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Bitcoin Mining Now Accounts For Almost One Percent of the World's Energy Consumption (theoutline.com)
It is well-established established that Bitcoin mining -- aka, donating one's computing power to keep a cryptocurrency network up and running in exchange for a chance to win some free crypto -- uses a lot of electricity. Companies involved in large-scale mining operations know that this is a problem, and they've tried to employ various solutions for making the process more energy efficient. But, according to testimony provided by Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, no matter what you do to make cryptocurrency mining harware greener, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the overall network's flabbergasting energy consumption. From a report: Instead, Narayanan told the committee, the only thing that really determines how much energy Bitcoin uses is its price. "If the price of a cryptocurrency goes up, more energy will be used in mining it; if it goes down, less energy will be used," he told the committee. "Little else matters. In particular, the increasing energy efficiency of mining hardware has essentially no impact on energy consumption." In his testimony, Narayanan estimates that Bitcoin mining now uses about five gigawatts of electricity per day (in May, estimates of Bitcoin power consumption were about half of that). He adds that when you've got a computer racing with all its might to earn a free Bitcoin, it's going to be running hot as hell, which means you're probably using even more electricity to keep the computer cool so it doesn't die and/or burn down your entire mining center, which probably makes the overall cost associated with mining even higher.
I can transfer money from my bank to anyone else in the UK with a bank account quickly and for free. I can withdraw cash from thousands of cash machines for free. I can buy from millions of merchants for free.
Bitcoin - Free? Fast? Energy efficient? Decentralised?
No, no, no and no (blockchain size).
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Sure I'll give you a comparison with gold:
Gold a noble material with special properties is bought and sold not just for its trading value but for actua looks, and a massive amount of specific applications too.
Bitcoin is a system for converting energy into wishful thinking.
The world would be better off if bitcoin had never existed.
The world wouldn't function as we know it (many chemical reactions depend on gold catalysts, many more depend on gold for protection of materials from the chemicals being worked with) without gold.
But the very fact that the number of different cryptocurrencies is proliferating tells us that the basic idea does not work. As each currency smashes into its supply limit, people who want to use crypto as money have to invent a new coin, and then teh next new coin, and then the next.
That doesn't follow. People who want to use bitcoin as MONEY have no problem, there's no need to invent a new coin for that. You can use any of these as money just fine, insofar as you can find people to make your transactions. The increasing computational needs of the network don't make it any harder (or easier) to use it as money, as bitcoin aims for a 10-minute block-completion rate.
The reason we're getting so many cryptocurrencies is the same as the reason we get so many log-structured key-value stores. It's not because the existing ones don't do the job, it's because they are (relatively) easy to create and there are no barriers to entry. So technically capable newcomers see the system as it is, and imagine that all of the outstanding issues could be solved with some minor change, without comprehending the systemic issues which caused those issues. So we get another implementation which is slightly different, ad nauseum, but since the barriers to use really aren't technical in the first place, none of them really wins.
No commodity that constantly rises in value can be used as a currency. Mark those words.
In the medieval pre-technology world, gold made a perfectly good currency because its value was easily recognizable and only a small amount of new gold was physically mined per year, making the 'money supply' in gold close to constant. Because gold traded for the same amount of Stuff year after year, gold coins circulated universally in the same way that Euros and dollars do today.
But when technology started to create new wealth at a faster rate than the gold supply grew, the limited supply of gold coins was bid up in price and because of that became hoarded and disappeared from circulation. In the US, an argument over whether to add silver to gold as a basis for the dollar to increase the money supply occupied the entire nineteenth century as the country industrialized. Eventually the precious metal backing for the dollar was replaced by fiat as more money was needed, to allow it to continually circulate in the economy.
The pressure to add new cryptocurrencies to Bitcoin to allow enough money supply for coin to circulate is the bimetallism debate all over again. When fiat money replaced metals, at least metals endured as a hoarded investment. Crypto, on the other hand, is nothing but a magic spell cast in bits. It has value only to the extent that you trust whatever magician is promoting it.