A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

Bitcoin is one way to use energy. There are hundreds of thousands of other ways.

When you say Bitcoin "hurts the environment", what, concretely do you mean? Presumably, you mean it in a stronger sense than "using energy to produce food hurts the environment" or "using energy to run an ER hurts the environment".

That is, you think that relative to the benefit provided, the use of (harmful) energy to run bitcoin miners doesn't justify its environmental cost.

Which is great, but I could say the same thing of Ferraris for show-off producers in LA, or Hello Kitty backpacks.

What justifies focusing our attention on Bitcoin per se, and not those? Do you plan to publish a universal, agreed-upon list of things whose social value doesn't justify its environmental cost?

The real problem is energy users not bearing the full environmental costs of what they do.

The thing is, we have a well known solution to that: cap the total carbon emissions, or tax them in a way that reflects the harm.

Yes, Bitcoin creates an incentive to use energy. And it will be spent by miners who weigh the costs of the energy against the value of the Bitcoins produced. Like every other good on the market, it will respond to incentives created by laws.

If the damage of energy isn't priced in, then there will be too many resources spent on mining relative to the environmental cost. But this is true of every other good as well.

All Bitcoin does is amplify the problems of the existing failure to appropriately price energy. But this is true of literally every other energy-using good in existence!

There is no reason to single out Bitcoin. To blame it for environmental problems is special pleading or privileging a hypothesis.

"I don't want wiggins at my university. They cheat!"

'Well, a certain percentage of any demographic is going to ch--'

"Irrelevant! We're talking about wiggins!"

EDIT: Should probably add the disclaimer that I'm long Bitcoin.

Problematic topics are usually omitted from discussions when they are complex or not obvious and in the forefront. The conversation goes elsewhere, and we turn our heads to follow it.

From this article:

> As with many dubious claims, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that much of it is underpinned by a single, leisurely researched source: Digiconomist.

> In fact you’d be hard pressed to find many articles in the press pushing the environmentalist, anti-PoW narrative that do not link back to that one source. But hey, can you really blame them in today’s sound bite media environment? Research is hard and time consuming.

The author's POV is a little different in that he is addressing anti-bitcoin alarmists - but, underlying this is the argument that research and shared knowledge on the topic is scarce. This is the kind of content I want to see more of.

I'm happy this comment sparked some discussion here.

The banks where I checked where #52, #55 and #77

All in all, I received the same information in all 3, even thought they all have a SWIFT code assigned (So that probably mean they don't even have a registered account for the bank).

Here's a page from a rather large bank, where the process is exposed:

http://comex.bancogalicia.com/optimice-su-operatoria/bancos-...

It's in spanish, but if you click in either "Dólares" or "Euros" you get some bank icons below (3 in "dólares", 2 in "euros") with the details of the bank accounts where you could send the money. For any other currency, you have to call to get the instructions.

Can't get any more clearer.

Another example would be exchanges: a vast majority of people do not use cryptocurrency in a peer-to-peer fashion, but instead go through a small number of centralized exchanges, which have been known to freeze withdrawals, have been riddled with theft, fraud, and a playback of all the financial schemes dreamed up in the last few centuries which have not yet been regulated against in cryptocurrency (pump and dump, Tether etc.).

On top of that, the crypto media sphere seems to be completely unreliable: I've seen many headlines which are deliberately misleading with the intent of stoking a one-sided, glowing narrative about cryptocurrency (I.e. a crypto startup opens their account at Chase bank and the headline reads: "X Coin Begins Partnership with J.P. Morgan Chase", and related online communities are heavily moderated to support the official viewpoint while silencing others.

Long story short, when I bought a little bit of Bitcoin to play with a few years ago, I could buy a coffee with it, and I could even make purchases with it on Amazon. Since then it's gotten much less useful to the average user.