The reality is that you can't dictate what power is used. Power on a large scale is extremely hard and expensive to transmit. Comments like this do not consider the larger picture.
If you plop a mining farm down next to an existing hydro dam that was previously used for powering aluminum smelting, then that farm is now funding the maintenance of that dam. That dam then can provide power to the surrounding community. It isn't about making up a difference, it is about keeping that dam running. Oh and what's worse for the environment then wasting energy on mining bitcoin? Aluminum smelting.
This is exactly what coinmint did at an old Alcoa facility in upstate NY. They are using power that would otherwise go to waste. It is too expensive to build more transmission lines to feed power to people further away. Re-using the Alcoa facility also helps fund its further cleanup from the years of toxic waste produced there. A bunch of drone computers is a perfect use.
I'm all for shutting down coal based mining. At this point most large mining operations are not profitable on that anyway and have moved to other sources of power.
Disclosure: I am a large very scale ETH miner who uses hydro (but not at coinmint, I'm just very familiar with their facility).
> It is much more efficient than existing financial systems
I find this really hard to believe. And it would really depend on what you’re measuring. If we look at transactions per second, the numbers aren’t good for Bitcoin. But really, what we’re talking about here is transactions per Watt of power. I’d love to know what these numbers are, but I can’t imagine it looks good for Bitcoin.
Maybe it looks better if you look at the total value of transactions per Watt (fewer transactions, but at high amounts). But then, Bitcoin starts to look more like a reserve currency where the major transactions are between large clearinghouses instead of a totally decentralized monetary system.
How is it more useful if >6 billion people are using the traditional system and a few hundred thousand, maybe a million are using cryptocurrencies while consuming an amount of electricity equivalent to Denmark?
Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. can be spent nearly nowhere except at exchanges because it's a pain in the ass to handle for merchants while I can pay with my Visa in the most countries seamlessly.
And how can it "bank the unbanned" when people need to have not only a smartphone but also a stable internet connection to the networks because if I don't observe the blockchain, I am still reliant on intermediates which are called payment processors in the traditional system that already exist.
Crypto currencies are just unnecessarily speed running financial history. Carried by ancaps and speculation that are only pushing it because legislation didn't catch up, yet.
This is including industry like aluminum smelting which are basically running their own power plants to work. Aluminum is either used directly or indirectly for everything produced.
It's also including households, trains, data centers, etc. Things people actually use to live. Meanwhile with Bitcoin people are just rushing to calculate as much zeros as possible into their hash to append 1 MB of data to a chain.
This thread is full of conflicting logic. For example:
“No one has the moral authority to tell you what is a good or bad use of energy” followed by “Bitcoin uses less energy than than banking and the military,” implying that these are “bad” uses of energy — and in fact, that’s the entire foundation of the Bitcoin cult! That Bitcoin is better than Fiat, that it’s the righteous currency because of decentralization/etc. When you have God on your side (in this case, Satoshi, someone revered despite having never been revealed as existing...) you can justify anything. Even massive energy waste and pollution.
Bring your data and let’s have at it. How much energy does it use? What function does your alleged waste serve that is already served elsewhere in society?
Creating a global sound money that won't be debased or censored. More than worth the electricity cost. Why do you want to forcefully stop people who voluntarily buy and use electricity to update a shared database? Just because you don't like it?
Energy use is allocated by how people spend their money. By choosing how you spend your money, you can choose how the energy is produced. If bitcoin is banned, then people spend their money on something else.
If people buy bitcoin instead of buying a new car, then the net effect on environment is positive, given that car production uses more fossil fuels than bitcoin production.
