Recently I often heard bitcoin critics telling me that "Bitcoin is too polluting", "Bitcoin waste too much energy" or other similar arguments.
Those arguments are as as as bitcoin, even
Satoshi discussed those have been debunked a few several times, but I am trying here to organise the material to counter those accusations.
- Defence
- Televisions, aeroplanes,Christmas lights, plastic, all require enormous amounts of energy to be produced and used: what is the amount of energy considered excessive to produce them? Why is this calculation done for Bitcoin and not for other goods?
- According to data from the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index devices kept on standby, in the United States alone, could power the bitcoin network for more than a year and a half. (a figure that has been constantly decreasing)
- Mining bitcoin is actually quite environmentally friendly, compared to mining other Store of Value (Gold)
I'm only going to address the first point, because you get into some quite convoluted arguments and make trivial defensive statements. First off, I doubt Satoshi envisaged bitcoin becoming anywhere near as popular as it has become the 11 years ago when he posted that statement. Anyone clever enough to produce the code behind Bitcoin would be clever enough to revise their original arguments when presented with new information - being that the network is vastly larger than back then.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/a-comparison-of-bitcoins-environmental-impact-with-that-of-gold-and-banking-2021-05-04If you refer to an article posted by the NASDAQ exchange this month, then Bitcoin uses twice the amount of energy per year than all gold extraction taking place and payment networks like VISA/Mastercard use 20% of the energy consumed by Bitcoin. They use the
Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index to determine that Bitcoin is using 113 TWh, more than the whole of Argentina. I think the real question that needs to be asked, is whether the environment cost of this new technology is worth the freedom it gives you from the traditional banking system? I'm not sure it is, and many governments might start using that argument as justification to attempt restrictions.[/list][/list]