Comment Re:Those in Cash houses, shouldn't throw stones. (Score 3, Insightful) 161
Should we talk about how much energy is wasted building and maintaining heavily fortified bank buildings that warehouse large stacks of colorful paper? Or why the US is still minting fucking pennies?
Oh, hey, I agree! Minting pennies is stupid, and we should stop doing it! Paper money is also pretty limited in its utility, and we should try to find ways to minimize it! We could probably find lots of ways to make fiat currency more energy efficient overall, and we should!
We can find and implement these efficiencies this without causing the collapse of the entire currency. We can find ways to make classical fiat money more energy efficient. Energy costs are not intrinsic to the value of fiat currency. All it takes is political will--tough, sure, but far from impossible.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is defined by energy cost. We literally can not make Bitcoin more energy efficient.
Bitcoin is designed to require maximal energy usage. So long as the energy cost of mining a block is lower than the value of that block, it's worth it to spend the energy. So long as the number of nodes increases, the energy cost per transaction will increase. So long as the length of the blockchain increases, the energy cost per transaction will increase.
In other words: so long as Bitcoin continues to be a viable currency, its energy costs will only increase.
The only way to make Bitcoin more energy efficient is to fork it to a model that doesn't tie value to energy costs. Good luck convincing the world of Bitcoin to do that. You'd have an easier time killing the quarter, let alone the penny.