ok found it on my own. A little bit questionable why exactly they put gold in there... . They calculated back the CO2 footprint of gold into theoretical TWH. Dunno what this comparison should tell, this is like putting concrete into comparison. In the end every device also contains gold again so it might have made sense if they wanted to calculate a total CO2 footprint including the gold production. Weird...

Interesting. Where is there are source of that picture including the sources of how it was aggregated? Would like to have a deeper dive into the whole analysis (especially having a question mark what the gold energy usage means?)

Why do you think so? PoW has a sustained load, the power grid has only problems with spike loads, like the one that comes from charging millions of electric vehicles, I don't think that is a fair point to be made and not really true. And it is not like that bitcoin uses infinite amount of power, that would only happen if the electricity would be free, which it is not. Also when regulators forbid to mine more than XYZ energy capacity that would be a good thing in the end since that would improve decentralization in total.

> A possible solution would be to have the EPA regulate the energy usage of miners and ban the product from the US if it fails energy regulations. The US does have some slice of the mining distribution so ASIC manufacturers will want to follow them to be able to sell their miners there.

Yup that would make sense, same could apply to the energy origin, to not allow mining activities if a certain percentage does not come from renewables. But I have doubts that the US government would have just the slightest interest to regulate in favor of crypto currencies. It always looks more that they would just like to ban them.

well the responses were aggressive, the way and tone of communication makes up aggression, not that we disagree or he points out flaws (which wasn't the case, it was stated wrong without added proof).

Thank you for the youtube video, will watch it.

> It would be fairer to consider Bitcoin as a currency and compare it to the next best alternative, which is the fiat system. Unfortunately, there really isn't any reliable estimations other than this[1] made about that but I would argue that they contribute far more carbon footprint as compared to Bitcoin mining, considering the numerous banking branches, offices, ATMs, etc.

Well I would totally agree to that, that should be a fair comparison. Technically, taking mastercard. Their tech and servers probably consumes less energy since those are really cheap operations even considering the grade of HA that is employed, but the whole apparatus around it (offices, workers, gasoline of people driving around, local terminals, ...) probably will be somewhat on par.

Well those are suprisingly agressive answers...

Maybe I missed the board, but it is called also technical discussion. I am talking about technical details of the implementation, so I might be off but not too far. Sorry if you feel like this ended up in the wrong place.


> And just how much energy does the world's leading alternative consume??  The energy FUD is a bunch of nonsense.

Do you have data to back that up? You seem to be very angry on me, I mean no harm, but clearly seem to have hit a nerve I did not intend to. If it is all FUD all is good, would welcome if you could send me the data that proofs this statement wrong.


> No.  Because....  It's decentralized.  There is no authority that gets to decide.  You want to force mining onto renewables?  Make renewables cheaper.  Mining is driven by profit, it will tend towards the cheapest electricity.

Please calm down... . Can you maybe get your emotions under control and read what I actually write. Everyone including me knows all that. I made the point that the energy consumption of bitcoin could be for good if it is driving development of renewable forward by giving them even more funding.


> There are not.  There will never be.

Why not? That is exactly what I wanted to know, what is the rationale? Is everything bad? If there is an actually feasible alternative, what is bad about adopting it?

> it seems you misunderstand the basics.  The only way to change any consensus rule is for ALL users to agree.

no i did not understand any single thing. Of course I know that.



Whatever, I didn't expect such a toxic answer, I honestly asked what is the state and are alternative considered and if not why not. I really don't know what is wrong with that. This really felt like questioning a religion instead of questioning the status quo.

First of all. I don't agree with MarsMan and I think what he is doing is straightforward market manipulation.

But one thing is o/c right in this whole mess. Proof of Work can't be Bitcoins destination. First of all one question is if it really still fulfills its function for decentralization. Is a system truly decentralized when there is already just a handful of groups that would just need to agree on common terms?

Energy might be another factor and important as well, so a less power hungry solution might be great, on the other side it could be very healthy to the renewables industry if all miners would be forced to use only green energy, since this would generate a significant amount of money flowing into those industries. But I don't see any technical way to really enforce that.

I am a long term user since Bitcoins inception, but I stopped following the development for some years now and hold most of my assets I bought for a few cents years ago and just do some trading from time to time. So I might be not up to date if there are efforts to move away from PoW. Can someone give me an update on this? If Bitcoin is not considering to move and evolve, what are your takes on this and why would one cling to much to PoW, just b/c of the hard fork it requires? Or are the alternatives still not mature enough?