tl;dr- The article's a bit confused, so to clarify: Bitcoin's entropy starts maximized, and then miners reduce it. According to the second-law-of-thermodynamic

tl;dr- The article's a bit confused, so to clarify: Bitcoin's entropy starts maximized, and then miners reduce it. According to the second-law-of-thermodynamics, the net-entropy of the universe tends to increase, so Bitcoin's entropy-reduction is just increasing entropy elsewhere (hence its huge electric consumption). Bitcoin's doing this because its security is based on having a high-entropy barrier against attackers (like a good password), except instead of a legitimate party being whoever has the password (and thus can beat attackers), it's based on whoever can attack the entropy the best (through 51%+ control of mining). --- Some of the entropy stuff seems a bit confused. As time goes on, Bitcoin's blockchain's entropy is decreasing, not increasing. The [genesis-block](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block) is like a [nucleation-seed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_crystal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_crystal), and the blockchain's growing from that genesis-block like ice crystallizing from a nucleation-seed as the surrounding water freezes. The second-law-of-thermodynamics asserts that entropy tends to increase in the overall system, in a cumulative sense, but not necessarily throughout the entire system. Bitcoin's blockchain's removed entropy tends to imply an increase of entropy in the surrounding environment (leading to the environmental concerns with its energy-consumption). If Bitcoin's mining-difficulty were reduced and the miner-pool shrunk a lot, then Bitcoin's blockchain would have less entropy removed, but the environment would have less entropy added to it as Bitcoin's power-consumption would be less. This is by-design. For example, if you want a secure password, then you want it to have [high entropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength#Entropy_as_a_measure_of_password_strength https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength#Entropy_as_a...), because then it's harder for an attacker to guess your password. Bitcoin's the same way, except that it doesn't start knowing the password -- instead, Bitcoin asserts that whoever controls the most entropy-removing-power (mining power) is the correct authority. So that's why [Bitcoin sets a high-enough difficulty](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty): it needs a high-enough difficulty to prevent someone from easily [faking a longer blockchain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending#51%_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending#51%_attack).