The issue most people have with Bitcoin is about it's value. It uses tremendous amounts of energy for what most people perceive as little to no tangible return, and the view is that we could use the same energy (and maintain the same "technological advancement" as you put it) for more valuable purposes; things essential to our survival both on an individual level (warmth/cooling, food, shelter) and as a species (accelerating our move to renewables, protected biodiversity, enabling simulations for improvements in medicine and the like).
Your argument seems to be against a fictitious opponent, or one at the extreme end of the normal distribution. Very few if any are campaigning against only reducing energy usage. Most are campaigning for a redistribution of Bitcoins energy consumption, about 0.55% of global production, to accelerate our technological progress.
Minor and probably distant concern. All forms of energy usage have losses, mostly heat. If consumption keeps going up forever, then at some point the accumulated generated heat will become a problem on itself. But let’s solve the more present matters first.
Why? Do you think every additional watt of energy will make us happier? The countries using the most energy per capita are gulf countries like Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE. The population there is 10-20% residents, the rest are quasi-slaves living in awful conditions (hopefully you heard about what they did for the World Cup).
> Do you know how we can measure the technological advancement of a civilization? By how much energy they have at their disposal ready to use.
Again, is the middle-eastern civilization more advanced? Most of them are still monarchies.
We already live in an energy-abundant society. Making more energy will not solve the underlying problems of it.
What did they do? I mean, besides the ridiculous Guardian article claiming unrealistically low death rates among immigrant workers. (discussed on HN earlier at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30930117)
> the rest are quasi-slaves living in awful conditions
How would you describe the much worse lives of those people in their countries of origin?
I was born in one of those countries, and personally know people who have made the choice to work in these counties. Do understand that people are not choosing to be quasi slaves because their lives are better as quasi slaves. No, more often it's a choice to create better lives for their families, and sometimes rarely it's a choice by their parents to ship off one out of their seven children to generate income. This quasi slavery is only possible through the insane arbitrage generated by petrodollars, and because we only selectively choose to be morally outraged at human rights violation only when it's done by the villain of the week.
Reminds me of people that were sure the Internet wouldn't go anywhere in the 80s. Technologies don't have to necessarily be useful on day 1 or even 1000 to be eventually successful.
Sun’s mass is 2e30 kg. E=mc^2 gives you max energy. (2e30 * 9e16).
Assume we start with one joule this year. Each year increasing energy output by 5%.
How long will it take till we use-up whole sun?
ln(2e30 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 2230 years
How long till we use up whole milky way? (Around 1.15e12 solar masses)
ln(2e30 * 1.15e12 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 2799
How long till we use-up whole universe? (10e53 kg)
ln(10e53 * 9e16)/ln(1.05) = 3348 years
Our potential is not limitless, exponential growth is not sustainable even on universe’s scale. Eventually we will reach hard wall.
2. Crypto heating (mining and poW) is very inefficient use of resource (as in, percentage of planet using crypto vs percent of total energy required for it). Not a smart thing for humanity to do.
3. Energy being limited, makes it shared resource. Crypto heating raises energy prices for others.
I am more and more frustrated with the energy angle of crypto. We live on a technological world that consumes energy, everything has an energy cost. The goal for an advanced civilization is not reduce energy usage, but make it cheaper, cleaner and more abundant! Why does people complaining about "0.5% of world energy usage" think we're researching fusion energy? So we can stop consuming it?
It's such a populist and uninformed argument that drives me up the wall. We can discuss the pros and cons of PoW and PoS, but using the "it consumes as much as X country" argument is intellectually dishonest and pushes forward a particular agenda. How much energy does porn use? Video games? Advertising? Spam? Space heaters? Surely we could do without them and consume even less energy.
Do you know how we can measure the technological advancement of a civilization? By how much energy they have at their disposal ready to use. [1] Not by how much energy they have saved.
We all hate climate change, let's push for cleaner energy instead of glorifying idiotic energy reduction slogans. If governments were to put a tax on energy generation from fossil fuels, crypto miners will be the first to set up hydro and solar plants to run their GPUs. Because mining makes only sense if you can get cheap energy, otherwise it's unprofitable. But that's a more nuanced and intellectual argument than "Bitcoin warms the planet!" and doesn't fit as nicely on a top-voted comment on a forum.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale