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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

With energy becoming more and more renewable, does it really matter if BTC uses a lot of it?

It does, because it competes with decarbonizations of things our civilization actually needs. Once that's done, it'll still be ridiculous to try and base the economy on bitcoins, because proof of work scales so badly it'll happily eat any and all energy that's made available.

Thousands of years from now, when humanity builds its first Dyson sphere, I would like to believe the collected energy will be used for purposes like making everyone's life long and prosperous, or propelling great starships across the void - and not just to secure the Bitcoin network.

And you're just going to ignore that we can do layer 2 technologies like lightning network?

Explain to me how they prevent the energy requirements of proof of work securing the entire cryptocoin infrastructure from growing significantly faster than the market using that infrastructure, and without compromising the whole reason behind cryptocurrencies in the first place, which is decentralization and lack of trust?

Hm I'm not sure I understand, because the answer seems very simple: because they dramatically increase ratio of the number of meaningful transactions describing real economic activity to a MB of valueable block space (and therefore per watt of total global PoW calculation).

If all they do is increase the ratio, that's only constant scaling. So in no way does it compensate for the scaling of PoW energy use with respect to market size.

Why would you assume it would be constant? What equations you are using? How exactly are you projecting the market size to POW increase, and how do you calculate L2 changes? "Increase" the ratio does not mean it will increase by *2, it can be ^2 or whatever other formula might end up being real.

Renewable energy isn't zero carbon. At the very least you gotta produce the energy generating system somehow. Then maintain it.

But renewable is all wasted if there is no demand. Hydro power used for bitcoin mining doesn't find a new user immediately if bitcoin stops and the power can't be stored long term so it can be wasted.

Hydro is the one type of renewable with built-in long-term storage.

I think you misunderstand. Once the power is generated it can't be stored for long. And I understand your point but you can't hold water in a reservoir/dam indefinitely, at some point you either use it to generate power or you let it flow through without generating power because otherwise the dam overflows.

IT's becoming more renewable from a very low base. Electricity generated in most of the world is still dirty, electricitymap [1] has a good overview.

[1] www.electricitymap.org

So long as BTC is adequately carbon taxed, probably not.

Don`t mix up the idea of renewable and infinite. Theoretically it can be done but until we each that point it definetly is not working like that.

Until most mining moves to renewables, yes it does.

It already is due to energy being the biggest mining expense. Miners congregate around inexpensive sources of hydroelectric/wind/solar energy.

Ok, I should be more clear. Until we have enough energy that we're all running on renewables and adding more bitcoin-related load uses up spare capacity rather than increase overall usage - it matters.

I mean, unless it's a dedicated power generating station, you're still using renewable power which is not used by someone else and overall we're supplementing that with coal and others.

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