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This is a rambling article, but the core premise that Bitcoin is leaky because it has an energy INPUT is a weird one. The argument that other tokens being fully

This is a rambling article, but the core premise that Bitcoin is leaky because it has an energy INPUT is a weird one. The argument that other tokens being fully closed loops that don’t leak value is certainly a take… Proof of work plays many roles in the Bitcoin. One role it plays is that it ties a digital token to a real world, scarce, valuable resource. The only thing a digital token can be tied to: computation, or energy. Closed loop staking tokens have no tie. It is a formless, virtual, free floating concept. Not to mention that they are all highly centralized, so they don’t even have confidence in their monetary policy to fall back on. With Ethereum, Cardano, Solana, etc, your value is in the hands of where the developers choose to take the protocols. They can and have changed their monetary policies, and they will again. This person’s real concern appears to be “number go up”. It seems to have infected their thinking. They see a system that decided to engineer for NGU instead of stability and confidence, and thinks that’s “not leaky”. It is extremely short sighted. In the stormy world of crypto, Bitcoin is the port.

anonymoushn 4y ago
The article also discusses stability, and Bitcoin does not really have a credible stability story if miners are paid only from L1 transaction fees.
- someguydave 4y ago
  why not? Fees will go up to cover mining costs in the distant future.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    By what mechanism will fees increase?
    - TakeBlaster16 4y ago
      Competition for limited block space. https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,30d,weight https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,30d,weight Constant supply and fluctuating demand will lead to times where you must choose between paying low fees and waiting a long time for confirmation, or paying high fees for faster confirmation. If you zoom out all the way, you can see this has played out with every halving so far.
      - paulgb 4y ago
        This argument made sense when Bitcoin was still a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” as Satoshi envisioned, but it doesn’t make sense under the current “store of value” narrative. If people are just buying and holding, they aren’t creating much demand for block space.
        TakeBlaster16 4y ago
        People do hold this viewpoint, and that's why I linked hard data. You can see the fees fluctuating from day to day. On Sep 3, many transactions had 10x the normal fees. On low volume days such as Sep 11, very few transactions had high fees. You can argue philosophically about whether a chosen narrative makes sense or "should" create demand for block space, but I'm ignoring philosophy and looking at empirical data. Since this is already happening, and has been for the history of the project, it's not a stretch to predict it will continue happening. If there was no competition for block space, the fee market would look like white noise, like BCH or DOGE: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#DOGE,30d,weight https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#DOGE,30d,weight
        paulgb 4y ago
        There's day-to-day fluctuation, sure, but the overall share of mining rewards that transaction fees make up has been trending down over the last year[1] to around 1-2% today. That means that to maintain the current level of security in the system, aggregate transaction fees will need to go up 50-100x over time to offset the lower block rewards. Even just considering the next halving in 2024, transaction fees would need to go up ~50x from where they are today to make up for the incentive lost to miners. [1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-sma30.html#1y https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-sma...
        TakeBlaster16 4y ago
        If I zoom your chart out, I could make all the same arguments about 2018. It looks like just another cyclical metric that follows the halvings. In the year after the 2018 peak, fees approached zero, but in the year after the 2021 peak, they stayed higher. As long as that keeps up and they don't actually go to zero, and people are competing for block space, miners will keep lining up, and the network will be fine. Halvings matter less as time goes on. I didn't shed any tears for miner incentives when the reward went down by 25, and I won't shed any tears when it goes down by a mere 3.125. Mining was never meant to be profitable beyond BTC's bootstrapping phase. In fact the protocol actively makes difficulty adjustments to keep profitability near zero. Let their profits go down. As long as people are competing for block space, and transaction fees keep coming in, miners will continue competing for their fractions of a percent, and the network will be fine.
ETH_start 4y ago
>>Not to mention that they are all highly centralized, Source?
- jevgeni 4y ago
  You just need to look. https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-cryptocurrency-may-be-more-centralized-than-you-thought-111254399.html https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-cryptocurrency-ma...
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    I didn't see anything in that article supporting the claim that PoS chains "are all highly centralized".
    - jevgeni 4y ago
      So according to you a protocol that prioritizes nodes with higher holdings of the crypto currency is somehow decentralized?
      - ETH_start 4y ago
        What difference does it make if the block-generating capital is ASICs or cryptocurrency? The distinction is completely orthogonal to decentralization.
        jevgeni 4y ago
        Then don't make that distinction? I originally wasn't. Point is, whether it is a huge farm of ASICs or PoS holdings, it still leads to centralization.
        ETH_start 4y ago
        The original comment asking for a source was quoting an assertion that Proof of Stake blockchains, as opposed to Proof of Work ones, "are all highly centralized". So given the context, I was implicitly asking for what distinguishes Proof of Stake from Proof of Work to make the former centralized where the latter is not.
lottin 4y ago
The article simply points out PoW imposes a huge cost on the system, and that such a cost is assumed by the token holders whether they like it or not. This has been known for a long time.
- aeternum 4y ago
  Yet gold also has a huge cost for secure storage and has throughout history. Gold remains a store of value, thus the argument seems quite weak.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    Gold is useful in chemical and industrial processes. Bitcoin obviously has no use other than money, so I don't know if they are completely comparable in this sense. If people decided that gold was not valuable as money, it would retain at least some value based on its usefulness alone.
    - eldenwrong 4y ago
      Its has other uses, like Microsofts decentralized identity or document vérification storage
      - cowtools 4y ago
        does it? If you simply fork bitcoin, won't you also get those properties?
        eldenwrong 4y ago
        Yes. Just like if you fork the amazon website you become amazon.
    - ChaitanyaSai 4y ago
      Thought-provoking post, but this is an argument I just don't get. Oxygen and CO2 are useful in chemical and industrial processes too. If you want something more limited, then Aluminium. That's the value Gold will retain if people decided it was of no use as long-term money. Gold's use in industry has very little to do with its value. What am I missing?
throwawayKiwi9 4y ago
People are so quick to dismiss cryptocurrency now because it isn't "green", but disregard the enormous infrastructure, capital, and resources that the global fiat industry uses that is completely automated away by crypto. Even if you only factor the value of human life alone, just the time saved by the hundreds of thousands or millions of worldwide fiat employees who's positions largely would not need to exist anymore should surely be factored into these discussions about resource consumption. And that's before factoring things like wages. Or the ultra-weathy executives. Let alone physical infrastructures, skyscrapers, data centers, private jets, marketing, R&D, legal teams, IT/security, fraud depts, and loads of other internal costs. I just don't buy that it's much worse than many existing costs we already turn a blind eye to. I believe that the growing use of safe nuclear power and other future alternative energy sources make this a moot position in these arguments anyway.
- unicornmama 4y ago
  Crypto has not automated away anything useful beyond toy projects nor shown potential to do more with less. If crypto disappeared today its disappearance would have zero impact on goods and services.
  - Galanwe 4y ago
    I'm sorry what? At the very minimum crypto showed that you can run an efficient, highly liquid, double digit billion dollar, fungible or non fungible exchange market in a fully automated and distributed manner. A huge fiat equity market such as NYSE averages $3B/d, crypto DEXes alone is around $2B/d. Crypto also completely removes the need for middle and back offices, clearing houses, etc. on these platforms. Just technology wise (if we were to drop the self-sovereignty of crypto tokens and just use central bank backed crypto euro/dollar/etc to replace the current financial system) a monstrous amount of manpower and energy could be saved by removing the banks, exchanges, brokers, clearing houses, compensation chambers, back office, etc. industries.
    - p4bl0 4y ago
      I'm sorry what? In practice, crypto markets are not any more decentralized than others. In real life people use hosted wallets on exchange platform. Transactions happen on a distributed (not decentralized!) ledger. The underlying network is only somewhat decentralized (the mining economy tends to the concentration of big players). Also the way you seem to imagine we could be "removing the banks, exchanges, brokers, clearing houses, compensation chambers, back office, etc." just shows how much you don't know about how an economy works. Real-world transactions need to be reversible, need escrow, guarantees and a lot of other mechanisms that are by design not available using blockchains based assets (if they are there, it means the assumptions which would have made a blockchain useful have been broken, and that we can achieve the same features and services without a blockchain in a more efficient manner).
cowtools 4y ago
>Proof of work plays many roles in the Bitcoin. No it doesn't. It has one purpose, and one purpose only: to secure the network against double-spending attacks by making it infeasible to reverse transactions. I won't comment on PoS. I am not familiar with it, but it seems like it bypasses this need simply because it is more of a compromise based on classical consensus. > With Ethereum, Cardano, Solana, etc, your value is in the hands of where the developers choose to take the protocols. They can and have changed their monetary policies, and they will again. This is a bad premise because it frames the discussion as a false dichotomy: between Bitcoin and Ethereum/Cardano/Solana/etc. There are PoW cryptocurrencies like Monero, Litecoin, and many others that have community-driven development and institute a less dangerous emission schedule than Bitcoin. > This person’s real concern appears to be “number go up”. It seems to have infected their thinking. They see a system that decided to engineer for NGU instead of stability and confidence, and thinks that’s “not leaky”. It is extremely short sighted. This is a misreading of the post. The problem is that (this is an over-generalization) bitcoin's resilience to attacks requires that the price of bitcoin increase twofold every halfening, or the relative hashrate to some outside attacker will be cut in half. >In the stormy world of crypto, Bitcoin is the port. This is an idiotic statement. Bitcoin development has completely succumbed to corporate capture at this point by Blockstream and the likes.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > I won't comment on PoS. I am not familiar with it, but it seems like it bypasses this need simply because it is more of a compromise based on classical consensus. Proof of Work and Proof of Stake round to the same thing. In PoW you input cash to buy miners and power to obtain coins. Cash > ??? > Coins. In PoS you input cash to buy coins to obtain coins. Cash > ??? > Coins. In both PoS and PoS those with the most money get to control the system. PoW adds a layer of indirection by wasting mountains of components and a country worth of power but at the end of the day there's no real difference.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    In Proof-of-Work, a large fraction of the money you put into the system is destroyed. There are physicially meaningful economies (and dis-economies) of scale involved. You are generally incentivized to sell your cryptocurrency as fast as possible to cover your real-world costs (lowering the price of the cryptocurrency). In Proof-of-Stake, you are incentivized to keep your money into the system so you can control more and more of it. It's like a ponzi scheme where you are incentivized to re-invest your winnings. This falls apart when everyone starts to cash out. The use of bitcoin mining as indoor heating is one such example of a dis-economy of scale (but this is an oversimplification because it does not factor depreciation costs). Also, there are systems like RandomX which encourage CPU-based mining, which has economies of scale for home miners or botnets over larger mining operations.
zeroclip 4y ago
> With Ethereum, Cardano, Solana, etc, your value is in the hands of where the developers choose to take the protocols. They can and have changed their monetary policies, and they will again. The consensus mechanism has nothing to do with governance in most chains. Bitcoin and Ethereum governance is both determined off-chain through social consensus, based on what node and client software the honest users of the chain choose to run.
- TacoToni 4y ago
  Yup - typically referred to as layer 0. The ETH devs cant willy-nilly change the protocol and expect social consensus to agree. As a solo staker i also have the choice of which node and client to run (like you said).
locallost 4y ago
How is it a rambling article? The author has an opinion and articulates it. It could be wrong, but that doesn't make it a ramble. To me, it seems like an interesting take and makes a lot of sense. If the network is kept running by miners, and they need a certain price to make it profitable, then the price needs to keep going up as the rewards halve. Seems straightforward. It's also made clear that the price will eventually need to be astronomical. The second argument is that the price will need to go up even more, since the hashrate will need to go up as well, plus electricity prices will also go up. I wouldn't mind hearing where the author is wrong here. The argument about Ethereum I am less interested in.
kwhitefoot 4y ago
> it ties a digital token to a real world, scarce, valuable resource. Not really, once the token exists the real world, scarce, valuable resource no longer exists. If I tie a fiat currency token (USD, GBP, NOK, etc.) to a real world resource I can exchange the token for the resource.
DennisP 4y ago
The mystical powers people assign to proof-of-work are quite something to behold. The only thing keeping Bitcoin devs from changing the issuance schedule is social consensus, just like with any proof-of-stake chain. PoW may tie the token value to a real resource, but that's a correlation where many advocates get the causation reversed. Because of difficulty adjustment, the energy devoted to hashing is the result of the current price, not the other way around.
- manholio 4y ago
  To add, the energy devoted to Bitcoin hashing is a product of the bitcoin price, block reward, and the wide acceptance in the Bitcoin community of the idea that provable energy burn is a good way to ensure rarity of the coins. Even if we maintain proof of work chains as the fundamental consensus tech, there is absolutely nothing (aside from momentum) stopping the community from decreasing the block reward to the a lower value required to prevent double spends of reasonable size. The current hashing power and energy burn in Bitcoin is absurdly oversized for that specific purpose. You could even maintain the current coin issuance schedule - there is absolutely no need to burn coins into existence, you could simply distribute them randomly to existing holders.

anonymoushn 4y ago

The article also discusses stability, and Bitcoin does not really have a credible stability story if miners are paid only from L1 transaction fees.

someguydave 4y ago
why not? Fees will go up to cover mining costs in the distant future.
- cowtools 4y ago
  By what mechanism will fees increase?
  - TakeBlaster16 4y ago
    Competition for limited block space. https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,30d,weight https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,30d,weight Constant supply and fluctuating demand will lead to times where you must choose between paying low fees and waiting a long time for confirmation, or paying high fees for faster confirmation. If you zoom out all the way, you can see this has played out with every halving so far.
    - paulgb 4y ago
      This argument made sense when Bitcoin was still a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” as Satoshi envisioned, but it doesn’t make sense under the current “store of value” narrative. If people are just buying and holding, they aren’t creating much demand for block space.
      - TakeBlaster16 4y ago
        People do hold this viewpoint, and that's why I linked hard data. You can see the fees fluctuating from day to day. On Sep 3, many transactions had 10x the normal fees. On low volume days such as Sep 11, very few transactions had high fees. You can argue philosophically about whether a chosen narrative makes sense or "should" create demand for block space, but I'm ignoring philosophy and looking at empirical data. Since this is already happening, and has been for the history of the project, it's not a stretch to predict it will continue happening. If there was no competition for block space, the fee market would look like white noise, like BCH or DOGE: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#DOGE,30d,weight https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#DOGE,30d,weight
        paulgb 4y ago
        There's day-to-day fluctuation, sure, but the overall share of mining rewards that transaction fees make up has been trending down over the last year[1] to around 1-2% today. That means that to maintain the current level of security in the system, aggregate transaction fees will need to go up 50-100x over time to offset the lower block rewards. Even just considering the next halving in 2024, transaction fees would need to go up ~50x from where they are today to make up for the incentive lost to miners. [1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-sma30.html#1y https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-sma...
        TakeBlaster16 4y ago
        If I zoom your chart out, I could make all the same arguments about 2018. It looks like just another cyclical metric that follows the halvings. In the year after the 2018 peak, fees approached zero, but in the year after the 2021 peak, they stayed higher. As long as that keeps up and they don't actually go to zero, and people are competing for block space, miners will keep lining up, and the network will be fine. Halvings matter less as time goes on. I didn't shed any tears for miner incentives when the reward went down by 25, and I won't shed any tears when it goes down by a mere 3.125. Mining was never meant to be profitable beyond BTC's bootstrapping phase. In fact the protocol actively makes difficulty adjustments to keep profitability near zero. Let their profits go down. As long as people are competing for block space, and transaction fees keep coming in, miners will continue competing for their fractions of a percent, and the network will be fine.

ETH_start 4y ago

>>Not to mention that they are all highly centralized, Source?

jevgeni 4y ago
You just need to look. https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-cryptocurrency-may-be-more-centralized-than-you-thought-111254399.html https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-cryptocurrency-ma...
- ETH_start 4y ago
  I didn't see anything in that article supporting the claim that PoS chains "are all highly centralized".
  - jevgeni 4y ago
    So according to you a protocol that prioritizes nodes with higher holdings of the crypto currency is somehow decentralized?
    - ETH_start 4y ago
      What difference does it make if the block-generating capital is ASICs or cryptocurrency? The distinction is completely orthogonal to decentralization.
      - jevgeni 4y ago
        Then don't make that distinction? I originally wasn't. Point is, whether it is a huge farm of ASICs or PoS holdings, it still leads to centralization.
        ETH_start 4y ago
        The original comment asking for a source was quoting an assertion that Proof of Stake blockchains, as opposed to Proof of Work ones, "are all highly centralized". So given the context, I was implicitly asking for what distinguishes Proof of Stake from Proof of Work to make the former centralized where the latter is not.

lottin 4y ago

The article simply points out PoW imposes a huge cost on the system, and that such a cost is assumed by the token holders whether they like it or not. This has been known for a long time.

aeternum 4y ago
Yet gold also has a huge cost for secure storage and has throughout history. Gold remains a store of value, thus the argument seems quite weak.
- cowtools 4y ago
  Gold is useful in chemical and industrial processes. Bitcoin obviously has no use other than money, so I don't know if they are completely comparable in this sense. If people decided that gold was not valuable as money, it would retain at least some value based on its usefulness alone.
  - eldenwrong 4y ago
    Its has other uses, like Microsofts decentralized identity or document vérification storage
    - cowtools 4y ago
      does it? If you simply fork bitcoin, won't you also get those properties?
      - eldenwrong 4y ago
        Yes. Just like if you fork the amazon website you become amazon.
  - ChaitanyaSai 4y ago
    Thought-provoking post, but this is an argument I just don't get. Oxygen and CO2 are useful in chemical and industrial processes too. If you want something more limited, then Aluminium. That's the value Gold will retain if people decided it was of no use as long-term money. Gold's use in industry has very little to do with its value. What am I missing?

throwawayKiwi9 4y ago

People are so quick to dismiss cryptocurrency now because it isn't "green", but disregard the enormous infrastructure, capital, and resources that the global fiat industry uses that is completely automated away by crypto. Even if you only factor the value of human life alone, just the time saved by the hundreds of thousands or millions of worldwide fiat employees who's positions largely would not need to exist anymore should surely be factored into these discussions about resource consumption. And that's before factoring things like wages. Or the ultra-weathy executives. Let alone physical infrastructures, skyscrapers, data centers, private jets, marketing, R&D, legal teams, IT/security, fraud depts, and loads of other internal costs. I just don't buy that it's much worse than many existing costs we already turn a blind eye to. I believe that the growing use of safe nuclear power and other future alternative energy sources make this a moot position in these arguments anyway.

unicornmama 4y ago
Crypto has not automated away anything useful beyond toy projects nor shown potential to do more with less. If crypto disappeared today its disappearance would have zero impact on goods and services.
- Galanwe 4y ago
  I'm sorry what? At the very minimum crypto showed that you can run an efficient, highly liquid, double digit billion dollar, fungible or non fungible exchange market in a fully automated and distributed manner. A huge fiat equity market such as NYSE averages $3B/d, crypto DEXes alone is around $2B/d. Crypto also completely removes the need for middle and back offices, clearing houses, etc. on these platforms. Just technology wise (if we were to drop the self-sovereignty of crypto tokens and just use central bank backed crypto euro/dollar/etc to replace the current financial system) a monstrous amount of manpower and energy could be saved by removing the banks, exchanges, brokers, clearing houses, compensation chambers, back office, etc. industries.
  - p4bl0 4y ago
    I'm sorry what? In practice, crypto markets are not any more decentralized than others. In real life people use hosted wallets on exchange platform. Transactions happen on a distributed (not decentralized!) ledger. The underlying network is only somewhat decentralized (the mining economy tends to the concentration of big players). Also the way you seem to imagine we could be "removing the banks, exchanges, brokers, clearing houses, compensation chambers, back office, etc." just shows how much you don't know about how an economy works. Real-world transactions need to be reversible, need escrow, guarantees and a lot of other mechanisms that are by design not available using blockchains based assets (if they are there, it means the assumptions which would have made a blockchain useful have been broken, and that we can achieve the same features and services without a blockchain in a more efficient manner).

cowtools 4y ago

>Proof of work plays many roles in the Bitcoin. No it doesn't. It has one purpose, and one purpose only: to secure the network against double-spending attacks by making it infeasible to reverse transactions. I won't comment on PoS. I am not familiar with it, but it seems like it bypasses this need simply because it is more of a compromise based on classical consensus. > With Ethereum, Cardano, Solana, etc, your value is in the hands of where the developers choose to take the protocols. They can and have changed their monetary policies, and they will again. This is a bad premise because it frames the discussion as a false dichotomy: between Bitcoin and Ethereum/Cardano/Solana/etc. There are PoW cryptocurrencies like Monero, Litecoin, and many others that have community-driven development and institute a less dangerous emission schedule than Bitcoin. > This person’s real concern appears to be “number go up”. It seems to have infected their thinking. They see a system that decided to engineer for NGU instead of stability and confidence, and thinks that’s “not leaky”. It is extremely short sighted. This is a misreading of the post. The problem is that (this is an over-generalization) bitcoin's resilience to attacks requires that the price of bitcoin increase twofold every halfening, or the relative hashrate to some outside attacker will be cut in half. >In the stormy world of crypto, Bitcoin is the port. This is an idiotic statement. Bitcoin development has completely succumbed to corporate capture at this point by Blockstream and the likes.

arcticbull 4y ago
> I won't comment on PoS. I am not familiar with it, but it seems like it bypasses this need simply because it is more of a compromise based on classical consensus. Proof of Work and Proof of Stake round to the same thing. In PoW you input cash to buy miners and power to obtain coins. Cash > ??? > Coins. In PoS you input cash to buy coins to obtain coins. Cash > ??? > Coins. In both PoS and PoS those with the most money get to control the system. PoW adds a layer of indirection by wasting mountains of components and a country worth of power but at the end of the day there's no real difference.
- cowtools 4y ago
  In Proof-of-Work, a large fraction of the money you put into the system is destroyed. There are physicially meaningful economies (and dis-economies) of scale involved. You are generally incentivized to sell your cryptocurrency as fast as possible to cover your real-world costs (lowering the price of the cryptocurrency). In Proof-of-Stake, you are incentivized to keep your money into the system so you can control more and more of it. It's like a ponzi scheme where you are incentivized to re-invest your winnings. This falls apart when everyone starts to cash out. The use of bitcoin mining as indoor heating is one such example of a dis-economy of scale (but this is an oversimplification because it does not factor depreciation costs). Also, there are systems like RandomX which encourage CPU-based mining, which has economies of scale for home miners or botnets over larger mining operations.

zeroclip 4y ago

> With Ethereum, Cardano, Solana, etc, your value is in the hands of where the developers choose to take the protocols. They can and have changed their monetary policies, and they will again. The consensus mechanism has nothing to do with governance in most chains. Bitcoin and Ethereum governance is both determined off-chain through social consensus, based on what node and client software the honest users of the chain choose to run.

TacoToni 4y ago
Yup - typically referred to as layer 0. The ETH devs cant willy-nilly change the protocol and expect social consensus to agree. As a solo staker i also have the choice of which node and client to run (like you said).

locallost 4y ago

How is it a rambling article? The author has an opinion and articulates it. It could be wrong, but that doesn't make it a ramble. To me, it seems like an interesting take and makes a lot of sense. If the network is kept running by miners, and they need a certain price to make it profitable, then the price needs to keep going up as the rewards halve. Seems straightforward. It's also made clear that the price will eventually need to be astronomical. The second argument is that the price will need to go up even more, since the hashrate will need to go up as well, plus electricity prices will also go up. I wouldn't mind hearing where the author is wrong here. The argument about Ethereum I am less interested in.

kwhitefoot 4y ago

> it ties a digital token to a real world, scarce, valuable resource. Not really, once the token exists the real world, scarce, valuable resource no longer exists. If I tie a fiat currency token (USD, GBP, NOK, etc.) to a real world resource I can exchange the token for the resource.

DennisP 4y ago

The mystical powers people assign to proof-of-work are quite something to behold. The only thing keeping Bitcoin devs from changing the issuance schedule is social consensus, just like with any proof-of-stake chain. PoW may tie the token value to a real resource, but that's a correlation where many advocates get the causation reversed. Because of difficulty adjustment, the energy devoted to hashing is the result of the current price, not the other way around.

manholio 4y ago
To add, the energy devoted to Bitcoin hashing is a product of the bitcoin price, block reward, and the wide acceptance in the Bitcoin community of the idea that provable energy burn is a good way to ensure rarity of the coins. Even if we maintain proof of work chains as the fundamental consensus tech, there is absolutely nothing (aside from momentum) stopping the community from decreasing the block reward to the a lower value required to prevent double spends of reasonable size. The current hashing power and energy burn in Bitcoin is absurdly oversized for that specific purpose. You could even maintain the current coin issuance schedule - there is absolutely no need to burn coins into existence, you could simply distribute them randomly to existing holders.