While yes, the military uses a ton of energy and shouldn't exist at its size, that doesn't mean the crypto internet casino is a good use of energy.

I'm curious about the statistics of crypto use to buy goods and services vs the crypto use for investment, gambling, scams, rugpulls, etc.

I wonder how much energy was used for NFTs which are neither efficient or ethical.

Do you think the US wouldn't need or want a military if the whole world switched to bitcoin tomorrow?

Are you implying that we could or should replace USD with BTC? Bitcoin uses over 2% of the energy to process 0.02% of the transactions. Aside from all the geopolitical & economic detriments that would incur, scaling Bitcoin up to the national level would require us to increase our energy production roughly 10000% just to power the mining.

And then you're further implying that doing so meant we could or should disband the military? Uh, I don't know what to say to that other than that there are plenty of non-economic reasons to have militaries.

Bitcoin really is a complete waste of time and energy.

Nope. I'm just pointing out that the energy isn't wasted and it's is appropriately proportional to the task it faces.

It would be a much worse world if basic utilities started refusing to provide service just because they had opinions about your usage and emotionally didn't like it.

> The use of energy to protect bitcoin from attack from nation states is non-violent. It really is an efficient and ethical use of the energy.

Can Bitcoin be used to stop people from attacking ships going through the Suez Canal?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis

Can Bitcoin be used to discourage people from grabbing marine territory from other countries?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line

If the US Army didn't assault and helped terrorists nation there, those attacks wouldn't happen in the first place.

Bitcoin doesn't solve any problem: as soon as you do anthing offchain, bitcoin doesn't protect you.

Bitcoin doesn't gurantee that if you give someone money and exchange it for bitcoin that you will get the bitcoin. It will not guarantee that if you want to buy something, that you receive the item in the expected quality, time and condition.

The only use case for bitcoin are ON chain transactions and the only solution to this are smart contracts which also don't solve the problem because its still only for digital things and it requires the same amount of capital which doesn't make sense because rich people could block you from ever accessing your money if they want to destroy you.

Please please please please start reading up on blockchain!1 :(

> as soon as you do anthing offchain, bitcoin doesn't protect you

except that most, if not all, off-chain networks are still based on-chain and have mechanisms for being a relatively secure way for exchanging day-to-day without having to settle on-chain for every transaction

Imagine a world were someone with a private key could send money transparently to someone else by just signing the transaction publicly.

Suddenly you don't need PoW anymore. The only thing bitcoins gigantic energy consumption does is making sure there is only one central blockchain. Nothing more. And for that it needs 2% of total US Power usage...

Except the whole point of bitcoin is that it's a scarce commodity enforced through power consumption (something that's a limiting factor to adversaries)

> The only thing bitcoins gigantic energy consumption does is making sure there is only one central blockchain.

which is how you constrain supply in a decentralized way with an independent time-keeping mechanism

Your argument could be valid if bitcoins were actually useful.

I wish US military could additionally use that 2.3% power.

> The Department of Defense spews so much greenhouse gas every year that it would rank as the 55th worst polluter in the world if it were a country, beating out Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal, according to a new paper from Brown University’s Costs of War project.

> Why so much? Well, first off, there’s all those military buildings (some 560,000 on bases around the world) to power, heat, and cool. That accounts for about 40 percent of the total. The rest goes toward operations like moving troops and carrying out missions. The biggest CO2 culprit is, by far, planes. “Aircraft are extremely thirsty,” Crawford said.

https://grist.org/politics/u-s-military-emits-more-co2-than-...

US: 14.9 tons of co2

Sweeden: 3.6 tons

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

Billion tons.