SolarBatteryBitcoin

It's not free, because every Joule of solar energy has a cost, because solar panels are not free and have a finite lifetime.

It's a sacrfice but of something we can easily sacrifice, excess of solar energy we have no means to store but we still need to produce if we want to go 100% renewables.

> The power needed to run these miners is entirely arbitrary.

No, the power is precisely equal to the value of being able to transact on the network to all participants, as determined in an auction roughly every ten minutes (in addition to block rewards for now).

> Complaining about bitcoin is peak "old man yells at cloud".

I propose "person yells at cloud" (of CO2 emissions) as a realistic alternative.

> No, the power is precisely equal to the value of being able to transact on the network to all participants, as determined in an auction roughly every ten minutes (in addition to block rewards for now).

I think you need to run a miner for a few days to learn the technology before making wildly inaccurate statements.

You have not shown a real scenario how bitcoin could work without an energy armes race.

The power consumption is NOT arbitrary: Everyone who owns bitcoins has to be motivated to keep bitcoin alive. More people having bitcoin means more people need to make sure that mining is happening.

The second point is, bitcoin mining requires a certain amount of distribution to work as intended which leads to: you need a critical mass of people doing the mining as you can't just trust 3 people mining it for you and you trusting them. Especially as bitcoin is often mentioned as being 'free'. Therefore you can't just go to a bank or country and let them mine it with nearly no power consumption.

The third point is: Mining has to be motivational enough and therefore it will hover between being worth to do so in countries like USA (for distribution reasons) and gambling (gambling provides high margin with high risks and i think that could be a good UPPER resource consumption limit).

Forth: Bitcoin mining always needs an incentive which makes it competitive: If everyone can mine unlimited and there is no factor to determine who can mine more, than it just doesn't work anymore.

We now have a system which ALWAYS consumes resources and its critical to understand 'consume'. That resources is gone. Otherwise your proof of work wouldn't work anymore.

A global economy is easy able to destroy something like bitcoin: China can just ban it, countries can put pressure on other countries like USA and partners do with North Korea. No country has a benefit of allowing bitcoin. A country has control over their currency and they like to keep the control.

"the new world economy" what? Do you think we have our current financial system just for fun and we all move to bitcoin? Our current financial system is build and has grown over a long period. We all LIKE that current system. I like to be able to go to my bank and show my passport and get my money. I like to know that untaxed money is harder to hide. I like the knowlwedge that you can't transfer high amount of money from left to right without an external party looking over it for money laundring. Those systems are beneficial for every normal human being.

Don't throw in garbage statements like "old man yells at cloud". Either argue or don't.

The premise is that there no more worthier causes than bitcoin beyond the grid needs. That premise is simply false. You can use excess grid capacity for lots of useful things including water desalination, charging cars at off peak hours, producing hydrogen. These are all applications that can flexibly use clean/cheap power when it is available instead of putting a constant load on the grid. This solution would compete with all of that. Excess grid energy is a resource that we need to use more effectively. Wasting it on bitcoin is pointless. Nobody really needs bitcoin except those living on hoarding it; which is pretty much the only thing you can do with it.

In the same way a lot carbon capture schemes use clean energy to slightly reduce (but not completely solve) the amount of CO2 added to our atmosphere. A better use of that clean energy is to completely remove the need for adding more CO2 to our energy (rather than just partially) through alternatives that make better/more efficient use of the clean energy that these capture schemes take.