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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

But it still doesn't waste as much energy as the standing armies fiat currencies rely on. And if your country doesn't have a large standing army then your currency is being subsidized by those you ally with who do have standing armies of significance.

And the good it brings to the world in being a non-nation state controlled currency is obvious. From enabling continuation of money transfer in failing or restrictive governments to allowing for capital exchange between individuals directly without rent seeking or censorship it provides good every day.

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Why should Fiat money use more energy than global bitcoin adaption? Bitcoin already used as much energy as medium-sized countries (I believe it was as much as Ireland last year or the year before) and nearly no one uses it for daily payments.

Compared to that, I'm not aware that the Swift Network or Visa/Mastercard would run whole power plants to support their energy needs. They just need a medium sized data center to support hundreds of millions of payments a day.

Mainframes running a ton of financial transactions bill by CPU usage from IBM. Banks etc want to use as little computer resources as possible.

>Why should Fiat money use more energy than global bitcoin adaption?

The problem was the original poster in this thread setting up the strawman that bitcoin is for every single transaction (or even a decent fraction of them).

But to answer your direct question: because the security and processing of it's transactions depends on the security of a nation state. That nation state's security stems from the military among other things. The energy expenditure is enormous and the influence of the nation state's desires on what transactions are processed is an everyday factor. This is obvious in watching the Justice Dept. interact with the major credit card companies.

Transactions that indirectly depend on bitcoin also increase its price, and cause more energy to be burned on mining. If bitcoin starts to secure any notable fraction of business it will cost much more than the amount of army needed to keep a currency stable.

Agreed. I'd like to add that even if Swift/Visa/etc. combined use power plants worth of energy (which I actually assume they do, though it's hard to tell), they do orders of magnitude more payments with it.

Running fiat involves more than just electricity.

People, offices and everything related requires power and physical location too.

Bitcoin has proven time and time again to be a giant ponzi scheme

https://www.reddit.com/r/buttcoin contains good reading

If bitcoin had global adoption, there would be no more armies in the world? That's quite a stretch...

This might be the case, no way to proof, but bitcoin has been proven to be useless as a medium of exchange so it's best to stop wasting all that energy on it. I believe there is a future for virtual currencies but there's still work to be done to work out the bugs.

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