Could say that about social media or video games.

Unlike video games, maximizing energy waste is the goal of proof-of-work. The more energy wasted, the more money you make. It's an engine of conspicuous consumption, which makes it more dangerous than any leisurely pastime where energy is merely an input.

You just said it, it is money.

It's not wasted any more than it is wasted when you play a game or watch a youtube video or TV. It's just a use of energy which you are trying to make as somehow bad. It's just a cultural preference.

No, because if someone invents a way to power YouTube free of energy, that would be awesome, and it wouldn't detract in any way from the value of YouTube.

But if someone worked out a way to generate BitCoin for free without any energy input, that would destroy BitCoin, because it depends on proof of work, where work is defined as consuming energy.

So that makes it intrinsically bad? What is acceptable vs unacceptable uses of energy? Esp. when we're not talking about food production or medicine

Well, it's wasted in the sense that bitcoin could switch to proof-of-stake and use much less energy.

I believe proof of work is terrible environmentally speaking.

But what it brings (decentralization) is well worth all the negative sides anyway.

Bitcoin is extremely centralized. Every transaction is recorded in a centralized ledger. That ledger may be distributed, but that's not the same thing as being decentralized.

There's nothing preventing anyone from mining blocks, either individually or in a pool, and broadcasting newly found blocks to the network to be permanently and uncensorably added to the ledger.

> maximizing energy waste is the goal of proof-of-work

No, it's not. You can't mine inefficiently and remain profitable. There's a market after all.

This is such a ridiculous comment. I have to wonder why we have such gleeful wilful ignorance whenever the topic of Bitcoin or crypto comes up.

Speak only of your own willful ignorance. Nobody said anything about inefficiency; ASICs are extremely efficient at wasting energy. The point that Bitcoin proponents refuse to admit is that, unlike other systems, making the components more efficient does not reduce the energy consumption of the system, because energy consumption is the purpose of this system.

Even worse, it puts a floor on the price of energy, which disincentives everyone else from seeking more efficient solutions to power production, because all that efficiency will be wasted by proof-of-work anyway. We as a species will never have free energy, and this is the reason.

While the sibling comment has answered on why this is nothing like social media or video games, I do wish that the energy cost of these activities was taken into account more often. Video games in particular have become massively wasteful. Just downloading these 100GB behemoths expends useless energy. And everyone is pushing for 8K 172FPS games. Why? Just why?

And yes, before you answer, that applies to any hobby you can think of. You won't be astute by pointing out that e.g., car enthusiasts are similarly wasteful.

Because its fun?

How is a game running at 144 FPS more "fun" than one running at 60 FPS?

When energy is stored in the height of water, if you don't turn it into electricity and let the water flow freely then it will turn itself into waste heat.

And the water miraculously makes that heat without chewing up fab capacity that could be used on cancer research or whatever.

Fab capacity responds to market demand. It's not a fixed supply, outside of the short run.

It's good enough from a demand perspective.

Chips are not made after lunch until evening. They are made weeks and month ahead

Long term demand for chips will result in more fabs and make things slightly cheaper for everyone.

Bitcoin demand is a bit erratic so maybe it's more negative than positive, but it's definitely not all bad.

It's all bad.

The chip shortage last year which affected cars, roof window, refrigerator etc were also affected by ASIC production for Bitcoin miners

That's the short term. In the longer term it leads to more asic capacity.

It's possible that without Bitcoin production in the many years leading up to 2020 the supply crunch would have been worse.

Also remember that a huge chunk was based on GPUs and those don't mine Bitcoin, they mine other things.

Those Asics basically have been made and will be thrown in the trash.

And the only thing they ever did was guessing a hash.

Our economy needs enough chips without demand from Bitcoin. The only thing this did was making it more expensive for everyone.

Do you not think supply and demand applies to building chip fabs, or something? And economies of scale?

I'm serious when I say that if there was less asic demand in 2015 and 2018, no matter what the asics were for, that might have reduced the asic capacity in 2021 enough to make the problems we had even worse.

"might".

Fabs (especially the ones who can build the chips we talk about) are not build on a crypto hype and also not build short-term.

The worry about whether it's stable enough is valid but bitcoin asics are long term.

So are you saying if the government wanted to subsidize chip development and had these choices:

A) Make resistive element chips out of wafers and all the normal complex chip patterning, using up the fab side of things and wafer space

B) Subsidize custom chip molecular simulation accelerators for cancer research, by providing the fab side of things and wafer space to design researchers or companies

A is as good as B?

No. Why do you think I'm saying that?

I'm saying that over the course of several years, A is better for chip advancement and availability than nothing at all. And in the real world it's A+B vs. just B, the same amount of B in both scenarios.

I'm not aware of Bitcoin reducing any cancer research budgets anywhere. Are you?

This would be like the government proposing buying up a big portion of argricultural tractors and running hours on them until their engines wear out, in order to help the economy make more tractors. Cash for clunkers without the environmental rationale.

That would be bad because of the CO2 emissions and because it's a huge waste of government money.

It would not be bad for long-term tractor availability, if they kept up big purchases for many years. Especially if tractors were a hotbed of research and improving by orders of magnitude.

Or to put it another way: It's a hugely inefficient way of boosting tractors, but it will in fact boost tractors. It's not a good idea overall, but it will have some positives.

This is written like the construction of a hydroelectric dam on an intermediate point at any elevation change in a river is an inevitable law of nature... ?

It's a choice whether to build a dam or not, but that choice will not change the amount of heat generated.

You could put that power to better use, but if you don't have something lined up then the waste of idle turbines bypassed by water is just as bad as the waste of mining bitcoins.

Hydro dams typically store water uphill for later. If you use it now, it's not there to use later.

In the case of a 'stranded' dam, there isn't likely to be a reason to generate power either now or later, so you might as well run BTC generation. I suspect this has been the motivation to build an awful lot of 'stranded' hydro dams, though...

You can store water in the short term. The long term view is simpler. The storage will eventually fill up if you're not using all the power, and at that point you either find a use or you dump the excess water and cause just as much waste heat.

Hm idk if that accurately describes what’s happening here, because people are buying that “waste heat”. Agree or disagree about BTC, a market exists.

Check your financial privilege buddy. You may think that because you get paid in the world reserve currency with low inflation. Others are not as lucky, and this won't always be the case. Heard about de-dolloraziation?

Whatever you get paid in, you can convert the money into whatever currency you feel like afterwards. (Unless your country has weird capital or exchange rate controls, of course.)

Perhaps you meant something else?

I'm honestly not sure if this is rhetoric that's coming from the point of view of like a die-hard cryptocurrency true believer free market US libertarian, or somebody that's fully on board with the Russian and Venezuelan governments' stated anti-dollar perspective on global economics.

The whole globe should be Anti-dollar (and anti-government money from any country)! What gives the US the right to the global reserve currency and the power to export inflation?

And Bitcoin is so stable and international accepted and not able to be attacked by a 50% attack that it's better to use in a crisis than gold and food?

Have you seen someone trading worthless money into BTC in a crisis? No you have not.

Either you keep Bitcoin and start really using it globally or this argument is wrong.

And you can see in El Salvador how bad it is.

Stability is an illusion. Everything is fluctuating in value every day. Some would argue that given bitcoin's fixed supply, it could be an asset against which everything else value can be measured accurately. An economical measuring stick, if you will.

> International accepted

Yes, except China!

> 50% attack

Buddy are you still in 2013?

> Crisis

Yes, there are some accounts of people fleeing the Ukraine war with their savings in a USB stick, Bitcoin sure is great in a time of crisis where criminals would be on the look out for shiny metal!

> start really using bitcoin..

What are you talking about? I'm using Bitcoin right now! I use it every day especially when I am soundly asleep knowing that my Bitcoin is safe and my purchasing power will grow in the long term.

> El Salvador

El Hodlador knows what long term means.

Hard to argue if you don't bring proof or anything.

51% is still possible. See the last Blogpost about it on hn 1-3 weeks ago.

El Salvadors people are suffering under Bitcoin.

And yes pls tell me how you actually use BTC on a daily basis.

Given your username, one would assume that you know the 3 uses of a money. But you know what they about assume-ing. I use bitcoin on a daily basis for the most important usage of a money - store of value.

An accessible store of value/trade that isn't controlled by a powerful state like US whose interests aren't really the best for humanity.

If that's not good for society, I don't know what is.

Oh how about saving CO2? Because climate change will be even more expensive.

Or creating or just using your own currency?

There are a lot more good options than shitcoins

Climate change will be expensive regardless of "shitcoins".

Those "shitcoins" at least pave a way to take power from large entities whose best interest isn't saving world's climate, doing more good than harm indirectly.