Since you chose to post this request here and not on the thread about playing chess with sed, I suspect you are imagining some form of real world effect from the energy expenditure from people doing this. I think that lacks a sense of perspective, a better approach would be to consider the change in state of the world after an extended period of expected use of the approach. Considering the considerable lack of practicality of calculating in Bitcoin (and indeed playing chess in SED) the expected use is negligible and consequently the impact would also be negligible.
[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492...
The same goes for any stock in the S&P 500. Market Cap is just a number.
We don't ration energy usage to the bare essentials in free countries. That's the sort of thing that people attempt to escape.
As with many things, there is not a single 'right' or wrong, but degrees of evidence. Highlighting current chain inefficiencies allows future versions to better mitigate these energy impacts. Honing any process to use less energy while achieving similar or better results is not an unreasonable goal.
Re: your first point, am I right to understand that entities that are able to afford higher usage should have no qualms doing so?
"Peer-reviewed" is meaningless if it's not scientific, fact-based.
> articles on current waste
See, you start with the assumption that it's wasted. You can only come to that conclusion if you assume that bitcoin serves little or no purpose.
> Honing any process to use less energy while achieving similar or better results is not an unreasonable goal.
Energy usage is what brought humanity from stone tools and caves to the moon, using energy is a good thing that advances civilization. Energy production can be problematic, which bitcoin doesn't do. Proof of work is one of the core innovations, there is no system that has better results.
Both can be accounted for: would you not rather see a version where these issues are accounted for? PoS is a sure way forward, but there are still many legacy chains around that do not benefit from this [0].
[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
No, PoS is a total failure. As it is not tied to reality the history of the ledger can be modified at will. There is no independent way of knowing which chain is the "real" one. There is no independent way of knowing which "validators" are valid. You can not leave the network and rejoin and be sure about the history without trusting some third party. This is the problem that PoW solved and PoS doesn't.
I wish people would just be honest and say yes, it's absurd and wasteful, but I think it'll make me rich so I don't care.
The scale is mind boggling.
I don’t perceive bitcoin as useless. I think the energy usage is way out of scale. POW is elegant solution to building the system, but the logical conclusion is that it ends up taking massive industry scale resources only catering to small to midsize industry. It’s economically viable only in the narrow sense that we don’t anticipate the true longterm costs of energy spent.
That's a fair assumption, but personally I find it absurd to think that a global open permissionless trustless non-censorable payment system will not keep growing. I think that's an expression of the financial privilege rich people in secure, wealthy countries without any financial problems have.
> That’s true, but then so does Google, Youtube, Facebook, Amazon, the cruise industry, Christmas lights, household drying machines, private jets, the zinc industry, and basically any other sizable platform or industry. From that list, Bitcoin’s energy usage is the closest to that of the cruise industry’s energy usage, but bitcoins are used by more people, and the network scales far better. If people were 10% more efficient at shutting off their electronic devices when not using them, then that alone would save more energy than the global Bitcoin network uses.
Why would it be less economically viable with scale? As Bitcoin increases in value, the hashrate and energy usage will increase. If it doesn't, the hashrate and energy usage will stagnate or decrease.
If you think the energy usage is "way out of scale" for the problem it solves, I think you may be underestimating the challenges of developing a decentralized monetary system and the impact of money on society itself.
That's just your opinion. Most hardcore bitcoiners aren't in it to be rich, it's because it has a lot of potential to be a more sustainable monetary system over what we have now. I don't see the energy consumed by Bitcoin to be wasted and I'm doubtful that most who say it is understand why it's used in the first place.