Bitcoin Energy Consumption

Mining bitcoin does not convert electricity into value. It converts electricity into currency. Currencies don't have value, they represent value. Their only intrinsic value lies in their ability to allow exchanges of goods.Take regular currencies for instance ($€¥…): they do not convert paper into value, they use paper to represent value. Now does printing more of it makes it better at enabling exchanges? Not necessarily. There's a point beyond which you just ge

The energy is a pure waste. The "difficulty" of bitcoin blocks is continually increasing but the utility of being able to transact in bitcoin is not greater today than it was in 2015 (arguably less, since fewer merchants will sell goods in bitcoin)

they wouldn't. it's a problem of humans , not of bitcoin.. they would find other useless junk to spend their energy on :-).

Bitcoin is entropy.Sheer wasted electricity.

You could argue that energy is being wasted in traditional currency systems. Printing currency, ATM machines, cash registers, transporting cash in armored cars. This energy doesn't serve any purpose besides maintaining the currency itself, similar to bitcoin.

Bitcoin is not a battery for the very simple reason that it does not store energy: you cannot turn a bitcoin directly back into energy.Proof that energy has been expended has no intrinsic value at all. If it did, we would not throw out burnt toast. But it is mere entropy.

It's a false equivalence (energy consumption, therefore bad). What if Bitcoin is solving a true market need (that is, preserving wealth in a truly decentralized way)? Would that make it worth the energy consumption?You only need to look at what the current monetary system is based on -- the petro-dollar. Backed by the might of the US military, consuming crazy amounts of energy. What if Bitcoin eliminates the need for this?

This seems like a false dichotomy.A better question is "what value does Bitcoin provide for the energy it uses compared to similar alternatives (Ethereum, Ripple...)?"

>There is no wealth / money / assets being created or destroyed by Bitcoin going up or the coin count increasing.That's false. There is electricity being spent, and the security of all transactions before the current block being further secured by each new block.you might not think it's a valuable thing, but many others do, and you can't just discount it as not existing because you don't see the value.Just like how you might not see the value in v

Although interesting in its own right, Bitcoin's energy consumption is in no way a good basis on which to judge its social value.Bitcoin is fundamentally an asset. A useful analogy is to think of it as gold. Gold can be used to make payments, but it is not convenient. Same goes for Bitcoin. But they are both useful as a robust way of storing value.Maintaining the Bitcoin network costs energy, but almost nothing else. Given Bitcoin's price history, it's safe to assume that Bi