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Comment by phplovesong | Hacker News Reader

Simply put:

Bitcoin was to be an alternative to FIAT, but it ended up being nothing more then a meme-stock that consumes more energy than Poland or Argentina.

Its sad really. But the greed in people turned it into shit.

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A different metric of comparison isn't Bitcoin's energy consumption compared to other countries but compared to the existing banking system it's trying to replace, which burns more energy than Bitcoin and allegedly burns more energy funding wars with fiat. Mining gold instead of Bitcoin burns more energy than Bitcoin too.

Compared to that for energy consumption, Bitcoin is superior really.

> compared to the existing banking system it's trying to replace

I don't think it's appropriate to compare it to the existing banking system (whose featureset goes far beyond payments and managing account balances).

It's appropriate to compare it to existing payment and account systems. And on that front, compared to e.g. Mastercard, there's no way Bitcoin is more efficient. TXs/watt, $/watt, however you want to measure it.

> there's no way Bitcoin is more efficient

No way? You studied this personally and can prove it?

Transaction Fees On Bitcoin Lightning Network Are 1,000 Times Cheaper Than Visa And MasterCard

https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/447705

Lightning isn't Bitcoin. It's an L2. It helps implement actual practical payments for Bitcoin, and doesn't (afaiu) manage account balances. In other words, you cannot seriously compare it to Mastercard; you've gotta include Bitcoin itself.

Also, it should be obvious that sources from the cryptocurrency industry have a conflict of interest. If there are better sources than something like Binance, then those should be used. If there aren't better sources, well...

I have no numbers but i would assume the global "FIAT market" is orders of magnitude larger than bitcoin, so ofc it consumes more. I would want to se a chart of how much 1USD/EUR "consumes" compared to 1BTC.

You should not compare bitcoin to "the banking industry", but instead to say a stock. Apple is worth more than the entire crypto industry, but for arguments sake lets say they are the same.

So you should instead compare bitcoin to APL stock. How much energy is APL (and APL alone) stock using? This is hard to measure, but probably a fraction of a fraction of the bitcoin energy use.

A bitcoin transaction costs around $100 (in invisible money supply increase, paid by everyone that holds Bitcoin, but received by the miners).

There's no way a fiat transfer costs that much.

The comparison is moot because Bticoin barely functions as a currency. Banking system provides a lot of other functionality beyond just money.

I never understood why bitcoin is winning popularity/pricing over ie. ethereum - which doesn't burn energy anymore and you can actually do programming on it, not just moving money from a to b.

Because it's based on narratives. Bitcoin has the strong narrative and the "network effect". Because bitoin keeps surviving, the narrative reinforces itself. At this point surely most people know, even if they're unwilling to admit or fooling themselves, the utility value is basically dead.

The utility value is now a pure gamble that a person tomorrow will pay me more than I paid for it today, thinking that a person in the future will pay them more than they paid. And that can be a powerful enough narrative to keep it going.

But if bitcoin disappeared today, 99.99999% of the world wouldn't even notice, that is how little of a problem it solves.

Anyway, the point is, imagine the scenario if ethereum overtook bitcoin in value. What will this actually do to the ecosystem? In my view, it would be catastrophic to the value of all coins, because it suddenly destroys the narrative of a "store of value" (the last lingering narrative). Any other coin could just overtake ethereum, and out of all the thousands of coins, which one? At that point, I think the whole thing comes down.

One interpretation of this comment, if viewed from an adversarial angle, is that comments like this, although perhaps not this comment specifically, are designed to dissuade people from buying crypto days before a bull-run starts.

Accurate data illuminate a lot of things.

I would benefit enormously from people buying crypto to keep the price going up. I've owned bitcoin for 9 years. I bought it when I realised that the narrative was strong enough to overcome any technical arguments and I wanted to profit from that. One day I'm assuming it help me retire.

(I just wish I'd bought more)

Bitcoin has a longer proof-of-work history, which is the only thing that secures any blockchain.

Stake also secures blockchain and doesn't waste energy.

One theory backed with proprietary data is that it's because bitcoin was created by the US government and money printed by the Fed goes in bitcoin so the government will one day pay its projected $113T of debt by dumping on everyone.

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