>Even arguments about renewable energy being used to mine BTC are moot, because they don't consider the opportunity cost of what could be done with all that energy instead.
If I launch a BTC miner into space and use a star to power it, will you worry about what else could have been done with that energy?
The more remote the energy source, the higher the cost to deliver it to a centralized grid, meaning it will probably be wasted anyway if it can't easily be converted into an easier to transmit form, BTC. Rather beam internet through space than attempt to beam energy.
> If I launch a BTC miner into space and use a star to power it, will you worry about what else could have been done with that energy?
Well first of all you used a ton of energy to get it to space. But yes, I would definitely worry about it. There are a ton of other CPU intense jobs you could do with a rig like that that would be more beneficial to humanity. Medical research for example.
It doesn't matter where you do the computation, that energy could always be used to do something more meaningful.
The same is true about a lot of computation that is done now. But bitcoin is far more "wasteful" of compute than most other things.
The point is that without btc the energy wouldn’t have been captured anyway. In theory if all btc miners used only renewables, the price of renewables would drop, and become more affordable for others, and the net impact on the environment would be positive.
Renewables are infinite, we are constrained by our ability to capture them efficiently enough to beat fossil fuels.
There are probably other factors at play that prevent this from working in reality though
Renewables aren't infinite; they are constrained, just as you said, by our manufacturing and natural resources to build vehicles to collect them.
Unless BTC somehow manufactures more solar panels or provides more natural resources, then any resources consumed by BTC are resources that aren't used for other purposes.
Ultimately, we are always limited in how much we can accomplish, and devoting resources to BTC necessarily takes away resources from other uses. The only question, then, is if BTC is a better use for those resources than other things.
The idea is that economies of scale and increased incentives drive forward new innovation in technology that increase the amount of renewable energy that can be captured.
Eg if we need to manufacture 100x more solar panels than last year, the cost per solar panel will drop dramatically, and the efficiency will rise due to the volume of investment in solar panels.
We are not limited in how much we accomplish as technology provides efficiencies that allow us to grow, it’s not a zero sum game.
> In theory if all btc miners used only renewables, the price of renewables would drop, and become more affordable for others, and the net impact on the environment would be positive.
No. If demand rises, so do prices. Not the other way round.
Not if your goods are infinite. There’s an infinite amount of sunlight and wind, if demand goes up, more tools/breakthroughs in tech will be made and the costs will drop dramatically.
See battery tech and solar panels lately.
Only if we hit a hard resource and tech barrier will we not be able to move forward.
What benefit does it supply to humanity? I can think of plenty of uses for a distributed ledger, but what is the use of Bitcoin that can't be done some other way?
I would argue that bitcoin isn't money. It's an asset that has to be converted to/from money on each end to be useful. There's not a lot you can buy directly with bitcoin. Sure there is more every day, but even then the vendor is really just providing a hidden bitcoin conversation service, because I don't think there exists an entire supply chain that can be done with Bitcoin (as opposed to say USD or EUR).
Furthermore, all bitcoin transactions involve many 3rd parties. The key feature is that you don't have to trust the third parties, not that they don't exist.
Sort of, but not really in the same way that a banking ledger is maintained by a bank. You don't need to trust the other 3rd parties to maintain it properly, and you are also "maintaining" the ledger yourself.
If I launch a BTC miner into space and use a star to power it, will you worry about what else could have been done with that energy?
The more remote the energy source, the higher the cost to deliver it to a centralized grid, meaning it will probably be wasted anyway if it can't easily be converted into an easier to transmit form, BTC. Rather beam internet through space than attempt to beam energy.