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> If the world bank were to assist in implementing bitcoin in El Salvador, their general technical & financial competence would be transparently on display. And I doubt this fact appeals to them.

Having worked for a similar international government type organisation before, this would mean:

1) Hiring someone like IBM to implement the project, who would charge roughly 10x per man hour what they would have to pay for an internal team to do it, as well as licensing fees for various IBMs products that they don't really need.

2) IBM would find a group of junior level developers to build it, who would work about as well as you would expect given the constantly changing requirements dictated by a comittee who can barely spell blockchain.

3) After an overrun of 6-12 months the project would be scrapped, and whichever C-level manager who was incharge of it at IMF would be able blame IBM.

4) Said manager would then be able to take this experience and find a similar level position in private industry, paying 10x what he was on before. He'd celebrate his new job, by playing a round of golf with his IBM buddies.

The absolute figures are bitcoin uses about the equivalent of Sweden’s energy consumption every year. Renewable energy isn’t free and should be replacing legacy sources, not being used to do pretend work. Environmental is a huge factor.

Can you make me a list of real vs pretend work so I can base my ethical decisions on it?

It's not a comprehensive list, but a good rule of thumb is that any computer spinning around computing a number that no one cares about the value of is pretend work.

so BTC would be real work because a lot of people care about those numbers, right?

No, no one cares about the final numbers - they are just, as the Bitcoin paper explains, Proof of Work. The only point of doing those calculations is to prove that you have spent X processor cycles in service of Bitcoin. You could entirely replace the calculation (and checkers) with a different calculation and nothing whatsoever would change about bitcoin, because no one cares about the values.

Conversely, if you found an algorithm that could compute those same values in microseconds on a calculator, bitcoin would plummet in an instant, because suddenly anyone with a calculator could run 99% attacks on the bitcoin network. The numbers aren't improtant, the busywork is.

Well yes, the values existing are important, the values semantics aren't, that's why its a proof of work.

That's assuming Sweden's power grid is up 365 days a year, but we should subtract a few days to account for bitcoin ransomware attacks.

> The absolute figures are bitcoin uses about the equivalent of Sweden’s energy consumption every year.

Even using those sources I believe it's "electricity" consumption not "energy" consumption.

Why should renewable energy be replacing legacy sources rather than bitcoins sources?

> Bitcoin's enegery:market-cap ratio

This is absolutely the most contrived number I've ever seen put into the service of excuses for bitcoin's ghastly energy consumption. This is actuallly a new one on me.

It's especially good since "market cap" of a crypto is a made-up marketing number that tells you nothing about the price or its likely movements - it is, literally, the last speculative trading spot price multiplied by the number of coins someone thinks are in circulation.

A billion putative dollars of market cap can disappear in five minutes when the price goes down. Where did all that value go? Nowhere, it was imaginary.

>It's especially good since "market cap" of a crypto is a made-up marketing number

I've never heard this before. What makes you think this?

If there's one thing I've learned, an open market is rarely wrong, esp. in the mid to long term.

> Bitcoin's enegery:market-cap ratio - a proxy for energy vs. value to humans - is >300x better than an airline & 60x better than JP Morgan & 20x better than google's.

Market cap is not, to me, any kind proxy for "value to humans". The utility of Bitcoin as an alternative to fiat is obviously unrelated to the number coins or their price.

So say this while offering zero other alternative.

How else would you place a value on a company or product's explicit worth to humans?

I can't give you one formula for that. It depends which kind of product, since most things are more than just investment objects.

What is the value of money, viewed as a technology that facilitates the everyday exchanged of goods and services? My only answer to that is "incalculable", since I can't really imagine society without some variation of it. The value of that concept does not reduce to a number.

If we then move on to the discussion of different forms of money, say cash versus digital, or bank deposits versus cryptocurrencies, then I honestly don't see how "number of units times trading price" is any measure of the relative usefulness or value of each of those as technologies. It might be an answer to something, but not that question.

Actually, now that you've made me think about it, I might concede that market cap is useful measure of something's value as an investment object. But the value (rather, usefulness) of a currency is more than that. My salary is not an investment, it's a way of storing the value of my labour and convert it into the stuff I need to survive. So to me, that discussion needs to cover things like efficiency, resilience, and politics (e.g., who controls it). And to me, Bitcoin is very far from a winner in any of those.

Why are you comparing energy:market-cap ratio instead of something like energy:transaction-volume ratio for example? I'm sure if you compare Bitcoin to Visa on that metric instead, it'd look pretty bad for Bitcoin.

The value Bitcoin provides to humans is about more than the transactions.

The value is primarily about security as a store of wealth.

This is why I use market cap.

The value it provides is a Ponzi scheme for elites and lumpens to quickly make money, nothing else.

Hope you try to avoid allowing jadedness to cloud your interpretation of & openness to reality.

>From the data & trend on % renewable energy use & the absolute figures compared to, for instance, energery use by [arguably displaceable] financial co's, that seems a little weak.

Environmental concerns are very fashionable ways to get out of dealing with it, whether true or not. But on your point directly, bitcoin won't displace most financial companies so the implementation of bitcoin doesn't mean anything about that.