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Comment by erulabs | Hacker News Reader

Nothing in life is free. While I concur BTC mining is expensive (and I'm a huge fan of movements to Proof-of-Stake (Vitalik is a genius)), I'd love to see a comparison to the movement of gold. Large sums of gold are regularly moved on passenger planes, not to even start on the environmental cost of minting, coining, holding and protecting gold stores.

All energy expenditure == global warming, but that doesn't mean no energy should be spent. As one of my favorite humorist/economist/lecturers, Jeffrey A. Tucker, somewhat trolling-ly put it: "Sometimes conserving is not a good idea. There are some life activities that cry out for the expenditure of resources, even in the most generous possible way."

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> Large sums of gold are regularly moved on passenger planes, not to even start on the environmental cost of minting, coining, holding and protecting gold stores.

Citation sorely needed. A "large sum" of gold would fit in a small suitcase. Who the fuck is filling airplanes with significantly more than that, save for exceptional circumstances?

Most "store of value" gold sits in vaults around the world and is never moved. When ownership changes because someone buys a gold ETF, it's just bits moving around in a database.

Gold doesn't swim. It needs to be mined too. Not with shovels.

Gold has utility unrelated to its status as a store of value. That is not true of Bitcoin.

Why? It's all just in your mind

Ugh, no, gold is used in electronics, aerospace materials, even to treat arthritis. Even if no one ever used it as currency it would still have properties that make it useful.

This is not true of Bitcoin.

Well bitcoin is currency that can be transmitted digitally unlike gold. Yes, you can't use it in jewelry true!

I think the difference is that bitcoin mining is an intentional race about who can spend the most energy.

You can argue about how useful it is to move gold, but at least it's a physical process that requires a well-defined amount of energy - and can be optimised if you want to spend less.

With bitcoin, there is no set amount of power that is needed to mine a block. The answer is literally "as much power as possible".

IIUC your point is that energy is wasted in the mining process. But I am not sure you can say it is a competition for who spend the most energy... Is power consumption linear with computing power, I am curious. Anyways, just as gold moving, computing power can be optimised for energy efficiency. Also it would have been better for OP to compare not with gold moving but with gold ... mining, an extremely energy hungry ans environmentally destructive industry.

In bitcoins case the incentives are such that it’s power consumption that’s essentially being measured.

Now let’s say that someone would make a chip that would use only 10% of the power of the current ones. What do you think would happen: People would keep current hashrates and just consume 10% of energy.

Or: People would scramble to get these chips and keep on burning the same amount. As your rewards are basically due to your ratio of the total hashrate. Not any absolute amount.

It's actually like that with gold also: the amount it costs to mine/refine an ounce of gold is always almost the same as the value of an ounce of gold, because whether or not it is worth exploiting a marginal deposit depends on the value of gold.

> Nothing in life is free.

Should read: every action (including inaction) has specific, inescapable consequences.

The question is: what matters more? Is the cost worth it?

No one needs bitcoin. No one. You might argue that we need a viable currency, but the two are not equivalent.

What everyone needs, without exception, is a functioning biosphere.

I agree with your humorist. Now is a perfect example of a time when we need to be expending resources and capital on saving the planet. Generous? Or just adequate?

I might be wrong but I don’t believe that Vitalik had anything to do with the development of Proof-of-Stake.

See this article for a short history: https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-history-and-evolution-of-...

How about a comparison to something electronic, like a credit card transaction? This is (purposefully?) derailing as I don't think a single person is suggesting gold coins is a better alternative to BTC.

He did, he claimed a Bitcoin transaction takes half a million times more energy then a credit card transaction. 621 kwh

Indeed. Which is why this mention of gold coins seems pointless.

Irrelevant equivalencies. What has gold to do with anything?

Hard to imagine anything more colossally wasteful than burning precious energy sources for ... imaginary points.

My understanding of the world suggests that the value of gold and the value of bitcoin are equally "imaginary". Should humans not spend energy on their imaginations?

Except gold is intrinsically useful. You can use it to create physical items that do things. Bitcoin's only value is imaginary.

Well, yes, but that completely misses the point. Bitcoin is currency, and you can reason that all currencies solely have imaginary value. We only value dollar bills because of an intricate system of promises that assures us we can exchange them for things. Bitcoin is no different.

Gold is largely not currency, so I don't think this is a good defense of OP's argument.

You can compare the environmental impact of physical currency to Bitcoin if you want, but I don't think it will work out in Bitcoin's favor.

Ooh I only disagree about bitcoin having imaginary value. I believe a bitcoin has real value, because we have chosen it to have real value, much like we collectively chose the USD to mean something.

I don't have any real opinion on the environmental effect of bitcoin, if we do that then maybe we should start thinking about the environmental effects of javascript.

Sounds like we’re on the same page? All I’m trying to say is that gold vs. Bitcoin is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Usefulness is quite relative. Do we really need jewelry to signal out social status to others ? I personally don't think so. (Industry only uses small amounts of gold)

That's not quite what I'm saying. Gold is intrinsically useful because you can do things with it, regardless of what those things are. Whereas literally the only thing you can do with Bitcoin is trade it to someone else.

What can you do with Music?

Art?

Movies?

all of these things are inherently not about intrinsic utility but they all weigh heavily into human societies.

If I can utilize Bitcoin as a store of value against inflation or as free speech money or even just as a middle finger to the USD then it has utility.

Means of exchange has a use value.

Anything can be a means of exchange. Bitcoin just happens to have zero other uses.

Not anything can be a means of exchange. For that it has to have some physical properties (transportability, fungibility for example) and social properties (value !) or else you are relying on third party procedures to keep count ... or a public unfalsifiable record like a blockchain.

aren't most fiat currencies in the developed world basically imaginary points now too?

Now add Avalanche to that comparison.

All of these posts are false equivalency until we are willing to compare energy usages of other "frivolous" uses.

How about

* Video games * movie viewing * 2.0 phone apps no one wants * the entire payments industry * banking energy consumption with all facets factored in (human resources, commuting, logistics)

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