The common view of ’s energy consumption is totally misguided. I’ll lay out a few reasons briefly:
1. Energy consumption in itself isn’t bad — it’s how that energy is produced that matters. All evidence indicates that most — in for example — is done using renewable energy, or energy that would have otherwise been wasted. (If you prefer clean energy to dirty energy, that’s fine — but that doesn’t really have anything to do with .)
2. Moving to Proof-of-Stake (or insert-your-eco-friendly-consensus-algo-here) is not a solution. There currently is no replacement for Proof-of-Work. Without being tied to the Earth by physical laws in some way, the chain is not immutable.
3. This idea that anyone can declare what is a “waste” of energy is straight up authoritarian and weird. uses less energy than Christmas lights, so who decides what’s wasteful? This argument is a non-starter if you ask me.
4. consumes a lot of energy — compared to what? If we’re going to compare the cost of to something, let’s compare it to the fiat system. How much energy do you suppose is burned by the US military? The US is in eight different wars right now, with no end in sight. This is possible only with endlessly-printable fiat dollars.
But don’t take my word for it. Here’s a member of Congress saying as much:
5. It’s a market! Despite what you might hear on CNBC, there is no “intrinsic cost” to . When the price of is up, more miners come online, difficulty adjusts, more energy is consumed, the network is more secure, demand for bitcoins increases, price goes up, more miners come online, and round and round it goes.
When the price of goes down, it works in the opposite direction. Don’t you believe in markets? 🙂
Fact is, is going to be instrumental in addressing the major causes of climate change. Any eco-conscious person should be gung-ho about !
Published at Sun, 19 May 2019 20:28:52 +0000
