Bitcoin uses less than 0.1% of the world's energy. Any time somebody says things like "uses more energy than a country" they are either dishonest or malicious and clearly have an agenda. I'd recommend to try to stick facts, not opinions.
Bitcoin or not I don't like the idea of having opinionated people and entities judging what I do with the energy I paid for. Today is proof of work, tomorrow might be high end computer gaming, hopping on a car for a trip etc. You can already see on this very site judgmental comments about carbon usage when you mention a hobby like home lab.
My initial point was to inform the OP about peer-reviewed articles on current waste, not which energy uses are allowed or disallowed, nor a call to judge or curtail individual energy expenditures.
As with many things, there is not a single 'right' or wrong, but degrees of evidence. Highlighting current chain inefficiencies allows future versions to better mitigate these energy impacts. Honing any process to use less energy while achieving similar or better results is not an unreasonable goal.
Re: your first point, am I right to understand that entities that are able to afford higher usage should have no qualms doing so?
> My initial point was to inform the OP about peer-reviewed
"Peer-reviewed" is meaningless if it's not scientific, fact-based.
> articles on current waste
See, you start with the assumption that it's wasted. You can only come to that conclusion if you assume that bitcoin serves little or no purpose.
> Honing any process to use less energy while achieving similar or better results is not an unreasonable goal.
Energy usage is what brought humanity from stone tools and caves to the moon, using energy is a good thing that advances civilization. Energy production can be problematic, which bitcoin doesn't do. Proof of work is one of the core innovations, there is no system that has better results.
I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the linked sources, though. Similar to the authored pieces, I don't assume energy is 'wasted' on a perceived goal, but that actual waste is produced (e.g. mining devices are discarded quite frequently) as well as waste energy due to protocol implementation inefficiencies and infrastructural limitations (i.e. many compute cycles for little gain).
Both can be accounted for: would you not rather see a version where these issues are accounted for? PoS is a sure way forward, but there are still many legacy chains around that do not benefit from this [0].
No, PoS is a total failure. As it is not tied to reality the history of the ledger can be modified at will. There is no independent way of knowing which chain is the "real" one. There is no independent way of knowing which "validators" are valid. You can not leave the network and rejoin and be sure about the history without trusting some third party. This is the problem that PoW solved and PoS doesn't.
Less than .1% to secure more than 500 billion of value. Bitcoin energy usage is primarily to secure the network, not for transaction "volume", but that's a common misconception for people who have yet to learn about bitcoin.
You're splitting hairs. If the energy is needed to stave away a 51% attack, that's the energy needed to support the single digit tps monstrosity you have. As for the 500 billion in value, I doubt if everyone liquidated their positions today it'd amount to a figure remotely close to that.
> I wish people would just be honest and say yes, it's absurd and wasteful, but I think it'll make me rich so I don't care.
That's just your opinion. Most hardcore bitcoiners aren't in it to be rich, it's because it has a lot of potential to be a more sustainable monetary system over what we have now. I don't see the energy consumed by Bitcoin to be wasted and I'm doubtful that most who say it is understand why it's used in the first place.
Every industry on this planet that is worth doing uses "more energy than one country". Anybody who parrots this "argument" is either stupid or malicious.
I find it interesting to travel in such country. Take a train and when it approaches a city look at all the buildings passing by. All the lights in the windows that show that people live there. The eletric heating of many of those homes. All the electricity any of the people living there ever spends. All the factories, farms you see on the way. Massive greenhouses. Server farms. All those electric cars stuck in traffic. The train goes for hours and hours. Everything you see combined uses less electricity than bitcoin. Millions of people can run their lives and build all their businesses using less energy.
Like I said, the same can be said about any industry on this planet. That this fact is mind-boggling for you shows that you haven't really ever thought about energy consumption. That you see this as a weakness of bitcoin shows that you approach bitcoin with the preconception that it is useless, and that you try to find facts that suit your view.
That’s a fair point I don’t have good grasp on what energy usage really is.
I don’t perceive bitcoin as useless. I think the energy usage is way out of scale. POW is elegant solution to building the system, but the logical conclusion is that it ends up taking massive industry scale resources only catering to small to midsize industry. It’s economically viable only in the narrow sense that we don’t anticipate the true longterm costs of energy spent.
> but the logical conclusion is that it ends up taking massive industry scale resources only catering to small to midsize industry.
That's a fair assumption, but personally I find it absurd to think that a global open permissionless trustless non-censorable payment system will not keep growing. I think that's an expression of the financial privilege rich people in secure, wealthy countries without any financial problems have.
> That’s true, but then so does Google, Youtube, Facebook, Amazon, the cruise industry, Christmas lights, household drying machines, private jets, the zinc industry, and basically any other sizable platform or industry. From that list, Bitcoin’s energy usage is the closest to that of the cruise industry’s energy usage, but bitcoins are used by more people, and the network scales far better. If people were 10% more efficient at shutting off their electronic devices when not using them, then that alone would save more energy than the global Bitcoin network uses.
> It’s economically viable only in the narrow sense that we don’t anticipate the true longterm costs of energy spent.
Why would it be less economically viable with scale? As Bitcoin increases in value, the hashrate and energy usage will increase. If it doesn't, the hashrate and energy usage will stagnate or decrease.
If you think the energy usage is "way out of scale" for the problem it solves, I think you may be underestimating the challenges of developing a decentralized monetary system and the impact of money on society itself.
