been able to use energy profitably, while subsidizing the costs by externalizing them via climate change, that part isn't new. People get too caught up on bitcoin because it is new and nobody understands it (not just from a technical perspective), so it is really easy to dismiss. Singling it out in that manner seems silly.