Because it’s a necessary to ensure you can buy and sell things when you want to.
> Why is there not a daily hackernews thread complaining about the energy consumption of the US military?
People are willing to pay a high energy cost for safety. Bitcoin doesn’t provide me any safety and it doesn’t have the strongest military in the world claiming it’s worth anything.
If you think Bitcoin will topple governments be prepared for a long future of conflict and casualties. Maybe it will be worth it but I doubt it.
So all in all it’s a massive energy waste thought experiment.
What makes you think the US wouldn’t put it’s population in front of the rest of the world in a life or death war scenario?
What if the moon were made of cheese?
I don't see any connection between the growth of BTC and the shrinking of military budgets or the reduction of warfare.
Yeah, right, it worked so well for alcohol... It DOES (/s) work so well for drugs in the US right now... And hey imagine whether it's easier or harder to ban something that doesn't take any physical space in your suitcase and can be transacted with only internet connection.
Increasingly, mining operations have to make special arrangements with entire power grids to suck up their energy and basically just burn it in arbitrary calculation. The scale at which this operates, and the increase over time, are both what makes up a lot of the problem, and what makes it impossible to hide.
If you'd prefer a world where people value bitcoin BECAUSE due to its unpopularity and externalities, governments resort to drone striking such operations when discovered, all I can say is: well, that solves the energy wastage issue, as blown-up ASIC farms aren't good at burning energy anymore. Maybe it solves the constant devaluation against energy cost issue, too! But I think you're missing the point and looking at only the end product of the industry.
"""and even though bans are not magic, even a half-arsed enforcement of such a ban is enough to prevent a currency becoming endemic."""
Physical force is the strongest currency on Earth. Arguing it’s not is arguing millions of people die for entertainment rather than shifts of power.
If Bitcoin is the revolutionary future millions will die on that hill to make it so.
If you’ll excuse my admittedly also-naïve wargaming of their responses:
“Dear ISPs, this is the government. That stuff you do to block piracy and illegal porn? Do that for bitcoin.”
“Dear Banks, this is the government. Purchase of bitcoin is now a federal offence. Tell us if anyone tries to exchange them for money.”
“Dear The Power Company, this is a government order. Turn off power to these properties who are engaged in illegal Bitcoin mining.”
“Dear everyone, this is the government. Your taxes can only be paid in dollars, not in bitcoin.”
(Not that I would say such things will never happen, only that I expect America to become irrelevant on the world stage before it happens; and even in the most extreme USSR-mimicking scenario that is not something I expect before 2041).
In analogy, it is same reasons why we lock our doors and don't leave keys in parked car.
Do you seriously assume that some nations and some organization, do not, actively seek, how to take things that do not belong to them ?
At this point Bitcoin and Eth have about a trillion USD of built up burned work. Is that enough to prime the pump for a POS-based world economy? I dunno. Probably?
Remember; the last time Bitcoin tried to change its mining algorithm, the democracy voted for a split. Ethereum has said they're moving from Proof of Work to Stake; I'm not surprised, given the Ethereum developers seem to abhor Work in all of its forms, including making progress on Ethereum itself, so we'll see if that actually happens in a few decades.
PoS is a theory right now, with some minor market traction, but nothing to the degree of BTC or ETH. Don't levy it as a promise which absolves the environmental sins of cryptocurrency, when its so obviously unlikely to do so. Bitcoin is the zeitgeist; its actively destroying the planet; its not moving to PoS.
They still have to migrate the rest of the network to it, but that's a relatively easy task. Once you have consensus, adding more data to reach consensus on is basically just adding a hash value to each block.
I don't think anyone seriously thinks Bitcoin will replace militaries completely.
The importance of the role of the dollar as a reserve currency is also just an urban myth:
https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/the-reserve-currency-myth-t...
It's not.
