Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scroll down to the bar chart showing the country rankings. Look at the top 3 countries (China, US, India). Compare those to Bitcoin... can you honestly tell me that Bitcoin constitutes a significant amount of energy consumption in that context? And it's also worth noting that energy consumption isn't necessarily bad for climate change. You're conflating "energy consumption" with "CO2 emissions". It's CO2 emissions th…
America, India, and China? Those are fully functioning, massive economies that power the entire world and have people commuting, working, eating, farming, manufacturing, and doing all the normal processes that life entails. Are you saying we should compare a digital coin with very niche usage to the collective impact of all of those actions taking place in the most massively populated and economically significant nat…
>But say you want to flip a switch and turn off a single cryptocurrency in order to do it, and you'll have floods of people trivializing it, saying "well, let me tell you why 110 million people's CO2 emissions aren't that big of a deal..."
Well, with Bitcoin, you can't "flip a switch" to turn it off. There's literally no one on the planet with that power, which is kind of the point. As long as people see value in the asset and the network, it will always be there.
Moving onto your latest post, everything you said depends entirely on whether you believe the value proposition of Bitcoin separating money and state.
As said by Satoshi Nakamoto, "The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible."
It's worth a lot to me and many other people not to see their wealth melted away by inflation, which is basically a hidden tax that disproportionally effects the people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale. And that's just one use case for it (i.e. store of value). There are other important features of Bitcoin that people value.
A sound money with decreasing inflation, absolute scarcity, that is difficult (if not impossible) to manipulate is very valuable to ~8 billion people on this planet. At the moment only a small percent of people understand that (maybe hundreds of millions?), but that may change over the coming decades.
Looked at it in that way, it's current energy expenditure is incredibly small and for the amount of wealth it secures and transfer globally... also incredibly efficient.