Every now and then a new article comes out about how BTC is wasting energy, it consumes X amount of energy comparable to <insert small country>. I email or tweet authors of such study/article if they have any estimates on how much energy and materials US bank offices consume: including AC or heating, computers left on over night, lights left over night, TVs playing ads. I asked that more than 5 times and not once got a response. I believe that running traditional banks in US and CA consume more energy than Bitcoin. Sure, bank produce billions times more transaction per day, but BTC will either be replaced by more efficient networks or will evolve into such. US banks used to send letters and cash in coal powered trains. Anyone got source on that?

You can go estimate it yourself pretty easily based on number of branches and some average energy use per square foot (pick the US’s commercial average as a upper bound to be conservative)

Bitcoin consumes 'more electricity than Argentina' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56012952

But to summarize as someone who works in energy related research:

All the banks in the world combined do not use as much energy as bitcoin alone now.

Cryptocurrencies are inherently non-productive work as their algorithms are designed to solely be computationally expensive to create a means of artificial scarcity.

Block chain isn’t the problem, non-productive hashing algorithms are.

I don't know much about energy network and power consumption of average Joe in Argentina/Slovenia/Greenland, so this article doesn't tell me much. Is that because 25% of a country doesn't have access to stable electricity, so energy requirements to run a country are small? Are their electric and electronic devices are mostly power efficient? Do they use a lot of geothermal heating without using electricity and gas to produce heat or cold, so energy use of a country isn't the same of another country in a different location? Are their energy providers close to cities, so less energy is lost in transit? Do they have home-based wind/solar power generators skipped from equation due to relaxed regulations?

Energy consumption in the UK dropped by 12.9% during COVID pandemic[1]. Is that enough to stop people blaming BTC for everything bad on energy market and pollution? That was _easy_ to fix.

I agree hashing and PoW protocols are crap and I even think they should be banned, but let's start adding to this discussion other things, like how bad USD and traditional banking systems are. We talk even less often about international banks money laundering with ISIS, Al-Qaeda and Mexican drug cartels, hello all HSBC and Deutsche bank employees! I'm sure we have a lot of easier targets (still talking about ecological damage and pollution) to fix than networks like Bitcoin [2].

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/qeoyak/jeff_bezos_sup...

Then I would take into account how PoS would affect this in the future, as crypto is a technology that is meant to be built on, evolved, upgraded, and replaced by something better. Like money.

Then probably ask which system is more democratic in its distribution and transparency of the money, and I would bet that system would finance less legacy climate destroying industries

Get list of 10 largest banks and major credit card companies.

Get their ESG reports.

Add annual energy and emissions summaries together.

Multiply by 2.

Stand in awe that it’s still a fraction of Bitcoin.

You can then go find some other incredibly ignorant tangent to argue about to promote your belief in a crypto Ponzi scheme.

BTC daily transactions, below 500k, soruce: https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-b...

Cash and card (made available by banks) daily transactions are just on another level, more than 1 per person in EU for instance, and the number of people is easy to find, source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/893459/average-number-of...

These systems aren’t replaceable by bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a debit banking transaction system equivalent only. It uses several times the energy of the equivalent portions of the banking industry.

The article still says:

>Galaxy Digital also showed that a significant part of the world's energy production is wasted — about 2,205 TWh per year which is 19.4 times that of the Bitcoin network.

>Cash and card (made available by banks) daily transactions are just on another level, more than 1 per person in EU for instance

Totally agree, like I said in another comment, I think BTC holds trading value and sentimental value, but should be replaced by any other from dozens of better adapted networks.

Crypto energy consumption is just unnecessary waste.

Not all, but never said otherwise!

That's quite some improvement that would be needed..

No, not at all. I'm quite sure Bitcoin will go down because of its inefficiencies and it only holds trading value because of "cryptocurrency whales" and sentiment. Every time it goes up I'm surprised that people still go this route while there are dozens of better solutions for whatever BTC was promised to be.

But it hasn’t yet and I fail to see how using it makes it more likely to happen.

Bitcoin doesn’t have the ability as it exists to handle the volume that banks do now.

I have some crypto that I bought long ago, but I’m feeling much less enthusiastic about it lately.

I love to see the big banks go away and lose the stranglehold they have, but replacing the players with new players doesn’t do that.

[0] https://hackernoon.com/the-bitcoin-vs-visa-electricity-consu...

[1] https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...

How do you store $100 million worth of value for 100 years in the current economy?

You can't store it in dollars, it degrades exponentially with inflation. 100 years ago, a dollar was worth the equivalent of $13.90 today[1]. If that trend continues for the next 100 years that $100 million will be worth the equivalent of $10 million today roughly losing 90% of its value (wait that's almost 100%!). This is even before we factor in the fact that we only left the gold standard in 1971, and that the federal reserve have "discovered" new monetary stimulus strategies that promote inflationary practice. If you park your $100 million in dollars, you can almost expect the entirety of it will disappear in 100 years.

So if putting your wealth in dollars doesn't maintain it, where are the smart people putting their wealth? Simple you can park it in a stable asset.

I'll give you a good example of one of the most stable assets you can currently buy, which is real estate[2]. Which if you have ever bought a house or if you look at the markets you'll realize, this is where a lot of people park their wealth. Ever wonder why we could have so many homeless people when we have so much unoccupied real estate? Its not just because rich people are a-holes[3].

But to store $100 million in real estate, you need to construct that much market value in real estate. That's going to produce a lot of concrete, plaster, steel, glass, fiber glass, polysterene, polyisocyanurate, polyurethane, list goes on. Its going to burn a lot oil, a lot of coal, use up a ton of electricity. You think bitcoin is bad? Look at what the waste the construction process produces. If you want to see a climate catastrophe in the making, check out the ghost cities in china[4].

Now let's factor in the fact that even real estate value degrades. That is to say the house itself will have required repairs and the full economy will have added more houses so its value to the whole real estate economy has been diminished. And keep in mind most constructions are only built to last a set number of years.

Keep in mind this is one of the best alternative stores of wealth that exists. You're not going to find very many asset classes that can keep its real value as well as real estate either[5]. And even if you do, they aren't going to be that much less polluting. Stocks in coca-cola is a production of corn to corn syrup to canned corn syrup. Stocks in nike is a production of nylon, rubber, and polyurethane. Gold has to mined and that has even more problems associated with it[6].

So people blame bitcoin for its energy expenditure because they want to point fingers, but you have to realize that when you start considering everything in the system, it is a far more efficient system overall than anything we're currently working with because its such a direct translation of energy into wealth. And if we're worried about pollution, we are free to swap out the energy creation for more sustainable alternatives as our society evolves, unlike concrete which is much harder to replace. People want to look at only a small section of things and point fingers because its easier, but when you start really pulling the thread to see what it looks like you start to realize how much of a hairball the whole thing has become.

This post is already getting way to long so I'm going to stop it here. There isn't a single source to any of these, its just theories to how I see this world that has evolved over time. Sources provided, however, are true to the reality of the world we live in, which will not be changing from its capitalistic nature any time soon. Pretty sure I'm on my own island so please disagree with this post all you want. I'm just presenting why I believe other capitalist avenues for wealth acquisition and storage create significantly more inefficient systems.

[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1920?amount=1

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/01/real-estate-is-still-the-bes...

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/american-h...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in...

[5] https://www.millionacres.com/real-estate-investing/articles/...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_mining#Adverse_effects_an...

Natural scarcity in the form of land, gold, etc., or unnatural scarcity in the form of crypto, water rights, futures, stocks.

I find your arguments kind of silly about emissions and energy. Real estate in the form of teak farms are inherently 60+ year investments, fix carbon, and basically require no energy, and have nominal upkeep. Teak has been a steady supply of income for hundreds if not thousands of years.

99-year leases are also normal and allow you to retain land while letting others develop it or use it and puts the paying of taxes on them. Banks routinely finance mortgages on 60 and 99-year leased land for housing development.

Crypto's only true benefit is the lack of minimum investment quantities. I can more easily store for 100 years $100m of cash today than I can $100.

It also has the benefit of allowing people who don't know how to invest money to believe that somehow the flawed logic you just used is actually sensible.

Hey thanks for the suggestion! That's also another benefit of crypto, you can store for 100 years $100 just as easily as you can $100m. Let's see you try to do that with teak farms.

I would also love to hear how 60 and 99 year leases from banks are a simpler alternative to trading wealth. Seems awfully complicated to me. To be honest, if I wanted to send someone some crypto, I could do it in less than an hour whenever I want.