Bitcoin's energy consumption is a feature, not a bug. The amount of energy consumed by the network will continue to increase, as it should, as it secures more wealth.

A currency that's based on energy has been speculated about for decades, such as by Buckminster Fuller, which he called the Kilowatt Dollar: http://roperld.com/science/CurrencySystems.htm

Bitcoin is the first attempt at such a money that might actually work. https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-1053/

If you're curious about the connection between Bitcoin and the energy sector these are worth looking at.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvtGQ-7O1Tw

* https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-energy-use-comp...

* https://youtu.be/b-7dMVcVWgc

* https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-is-humanitarian-...

For what its worth, this is a difficult concept for most people to understand. I've held crypto since the early days, went to ethereum believing in POS, then crypto "3.0", and only now have I returned realizing what it all meant. Granted most people barely understand how the economy today works, many times out of denial.

Same. I've only recently (mid-2021) deeply understood the implications of Bitcoin, despite hearing about it in 2009, buying some in 2013, and losing some in the MtGox hack. Clearly I'm a slow learner.

I think people are vastly underestimating the impact of Bitcoin embedding itself within the energy sector, and providing an accessible and permissionless escape hatch to millions (billions?) of people whose currencies are hyper-inflating.

> The amount of energy consumed by the network will continue to increase, as it should, as it secures more wealth.

this is very apt. after exhausting the worlds resources guarding our money from each other maybe we'll reflect that it was money that was the bad idea and bitcoin was just an implementation detail

Money is just a psychological-technology that vastly improves efficiency of trade.

It's not exactly feasible to return to a barter system, unless you have some other way of solving the "double coincidence of wants" problem?

One of the innovations of Bitcoin is that it serves purely as a monetary good, so there's no other demand for it outside of it serving its role as money. Counter that with gold which has many other applications.

To be fair, fiat achieved this too, but it came with disastrous trade-offs...

Bitcoin consumes far less energy than gold or banking at full adoption, Overall this is an environmental improvement.

But is the Kilowatt dollar idea based on irrevocably wasting the energy, i.e. on useless hash puzzles?

"Wasted" is a value judgement. Miners put the effort in to procure the energy and then choose to spend it on hashes. It is by definition not wasted.

You know Christmas lights in the USA use up more energy than the Bitcoin network does for the same period? Is that "wasted"? Ultimately that's up to the spenders of that energy to decide.

There are significant political and economic tradeoffs between POW and POS... I highly recommend this article for an analysis of these.

https://www.lynalden.com/proof-of-stake/

I suggest this analysis because folks tend to state their preference for POS while only mentioning the energy costs as the only factor in their calculation. I do think it worth considering these other tradeoffs as well.

Besides the energy costs, what's the answer to PoW miners' effects on the GPU market? Especially as the supply chain is already strained by COVID-related increases in consumer demand. While I'm still concerned by mining energy costs, the optimal equipment needed should be separate from consumer-grade, e.g., how datacenters won't be hoarding Core i9 processors or RTX 3080s.

Any decentralized distributed ledger is by definition more energy intensive and wasteful.

All of the financial systems today may keep a dozen or so copies of a financial transaction for a limited time span. They do so using as cost-effective means as possible (they’re a for-profit business). They also do it under extremely well coordinated economies of scale.

From the get-go any reasonable distributed ledger application (regardless of PoW, PoS, etc) keeps many thousands of copies of that consensus ledger. In the case of Bitcoin it’s roughly 13,000 nodes so at least 1000x as many resources as the centralized financial systems we have today. Oh yeah - and it grows forever. As I’ve noted before if you buy a beer for $3 with Bitcoin there will end up being 13,000 or more records of that transaction FOREVER.

With 10 years since inception and an absolutely tiny transaction volume (compared to say, Visa) a full Ethereum node requires at least 6TB of storage space. Bitcoin is the big one and it has roughly 500K transactions/day. Visa alone has a billion. With any real traction these ledgers will end up at petabyte and exabyte size very quickly. Oh yeah - and you’ll still need tens of thousands of copies. Each of these nodes still needs gigabytes of RAM, fast CPUs, bandwidth, etc in addition to the insane storage requirements.

Note that I’m talking about the distribution and storage of the ledger itself. Mining and PoS have nothing to do with that - these 1000x inefficiencies persist even with PoS.

The nodes themselves are the massive resource and energy issue that are just hiding behind PoW right now.

Kind of silly to vehemently argue against the redundant storage of important financial information

The lack of a lifecycle on data in blockchain, especially one that is supposed to serve people on a planet scale, is actually a pretty serious issue.

Learning how critical it is for everything to have a lifecycle was one of the turning points of my career (and I learned it over a decade into it). I’m guessing from your comment you haven’t learned it yet, so I’d invite you to keep an eye on all the lifecycles you deal with in the near future.