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TL;DR Bitcoin uses over 75% of the energy used to mint and print all the fiat money in the world for about a percentage point of the transaction volume, but it'
by cwyers 9y ago
TL;DR Bitcoin uses over 75% of the energy used to mint and print all the fiat money in the world for about a percentage point of the transaction volume, but it's okay!
- desertrider12 9y agoThe computation has nothing to do with minting. The computation allows every Bitcoin user to “vote” on the correct sequence of transactions in the last block, and the reward for solving a block is just to make sure that people keep hashing. You can’t have a blockchain without a large number of people doing some kind of easily verifiable computation.
- colemannugent 9y agoNow factor in all the costs of moving bills to and from ATMs, banks, and businesses and see how the numbers stack up. While we're at it, factor in the cost of robberies where the robbers take cash, as Bitcoin eliminates those costs as well.
- tinus_hn 9y agoAre you in the universe where no Bitcoin got stolen, ever? Because I surely am not.
- bad_user 9y ago> Now factor in all the costs of moving bills to and from ATMs, banks, and businesses and see how the numbers stack up. That's unfair. A more reasonable comparison is with credit card transactions. Several European countries are positioned to go cashless you know. > While we're at it, factor in the cost of robberies where the robbers take cash, as Bitcoin eliminates those costs as well. That's a really stupid argument to make, but while you're at it, factor in the cost of Bitcoin robberies of people getting hacked, more and more every day. There's even a story around of a guy robbed at gunpoint. The more popular it gets, the bigger as a target it becomes ;-)
- cwyers 9y agoAdd in all the costs of the Bitcoin infrastructure to Bitcoin's usage, too - exchanges and so on. And then you still have an instrument so unstable that you can't actually buy anything with it; Steam discontinued BTC purchasing recently because the system is unusable for retail. So you still need that fiat money infrastructure to, you know, pay for anything.
- brazzy 9y agoBitcoin loses that comparison, because it cannot become energy efficient. The energy it has to waste in order to continue functioning necessarily scales up with its total value.