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Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

Give me a fucking break. The "traditional financial world" processes tens if not hundreds of thousands of transactions per second worldwide. Bitcoin processes no more than 4 per second. On a per-transaction basis, you could be insane to argue that Bitcoin is anything other than an environmental disaster.

Worse, Bitcoin's energy consumption scales based on the price of bitcoin, not on transaction volume. The more USD each bitcoin is worth, the more miners will spend on energy to get that sweet, sweet block reward.

So it isn't a "meme" and Bitcoin's proponents would do well to concede that "yeah, bitcoin pisses away a lot of electricity--sorry about that...".

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> Worse, Bitcoin's energy consumption scales based on the price of bitcoin, not on transaction volume. The more USD each bitcoin is worth, the more miners will spend on energy to get that sweet, sweet block reward.

Until Bitcoin is done bootstrapping and the block reward is zero.

This is just your bias disguised as virtue. Bitcoin is a blip compared to everything that “wastes” energy.

By the way there is no such thing as a waste of energy. This isn’t soviet Russia, neither you nor the government dictate how one is allowed to use energy. As long as you have the funds to pay for it, you are free to use the electricity how you see fit.

If you’re reasonably concerned about the environmental concerns of how energy is produced, take it up with the producers. Stop technology-shaming.

Supply and demand. If you want mining to reduce emissions, increase the cost of energy. Bitcoin will remain unaffected. Don't blame bitcoin because of the cost of energy. Blame the energy producers for selling it to miners at that price.

Why not blame both?

Because one is to blame and the other is not.

That's tautological. Implicit in the question is a request for an explanation of why both are not to blame. If you don't believe Bitcoin has an enabling or encouraging effect on activity that is bad for the environment, why is that? Why is it more appropriate to shift blame entirely on the energy provider instead of the very energy inefficient process?

Do you also suppose that we should reduce vehicle emissions by increasing the cost of gasoline? Why isn't it fair to blame vehicles that run on gasoline and vehicles which are particularly inefficient at running on gasoline?

> That's tautological.

No it's not. I'm saying you can fix the problem by modifying one constraint. Fix the cost of energy, and you fix your problem with energy wastage. It will make absolutely zero difference to bitcoin what the price of energy is. If energy is more expensive, mining will reduce, and bitcoin difficulty resets to the lower mining hashrate.

> Do you also suppose that we should reduce vehicle emissions by increasing the cost of gasoline?

Of course. It's ludicrous to think otherwise.

What a cop out. So we have to increase energy prices so a bunch of greedy scammers can waste energy speculating on hot air?

Again. Give me a break...

You can do with your money what you like. There's a word for that : freedom.

Of course you can, but that doesn't make it not environmentally unfriendly.

Bitcoin is modern gold. You can travel across borders with literally millions in your pocket without having to trust anyone. If you can’t see the value of that then you are being willfully ignorant.

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