[j0ba]

Let's get rid of bitcoin. Then we can use "green" dollars. They don't need servers to run. Well, except for all the banks, federal reserves, and credit card processors. I wonder how much electricity they take to run. Well, probably not 2% of all US electricity.

But why are banks so secure? I guess because of police partially. I guess those police need electricity too. But we need them anyways, so I guess that only partially counts.

But why dollars? Why not pesos, or euros? The dollar is backed by the US military, of course. I wonder how much electricity the military uses.

Anyways. Let's get rid of bitcoin. That will solve the climate crisis! We can sell anti-bitcoin stickers made in China on Amazon to show our support!

[ThisIsMyAltAcct]

Police, banks, the military, the Fed all provide many more services than bitcoin does and do more than just protect the dollar. What an incredibly dumb comparison.

[j0ba]

Your assertion is that it's dumb to compare two competing financial systems?

The dumb analysis is to talk about Bitcoin energy usage in isolation, without comparing it to the present system. The present system would not work without police officers and military. Bitcoin replaces these things with servers and decentralization.

There is no military protecting the internet. You would need to bomb every country in the world to destroy the internet. The same is true for Bitcoin.

US military is 100% necessary for the dollar-based world order. The fact they do other things is not important. You still need the full US military to protect the dollar, even if they didn't do other things.

[tcmart14]

Maybe next time Somalian pirates attack a merchant vessel, bitcoin can put a stop to it!

[staplers]

  provide many more services than bitcoin

To who?

Extremely cringe to see the HN bubble struggle to grasp how the world economy works. Not all government currencies are properly maintained.

[tcmart14]

I do some work with financial tech and let me tell you, working with integration partners for payment processing who are fully into crypto made me realize, we shouldn't trust these people with our financial system. I had to explain to a senior engineer with 20+ years of experience why he shouldn't rely on floating point to calculate service fees (their calculations were always wrong and over charged our customer's customers because they used floating point). Can't calculate a 3.5% service fee properly, but will tell you why he so so much smarter than the everyone in traditional finance (who don't fuck up this calculation). And this has been an ongoing problem for a year, to the point that we built around their system because we can't trust their system does what they say.

[lgleason]

That is the tip of the iceberg from what I've seen in the space. I've seen poor security, amateur hour with servers, connectivity etc..

[happytiger]

The existing financial system uses roughly double what bitcoin does.

[mminer237]

It also processes over 4,000 times as many transactions: https://matthewminer.name/blog/bitcoin-energy-consumption-vs...

The fact that 0.025% of transactions use 33% of the power is not exactly a win for Bitcoin.

[sumeno]

How many orders of magnitude more is the number of transactions supported by the existing financial system?

Visa alone can process 24,000 transactions per second. Bitcoin can handle 7

[johnfernow]

The difference is that the existing financial system is used by about 3/4 of the world population (closer to 94% in developed nations) for the exchange of actual goods and services.

Bitcoin has significantly fewer users, but more importantly it is almost never used for the actual exchange of goods or services.

With my bank (and the accompanying infrastructure that goes along with it), my employer can deposit directly into my account, which I can then use to pay rent online (as opposed to physically traveling to their office), buy groceries at the store, and purchase nearly every legal good or service that is for sale, all while reducing the odds of me being robbed or losing money (e.g. losing my wallet.) If someone or some business scams me, I'm given methods of retrieving my money without confronting them in person. It also allows me to autopay all my bills so I'm never charged for forgetting to pay (and frankly I have very little desire to write and mail several checks each month or travel to various places to pay in cash.)

Credit cards, debit cards, direct deposit and money transfers are far more convenient than using cash, and aside from convenience, I imagine they decrease a nation's carbon footprint over using exclusively cash (due to less need to mint, print and transport physical currency, as well as travel in person to pay or receive payment.)

They do come at a cost of privacy, but if I wanted privacy for a specific purchase, I can still use cash for those specific transactions. While it may have a higher carbon footprint than digital payments, overall ink and paper tend to have low carbon footprints (though it's probably a bit higher for currency than it is for standard A4 paper.) Still, it's near certainly less carbon intensive than Bitcoin (per purchase, maybe not in total since billions of people actually use paper currency to buy things at least sometimes.)

Cryptocurrencies and their accompanying anonymity can bring about good things, so I'm open to at least considering their value — there are countries with authoritarian and oppressive governments, and there have been several democracies that have fallen to dictatorship before and that very well could happen again in the future. As such, being able to anonymously transfer money does have its value, especially in a world with CCTVs and facial recognition.

Cryptocurrencies, of course, also can be used for illegal services that are near universally considered immoral and evil. Currently, in most countries (even ones that aren't exactly liberal democracies), this is likely a much larger harm.

Balancing freedom from and freedom to is always tricky: neither authoritarianism nor anarchy are appealing — allowing personal freedom while preventing people from encroaching on other people's personal freedoms is difficult to achieve.

However, even if I were fully convinced that cryptocurrencies currencies were a net positive on society (open to considering the idea but definitely not convinced yet), I struggle to see how one with such a large carbon footprint is what should be used.

[adamrezich]

you really think that every credit card reader in the country, every ATM, every computer and piece of electronics at every branch of every bank, and all of Wall Street and everything, adds up to less than the sum total of Bitcoin mining in the country, in terms of energy usage? how could this possibly be the case? I'm not even a Bitcoin guy and this is absurd on its face.

[jcranmer]

Yes.

This article gives an estimate of about 2% of all electricity usage going to bitcoin mining. All data centers in the country combine to a similar ballpark in energy usage (another comment states 1-3%). Finance accounts for 20% of US GDP, so we'll be charitable, round up its usage of datacenters to 50%, to get about 1% of electricity from financial data centers.

There are about 6.7 million employees in the financial sector [1]. Assume everyone has a computer with a 600W power supply at full bore for 12 hours a day [2]. That comes out to about 18 billion kWh of electricity a year, which is (checks math) 0.425% of US electricity consumption [3]. Sure, I'm not accounting for all the PoS systems at every retail location in the country, but they're going to use far less energy than even the overspecced numbers I'm using.

So overall, this comes out to about 1.5-2% of US electricity usage going to the financial sector, less than Bitcoin mining. Also remember that magically switching everything over to Bitcoin would still require all those PoS systems, not to mention large fractions of Wall Street and bank branches and whatnot, so this isn't really a fair comparison overall. And some amount of the financial sector includes cryptocurrency companies already.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag52.htm

[2] This basically comes out to a decently powerful computer being used at max spec for an 84 hour work week. A generous overestimate, I'd hope you agree.

[3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...

[lgleason]

Right, but the financial system is actually used by most people in the US. Bitcoin, a small fraction of that...and this figure does not include all of the energy expended to process bitcoin transactions.

[beau_g]

You are comparing the transaction cost of credit cards/banking/trade to the transaction cost + infrastructure cost of bitcoin. Credit card companies, banks, financial institutes have millions of employees that drive to work, HVAC in their offices, etc. that is not required with bitcoin. This is ignoring all of the rest of OPs point that preserving the dollar system has countless other external costs.