Re: "So perhaps people should quit criticizing bitcoin for its energy intensity and start criticizing states and nations for still providing new industries with

Re: "So perhaps people should quit criticizing bitcoin for its energy intensity and start criticizing states and nations for still providing new industries with dirty power supplies instead." Three responses: (1) The author has introduced another unrelated claim, presumably to distract from the main point. See the informal usage of "non-sequitur" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy (2) This is a false choice. The two arguments are separate. (3) There are better alternatives when it comes to energy efficiency: (A) in the current cryptocurrency space; (B) in the financial transaction space; (C) in the (open-ended, what might the future hold) software design space. ... The article misses the point. If we're talking energy, the main criticism of Bitcoin is its efficiency. I mean "efficiency" as defined in the engineering sense: useful output / input. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiency If we define useful output as one Bitcoin transaction, how much input energy does that require? According to [2], "Because of all that calculation, the energy cost of Bitcoin is high in comparison with that of conventional financial transactions. For example, according to one estimate, processing a bitcoin transaction consumes more than 5,000 times as much energy as using a Visa credit card." According to [3], "Bitcoin's power consumption is extremely high compared to conventional digital payment, and one transaction now uses as much energy as your house in a week" [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/the-ridiculous-amount-of-energy-it-takes-to-run-bitcoin https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/the-ridiculous-amoun... [3] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mi... ... Finally, here's my personal perspective. I have relatively little confidence in a simple, generalized idea of cryptocurrencies. As far as the basic computer science, I like blockchain technologies roughly as much as I like Merkle trees. I'm also open to see where alternative forms of transactions can go. That said, these forms have design constraints that the technologies must address. I would like to see particular innovation in the design of particular cryptocurrencies that make them suitable for particular uses. For a system that hopes to scale up transactions for a broad user base, I think per-transaction energy efficiency is an important metric.