It's not a straw man. Yes, if the energy mix was only reliant of renewables, energy usage wouldn't be as much as a problem. But it is not, and won't be in years, decades, so we can't just brush off the energy usage of crypto as "well it's the energy mix fault". You cannot evaluate a technology in isolation of its real world, practical context.

Not to mention that even with renewables, energy usage would be still a concern. Renewables will still have issues around distribution, power peaks, energy storage, price, and crypto wouldn't be helping any of them. A discussion of how would crypto affect the rest of the people compared to the benefit it brings would still be relevant.

How come you see this argument pedaled on crypto but not every other technology?

Cobalt mining for batteries?

Energy consumption for processed metals?

Oil refining from rocketry (largely used by military in practice scenarios)

This list goes on. It seems crypto is the only technology evaluated in relation to the whole environment. For all the others we shrug and ignore externalities.

56% of energy used for Bitcoin mining is coming from renewable sources of energy.

Is there a source for that? Last time I checked there weren't reliable reports even on total energy usage, much less energy sources.

That's a self-reported survey by members of a Bitcoin mining council, which represent an unknown portion of the total mining capacity, and if I'm correct the term "sustainable energy" includes "carbon-based energy with net emission credits". It doesn't seem the most reliable source to me.

In other words, 44% comes from non-renewables.

It's not like those 56 are free either, we could use that energy to run more important things instead that crypto is taking away from.

In many cases, you can't use the energy that is used for Bitcoin mining for anything else, since there are simply no consumers next to the renewable energy source.

That is one heck of a waste, at a time when managing the thermal runaway of our planet is a matter of great and immediate urgency.

Separating money from the state is worth the cost.

I think this is what every crypto argument secretly comes down to, this ideological disagreement.

I don't want money to be separated from the state, and especially not at a cost.

One man's crypto-anarchocapitalist utopia is another man's dystopian capitalist nightmare that we sacrificed our environment for.

Imagine telling a guy who lives in a state with over 15% inflation rate that he's destined to stay poor because some people in first-world countries think that hard money is an utopia.

I never said money in any form is an utopia.

The utopia would be post-money imo and moving money away from the state would make that harder to achieve.

If crypto was only mined on renewables and there was sufficient (and sufficiently distributed) renewable energy that the presence of crypto did not otherwise detract from our desperately overdue de-carbonization efforts, then sure, whatever, knock yourselves out melting your processors to do funny math.

But that isn't the reality we live in.

The environmental aspect is manifestly a part of how crypto phenomenon, and attempts to separate the underlying technology from the manner in which it is (and for the foreseeable future, will continue to be) used, are disingenuous at best.

Energy is fungible, we don't have 100% green energy and won't for a very long time, we make up the difference with fossil. Even if crypto used green energy only, it means more fossil burned.

To continue human civilization we need to stop fossil burning as much as possible, crypto is unnecessary and should therefore be stopped.

But that is solved with a price on carbon. That would make mining without renewables unprofitable.

How do you argue that something is unnecessary? Aluminum uses heaps of energy… we haven’t needed in for 1000s of years, is it neccersary?

I think the renewable energy is the real straw-man.

What about the non-recycable waste after "renewable" energy. Windmills have steel coated by epoxy wings, those cannot be recycled.

Solar panels is also ready for the trash-heap after 20 years, due to being a complex composite..

The only real energy source that would help would be nuclear, but even if we get that where have more efficient room-heaters and better use of the computing.. (protein folding could be one for example)

Solar panels aren’t complex composites. They are silicon with some coatings on it. You can definitely recycle them.

Renewable are also not free. The technology of crypto (as it exists today) is more energy consuming than a single computer processing all the transactions centrally.

No matter how you cut it, that delta is waste if the additional functionality is useless.

That’s not a straw man. It’s literally how huge portions of crypto are mined right now. Were you trying to say “red herring”?

Regardless, energy is a market and even if crypto used purely renewable energy, that’s energy that wasn’t used for replacing fossil fuels in some other use case. Literally any technology that massively boosts energy consumption has the same problem.

Burning electricity as heat just so our currency is little bit more resilient doesn't really seem in anyway efficient way to do things. And any efficiency gains are negated because we will just do more of it.

Any other industry including financial one will try to minimise the waste if it becomes unreasonable. Not so with proof of work crypto.

Crypto mining is using renewable capacity that could be used for other purposes.

Your argument lacks a modal operator I think.

Renewables have environmental impact too.