It saddens me to see friends investigating Bitcoin as though it were a legitimate investment instead of a faith-based Ponzi scheme that consumes energy for no reason run by incels who can only string the same four words together.
My naive thinking is that at some point governments of the world will be forced to criminalise it for huge energy use that undermines green targets - it won’t be popular so I’m not sure how that will play out. But maybe assets will be duplicated in some more efficient blockchain.
I’m having a hard time resolving it into a simple moral black box. But yes: problematic at best. Many argue the case on the energy consumption aspect (use of renewables etc), hard to find the objective truth because it’s not in their interests to disclose it.
This post 👇makes the case that proof of work doesn’t intrinsically require wasteful energy consumption. davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/201…
The underlying, more sinister question is how is that actually different from money.
I can pay my lunch with a 10 euros bill and that won’t burn energy just to register the transaction. (It’ll instead be part of a single transaction at the end of the day for the restaurant. And that transaction will still burn less energy than the BTC equivalent.)
I was essentially focused on the social construct aspect of money. But I’d love to better understand the total energetic cost of money too.
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