> We don't need Bitcoin. It hasn't enabled anything that couldn't be done already using the banking system, or with existing non-power abusive technology.
The advantage of Bitcoin may seem questionable if you believe dependency on central banking is fine and hedging against financial risks of traditional banks is silly. But mind you there are many people in the world without access to stable banking services.
> If we instead of running PoW blockchains, and used the far more efficient existing banking infrastructure, we could almost completely shut off all of Germany's gas from Russia (at least that portion used to generate
Come on, the number of Bitcoin miners in Germany might approach zero. Energy is way too expensive there. Miners operate in countries with access to cheap energy (which could be coal like in China but also renewables like in Norway). There may be validation modes in Germany but those draw much less power than a mining facility that append to the ledger. So Putin wouldn’t even notice if Central Europe would be shutting down the Bitcoin network.
And do you know what services had similar energy consumption in the past and nobody cared? Peer to peer file sharing like Bitorrent. Running seeding nodes 24/7 or your desktop computer for days just to download illegal copies of movies and software was not exactly environmentally friendly either. Can’t remember any outrage about that. While it’s valid to criticize Bitcoin‘s energy consumption it is not completely out of place and not without precedent.
> I'm pretty sure renewables are actually cheaper to produce than fossil fuels.
Yes, they‘re cheap to produce but very expensive to distribute. Germany e.g. heavily subsidized renewables in the past making electricity very expensive here (AFAIR even one of the most expensive in the world). The most economic renewable currently is hydroelectric power where you also can regulate power generation in response to demands.
But that wasn’t my point. I was just arguing Bitcoin is not a significant contributing factor to rising electricity costs.
> Worldwide power generation is a zero-sum game. There is limited power generation available each day. … It's a zero sum game.
No, that’s not how markets work and energy markets neither. If demand rises energy producers react by increasing production, if demand falls they lower production. If demand rises long-term, they invest in more production facilities. That, of course, takes time so prices will rise temporarily but still creating an incentive to invest. If Bitcoin miners manage to leverage renewables they might actually encourage a net production rise of renewable energy.
BTW: The Bitcoin network‘s power consumption is not fixed either, it depends on the network load and the number of miners competing with each other. At the peak of the bubble it may be much higher than on average. The next crypto winter is likely to come soon and then power consumption goes back to normal. Until the next crypto craze competing networks will hopefully have switched over to Proof-Of-Stake successfully.