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Bitcoin Mining Consumes More Energy Than Most Countries in the World (hypebeast.com)

submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[+] [email protected] -25 points 1 year ago (10 children)

This is not a problem of Bitcoin, but a "feature".

Framing it this way sounds very bad naturally. But there is another way to think about it.

Having Proof of work means, that each amount of Bitcoin is actually representing something from the real world - energy. It's not possible to simply create Bitcoin out of thin air, you have to spend a lot of energy to do it. And it was designed like this on purpose.

Hard to explain all in one comment, but books like "The Bitcoin Standard" explain in detail why this makes Bitcoin a nice way to store value, especially over time.

The resulting high tx fees are also a thorn in the eye. But I think Bitcoin was not meant to be used to make daily transactions, it is made to enable people to store or save value over long periods of time. To enable everyday transactions, the lightning network is being built, and something else to look into :)

[+] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (8 children)

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[+] [email protected] -21 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Well, if the energy wasn't actually used, or destroyed, then this "connection to the real world" would just be fake.

The work done produced a store of value that cannot be tampered with. If we say Bitcoin produces nothing of use, we should also say banks are doing nothing of value at all. But that is not entirely true. Keeping track of who owns what is an essential part of our society. Doing that, without having to trust a single powerful group of individuals, is of immense value from my perspective.

Besides that, the goal of many "Bitcoiners" is to use energy, that would be lost otherwise. Currently, it is a huge problem of renewable energy sources that the energy output is somewhat constant, but our usage is very much fluctuating (night vs day etc.). Storing energy on its own is very expensive and totally inefficient. Using that energy to power this decentralized record of who owns what is an amazing idea to me.