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Because you don't want to "play that game", so you can just assume the financial infrastructure costs zero? Is this how you "play that game"?

lxgr 6y ago
It's definitely not zero, but I don't know any process in the financial industry that explicitly incentivizes wasting electricity. If business class tickets become cheaper, financial analysts will not start buying more plane tickets. Bitcoin miners on the other hand will start mining twice as fast the second the electricity price drops by half. It also doesn't seem like Bitcoin stakeholders are remotely interested in transitioning the system off proof-of-work and towards less wasteful alternatives, or even just making it more tractable as a retail payment system.
- dnautics 6y ago
  > I don't know any process in the financial industry that explicitly incentivizes wasting electricity Inflation. If you don't spend your money, it loses value. This is actually part of the economic program (inflate to grow demand). What are you going to spend it on? Stuff or sevices. Stuff takes electricity to make. Services take electricity to perform. You could also invest, but that's also just indirectly incentivising stuff and services, except in a trickle down fashion (put money into the corporation that's gonna do these things). Bitcoin may be wasteful, but, its energy cost is explicit and not hidden, which is why it's attacked.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    >Inflation. If you don't spend your money, it loses value. This is actually part of the economic program (inflate to grow demand). What are you going to spend it on? Stuff or sevices. Stuff takes electricity to make. Services take electricity to perform. How does spending money on clean energy infrastructure produce CO2 emissions? Obviously there is a trace amount because we are dependent on a CO2 based economy but in reality if the incentives were correct we would be able to increase spending without additional CO2 emissions. The problem begins with the fact that the central bank is distributing the fresh money in a way that drives Bitcoin up. So yes, we could argue that the central bank is directly responsible for the CO2 emissions of Bitcoin and the system itself is what's broken. Bitcoin is just the symptom.

lxgr 6y ago

It's definitely not zero, but I don't know any process in the financial industry that explicitly incentivizes wasting electricity. If business class tickets become cheaper, financial analysts will not start buying more plane tickets. Bitcoin miners on the other hand will start mining twice as fast the second the electricity price drops by half. It also doesn't seem like Bitcoin stakeholders are remotely interested in transitioning the system off proof-of-work and towards less wasteful alternatives, or even just making it more tractable as a retail payment system.

dnautics 6y ago
> I don't know any process in the financial industry that explicitly incentivizes wasting electricity Inflation. If you don't spend your money, it loses value. This is actually part of the economic program (inflate to grow demand). What are you going to spend it on? Stuff or sevices. Stuff takes electricity to make. Services take electricity to perform. You could also invest, but that's also just indirectly incentivising stuff and services, except in a trickle down fashion (put money into the corporation that's gonna do these things). Bitcoin may be wasteful, but, its energy cost is explicit and not hidden, which is why it's attacked.
- imtringued 6y ago
  >Inflation. If you don't spend your money, it loses value. This is actually part of the economic program (inflate to grow demand). What are you going to spend it on? Stuff or sevices. Stuff takes electricity to make. Services take electricity to perform. How does spending money on clean energy infrastructure produce CO2 emissions? Obviously there is a trace amount because we are dependent on a CO2 based economy but in reality if the incentives were correct we would be able to increase spending without additional CO2 emissions. The problem begins with the fact that the central bank is distributing the fresh money in a way that drives Bitcoin up. So yes, we could argue that the central bank is directly responsible for the CO2 emissions of Bitcoin and the system itself is what's broken. Bitcoin is just the symptom.