What are your thoughts on BitCoin?

[Hrothbern]

The first order effect on global energy consumption, on Climate, of crypto currencies is bad.
See quote from analysis of the NYT below on bitcoin. (article Business Insider Sep 2021).

But this is still to some degree transparant and can be handled with green policies.

My greatest concern however is that the criminal money circuit can both escape and infiltrate the legal economy.

It's difficult to measure exactly how much energy bitcoin mining consumes, but a new analysis by the New York Times shared some staggering data that puts the energy use in perspective:

• Bitcoin mining consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually.
• That's more annual electricity use than all of Finland, which is a country of 5.5 million people.
• That's almost 0.5% of all electricity consumption worldwide, and a 10 times jump from just five years ago.
• That's about the same amount of electricity consumed in the state of Washington each year, and more than a third of electricity used for residential cooling in the US annually.
• And it's more than seven times the electricity used by all of Google's global operations.

Given bitcoin's massive price appreciation in recent years, it's not hard to expect the electricity consumption to continue to grow. Bitcoin is now worth about $50,000, a roughly fivefold increase from last year. It was priced at around $500 in 2016.

https://www.businessinsider.com/bit...an-google-2021-9?international=true&r=US&IR=T

 

[emzie]

You see the libertarian adoption of bitcoins as a bad thing. You couldn't be more wrong. They created a semi-non-shady reason to buy bitcoins. Now I can claim I'm not trying to buy weed, but am investing in the future.

SMH

 

[amadeus]

I’m not really convinced by that graph about energy consumed by system (banks/gold/bitcoins) — even if the bank produces 10 times more pollution overall, I imagine per/$ or per/transaction costs are lower since billions of people use regular banks, whereas I suspect you have a much smaller group of people using bitcoins, and quite selectively.

 

[warpus]

I think you are right that banks have a smaller overall direct carbon footprint compared to bitcoin - but not compared to any blockchain using POS. It's good people are talking about this angle though, we should be embracing greener approaches and not the opposite (and also more democratic, open, and many other considerations, but the carboon footprint is an increasingly important one...)

 

[El_Machinae]

Holding bitcoin creates price support for its current level of emissions. The easiest way to help with AGW is to buy an alternative investment with those funds.