The Bitcoin Energy Argument That Nobody Makes

> Should the costs be borne by the same people who derive the benefit? Absolutely.

Apologies in advance, but for the sake of argument I'm going to create a straw man for a moment. I'll do my best to bring my straw man argument back around to fit the context of this conversation.

Sometimes the real cost of an activity isn't fully apparent until a crisis emerges from those activities, such as the Flint, Michigan water crisis. And sometimes by the time we figure out how much damage has really been done, the people who "should have paid" are long gone (soil contamination is still a good example here).

Sadly, humanity has proven time and again that we are entirely willing to dump our problems onto others in order to further enrich ourselves. At the most visible level there is inflation, where producers happily pass the burden of increased operational costs on to the consumer. When land tax increases, profit doesn't go down, rent simply goes up.

My point is that the true cost of an activity isn't always readily apparent, and sometimes humanity will be left to foot the bill. Case in point, in the distant future our planet will be a very unsafe place to just run around digging holes in - because you might run into a nuclear waste deposit. All of the measures that we take to try to scare people away from these sites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin...), may in fact end up piquing their curiosity and attracting them.

So when you talk about "the costs being borne by the same people who derive benefit", to my ears that sounds very tone deaf when you consider that those costs involve burying nuclear waste and marking those locations on maps that will very likely become lost long before the waste site is safe. If you don't care about the humans of the far future, then I don't think we even have enough common ground to constructively argue upon.

> Should we treat as implicitly accepted that a particular use of energy is frivolous and should be stopped? Not if you care about your own ability to use energy to do things you think are valuable.

Implicitly accept? No, I think we should explicitly reject frivolous energy use on the grounds that we endanger the future inhabitants of this planet with the byproducts of that energy use.

> So when you talk about "the costs being borne by the same people who derive benefit", to my ears that sounds very tone deaf

I fail to see how suggesting that costs should track with benefits is tone deaf, or even particularly controversial. All human activity (or any other activity for that matter) meant to produce a benefit will come with some attendant costs. Doing our best to set things up so that costs track with benefits should minimize the costs imposed on people who aren't benefitting. How is that even contentious? This applies across time as well as space. So the assumption that I don't care about costs borne by future humans is erroneous. Will we ever figure out a way to make the costs fall perfectly? Of course not. You're right that costs are not always readily apparent or even easily predictable, and that's assuming we all even want to do the right thing. We'll get it wrong. But we'll get it less wrong if we think hard about how to solve the coordination problems when we do see it happening. I don't see any other alternative, except just to stop all human activity so there are no costs at all.

> Implicitly accept? No, I think we should explicitly reject frivolous energy use

You're just using the term explicit and then assuming (implicitly) that we all basically either agree on what constitutes frivolous energy use or that any disagreement we have is irrelevant. If everybody agreed on what constituted frivolous energy use, the suggestion that we reject it would be trivial. But some people think using energy to secure PoW blockchains is useful. I do. Other people think using energy to run servers hosting TikToks is useful. I don't. I also don't advocate taking them down because I've assumed everybody agrees with me. Like the author of the article seems to do, you gloss over the entire sticking point, which is that people would like to use resources, including energy resources, for different things, some of which we will disagree on. We should minimize the amount that they can impose their costs on us and accept that if we want the ability to use energy to do things we perceive to be valuable, we have to extend the same courtesy to others.

What he seems to be saying is that by design proof of work incentivizes fully saturating available energy, and that the only world in which it won’t compete with other uses of energy is one in which we have more than enough capacity for all other uses, plus excess, and that until we’re there being in favor of devoting energy to proof of work is functionally equivalent to being against preventing emissions. I’m unaware of the debate, so as a lay man I admit I don’t know if the argument is old or not (and I think how old it is is irrelevant to whether or not it is right), but I find this line of argument compelling.