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Right, and all those things are harmful to the planet.
Human life in general is harmful to the planet. So what are you saying?
> responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages red flag this article is steeped in pseudoscience. you could spend a lifetime trying to model and predict global weather patterns _with no outside intervention_. the idea that you could even make an attempt at attaching a number to this phenomena is laughable. what are the error bars here, 10,000%? lets pretend, for example, you tried to estimate the impact of tsu…
You could make up some fear mongering "study" about almost every energy using topic. AI and video rendering for instance which is often for some marginal purpose. Or heating pools, idle electronics, big homes with AC, leisure travel, all the useless crap bought and manufactured in China with dirty coal, etc.
It's useful to know that BTC has major externalities because it allows us to make a rational choice. We could make different choices about all the things you listed, too. Or not! But you seem to be actually arguing for willful blindness, here.
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Smaller than the energy required to run Ireland, unlike bitcoin. An algorithm designed to be wasteful in energy wasting energy is not something we should be shocked at.
The US military certainly consumes more energy than Ireland.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_Sta...
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Do you deny that hydro is cheap or do you claim that miners choose to use power in more expensive locations?
Bitcoiners use the cheapest energy they can find in place where they can cheaply install hash power. Some of that may be hydro. A lot is coal. Even when they do use green energy, the effect of doing that is to displace other users onto dirtier forms of energy, thus creating just as much pollution anyway. Bitcoin is not green in any way whatsoever. Bitcoin specifically wastes energy, by design. This is never green. Th…
What is the energy cost of the entire USD-based financial system? At a minimum we need to total up what the US Mint, the Federal Reserve, Visa, Mastercard, Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and thousands of other companies and government entities do. It is obvious that amount of energy used to keep the USD going absolutely dwarfs Bitcoin.
What is the energy cost of the entire USD-based financial system? At a minimum we need to total up what the US Mint, the Federal Reserve, Visa, Mastercard, Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and thousands of other companies and government entities do. It is obvious that amount of energy used to keep the USD going absolutely dwarfs Bitcoin.
When the propaganda machine spins up and the smear campaigns start, it's being considered a valid threat by the established players.
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This is not just some article, it's a peer-reviewed study from the University of Arizona. Surely it has fault, but honestly I don't think a "cursory glance at wikipedia" provides a compelling counterargument
> This is not just some article, it's a peer-reviewed study from the University of Arizona Without going into the paper itself, why do you believe being peer-reviewed means that we cannot - and should not - look at it critically with our own brains and minds, analyze the evidence, and reach our own conclusions?
This is about the furthest thing from “science”. Just sensationalist propaganda. It’s so far from being even remotely plausible. Maybe 1 BTC is responsible for $0.49 of “damage” if you could ever actually quantify it. Most of this electricity comes from the cheapest source of power, which is hydro.
> Most of this electricity comes from the cheapest source of power, which is hydro. This has become almost a religious belief amongst cryptocurrency acolytes, but it's simply not true. -- Edit: please see my comment¹ and piplikoc's comment² below for more detail on this. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342411 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342366
It is year 2021 and people still think Bitcoin is boiling the oceans. Bitcoin is the greenest think on this planet. Economic empowerment it brings to individual together with energy extraction innovations is just beyond imagination of most people in this forum.