a currency for the masses whose tx fees are 3x what an average person earns in a day 😎😎😎
Even ethereum has gotten up to like $5 per transaction, its sad. And of course the environmental waste is staggering. Proof of work needs to die yesterday.
People are still mining bitcoin? wtf?
Reason one million and two why Bitcoin has never been a good idea.
There’s no source whatsoever linked in the article. I call bullshit.
Of course Bitcoin and similar Proof-of-Work blockchains are wasteful, but the claim of the article remains a fabrication if they don’t link a source.
This is a better current article which even links sources: Nasdaq - How Much Energy Does Bitcoin Use?. Quote:
At its present level, Bitcoin consumes 81.51 terawatt hours (TWh) annually. If it were a country, it would rank as number 39 for annual electricity consumption, ahead of Austria and Venezuela.
This is far away (63.9% to be exact) from what the Hypebeast article linked in the OP claims:
As of May 3, 2021, the amount of electricity consumed by Bitcoin was recorded at 133.63 Terawatt-hour (TWh)
So much potential in a digital currency but it’s all going to waste. Incredibly disappointing.
Is the lightning network supposed to help with this at all?
It doesn’t help with power consumption in any way
discovered this somewhere in the comments, but thought it deserves its own post
Bitcoin has become an environmental disaster. How sad.
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What about brick and mortar banks ? They re costlier to run !
Much toilet paper
Many workers cars
Etc etc
Dont forget the corruption with it !!!
This is not a problem of Bitcoin, but a “feature”.
Framing it this way sounds very bad naturally. But there is another way to think about it.
Having Proof of work means, that each amount of Bitcoin is actually representing something from the real world - energy. It’s not possible to simply create Bitcoin out of thin air, you have to spend a lot of energy to do it. And it was designed like this on purpose.
Hard to explain all in one comment, but books like “The Bitcoin Standard” explain in detail why this makes Bitcoin a nice way to store value, especially over time.
The resulting high tx fees are also a thorn in the eye. But I think Bitcoin was not meant to be used to make daily transactions, it is made to enable people to store or save value over long periods of time. To enable everyday transactions, the lightning network is being built, and something else to look into :)
So each bitcoin represents something of real value - energy - that was destroyed. The work done produced nothing of use, nothing of value. Just a lot of GHG emissions.
Well, if the energy wasn’t actually used, or destroyed, then this “connection to the real world” would just be fake.
The work done produced a store of value that cannot be tampered with. If we say Bitcoin produces nothing of use, we should also say banks are doing nothing of value at all. But that is not entirely true. Keeping track of who owns what is an essential part of our society. Doing that, without having to trust a single powerful group of individuals, is of immense value from my perspective.
Besides that, the goal of many “Bitcoiners” is to use energy, that would be lost otherwise. Currently, it is a huge problem of renewable energy sources that the energy output is somewhat constant, but our usage is very much fluctuating (night vs day etc.). Storing energy on its own is very expensive and totally inefficient. Using that energy to power this decentralized record of who owns what is an amazing idea to me.
Shit like this is why we as a species are doomed.
Please explain
I struggle to believe whether this written by a human with a connection to reality
What makes you think that?
If my argument is totally wrong and disconnected from reality it should be really easy for you to explain to me why that is.
Sounds like random hate simply because I represent a different opinion. I didn’t say “use Bitcoin, the climate doesn’t matter”. I was just trying to explain why people find Bitcoin positive despite the huge energy consumption.
Bitcoin folks find bitcoin positive because they’re invested in it and have either sunk cost phallacy or FOMO on future earnings. People who still think it’s a legitimate currency or has any real world use should be committed. At this point, it’s worth money because there’s enough of you in the weird ponzi scheme to keep it afloat for a while.
who cares! the planets dying!!
I think it’s very unlikely that all that energy would have been “wasted” otherwise. I think it’s also increasing the price of electricity at peak production hours which makes it less appealing to invest in hydrogen production facilities. The problem of attributing money has largely been solved already, Bitcoin isn’t necessary. Even if it was needed Ethereum can fill that role too, either as an independent monetary unit or more likely a method of unregulated gambling.
Bitcoin was an interesting proof of concept that showed that blockchain technology could work, but today it’s obsolete, slow and wasting energy and only used because people haven’t realized that yet.
So is there a Bitcoin mining say where it calculates the electricity consumption and gives back to an association an equivalent in Bitcoin of the Energy used? Where in return for the energy you use to create the Bitcoin you give a part of it back for healthy projects?
