Bitcoin's Climate Change Impact Is Under Scrutiny

And, so what?<p>Is everyone going to stop like how &quot;gas&quot; is under scrutiny? No.<p>Replace with coal, or any other commodity. Copper, Gold, Silver, Platinum, etc.<p>&quot;the annual carbon emissions from the electricity required to mine Bitcoin and process its transactions are equal to the amount emitted by all of New Zealand. Or Argentina.&quot;<p>So? When did comparing to a country become a metric of success or for cause of concern? We can say the same&#x2F;use the same metric for Gold, Silver. In general an economic indicator of prosperity is energy usage.<p>If anything this sounds like a marketing piece for the companies cited in the article vs a rag on bitcoin itself.

The fact that nobody can simply say, &quot;here is what Bitcoin does, this is why the energy consumption is justified&quot; is a strong indictment against the supposed value that Bitcoin brings.<p>But, there is no legal mechanism that measures the utility of commercial activities, and which dictates that energy should be consumed only by enterprises that have a certain utility. This is unprecedented territory.

The thing is either Bitcoin is successful which means the value settled on it&#x27;s blockchain will be very substantial, so the electricity used to secure that value will be worth it.<p>Or it fails as many on HN predict in which case you have nothing to worry about because this electricity usage would only be temporary, no miner would spend energy securing an unused blockchain.

Most bitcoin mining is in China and is powered by coal. China is more interested in getting ahead in bitcoin then they are worried about what Greta and company thinks. Progressives know China wont bend so they go after soft target counties happy to bend over for the cause du jour. USA, Canada etc.

I would like to know what the global amount of quiescent hashing power being wasted&#x2F;unused on devices that could be contributing at a low priority to crypto mining.<p>Increasing the number of low hashrate miners while at the same time increasing the networks total hashrate would force the difficulty to increase and possibly make power hungry mining operations no longer economically viable and could have the added benefit of a more robust, more decentralized system.