A rapidly-growing 1% problem, one that has the potential to nullify other costly gains. Such problems need to die young, before they grow into 5/10/50% problems.

Yes. Bitcoin is a mechanism for arbitraging the conversion of energy production directly into black-market money. As such, there is no other possible use for energy so well adapted to exploiting the most horrible, polluting, illegally-in-operation energy production facilities as they get phased out.

What you do is buy up the dirtiest plants, run them until they break, bribe or evade any authorities (if they even exist) who would stop you, and if the plant is being shut down because it's failing to comply with pollution regulation (again, if such even exists) that just puts it in a weaker negotiating position. As such they HAVE to deal with you at whatever price you're willing to pay because they can't go anywhere else because they have to run illegally. But they're powering bitcoin, so it stops mattering if they're running illegally, because bitcoin is the currency in which it doesn't matter if you're being paid for crimes, only that the coin exists.

I consider that powerful motivation to arbitrage the energy system and exploit cases where energy suppliers are running out of options because they are too dirty. And this can be happening anywhere. Climate's global. If all the dirtiest coal burners are huddled together on a secret island for warmth and to eke out the last pennies (of real money) they can earn, they'll do that for bitcoin if they can't operate any other way.

And it'll still matter. It'll just be happening in secret, because bitcoin don't care.

A single percentage problem today. In order to become a mainstream everyday currency, use of Bitcoin will have to increase by three, four, possibly five orders of magnitude.

Do you think most proposed measures would have a bigger effect?

Air travel is about 2.5% of total carbon emissions and is incessantly discussed by climate activists.

He probably speculates, like the degenerate speculators, that it won't end up there.

Why push around everyone to consume differently while distributing vast amount of tax money that immediately go into more wasteful crypto ? It will not stay at 1% and I agree with the OP that it's going to be difficulty to reduce electricity wastage on one end while ignore the elephant baby in the crib taking over the room.

I'm a random internet person in Hong Kong. I have a friend mining half his rent in a hotel room who decided that he doesn't need to pay rent the "normal way" anymore, he can just sleep next to a cluster of mining machines in a hotel room. Is he the stupid one, or am I, paying 3000 USD of my own money monthly ? I have another friend who lost half his saving in shitcoin speculation, I have colleagues who made a 10x profit this year, I mean it's all fucking around me and it's very hard to say it's just a 1% part of an important problem.

I feel sometimes it's going to become the main problem. I can't wait for a mega crash to calm down all this excess. I can't accept I'm the idiot working the traditional way to make traditional money paying for traditional things while the futuristic gamblers mine their hotel room fees on a bet I'm going to eventually be forced into using their tokens at whatever cost when it becomes legal tender, locking the future price into making them billionaires.

That would be a fine argument if we weren't in a race to switch to new sources of electricity before triggering catastrophic damage, and losing.

Yes we need to clean up electricity production, but drawing on more electricity doesn’t make that better, it makes it worse. Case in point, there are coal and natural gas plants in Montana and the Finger Lakes that would have been shut down or downsized, but haven’t been due to bitcoin mining.

Um, the difficulty of switching to renewable energy is directly proportional to the amount of capacity you need to build. That we’ll eventually reach net zero carbon so emissions now don’t matter is a rather outrageous claim

You are making (wrong) assumptions:

- electricity is the only part where Bitcoin produces emissions (emissions of mining hardware)

- wasting climate neutral energy does not matter (it does: it's harder, takes more time and resources to switch to climate neutral sources; iirc studies estimate Germany needs to cut 50% of energy consumption to achieve 1.5° conformity)

- Bitcoin miners don't bypass widely adopted regulations somehow

Not quite

Even if BTC and every other POW cryptocurrency converted this afternoon to 100% renewable energy use (and we ignore the carbon cost of manufacturing the hardware), it is STILL a huge climate problem.

Why?

1) Because that ~1% of total energy consumption is being squandered on maintaining the cryptocurrency instead of any other use. Thus, it prevents those clean energy sources from displacing CO2-generating sources which would otherwise be taken offline.

2) Even if the BTC energy is entirely derived from some power source that could not be used by others, perhaps all geothermal generation on a remote volcanic island, it will still add net heat to the atmospheric system. and, of course, we still have the energy use and CO2 spewage of fabricating and moving the mining equipment into location.

So, no, this problem is NOT taking care of itself.