Where we don't see eye to eye is I don't think we should unleash a grey-goo esque power virus onto the world. The obvious reason is we have one now, we're using 0.1% of all the earth's power, and generating as much e-waste as a entire country to write a few hundred bytes into a tiny database once in a while. Work that can easily be done on a single raspberry pi.

L2+ don't offer the same guarantees as a L1, and once you drop any of the guarantees the whole thing becomes basically worthless.

So using the same information as you, we arrive at different conclusions: I don't think this solution is viable, good, worthwhile or should exist. I don't think if new power technology comes online a good use is making Bitcoin guzzle it like a dog at a sprinkler. I think China has the moral high ground on this one.

We will probably be arguing as I build my dyson sphere. 0.1% is nothing. :-p

The goo scenario is inevitable, either build some kind of antigoo shield tech or be consumed. Complaining about the goo is irrelevant to the goo.

I very much disagree that was a moral high ground decision — it was an authoritarian move to crush opposition to its financial dystopia, the e-CNY, and prevent its people from escaping the all seeing eye.

Everything you say makes sense within the context of Bitcoin's proof-of-work paradigm, that there aren't any reasonable solutions to these problems within it (there's no good way to add negative feedback to lower the hashrate, there's no good way to calculate a better lower hashrate), but it misses that there are alternative paradigms like proof-of-stake that avoid the problem of too much energy use entirely. Once proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies become more popular and fully prove the technique works at large scale, I hope other cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin follow along.

Sorry, Bitcoin will never be PoS. PoS doesn’t offer anything near the same security model, censorship resistance or decentralization. It is not a viable alternative for Bitcoin.

Proof-of-stake has much more ability to enact censorship resistance (https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/06/the-problem-of-censorsh...) than proof-of-work. PoW imposes huge entry barriers by restricting mining to those who can build and then operate expensive mining rigs, which are resources not equally available even to people with the same amount of money and may be monopolized (how many competitive mining rig manufacturers are there, and how many countries do they operate in?); PoS makes participating a much more level playing field by removing dependence on physical and monopolizable resources.

PoW does have sheer simplicity and a proven record of working on its side, but the idea that whatever upsides to PoW over PoS that exist are and will stay worth more than 0.5% of global electricity production seems extremely biased.