I don't really give a crap about what people do or don't do with new technology, ultimately what people want to spend their time and money on is up to them.

However, "Crypto" is different. If all it was was just the unbelievably irritating crypto bros rug pulling, ponzi scheming, wash trading, ugly NFT shilling and hacking all the while claiming to be at the spearhead of a solution to pretty much every human problem in existence then so be it. I would be capable of ignoring it. I would read a different article, do some work or go for a walk, ignored, done.

But "Crypto" (specifically the energy intensive kind) has a different problem, and that's that it has /massive/ externalities that it simply ignores, forcing us, the people who want nothing to do with it, to now deal with it, and with the people in the ecosystem that we find so objectionable. We are dealing with the significant fallout from their hobbies. We are in the middle of 1) a very serious climate crisis 2) a cost of living crisis where people can't afford energy to cook and heat (in the UK at least) and 3) a war that would likely be brought to a stop sooner if we could phase out Russian gas sooner.

All things that could be alleviated if "Crypto" and it's so-far intangible benefits were to dissapear.

That is why I hate "Crypto", that's why I call people out about it, why I'm "frothy".

> Not efficient? Well neither was the Ford model T. Newer generations are getting better.

The Model T allowed people to do something that previously hadn't been done before. So far no-one has been able to point me at a single thing that public public blockchains do that either is worth doing and is only possible using blockchain tech, or is better (more power efficient, faster) than using pre-existing technology.

If people can point me at some of these things then we can at least start having a discussion about wether it's worth spending an entire country's worth of electricity on it.

Once somebody spends $400,000 on an ugly ape and then found they spent their money for nothing, they will become a permanent enemy of crypto. It’s just a matter of time before you join us (crypto haters) the difference is that some of us knew it was a scam right away and others will have to learn it the hard way.

Some people will react the way you say, yes, but others, after spending $400k or whatever for a worthless NFT, or for some combination of “coins”, will double down, unwilling or unable to let themselves see the truth because that would mean they were wrong in a spectacular fashion.

So they push for crypto harder than ever, to get other people to come in, prop the system up, keep the value of their purchase up, and validate their worldview.

Another possible outcome is that people will pretend the whole thing didn’t happen.

(From the viewpoint that it is possible to learn from other people’s mistakes, people are already pretending the tulip bubble, law’s scheme, 1829, 1969, 1999, 2008, etc. didn’t happen. That Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë and the other authors of those awful Victorian novels lost their money in railroad bonds. The difference is railroads go somewhere, Aries don’t.)

Jeez, you must be a very rich man by now, with all the extensive shorting of crypto this amazing early insight must have allowed you to execute.

Congratulations.

Those who have these insights usually also know the aphorism "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".

You mean in unregulated centralized exchanges like binance and FTX, whose entire existence depends on the existence of these Ponzis? When they can just press a button, cause a flash spike, and liquidate all of your winning whenever they feel like it?

Yeah, I'm sure that works perfectly. After all, why would they be dishonest?

Using privacy coins I can donate money to causes I believe in (eg WikiLeaks) without fear of reprisal and with the knowledge that the funds will reach their recipient. If you have a better way, please let me know.

Private or not, which country are you in that would penalise you if you donated to Wikileaks?

Ultimately though, there's a decent argument for /not/ allowing completely anonymous money transfers as the list of organisations that you'd be penalised for donating to probably has a pretty strong overlap with the list of organisations that society as a whole, through it's government, has decided we don't want to receive money.

Crypto /might/ allow you to make an end-run around this system, but do we want it to, and even if we do, is it worth an entire country's electricity usage?

Didnt US companies stop payments to Wikileaks because they exposed the US govt, atleast with crypto Wikileaks and others can bypass US payments systems.

I don’t need $30,000k Bitcoin to support Wikileaks and my blogger. $10 Bitcoin works perfectly for this.

But people hype and fraud coins to heights they shouldn’t be and make it useless for actual use.

I think Eth is a good idea. I like smart contracts. But Etherium doesn’t need to be $3k and transactions shouldn’t be $10. $1 Eth and $.01 transactions is still perfectly fine for a sustainable system. But that doesn’t make people millions and billions by milking idiots.

I think if we had regulators preventing wash and pump and dump then we can just pick dogecoin or whatever and move on to digital cash. Until then, it’s not going to be possible with dogecoin going up 10x and down .1x along with everything else.

> Etherium doesn’t need to be $3k

The reason they're priced so high is because most of the supply has gone to early adopters (and its creators in case of the 70% premined Ethereum) leaving late adopters in fear of missing out and fighting over crumbs.

> we can just pick dogecoin

Dogecoin admittedly has higher inflation, but still had early miners getting 50x more reward than current ones. If you want to deter speculation, it makes more sense to just have a fixed reward, i.e. a pure linear emission, that maintains a high inflation for the first few decades.

Currently should be stable and predictable. There’s no need for early adopters to get rich. I just need to buy a pizza without cash.

1) Crypto is easily traceable. Far more than any other means of funds transfer if you exercise even modest efforts to hide the source of funds. And to the extent crypto provides a modicum of privacy it’s because it’s too small for governments to have put any restrictions on it.

2) There is absolutely no guarantee the money will reach Wikileaks. At best, the money will reach the holder of Wikileaks’s private key holder. As we found out with Coinbase, for the vast majority of crypto wallets, that’s not gonna be your intended recipient.

3) Even “The money” it’s a term Is debatable. If you sent them that crypto 1 month ago and they tried to withdraw it today, at best they would have got half the value you sent them.

There is nothing unique about crypto in terms of privacy other than the fact that most governments haven’t bothered with it. In fact, crypto is so easily traceable I’ve always harbored half a theory that it was created by the CIA specifically to chart out and bust drug and terrorist rings.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the only reason the government isn’t taking down/regulating crypto is because the intelligence agencies are just so thrilled with the awesome network information they’re getting about criminals through their crypto transfers.

That’s just wordplay, algorithmic stablecoins have been problematic and crashing since the beginning and a big one just crashed. Call me when USDC or DAI crashes - specifically not Tether because it’s arguably also undercollateralized.

USDT is a centralized stablecoin, same as USDC.

So in your argument that comes quite close to "No true Scottsman" fallacy, what is the exact criteria that you are using to separate out the "stable" stablecoins from the "unstable" stablecoins?

Grossly inefficient personal transportation and industrial farming have massive externalities forcing people who want nothing to do with it to deal with it. That doesn't seem to be a concern that matters to most people. And they're exacerbating the same climate and energy issues.

Public blockchain can be powered by renewable energy, using its own value to pay for it, and can harness power in areas where it is not feasible to harness that power for other purposes.

Here's a podcast[1] episode with Saifedean Ammous, if you're interested in the value proposition. He claims Bitcoin actually saved his life, so obviously incredibly valuable to him. Lex does a pretty good job at pushing back on his evangelism.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp4U5aH_T6A

But it is a concern, and it is being tackled in many places: gasoline is taxed very heavily. Farm subsidies are being reduced.

Just because not all externalities have been fully internalised yet, doesn't mean PoW with its massive externalities is fine.

We know that now, but are stuck in a world with cars, we're trying to dig ourselves out of that hole.

We know that crypto[1] uses massive abouts of power when we're struggling to move off fossil fuels. We know that now, at the genesis of the crypto.

[1] the crypto I care/talk about, the power hungry kind.

All of these things are the result of bad governing, not crypto. Maybe banning crypto would help them (I don’t believe that) but banning lots of other things would also help. What we really need is better energy policy, better foreign policy, and better regulation of companies destroying the environment and contributing unnecessarily to climate change.

Edit: The vitriol in some of the replies to this is fascinating. Did you all just lose a fortune in the crypto crash or something?

> Maybe banning crypto would help them

It seemingly serves no purpose, and yet takes up a huge amount of power, which in it's absence would allow us to phase out a lot of our fossil fuel usage, which could include Russian gas.

(Happy to hear what value crypto offers that can’t be done with more energy efficient mechanisms.)

The point of (good) cryptocurrencies is that they require real energy to coerce. Because of this I’ve felt safe keeping savings & transacting in bitcoin for years, I’m sorry that you don’t see that as valuable. Good luck with your ban, it isn’t smart.

What's your reason behind believing that? From what I know , Bitcoin mining fell 50% when China banned it [1]. How would that not be similar if the US + EU just bans it tomorrow?

[1] https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/109315/bitcoin-hashrate-...

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/12/09/bitcoin-hashrate-ap...

We get it.

It’s not cryptos fault that it’s a terrible currency. Just invest in it. It’s not crypto’s fault that it’s a terrible investment. Why don’t you want a great currency that government doesn’t control? It’s not crypto’s fault that half the money in the ecosystem is stolen. Why isn’t the government helping this anti governmental technology? It’s not crypto’s fault that the vast majority of the coins are scams. It only failed because Citadel and Blackstone attacked it.

No, crypto is pure and faultless. And anything that it does wrong is the fault of the government and/or Blackstone and Citadel and/or the Paper Hands.

I have seen many many people pointing out the shady dealings and the death spiral nature of Terra on social media like reddit. But they were shouted out with cries of "FUD!".

It's a ponzi scheme and if your caught holding the bag, it is always in your interest to continue the scam rather than call out the scammers. That is why crypto "communities" will never acknowledge negative facts.

Try re-reading my comment. I didn't say that.

Ah, the "have fun staying poor" argument of "y'all are salty you missed out". Is it really inconceivable for you that some people may have (a) concern for a massive, energy guzzling Ponzi scheme (b) that just this week was revealed to cause "billions" in losses in others in their society (c) that they have been calling out for months and have only gotten vitriol for?

No, their pockets must have been directly hurt to be this salty. It's not like people are capable of having intelligence, empathy, or a desire to build a better world if it doesn't line their pockets, right?

>> Is it really inconceivable for you that some people may have (a) concern for a massive, energy guzzling Ponzi scheme (b) that just this week was revealed to cause "billions" in losses in others in their society (c) that they have been calling out for months and have only gotten vitriol for?

I think getting incredibly angry about those things, to the point that the usual type of rational HN discussion cannot happen, is idiotic. Discussing crypto here has become like discussing US politics. It's just not possible because everything is described in black and white/good and evil terms. Claiming that getting rid of crypto will lead to the resolution of national and international crises is stupid.

Let's reframe those values slightly - every bitcoin transaction uses about as much electricity as it costs to run my house for nearly six months.

Are you sure that's not having an adverse effect on energy prices?

Why does that even matter, a rich guy travelling in a private jet uses more energy compared to you travelling in commercial jet, does that mean we should ban private jets?

In other words, the metaphor is bad.

By that logic business class should be banned because business class customers get preferential access compared to economy customers and they use more energy.

Don’t believe everything you hear on the internet. The vast majority of these articles lead to Mora et al which has been thoroughly debunked.

Facilitating certain types of illegal transactions. Ex, Sanctions evasions for the average Moe, online illicit substance transactions between complete strangers. So I would guess the crux of your statement is actually the “worth doing” part.

I respect your position but I respectfully disagree.

1. Filecoin: It was well-motivated from the start, to provide a cheap way to get counterparties (by default, a multiple of six) to pin content in IPFS. I don't regard it as a proven technology yet, but it's usable as it stands;

2. Brave's BATs: Brave annoys me with its cryptocoin boosterism, but in principle this provides an way for content providers to profit from gaining a readership that doesn't involve nasty ad-tech. I don't think the system provides good enough incentives for users to mint BATS as it stands, but I think that in principle the Brave team have a viable solution to this problem.

3. The Stellar payments infrastructure has a cryptocoin used to grease its wheels. I don't see Stellar's choice to mint their own cryptocoin as principled here (they could have allowed nodes to choose), but using some cryptocoin here is driven by use.

None of these coins use Bitcoin / present-day Ethereum style proof of work, so they do not appear to have the negative externalities you deplore.

Is there any reason this needs to be on a public blockchain? What are the benefits? Why is this a better solution than Brave keeping points/payments data in their own database?

The use of crypto here has the same reason as use of crypto almost anywhere else, to sidestep regulations and liabilities. Doesn't matter whether those regulations are there for very good reason.

That might work in a jurisdiction where the trade in cryptocurrency is illegal but its possession is allowed, but I can't imagine a US or European court would take that argument seriously when crypto has a demonstrable market value. The court would almost certainly treat crypto like a commodity in that case. Wheat doesn't have KYC requirements, but if you knowingly and demonstrably facilitate wheat trades on behalf of a sanctioned entity, you can expect some legal trouble.

Cf. e.g., from 2018, https://thenextweb.com/news/brave-blockchain-cryptocurrency-...

Blockchains are interesting, they're useful sometimes.

I think there is lots of utility in the space, even if BTC isn't it. My Urbit ship that gives me control of my own data is only partly related (but very useful) in that Urbit IDs are put on Ethereum because it works as a good ledger of ownership and stops floods of spam taking over communities.

A frequent companion of anti-crypto arguments is inflation is good. As a tool for goading humans into behavior like destroying the planet with overconsumption (oddly enough the same flavor of argument anti-crypto people use against crypto), I don't believe inflation is a good. I'd love to have open, curious discussions around this but it never happens. People just say inflation is good because otherwise people would stuff their mattresses and not eat.

We should eat only when we need to and spend conscientiously. Inflation is not a positive force for these two maxims. Somehow that idea has turned into heresy.

Of course, the externality is shoved on ALL of us with worsening environment, climate crisis, higher cost of electronics to do *real* work (no, your 10^15 hashes where -1+10^15 are thrown out IS NOT REAL WORK).

I hope EVERY shitcoin peddler loses everything.

Shitcoins are climate-destroying ponzi schemes. They're a negative-sum that the world ends poorer with the more they're made/generated/mined.

One person buys a Bitcoin that another person sold, which is zero sum. But miners burned real energy paid with not-Bitcoin to process it, thus value exits the system. Thus it is negative sum.

I do understand your point though I think. Waste in general is bad.

You don't need to mine more aluminum if you're able to use recycled aluminum in your products. And Apple does.

So Apple is perhaps not the best choice of a company to pick on in this particular part of the argument.

However, the main point was that I don't want to deal with them, and under normal circumstances I could just ignore the relatively minimal interactions I have with them.

But because I am effectively fighting back against /their/ externalities affecting me I have to seek them out. To learn about their hobbies, to find out about what it is they are doing.

Then it's a case of discussing wether the power consumption is worth it.

So far in this thread all that anyone's come up with is "because I might want to send money to someone that my government has banned money transfers to".

I have previously asked elsewhere and got a load of answers which fall into the "technically can be made on the blockchain, but can be done far more efficiently and effectively using exisint tech", eg. carbon credit trading, and (rather surprisingly) "publishing a website".

The jackass was boasting that he’d bought a graphics card from a scalper and was so happy he could mine Etherium. I told him I didn’t want to hear about it.

Are you honestly blaming cryptocurrencies for climate change, inflation and Russia‘s war against Ukraine? That’s crazy.

Climate change is a long running issue that started waaay before Bitcoin even was invented. Still projects other than Bitcoin are working hard to implement staking to use much less energy.

Inflation is an issue brought on us by Western governments drowning in debt for decades: For wars in Afghanistan and the middle east, unsustainable social security systems, stimulus packages.

And Russia … Putin and his supporters have finally come to terms with the fact it lost its super power Status and in a peaceful manner make the most of their vast and empty territory.

No, I don't think you understood what I wrote.

> Climate change is a long running issue that started waaay before Bitcoin even was invented.

What's your point here? Climate change has been around for ages so it's OK to blow a load of electricity on something that's not particularly useful?

> Still projects other than Bitcoin are working hard to implement staking to use much less energy.

Bitcoin isn't though, and Ethereum has been 6 months away for what, more than two years? They may never change. In the mean time it's blasting through a shit-ton of power for little to no actual value. Happy for people to stop burning through that power and pick up their hobby again when the power usage has been sorted out.

> Inflation is an issue brought on us by Western governments drowning in debt for decades: For wars in Afghanistan and the middle east, unsustainable social security systems, stimulus packages.

Power companies are literally putting their prices up because of a shortage of sources of power. "It's OK if we use all this power because governments are also bad" is kinda ridiculous.

> And Russia … Putin and his supporters have finally come to terms with the fact it lost its super power Status and in a peaceful manner make the most of their vast and empty territory.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here, that Putin invading Ukraine is making the most if it's vast and empty territory?

So shall we stop inventing technology that draws power because it’s bad for the environment? I mean Bitcoin isn’t consuming electricity just for fun. People use Bitcoin and that’s why it consumes power. Like people using air conditioning, fridges, washing machines and cars. Furthermore, the raw KWh figure the Bitcoin network is consuming (which AFAIK currently is unknown because miners moved all around the globe in the last couple of years) is not a useful measure of its green house gas emissions as we don’t know how it’s energy is created. It could well be on renewables by large percentage as they are cheaper in some countries (e.g. hydroelectricity in Norway) and mining is expensive.

> Power companies are literally putting their prices up because of a shortage of sources of power.

Price surges among some goods are not inflation but simply an indication of scarcity. Power scarcity affects Bitcoin as much as other sectors of the economy. Price surges across all economic sectors are inflation. BTW: It’s the inflationary policies of the FED and its equivalents creating cheap money and driving the investment bubbles … including the crypto bubble. If you‘re angry about the crypto craze put the blame also on the current monetary regime.

> I don't understand what you're trying to say here, that Putin invading Ukraine is making the most if it's vast and empty territory?

I was referring to parent‘s blame of the Ukrainian war on cryptos. It’s not the fault of crypto heads that Putin invaded its neighboring country and caused gasoline and electricity prices to rise. BTW: It’s probably not even Putin‘s fault alone. Government regulations to support the transition to renewable energy sources have been pushing prices up for electricity and gasoline already for years, at least in Europe.

Not exactly for fun, but sort of: frivolously, needlessly, and with an arms race dynamic: Put in 1000x more energy, and you get - exactly the same result, because the algorithm adjusted the Proof of Waste to make it 1000x more wasteful.

That wasn't my argument. My argument was that Bitcoin etc. are bad because of the power they consume when as far as I can tell almost all of what happens on these blockchains can be done far more efficiently and faster on existing technology, or in the case of transactions, existing banking infrastructure.

> People use Bitcoin and that’s why it consumes power.

I don't doubt it, it would be nice if they owned their externalities so I could stop being angry with them for it.

> Like people using air conditioning, fridges, washing machines and cars.

Things that we (realistically in modern society) need. The alternative to, for instance, washing machines would be to hand-wash clothes.

We don't need Bitcoin. It hasn't enabled anything that couldn't be done already using the banking system, or with existing non-power abusive technology.

> Furthermore, the raw KWh figure the Bitcoin network is consuming (which AFAIK currently is unknown because miners moved all around the globe in the last couple of years) is not a useful measure of its green house gas emissions as we don’t know how it’s energy is created. It could well be on renewables by large percentage as they are cheaper in some countries (e.g. hydroelectricity in Norway) and mining is expensive.

Worldwide power generation is a zero-sum game. There is limited power generation available each day. Right now even though we're trying to move to renewable or green energy, there is not enough of that to power what we need through renewables alone so we use fossil fuel.

If you removed the blockchain load from that system you could reduce the fossil fuel burn by approximately one whole country per day of load.

It doesn't matter where the generation comes from, using any of it to power what is effectively a pointless distrubuted heater is removing our ability to shift away from fossil fuels.

> I was referring to parent‘s blame of the Ukrainian war on cryptos.

Once again, that's not what I wrote. Ukraine is at war with Russia. Much of the rest of the world is at war with Russia by proxy, because most of the rest of the world is sick of Putin's bullshit.

Putin is making shit loads of money from selling Gas to Europe, especially Germany.

If we instead of running PoW blockchains, and used the far more efficient existing banking infrastructure, we could almost completely shut off all of Germany's gas from Russia (at least that portion used to generate electricity), significantly weakening his position.

It's a zero sum game. We're using renewable electricity to power bitcoin so we have to use fossil fuel for other stuff.

Plus, the whole "bitcoin runs on renewables" thing isn't entirely true https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...

> Government regulations to support the transition to renewable energy sources have been pushing prices up for electricity and gasoline already for years, at least in Europe.

I'm pretty sure renewables are actually cheaper to produce than fossil fuels.

The advantage of Bitcoin may seem questionable if you believe dependency on central banking is fine and hedging against financial risks of traditional banks is silly. But mind you there are many people in the world without access to stable banking services.

> If we instead of running PoW blockchains, and used the far more efficient existing banking infrastructure, we could almost completely shut off all of Germany's gas from Russia (at least that portion used to generate

Come on, the number of Bitcoin miners in Germany might approach zero. Energy is way too expensive there. Miners operate in countries with access to cheap energy (which could be coal like in China but also renewables like in Norway). There may be validation modes in Germany but those draw much less power than a mining facility that append to the ledger. So Putin wouldn’t even notice if Central Europe would be shutting down the Bitcoin network.

And do you know what services had similar energy consumption in the past and nobody cared? Peer to peer file sharing like Bitorrent. Running seeding nodes 24/7 or your desktop computer for days just to download illegal copies of movies and software was not exactly environmentally friendly either. Can’t remember any outrage about that. While it’s valid to criticize Bitcoin‘s energy consumption it is not completely out of place and not without precedent.

> I'm pretty sure renewables are actually cheaper to produce than fossil fuels.

Yes, they‘re cheap to produce but very expensive to distribute. Germany e.g. heavily subsidized renewables in the past making electricity very expensive here (AFAIR even one of the most expensive in the world). The most economic renewable currently is hydroelectric power where you also can regulate power generation in response to demands.

But that wasn’t my point. I was just arguing Bitcoin is not a significant contributing factor to rising electricity costs.

> Worldwide power generation is a zero-sum game. There is limited power generation available each day. … It's a zero sum game.

No, that’s not how markets work and energy markets neither. If demand rises energy producers react by increasing production, if demand falls they lower production. If demand rises long-term, they invest in more production facilities. That, of course, takes time so prices will rise temporarily but still creating an incentive to invest. If Bitcoin miners manage to leverage renewables they might actually encourage a net production rise of renewable energy.

BTW: The Bitcoin network‘s power consumption is not fixed either, it depends on the network load and the number of miners competing with each other. At the peak of the bubble it may be much higher than on average. The next crypto winter is likely to come soon and then power consumption goes back to normal. Until the next crypto craze competing networks will hopefully have switched over to Proof-Of-Stake successfully.

Source? I am pretty sure that is not the case. Not by a mile. You don't seem to understand the scale of PoW energy waste.

This is pretty shallow thinking. I’m sure the traditional banking system uses orders of magnitude more energy than crypto, but you don’t hear about that cause the “studies” about crypto energy use are funded by people who benefit from maintaining the status quo. In fact, you will notice most of the studies critical of Bitcoin focus on how much ENERGY it uses as opposed to its fossil fuel usage and greenhouse gas emissions. This is likely intentional.

Big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter probably use more energy than Bitcoin too, and it is debatable how much of what they do actually creates value in the world.

The U.S. military is one of the largest polluters in the world, and Congress nearly unanimously gives them hundreds of billions of dollars every year with very little debate or scrutiny or oversight.

The waste of natural resources and energy will not disappear just because crypto goes away. If anything, crypto will actually help SOLVE the problem sooner by creating real economic incentives to use cheaper and cleaner energy. Some estimates say that over 60% of Bitcoin mining now uses renewable energy, and it is trending in the right direction [1].

> So far no-one has been able to point me at a single thing that public public blockchains do that either is worth doing and is only possible using blockchain tech

“Worth doing” is subjective so that’s a non sequitur, but I will give you something blockchains do that is only possible using blockchain tech: they allow control over the supply of money without a central authority. Separation of money and state, if you will. Some may scoff at this idea, but currency debasement has contributed to the collapse of many empires and governments in history [2] so the importance of this invention should not be understated.

[1] https://bitcoinminingcouncil.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/... I’m aware this study may also be biased in a similar way as the ones mentioned earlier, but it at least includes the methodology and sources.

[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/currency-and-the-collapse-o...

Do you understand how markets work? What's disincentivizing the current energy users from seeking out cheaper and cleaner energy? Why would we have to invent a new coal-chugging[1] ponzi scheme to kick off that search?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...

> This is pretty shallow thinking. I’m sure the traditional banking system uses orders of magnitude more energy than crypto, but you don’t hear about that cause the “studies” about crypto energy use are funded by people who benefit from maintaining the status quo.

The people who benefit from the status quo (ie. regular banks) are pretty much everyone in the world who has a bank account and does transactions. That's a lot of people.

Bitcoin (ignoring eth and others for the moment here) might use half (not orders of magnitude) as much energy as the regular banking system (eg. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/research%3A-bitcoin-consumes...), but it services far far more people than bitcoin does.

Bitcoin handles (I'm googling these) 4.6 transactions per second, Visa somewhere between 1700 and 65k per second (https://www.visa.co.uk/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/vis...), depending on where you look, and that's just Visa, that's ignoring all the other banking systems out there.

You could roll those BTC transactions into the current banking system and the power usage of the regular banking system would hardly budge. You could save one half of the banking systems entire power usage by transacting using the banking system instead of bitcoin.

> In fact, you will notice most of the studies critical of Bitcoin focus on how much ENERGY it uses as opposed to its fossil fuel usage and greenhouse gas emissions. This is likely intentional.

Yes, because right now we are struggling to migrate off fossil fuel. This is a zero sum game, there is a limited amount of electricity we can generate right now, if you use some of the green energy to bitcoin it means you use fossil fuel for other things. If you use fossil fuel for bitcoin you can use the green energy for other things.

Removing the power usage of bitcoin means you can scale down the energy required by the system, and you can choose where that scaled down energy comes from. I suggest it should be taken from the slice of fossil fuel energy that is being generated.

> Big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter probably use more energy than Bitcoin too, and it is debatable how much of what they do actually creates value in the world.

It depends what you mean by value, but lots of things use energy create "value". Some things (facebook for example) can't be done without the web, servers etc. Some things (for example financial transactinos) can be done using existing technologies OR vastly wasteful tech such as bitcoin. There's a choice there.

> The U.S. military is one of the largest polluters in the world, and Congress nearly unanimously gives them hundreds of billions of dollars every year with very little debate or scrutiny or oversight.

Look at that bad thing, because that bad thing is allowed to exist so should the bad thing I care about!

> The waste of natural resources and energy will not disappear just because crypto goes away. If anything, crypto will actually help SOLVE the problem sooner by creating real economic incentives to use cheaper and cleaner energy. Some estimates say that over 60% of Bitcoin mining now uses renewable energy, and it is trending in the right direction [1].

See the previous reply about energy generation being zero sum.

The fact remains, that wherever the electricity for Bitcoin et. al. comes from, it's using about one countries worth of electricity, and if it wasn't, if the things that were being done using bitcoin were being done in a more efficient way using existing tech, that renewably electricity could be used to offset the fossil fuel generated energy.

> > So far no-one has been able to point me at a single thing that public public blockchains do that either is worth doing and is only possible using blockchain tech

> “Worth doing” is subjective so that’s a non sequitur, but I will give you something blockchains do that is only possible using blockchain tech: they allow control over the supply of money without a central authority.

Why is that bad though? There's good reasons why it makes sense to control what a countries money is worth, for instance controlling inflation.

> Separation of money and state, if you will. Some may scoff at this idea, but currency debasement has contributed to the collapse of many empires and governments in history [2] so the importance of this invention should not be understated.

Why is Separation of money and state something we want to aim for? It's certainly not going to stop currency debasement given that you still have to transfer bitcoin into something else to spend it (for most normal people/regular transactions), and at 4.6 transactions per second (at a cost of one half of a ragular banking systems power) you certainly can't use it to buy a loaf of bread directly (ignoring gas fees entirely).

You also have to compare it against what its competing against, all those fancy bank buildings with 24.7 lights and ac, the staff to mantain the paper trail (their commutes, etc), the vast security forces and militaries there to secure it (military being the largest polluter), etc.

From what I understand, the growth of the network, especially when it piggy backs on layer two networks like the lightning network for btc means 99% of the transactions can operate in a non proof of work method costing little more than the servers used to run a popular website.

Its still sooooo early. The tech will evolve and competition is fierce for the best solutions. So long we dont try to regulate it to death and protect the status quo, its going to evolve in ways we are yet to imagine.

I've seen several comments in this thread comparing BTC's energy consumption to that of the world's militaries; is this a new crypto meme?

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but we would still need police and the military even if the world only used cryptocurrency. The irreversibility of crypto transactions increases the ROI of crime, so I think we would need more police and larger militaries in that world. Also, non-financial crime and interstate conflict exists.

But that'll just mean more and more opportunity for PoliceCoin and WarCoin, so maybe it's actually sound monetary policy.

So “be calm bro, why so angry?” no longer seems like a legitimate criticism. If you want people to not be angry don’t build technologies that are highly destructive and cause immense harm.

Other arguments seem to be of the form “sure the last 35 cryptocurrencies didn’t do anything meaningful but number 36 and 37 are different I swear”. At some point even radical skepticism is a reasoned reaction.

Bitcoin is literally destroying the world and it’s main proven applications are facilitating illegal transactions. I wouldn’t be opposed to governments banning the thing on account of the fact it intentionally makes it impossible to adequately regulate digital transactions for fraud. This seems like it would be a reasonable response to the excessive firestorm of ransom ware that seems to be the only transaction that can reasonably pay the Bitcoin fees.

You misunderstand me. They can be angry all day long. My point isn't that they shouldn't be angry, but rather that it makes me doubt that their rationale is balanced.

>Bitcoin is literally destroying the world

That's true for damn near everything we do. Everything from cars, to space travel to computing to doing laundry.

> firestorm of ransom ware

And the internet brings an endless stream of viruses, spam, malware, hacking etc yet somehow people can accept that tradeoff just fine.

Few new technologies are pure positive only, or risk free, or awesome straight from the start.

Yould be pretty angry with people who started taking dumps in your backyard, you wouldn't consider yourself unbalanced to feel anger at that right?

Bitcoin is taking a metaphorical dump in my backyard and I'm angry about it. We're likely to blow past the 1.5°C climate target soon, it was too high anyway, we'll probably blow past 2, and I've got two kids who I don't want to die due to food shortages caused by the bad weather, or wars caused by food shortages.

Why bitcoin and not <list of things that use power>? Because Bitcoin etc. don't give us anything. Nothing. No-one can point at anything these things are good for. No-one in this thread, no-one before when I've asked.

Shit in your own backyard.

Many bad things don't die on their own; we have to fight them to the end.

(We're slowly coming out of a global pandemic which was quite "devoid of merit", for instance, but it didn't recede on its own.)

The author doesn’t want to wait it out because the cost to society in terms of wasted energy and support of bad actors is too high. He notes that he evolved into this position. At first he th out it was just silly. Then silly and annoying. Now just bad.

Looking from the outside, all the ones which matter seem to use PoW systems.

> and others are going to switch away from PoW (such as ethereum).

I've been hearing that for years, and it's always six months away.

"hearing" doesn't really mean much since random people can say whatever, but the switch to PoS has never been claimed to be 6 months away until this year. You're probably confused with the beacon chain with successfully launched in 2020.

Not sure this is the right metric, but you can see that the top of the list seem to represent the bulk of all crypto currencies. And if you want to include Tether, it’s apparently based on Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains.

Bitcoin is proof of work, and is showing no sign of switching to something else. Ethereum is proof of work, and hasn’t switched to proof of stake yet. I mean the tech is ostensibly there, but last I checked the merge still didn’t happen. Even if it was just those two, I would not dare call them "some crypto currencies" like they were marginal. Bitcoin and Ethereum, aren’t marginal, they’re basically the majority all by themselves.

Also, I’m not sure how trustworthy proof of stake actually is. I’ll believe it when Ethereum actually implements it at scale.

There you go. Some cryptocurrencies will survive once the regulatory framework is more clearer and settles in which will result in most the useless ones and non-compliant ones withering away.

That is the most likely outcome rather than the maximalists believing all of them succeeding or the skeptics like the one in this article believing all of them being destroyed. We've have examples like introducing KYC/AML checks for the exchanges, then unregistered ICOs were made illegal in the US (other countries to follow). It still did not put an end to crypto.

Next will be the exchanges delisting privacy coins and the likely regulation of stable-coins.

And in the mean time it's chewing through energy and uselessly adding carbon to the atmosphere. Blockchain's use case is generally the conditions of needing both (a) an append-only log and (b) being distributed/decentralized. I don't think there are that many places where it'd be of use.

I try to raise awareness of NIST's Blockchain Technology Overview, which is a good explainer:

* https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final

See especially Figure 6 ("p. 42", 53 of the PDF), which is a flow chart to help you decide on whether blockchain may match one's use case. Extracted:

* https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed

But we unfortunately now also have blockchain tied together with the notion of "money", and so folks are going bonkers over it (à la tulips and Beanie Babies).

An idea can take a long time before people stop practicing it, during which does a lot of damage: it's been 70 years and we're still stuck with car-centric/dependent suburbs.

I believe this top comment reveals the real reason why many technologists actually hate cryptocurrency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31356579#31356857

If cryptocurrencies can even be called "technology".

I have enough skills to implement a crypto currency from scratch. Some building blocks there are impressive and very useful: public key signatures, hashes. _Maybe_ ciphers and polynomial hashes as well. Those things I cannot design though I did implemented from specs (it was a ton of work). But as we all know, those blocks existed long before cryptocurrencies, and have lots of other uses.

Then you have the chained hash, which is basically a degenerated form of Merkle trees (patented in 1979) that look like a Git commit history. Git was first published in 2005, Bitcoin first appeared in 2008. Then you have proof of work (some computation that is hard to do, but easy to verify), which was an established technique before Y2K.

In the end, the one idea Bitcoin introduced that may not be obvious is this idea of a "longest chain", based on proof of work. We have proof of stake as well, but for now I’m waiting for Ethereum to implement it at scale to believe in it (right now most transactions happen in proof of work).

It’s a stretch to call that "technology".

The chance is actually 100%, because future national currencies will be "cryptographic" tokens. Think of it for 2 sec: is there a government on earth that would say no to a financial system where you can track (poor) citizens' money down to the last penny, always and forever? There's your answer...

I'm not certain, unfortunately. But I'm hoping.

I’m not certain it’s a disaster and I don’t hope for its failure. But I’m against it like I’m against best buy warranties or whole life insurance.

They are bad things that shouldn’t exist and no one should buy them.

Bring on the homeopathy! It hasn't died yet so it must have merit.

Exactly as a chance of meeting a dinosaur on your street today? What a coincidence.